Simple (and Surprisingly Accurate) IQ Test

There are a number of IQ tests out there, and I've probably tried them all. Most are gimmicky, and nearly all of them artificially inflate your score.

But this test provided me with the same score I received when I took my Mensa application tests. It consists of 38 true/false questions that must be completed in 13 minutes. You apparently get bonus marks for completing the test quickly, and there's a break after the 19th question so you can relax before tackling the second half.

I'll send a postcard to anyone who can guess what my score was.*

I'll send a prize to anyone who can beat it!**

*Family and close friends excluded from this offer; you'll get a phone call.
**Screenshot verification may be required. Prizes are expensive, especially now that I'm out of work.

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Snacksby

A few years ago I had this idea for a countertop recipe appliance that would synch to the internet and pull down recipes based on what you have in your cupboard. Like a lot of great ideas I've come up with, this languished into obscurity, and I started using AllRecipes.com for my cooking needs. (And, FWIW, AllRecipes.com remains a pretty good, if hard to navigate, site.)

But today I chanced across Snacksby, a recipe site that gives you options based on the ingredients you enter in a field at the top of the screen. It looks to be a fun site, with different recipes tagged with "snackonomies" like vegetarian and low-calorie, and even provides ingredient substitutions if you're out of cloves or something. It also knows about measurements, so it won't pull up a recipe requiring a dozen eggs if you've only got two.

There's a link on the front page from comments to a review at LifeHacker:

Great idea but completely worthless at the moment given that they currently have less than a dozen recipes in there and are relying on users to fill the database.

Fair enough; but as another commenter posted, user-edited content is pretty easy to get. And once this does fill up, it'll be just what I'm looking for!

Update: check out this great message letting me know that they couldn't find a recipe for me!

SNACKSLET
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot
so inoculate our old chicken stock but we shall eat relish of
it: I found you recipes not.

YOU
I was the more decieved.

SNACKSLET
Get thee to a grocery. Why wouldst thou be a
cooker of nothing? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I should accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
gluttonous, revengeful, ambitious, with more recipes at
my beck than I have cards to write them on,
imagination to give them shape, or time to cook them
in. What should such gourmets as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant chefs,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a grocery.
Where're your cookbooks?

YOU
At home, my lord.

SNACKSLET
Let the pantry doors be shut upon them, that they may play
fruitless nowhere but in'r own kitchen. Farewell.

YOU
O, help him, you sweet heavens!

SNACKSLET
If thou dost cook, I'll give thee this compost
for thy dinner: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape famine. Get thee to a
grocery, go; farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
cook, cook for a fool; for wise men know well enough
what illusory meals you make for them. To a grocery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.

YOU
O heavenly powers, restore him!

SNACKSLET
I have heard of your garnishes too, well enough; God
has given your dishes one face, and you make them
another: you salt, you drizzle, and you accent, and
put ketchup on God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your diet. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me hungry. I say, we will have no more meals:
those that have already, all but one, shall
eat; the rest shall starve as they are. To a
grocery, go.

Exeunt

Oh, Snacksby!
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

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Sudoku Combat

Like I really need another diversion in my life.

I often find myself playing sudoku on my Palm with this excellent software. It's a very addictive game; when I gave Heather my Tungsten|T for her birthday, she said, "Yay! Now I can play sudoku!"

So now there's Sudoku Combat, a simple site that pits your /\/\4D 5K!11zorz against some random opponent. The game is very easy to operate: type in a name and start the fun. It must set a cookie in your browser, because your settings and ranking are saved when you leave the site.

There are about 100 different avatars to choose from, and some are pretty funny. There's also four levels of sudoku to provide a challenge, from "easy" to "evil". And if you don't feel up to a head-to-head challenge, you can always choose to play by yourself.

Now, I'm not very fast at solving the puzzles, so most of the people I played handily kicked my ass. But it was still a lot of fun, and I expect it to eat up a lot of my free time in the coming weeks.

Link

Golf-Ball Finding Glasses

A lot of the links I put up on FeedMonkey come from me talking to people. The conversation usually goes, "Did you hear about the Grateful Dead's drummer's signature found on a zucchini grown in Rhode Island? Oh, I'll send you the link." But part of the reason I started this blog wasn't just to highlight the things I find interesting, but also to provide a catch-all location I could point people to instead of sending a link.

