The Daily Cross Hatch

The Daily Cross Hatch, a web blog dedicated to alternative comics, has posted a web comic which I jointly created with Rob Barton and Phil Ashworth.

Article at The Daily Crosshatch

Phil Ashworth's Blooooooooggg

Nice Captcha Google

Google has gotten creative with their captcha's (a test to determine whether the user is human).



After realizing this is worth sharing, I got a last minute snap of the screen-shot yesterday.

The XKCD Effect

On Jan 21 XCKD, a very popular web comic, posted a comic referencing the Fujitsu Q2010 laptop:



Prior to this, due to a lack of search volume, Google Trends had no global search trend data. However, the day XKCD published a webcomic referencing the Q2010 there was a global traffic spike. Not only does this demonstrate the high volume of XKCD traffic, but it also tells us where the top readers are.



On Jan 23 XKCD posted a comic referencing skynet:



The impact of XKCD on skynet also had a noticeable impact on global search trends! The traffic spike on Jan 23 can be clearly seen in the United States search trends:



The XKCD effect is big and all comics are still released under the Creative Commons License. I wonder how much an XKCD shoutout costs? From the trends below, I suspect things might change.

Autogram-Spoonerism

I'd like to try and come up with complex literary phrases that are layered with forms of word play.

Spad Boonerism

This is both a Spoonerism and an Autogram.

MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) documentation

Like most open source projects, they can always use more documentation. I recently posted a tutorial on how to run the MPB code on Cygwin. The tutorial has since been added to the MPB website, which is a nice affirmation that it may be useful. One stone in a great project by Steven Johnson.