Tropophilia

I’ve been traveling since early last week (hence the lack of posts), so I’m a bit behind on my reading.  In any case, here are a few things that have caught my eye:

• LifeHacker highlights a program for which, as a 5-13 year-old, I would have happily sacrificed my entire GI Joe collection: Lego Digital Designer, “a virtual Lego kit for your Windows or Mac desktop [...] Once you’ve built the perfect prototype, you can upload the results to the Lego web site to order a custom kit with every brick you’ll need included!”  Just a decade too late…

• I found this story from TreeHugger fascinating: the recent foreclosure crisis has left a number of pools on foreclosed properties in California and elsewhere untended and…well…perfect for mosquitos.  In an effort to combat disease-spreading mosquitos, the state of California is spotting green pools from the air and filling them with tiny fish that have been nicknamed the “foreclosure fish.”  This would seem like a reasonable solution, except…

[T]hese fish (Gambusia species) are native to streams around the Gulf of Mexico. Outside their ancestral waters, they wreak havoc with local wildlife.

[According to one scientist,] “In California they have decimated native species - yet civic authorities will give you a bag of them free if you have a mosquito problem. It may not seem risky putting them in a plastic and concrete pool, but the fish are champion escape artists, and can travel in as little as three millimeters of water.”

Sounds like another cane toad situation…

• Wordle is a cool new tool that creates a visual representation of frequently-repeated words in huge chunks of text.  I decided to try it out using the longest document I could immediately access: my senior thesis, “From Blogs to the Ballot Box: Online Campaigning in 2006 U.S. Senate Races.”  Check it out:

• If you’re a creative type and you’re looking for a little bit (emphasis on little) of money on the side, check out NameThis.  It’s a crowd-sourced platform where people with business ideas, websites, blogs, etc ask for suggestions to name their creation, and winning suggestions get cash money.  Given my awful track record with band names (I kid you not, I was in bands called Poultry in Motion, Jamaican Lemonade, and Icebreaker…these were all my ideas) and the struggle Jarred and I went through to name this site (word to the wise: inventing words is a good strategy), I don’t think this is my cup of tea.  but best of luck!

• The next item has been floating around the web for a while, but if you haven’t checked out this mock-up of what Google News might look like on a day of miraculously good news, it’s a nice reality check.

• I made my own variation on these Southwestern Turkey Burgers tonight and they were del.icio.us.  The internet is the greatest cookbook I know.

That’s all for now.  We really will be posting this week.  I hope.