Nov

28th 2007

What American Accent Do You Have?

Filed Under Offbeat | Leave a Comment

Take this fun quiz to see where your American accent comes from.  The thirteen question quiz asks you to select from a list of choices to see how closely you pronounce various words before calculating a result of what region your accent most matches. 

Oct

14th 2007

Babel spoken here

Filed Under Languages, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

Did you ever play the “operator game” as a child with a large group of friends?  The one where you whisper a phrase to the person sitting next to you, who then repeats to the next person sitting next to them and so on down the line until the last person who hears the phrase says it out loud.  The fun of the game is that the  phrase becomes garbled along the way so the end result is quite amusing.  What would happen if you took that same phrase and translated it back and forth between English and other languages?  Carl Tashion created his own “Lost in Translation” site to test out how phrases can become garbled in the translation process.  Try out his site and see how “babelized” your own phrases become.

Sep

24th 2007

Rote Geography Mastered at 23 Months Old

Filed Under Education, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

For a little balance after all the incoherent lack of geography education explanations and exposure to people who don’t know if the world is flat, I present to you “Lily: The World Map Master Baby Genius”.  I think the little dance she does on the bed helps her geography acumen. 




Lily was profiled on KSL News based out of Utah in August.  For the past six months she’s been locating countries around the world on a wall map and can consistently identify about 50 countries. 

Aug

29th 2007

Maps For Us

Filed Under Current Events, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

A new web site in reaction to the recent Miss South Carolina Teen USA’s garbled answer to a question about American’s inability to read maps has popped up.  A tongue-in-cheek blog, Maps for Us is reaching out to it’s readers:

The children of the US America are in deep trouble. Because some people out there don’t have maps. Such as South Africa.  Therefore, you must email us maps to make it better.

The blog was only launched today, but already there are some hilarious map posts.  Thanks to a heads up over on James Fee’s blog.

Jun

15th 2007

If US States were named based on world GDP

Filed Under Cartography, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

I first saw this entry over on Matt’s About Geography site.  From the Strange Map site, this map shows the 50 United States named with countries that have similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP). 

Jun

06th 2007

Would you like some global warming with your coffee?

Filed Under General, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

wickedcoolstuff_1949_56896590.gifAdena from All Points Blog pointed out this interesting post from Coolest-gadgets.com.  The Global Warming mug is available from Wickedcoolstuff.com.  Empty, the mug looks like an ordinary cup with a map of the world.  When the mug is filled with a hot beverage, the the coastlines disappear, mimicking what would happen if the sea levels rose due to global warming and melting ice caps. 

 

Global Warming Mug

Apr

03rd 2007

Google Maps - April Fool’s Page

Filed Under Google Maps, Offbeat | Leave a Comment

Not to be outdone by the annual April Fool’s joke accessible on April 1st from the home page of Google.com, the coders for Google Maps came up with their own April Fool’s page.  Envisioning a world under attack, you can type in an address and choose the type of disaster for that geographic area.  Living in Los Angeles, I naturally went for the giant fizzure in the earth created by an earthquake.

 Check it out: Google Maps: Wishing you a happy April Fools!

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