I'd browsed through Hammacher Schlemmer before, and I think it's an interesting site with a bunch of cool stuff. I found it while I was looking for wedding gifts, but I didn't post a link to it because I didn't understand how it differed from any of the other similar stores out there, like the Sharper Image. Well, I still don't think it stands out in any respects (with the exception of offering this awesome R2-D2 robot that I totally drool over at every opportunity), but my dad was interested in hearing about their golf ball finding glasses. So here's the link.

They look like an ordinary pair of sunglasses, but they're specially polarized to block out long wavelength light -- that's green and brown light to lay-people like you and me -- and allow shorter wavelengths to filter through. The pictures look impressive, and my dad tells me he's never seen anything similar advertised on the Golf Channel. The price is a little steep at $40, and probably rooted in the tradition of over-priced golf accessories, but with a box of good golf balls clocking in at $58, you'd really only need to find eight stray ones to make your money back.

Link

SuperDickery

In spite of what it sounds ike, this isn't another internet porn site. Instead, it's a site dedicated to the greatest underwear pervert of all time, Superman. And in particular, how much of a dick he is.

The main part of the site is a collection of comic book covers culled from Lois Lane's ("Superman's Girlfriend") and Jimmy Olsen's ("Superman's Pal") titles from the '60s and '70s that make a highly compelling case for Superman being a dick. But the site doesn't stop there -- it also chronicals a bunch of other crazy comic book crap, from ridiculous inventions to hilarious (and apparently unintentional) sexual innuendo to monkeys. Monkeys!

But I think my favourite section shows all the super powers that Superman's had over the years, including Super-Landscaping, Super-Mathematics ("Where I come from it's called regular mathematics" quips the site's creator), and my least favourite, Super-Ventriloquism. At one point Superman could use his Super-Ventriloquism to sound like anyone and to project his voice anywhere in the world. I am not making this up.

A friend of mine recently asked me why they didn't just call the site SuperDick.com. Well, as you see, it's already taken; as is SuperDick.net and SuperDick.org, but they do get less racy as we digress through the domains. In the end, a SuperDick is just what he is, while SuperDickery really describes his shenanigans -- and that's what makes the site fun.

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Time-Wasting Pepsi Game

This game is quite a lot of fun for being a one-trick pony. It's not something that's going to bring you back again and again once you complete it, but it's a great waste of time if you're, say, struggling at work on a Friday afternoon. As a bonus, leave your sound on at the end of the game: he never stops drinking! After 30 minutes it becomes one of the most deeply repulsive sounds I've ever heard.

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Build Your Memory

I've been using mnemonic techniques like this for years -- ever since I saw Harry Lorraine on Amazing Discoveries, actually. And while they make for fun parlour tricks, like memorizing 20 (or more!) license plates on my walk to work, I haven't actually achieved much success with them. When you read about top memory experts, they all use these techniques or slight variations, so I'm probably just not practicing enough or using them consistently.

But for people unfamiliar with these memory techniques, this is a well-documented and easy to understand resource with lots of examples, allowing you to jump right in and start improving your memory immediately. And yes, these tips will allow you to perform dumb stunts like memorize the order of an entire deck of cards, as well as not-so-dumb stunts like remembering the names and phone numbers of the 15 people you met at last night's dinner party.

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Google Maps Pedometer

One of the great things about Google is how most of their cool stuff is released with SDKs (software development kits), allowing both talented and not-so hackers to provide new and exciting things based on Google's technology. We've already seen some interesting stuff through use of the search engine (Googlewhack, Googlefight, Googlism, et al).

Gmaps Pedometer is a cool hack of Google Maps that allows you to record the distance you travel through various checkpoints. It's great for runners (like me) because it allows you to find the distance on non-standard routes, like running paths through parks or around a lake. It's also got a completely useless calorie counting feature that I don't recommend, and a route saving feature that I do. In fact, check out the 4km route I've been running with my dog.

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Birthday Calculator

I'm not sure who this Paul Sadowski guy is, but he's got an interesting birthday calculator. It tell you all sorts of information about your birthday: ordinary stuff like your day of birth and zodiac sign, and not-so ordinary stuff like the phase of the moon and date of conception. Too bad it doesn't have place of conception: I'd love to see how many people have "Back seat of mom's car."

I also recommend the Name Calculator page for those people into numerology. Not that anyone is.

Link to Name Calculator
Link to Birthday Calculator (Thanks, Lee)