I came across this map of the world on which water and land have been inverted. The result if a world on which we would have stacks of land surrounding massive oceans/lakes.

It makes for a cool effect.

Our boy Robbie Hunter became the first African to win a stage of the Tour de France yesterday. It was a very entertaining stage and I was pretty excited when I saw that Robbie finally got his win. He has been very close in the some other stages so I was really hoping for it.

Robbie took advantage of the chaos in the stage, avoided a crash on the last corner, and jumped too early but held of the attackers.

As happy as I was, Robbie was clearly much happier than me.

You’re the man!

The Economist has an interesting graph and brief article about the cost of cocaine around the world.

• The farther away a country from the main producers in South and Central America, and the more isolated it is, the higher the cost to traffick there.
• Cheapest in Colombia, the world’s biggest producer of coca: at $2, a gram costs less than a Big Mac
• In far-flung New Zealand, a gram costs a wallet-busting $714.30

I love the Tour de France. It’s awesome.

Today something really unusual happened - one of the cyclists hit a dog! Apparently both the cyclist and the dog are OK.

Here is a good pic of the incident from the superb Tour de France coverage at steephill. If you like the tour then I recommend this site.

Galaxy Zoo is a cool site that gets people to classify thousands of telescope photos of distant galaxies. You get some quick training, pass a test and then start classifying galaxies for them.

From the site:

The project harnesses the power of the internet - and your brain - to classify a million galaxies.
You’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before (the photos are taken by a robot and analysed by a computer).

The idea is that if real people are doing the classifications then:

• They will get a pretty accurate classification
• Anything really interesting will be brought to their attention

Also, all this raises awareness which is pretty cool.

I classified a few - this is the most interesting one that I saw. See explanation below if you really want to.

No - that’s not a UFO it’s the path of a satellite.  It is a streak because the telescope has a long exposure to get as much light as possible.  It’s blue because the telescope actually takes 3 pictures - one for red, one for green, and one for blue and then combines them.  The satellite passed while the telescope was taking the blue frame.

Maps of War have a great animation showing “5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds”.

Very cool.

It’s strange what some people get good at. People will spend thousands of hours getting unbelievably good at strange things. This is another example of that.

This guy is able to draw a superb rendition of the Mona Lisa in Microsoft Paint - the rubbishy picture editing program that comes with Windows. There are other amazing examples of pictures done in the MS Paint.

I may make fun of the guy, but I will admit that I have on occasion done some ‘MSPainting’ of my own. This is my best work.

Turns out that before the days of computer generated animation the guys at Disney were re-using some of their stuff between movies. Pretty smart. The pic alongside is an example of re-use between the Jungle Book the Winnie the Pooh.

This page has a list of examples.

It seems that some people take rock paper scissors (or as ching-chong-cha as we know it in SA) pretty seriously. ESPN2 televised the US championships last night. There is also quite an extensive site dedicated to the US league.

This is part of an analysis of the final:

In the first set of the finals, Jamie stunned David with a quick two throw victory, with no ties. Jamie made excellent use of the Roshambollah Trap, which posits that a player will not use consecutive identical throws. Thus, after winning with scissors, Jamie threw rock, knowing that he would either tie or win. The second set started with a tied rock before David wisely played paper twice in a row, having learned his lesson in the first set. David wins this time, pushing the match into the third and deciding set. This time, the players tie with rock then scissors, noticeably affecting an already exhausted Borne. After this, Jamie uses a similar one-two punch to take David out in two throws and win the championship with a final throw of paper, a throw he had not used successfully since the round of sixteen.