nocto

i’ve been wishing someone would create something like cafe press, where you can create your own personalised items (mugs, tshirts, fridge magnets etc), in the uk for ages. it looks like make my megastore have taken up the idea but they’ve made it all flashy and it won’t work for me. i’ll have to check it out on a windows machine later and see if it’s any good. i lied, i just hadn’t got the latest version of flash installed, it works quite happily under linux.

[found via not so soft]

from weatherpixie.com

[found via indigirl]

this selection of books is something i want to keep around to refer to as, although i’ve only read a handful ^* of the books on the list, i thought that every one of those handful was an excellent book. so it feels like i can trust their opinion.

[found via rebecca's pocket]

(*) to kill a mockingbird is long due a reread, i read the great gatsby about three years ago and adored it, i think i read the grapes of wrath years ago but i must reread now i’m a grown up, white teeth is probably my least favourite of these books but a stonking good story all the same, a thousand acres is wonderful though i liked smiley’s lidie newton book better myself, also the weight of water which again isn’t shreve’s best work as far as i’m concerned – try strange fits of passion instead, the handmaid’s tale should go down in history as a classic, and finally captain corelli’s mandolin is another book well worth the effort of reading. actually i’ve just spotted birdsong on the list and i couldn’t get into that book, must try again, but i still think the list promises great things.

at the moment my attention is on:

• threads magazine, tons of useful sewing type articles, as i’ve just pulled my sewing machine down out of the loft and am a bit apprehensive about remembering how it works.
• knitty.com, lots of fun knitting stuff and i especially like this jumper which manages to be stripy without looking like you ought to be three years old to wear it and these gloves hiding inside mittens which look terribly complicated but not too lengthy, i want some for next winter.
• get crafty, full of ideas for weird and wonderful projects.

there’s antipathy, anodyne, linoleum, imodium,

and antigen and collagen and grenadine and belgium…

the periodic table of rejected elements.

lyrics to the real song “the elements by tom lehrer” are found here.

this little flash animation will sing the original song to you and answers the final chorus of:

these are the only ones of which the news has come to harvard,

and there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.

with the list of elements discovered since the song was recorded in 1959, which is something like this:

• lawrencium (1961)
• rutherfordium (1964)
• dubnium (1968)
• seaborgium (1974)
• bohrium (1981)
• hassium (1984)
• meitnerium (1982)
• ununnilium (1994)
• unununium (1994)
• ununbium (1996)
• ununquadium (1999)
• ununhexium (2000)
• ununoctium (2002)

do you begin to think that they are making these up? “artificial radioactive element” makes me think that too. they seem to have given up on naming them after things and are going with a latin naming scheme based on their atomic numbers. my source for all those is this website which also features names that didn’t make it.

[found via write only media]

the london tube map is a piece of design that never fails to captivate me and i thought i had most of the designs in postcard form picked up at the london transport museum at one time or another. but there are some in the tube map archive that i don’t recall seeing before.

[found via interconnected]

if only everything on my screen could look as stunning as the orbit skin for mozilla. i will not be upgrading mozilla again until orbit is ready to come with me. clean, usable, simple and funky.

when did gone west turn into going south:

go west … suggesting something had terminally broken down …: the big Oxford English Dictionary has no examples before 1919. …

Contrast that with go south, which is first recorded in the 1970s, though it was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s, after which it experienced explosive growth.

and there’s plenty more fascinating stuff at world wide words.

an attempt at a clear out: my amazon book sale