Showing tag results for Non-Computer

Last year, The Philip Morris Companies renamed itself to the warm-and-fuzzy sounding Altria Group. Gotta love the colorful abstract logo they've got. (Psst, editors of the Altria home page: It's "Whom We Fund". "Whom" with an "m".) They claim the name comes from the Latin altus ("high") but that doesn't explain where the "r" comes from....

For those in the Seattle area who missed it last year, The Fremont Outdoor Cinema is screening Bubba Ho-Tep on Friday, July 9th. Go see it. You won't be disappointed. Assuming what you were expecting to see was Elvis fighting a mummy. With the help of JFK. In a wheelchair. If you were expecting something else, then okay maybe you'll be...

Some people wondered about my fascination with Germanic languages and asked why I didn't branch out to other language families. It's basically laziness. I grew up speaking English (and a little of the Holo dialect, most of which has by now vanished from disuse), then studied German in high school and college, and most recently added Swed...

Some people wondered about my fascination with Germanic languages and asked why I didn't branch out to other language families. It's basically laziness. I grew up speaking English (and a little of the Holo dialect, most of which has by now vanished from disuse), then studied German in high school and college, and most recently added Swed...

It has become customary in the telecommunications industry to quote a low price and then add half as much to it in "fees". Regulatory Programs Fee. It sure sounds like a government tax. It isn't. There's been a new round of official-sounding line items on telephone bills, which are really just ways for telephone companies to ra...

The first rule of Fruit Fly Fight Club: Flies can't talk about Fruit Fly Fight Club. Because they can't talk at all. At least not to humans. Researchers at Harvard Medical School took a break from studying lobster fighting and shifted their focus to fruit fly fights, and even mutant fruit fly fights. (Via The Annals of Improbabl...

After over half a year of eluding experts, the Hong Kong crocodile was caught at last. What amused me was that the article said that the creature had eluded an expert crocodile hunter from Australia named... John Lever? (Curiously, in this article, he is given credit for capturing the croc.) Not the self-proclaimed Crocodile Hunte...

Finnish Radio station YLE offers weekly news summaries in classical Latin. Because practically nobody outside Finland would understand the news in Finnish... In my random travels around the Internet, I stumbled across this article on the subject of teaching Finnish to foreigners: Finnish's status as an official EU language has created...

Dominic O'Brien, world speed-memorization champion, on his technique for memorizing over 18 decks of shuffled cards in an hour: "I remember things by personalising them," explains O'Brien, 43. "With playing cards, for instance, I memorise each one as a face. The queen of hearts I think of as Claudia Schiffer, the ace of clubs as Nick Faldo...

Prices in the Microsoft cafeteria are often illogical. For example, a "special sandwich" costs $4.25. A piece of whole fruit costs $0.50. But a "special sandwich with a piece of whole fruit" costs $4.95. If you're not careful, the cashier will ring it up as a "special sandwich with a piece of whole fruit" instead of as a "special sandwich" ...