Blog | Daniel Ogden » Interesting

Graffiti Should Be Legal

Daniel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:30:51 +0000

The legality of graffiti should be decided based on how good it is. Here, for example, are some that should be completely legal and acceptable.

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Thailand

Daniel — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:30:00 +0000

For a little over a week in December I went for a trip to Thailand, here are some of the pictures I took.

This was just down the road from where we were staying — complete poverty and all of the fancy hotels, houses and buildings were all mixed everywhere.

This is the view from the pool at our hotel, 33rd floor.

This is a good example of the ridiculous powerlines that were everywhere.

The Temple of Dawn we saw after going for a longboat ride.

I patted tigers at the Tiger Temple!

A long exposure shot at night — the view from a restaurant in Bangkok.

One of the shots from the footpaths along a river — shops and houses everywhere.

Plane trip on the way home.

So that was my trip, now off to my first day at a web design company! Exciting stuff.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! Thailand is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

Holidays!

Daniel — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:03:55 +0000

So the year of uni is over, and summer is coming!

I’m back and will be writing my blog once again with all the crap that I find interesting on the interweb.

In a related note, you probably know how typing a search in Google now gives a list of suggestions as you type.
Well typing “i like” produces some interesting suggestions, particularly the top two:

This also reminds me of a great web Twitter application — twistori — it basically aggregates all of the Twitter posts (in real time) that contain a particular word, like ‘love’ ‘hate’ ‘wish’ and stuff and just scrolls through them. I love just sitting and watching this — it sucks you in. Brilliant.

And they use helvetica as their typeface — I think it’s love.

Since I last updated the blog, I bought another t-shirt:

So that’s what’s new with me.

And this blog officially hasn’t sunk into the depts of the past, as many blogs tend to do after a few months. Woo! I’m ahead.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! Holidays! is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

Learn Something Everyday

Daniel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:33:00 +0000

There’s this website that has a new fact to learn which is posted everyday, and it’s communicated in the form of a brightly-coloured illustration. They’re cool facts, and brilliant illustrations. Here’s today’s:

Here’s the website: cargocollective.com/learnsomethingeveryday.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! Learn Something Everyday is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally

Daniel — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:46:22 +0000

So while I’m no expert, I’m a big fan of psychology in that I find it fascinating how the brain actually works and perceives things. I was reading this article from Cracked.com called ‘5 Ways To Hack Your Brain into Awesomeness’ and saw this cool-looking technique to give yourself an hallucination!

When I have a day free, I am definitely trying this with one of my housemates to see if it actually works. I’m so intrigued …

Yes, that’s right kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It!

You are going to need three things: a ping-pong ball, a radio with headphones and a red light.

Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with just white noise (static), and put on your headphones.

Step 2: Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.

Step 3: Turn the red light so it’s facing your eyes.

Step 4: Sit there for at least a half an hour.

Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.

How Does It Work?

It’s called the Ganzfeld effect, and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It’s the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale.

The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can’t guarantee they won’t involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that’s the risk you take, dammit.

So that’s brilliant and fascinating.

But that’s not all I’ve learned from the internet in the past few days, here’s some more stuff:

The 5 Least Sexy Products Money Can Buy

There’s a plethora of product review sites on the Internet, but they all have one problem in common: Responsibility. They’re always “carefully testing products” given to them “expressly for that purpose,” and where’s the fun in that? Plus, they don’t have nearly enough pictures or boobs and almost never use the word ‘ball-crushingly’ to its full effect.

30 Clever and Cool T-Shirt Designs You Will Love

There’s only one thing that designers love more than a clever and cool design…and that’s being able to wear it in the form of a t-shirt.

Toothpaste For Dinner

This week’s comic is, as usual, hillarious.

I really do love the interwebs.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

Wormhole

Daniel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:02:45 +0000

Image by Paco Calvino

This image is really cool. I was looking at ‘8 Mind-Boggling Optical Illusions’ while browsing the Digg new bookmarks, and this picture of a wormhole was on it.

I think it’s very cool. That is all.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! Wormhole is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

The Nocebo Effect

Daniel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:03:57 +0000

This article was taken directly from New Scientist as part of their article, “13 more things that don’t make sense” dated 02 September 2009.

When western anthropologists first heard reports of witch doctors who could issue deadly curses, they quickly found rational explanations. The families of the cursed often felt there was no point wasting food on the “walking dead”, for example. That’s why many of the cursed would die: simple starvation.

However, other case histories have come to light that defy attempts to explain them. In the 1970s, for example, doctors diagnosed a man with end-stage liver cancer, and told him he had just a few months to live. Though the patient died in the predicted time, an autopsy showed the doctors had been mistaken. There was a tiny tumour, but it had not spread. It seemed the doctors’ prognosis had been a death curse.

Though the mechanism remains a mystery, but at least now this kind of phenomenon has a name. The “nocebo effect” is the lesser-known opposite number of the placebo effect, and describes any case where putting someone in a negative frame of mind has an adverse effect on their health or well-being. Tell people a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, and they will experience more pain than if you had kept the bad news to yourself. Similarly, experiences of side effects within the placebo groups of drug trials have shown that a doctor’s warning about the possible side effects of a medicine makes it much more likely that the patient will report experiencing those effects.

This is not just in the mind: it is also about physical effects. The stress created by the nocebo effect can have a long-lasting impact on the heart, for example – perhaps serious enough to cause fatal damage.

The race is on to understand the precise mechanisms behind nocebo. Medical researchers are hoping that such an understanding will help to make the world a less stressful place. “It is a good way to understand anxiety, and to find methods to prevent it,” says Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, Italy.

We have all heard of and maybe experienced the placebo effect, but how weird is the nocebo effect?! I guess it makes sense though. If you can be made to believe you’re getting better, why not getting worse?

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! The Nocebo Effect is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.

The Cost Of A Coke

Daniel — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:00:33 +0000

Here’s an interesting fact:

The concentrate for 70 percent of Coca-Cola’s 1.5 billion drinks served each day originates in the tax haven of Ireland, where enough concentrate for 50,000 Cokes costs $2.60—including labor. The concentrate’s main ingredient? Caramel.

Source

But there’s so much coke can do:

Baking a ham basted with Coca-Cola produces a delicious gravy (apparently).
Coke can be used as a degreaser for driveways (this I can confirm).
In one night Coke can melt meat.
It kills bugs.
You can polish coins with it

Did you know?

There are 7,000 Coca-Cola products consumed worldwide every single second.
Santa Claus originally wore green clothes; until Coca Cola had their say and changed him.
The Coca-Cola logo is recognised by 94% of the population.

… That’s enough about coke. I’m not getting any royalties for this, so it’s not worth digging too deep into the world of coke.

Thanks for reading my post from your RSS reader! The Cost Of A Coke is a post from: Daniel Ogden’s Blog.