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Film the Blanks is “an ongoing experiment in deconstructing and abstracting film posters”.
The blog’s author takes famous, and not so famous movie posters, abstracts them, gives you a clue, and then your goal is to guess in the comments what movie the poster is from.
With projects like this, I think it’s interesting to see just how much information you can actually remove from something without loosing the meaning of that thing, so click over and see how many you can recognize.
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Wired put together a rather interesting bit of ‘infoporn’ that compares the BMI (body-mass index) of Playboy playmate centerfolds to that of the typical American woman from December 1953 (Marilyn Monroe) to January 2009 (Dasha Astafieva).
The results are clear: While the typical American woman’s BMI has steadily climbed over the years, the typical playmate’s has slowly declined over that same period.
As Wired notes though, the facts and figures given by Playboy for each of their playmates probably have a fair dose of estimation, guessing and exaggeration built in, but even still, it’s telling of what they think the average American ‘wants’ vs. what the average American really is.
[Wired - Playboy Playmate BMI and Average BMI]
[Via: Flowing Data]
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Can you judge a book by its cover?
I’ll be the first to admit that when looking for a new book to read, the cover ranks second only to recommended by a friend in terms of what I’ll look at first, but does this prejudice actually work? Does a good cover actually predict a good book, and vice versa?
Judgeby.com aims to find out, and presents you with an endless stream of book covers that you must rate. It then matches your rating to the Amazon user’s rating to see how close the two are. I was able to guess 7 out of 10 correctly, which means I either had a good bout of beginners luck, or there’s actually a bit of falsity behind the old saying, so give it a try and see how you do.
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When a gas pump is measuring your gas down to the thousandth of a gallon, are you really getting an accurate assessment of how much is going in?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: No.
As it turns out, gas pumps have an accepted inaccuracy of half a cubic inch, plus half a cubic inch per gallon. That means that if you’re getting 10 gallons of gas, then your gas pump can over- or under-dispense up to five and a half cubic inches of gas and still be compliant.
Five and a half cubic inches of gas is about .024 gallons, or twenty times the accuracy that your pump is claiming, so it’s basically all a lie.
[An Entirely Other Day - Are Gas Pumps Really Accurate To A Thousandth Of A Gallon?]
[Photo Via: _nickd]
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