The Birthday Paradox

"Assuming for a moment that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year, if you're sitting in a room with forty people in it, what are the chances that two of those people have the same birthday? For simplicity's sake, we'll ignore leap years. A reasonable, intelligent person might point out that the odds don't reach 100% until there are 366 people in the room (the number of days in a year + 1)… and forty is about 11% of 366… so such a person might conclude that the odds of two people in forty sharing a birthday are about 11%. In reality, due to Math's convoluted reasoning, the odds are about 90%. This phenomenon is known as the Birthday Paradox."

Technorati Tags: birthday, paradox, math, odds

Mario Adventure: The Best NES Game Hack of All Time

There's a Super Mario Bros 3 hack out there that isn't just a bunch of sprites rerendered into racial epitaphs or borderline pornography for once, and it's pretty cool. It adds new enemies, moves, levels, and power-ups. Plus, you can download it for free at the end of the article, so I'd say it's worth playing.

Technorati Tags: mario, super mario bros 3, mario 3, emulator, nes, hack, rom

Ten CSS tricks you may not know

There's a nice list of CSS tricks here, some of which I knew, some of which I sort of knew, and some which I had no idea about.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, css, top ten, tricks, list

Awesome Backgrounds!

There's some really nice backgrounds at this site. The coolest part is that they all seem to be actual photos.

Technorati Tags: photos, backgrounds, wallpapers

Arrested Development

Since there's a two-hour long marathon of new Arrested Development on tonight on Fox at 8pm, I found this page full of sound bytes from the show.

Technorati Tags: arrested development, fox, wavs, sounds

Lonely Planet - Ireland

I found this handy travel guide that might come in handy when we go to Ireland, although there is one for just about everywhere on the main site.

Technorati Tags: ireland, travel, guide, island

Einstein the Parrot

This parrot is really cool, she knows how to say and imitate a ton of things, including other animals. It seems like this type of intelligence/mimick ability is well known in African Greys.

Technorati Tags: parrot, einstein, talking, imitate

Drawing Tips!

I found this interesting site that shows you how to draw classical animation images (as in, by hand, through sketching). It's looks like it'll be pretty useful for improving your doodles during classes or phone calls, depending on when you doodle most.

Technorati Tags: drawing, animation, sketching, doodle

eBay Feedback Generator

Apparently there's actually a nifty little eBay Feedback Generator that allows you to select whether you're leaving feedback for a buyer or a seller, the number of characters, type of feedback/vocabulary, and details to mention. I'm definitely going to use this from now on, because I'm tired of trying to think of random bs for my Half.com sales (especially since I never interact with any of the buyers to begin with).

If you're really feeling lazy, there's a Greasemonkey script you can run to automatically fetch random feedback and fill in your comment field for you.

Technorati Tags: ebay, feedback, generator, script, greasemonkey

de-FIB-ulator: Voice Stress Lie Detector

The de-FIB-ulator is a lie detector that claims to be able to recognize when someone is lying. It first must be adjusted to an individual's voice and after that, if it recognizes that the person is lying, by analyzing tension in their voice, the little Pinnochio wanna-be's nose and horns will grow. Sounds kind of interesting and it recommends it for things like "Truth or Dare", which I know Becky loves to try to play. I doubt it's very accurate or anything, but at least it'd be fun to play with.


Technorati Tags: lie detector, lies, bs detector, polygraph

Falling Sand and Other Crazy Games

Chris found a whole bunch of interesting games in Flash and Java at this site. I like the Falling Sand one, it's pretty cool how all the different types of particles interact.

Technorati Tags: games, java, flash, game

Kittens!

Chris found this nice site full of kitten photos, I thought some of you might like it, especially Alyssa.

Technorati Tags: kittens, kitten, cats, photos, cute, photography, animals

CSS Made Easy

Here's a handy little CSS guide, in case you're rusty or just want to learn CSS from the beginning.

Technorati Tags: css, easy, guide

Openomy

Openomy is a free online file storage site that'll give you 1 GB of space. Of course, it wouldn't be a Web2.0 site unless it had tags, so apparently files are organized using tags instead of folders.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web 2.0, file storage, 1GB

Speedy Reading

Here's some handy little speed reading techniques, for those of you in a rush or who just want to burn through a bunch of novels in no time.


Technorati Tags: speed reading, reading, books

Hack Up Your MySpace

Here's an interesting way using CSS to hack up your MySpace page and get rid of the ads and whatnot. Unfortunately, it's also a good way to get your account suspended, since it's probably a violation of their terms of service.

So, instead, if you want to make the ads go away and make it easier to actually get logged into MySpace to begin with, I'd recommend getting Greasemonkey for Firefox and then running a few of these scripts.

There are some pretty cool ones in there, including one that'll auto-login, one that'll skip the full page ads, and one that'll remove the top banner ads.

Technorati Tags: myspace, hacks, greasemonkey, scripts, css, firefox

Mexico Aerial Photos

After I posted the China photos, these aerial photos of Mexico showed up on Digg, so I figured they'd go along nicely.

Black Holes FAQ

There's a nice list of random black hole questions that are pretty interesting.

Technorati Tags: black holes, space, time, wormhole

Amazing Photos of China

Check out these really cool photos of China. They look almost surreal. It's still probably not enough to make Beth actually like China, though.

Technorati Tags: china, photos

Want to send someone an email from Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Just use this handy email spoofing tool. You can even make those silly chain letters more realistic. Now instead of it saying "Bill Gates offered to pay people blah blah blah" and having it be from jennyluvgXoXo32321@aol.com, you can make it from billgates@microsoft.com. Have fun, but don't be stupid.

Zombie Roaches - First a wasp paralyzes the roach, does a little brain surgery, and then controls the zombie roach by manipulating the roach's antennae to where it wants to go, all to lay an egg that eventually ends up hatching a larva that eats the still living roach. Pretty crazy stuff.

Credit Review: 7 simple steps to grow your fortune. I particularly liked the online banking idea, so I signed up for HBSC, who'll give you $25 for signing up and has a 4.80% interest rate. Compare that to the 0.4% interest rate at the local bank.

Apparently all the Super Bowl XL Commercials are on Google Video, in case you missed some...or all of them.

30 Boxes is an online calendar that integrates with Flickr, MySpace, (Insert random Web 2.0 site here), etc.

That's not really the cool part though, the cool part is that you can actually get to all the crap you have to do from anywhere you can access the internet, plus you can see your friend's schedules if they're so inclined to add you to their "Buddy List".

It also has all the holidays for several countries, depending on which one you choose (although it's strangely lacking Easter). There's also an option to import any RSS feed you choose, which I tried to do with my website and caused the calendar to break and not show up, so I don't recommend that particular feature quite yet.

Otherwise, it's a pretty cool page and I'd recommend trying it out.