Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is...

These damn penguins won't stop following me. Fortunately, this bunch isn't leaving a trail of poo that's visible from space.

A great aviation milestone was celebrated in Fort Worth this past week when Lockheed Martin celebrated the 4,500th F-16 to be built in the 40 years since the contract was awarded to then General Dynamics. Aircraft #4,500 was built for Morocco. The 34 photographs included with the article are worth seeing even if you don't read any of the words. For more on the F-16 go to F-16.net. And here's a copy of the program from the YF-16 roll out ceremony on 13 Dec 1973.

A 1977 photo of an F-16 and the weapons it can carry. Photo from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The 1940 census. It's gonna take more than just a few minutes to find my relatives in here.

If you've ever had the biscuit, cookie, digestive debate with your British friends, here's a chart that explains the categorization of baked goods in British English, American English, and Chinese. (For example, biscuit, cookie, bing, respectively.)

Here's a guide to not offending your Chinese dinner host. I knew about burping being considered a sign of satisfaction with the meal. But they didn't mention something I thought I knew - you're supposed to leave a small morsel on your plate as a sign of fullness. Otherwise, they'll assume you're still hungry - or worse, that they didn't cook enough.

I wonder how you tell your Chinese host that eggs soaked in the urine of 10 year old boys isn't your cup of tea?

If I were to eat urine soaked eggs outdoors I'd certainly use these picnic pants. Wait. Eat outside? Srsly?

If linguistics in general and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift specifically don't get your elevator to the penthouse maybe this will. Recent trends in mobility and exposure of Americans to a wider variety of regional speech patterns have not homogenized speech accents. In fact, the distinctions between regional accents are becoming more well defined. And it may be due to politics.

All these years I've been playing hangman wrong. I bet you have been too.

Best of the visualization web for February 2012: part 1 and part 2.

One might think I'd like a bacon coffin. But, with all due respect, cemeteries are human landfills. Take whatever organs you want, let med students have their way, cremate the rest, sprinkle over garden.

Do you like a little poetry? Check out So So Poems.

Magical poop-stealing water chair. Now that's poetry! source

Amelia Rose Earhart, a distant relative of the Amelia Earhart, is planning to "retrace and complete" her namesake's global circumnavigating flight in 2016. Right now, she's a student at Mississippi State studying meteorology.

Who hasn't heard about Google's Project Glass, the augmented-reality eyewear prototype?

OMG, Google Map's street view is apparently too slow for some people. Hence, showmystreet.com. Just start typing your address.

Someone I follow recently tweeted that while there's a lot of new music there's not a lot of new instruments. Check out these strange musical instruments. Reminds me of H.S. when we invented the schwanette: strings stretched between a pigs teeth. You blow through its ass and strum.

The geeky, greedy, and trekky can now get together and compete for the Tricorder X Prize - $10 million to build a handheld device to measure health metrics and diagnose diseases.

A truly unique map of metal bands per capita. What's up in Scandinavia? Metal keeps you warmer? That explains Circus Maximus.

Learn from this, people: hiding in dung never works.

Sometimes I blather here about CFD - computational fluid dynamics. For those of you who are not technical but just a little curious about this arcane field here's a video Mathematics Gives You Wings from a Stanford University professor explaining CFD in a very accessible way. It's 52 minutes long but I think you'll enjoy it.

The reunion tour of progressive rockers UK (the 2nd lineup with Jobson, Wetton, and Bozzio) is coming to a town near you: Chicago, Boston, Philly (sorry, sold out).

Web design joke: Should I use tables for layout?

Aviation pr0n of the week. source

Follow-up: In case you're still incredulous about last week's report about Shitter, the company what will print your tweets on TP, here's a Business Week interview with the company founder. Shit just got real.

For my booze swilling friends, science settles the debate: shaken or stirred. Or consider this Business Week article about how one country's swill is another country's fine import beer. (The Chinese apparently love Pabst Blue Ribbon. Consider that tit-for-tat for the urine eggs.) And here's proof that innovation is not dead in Japan: Frozen. Beer. Foam.

And wait. And wait. And wait. source

Something engineers won't apparently need to read about: Intimacy 2.0 is a line of high-tech fashion made from "smart e-foils" that become transparent based on "personal interactions."

How much porn does the internet hold? Trust me, a lot. Like 800 gigabytes per second which is like 10 DVDs every second. For one site of many. Where does it all go?

Computer science for everyone else.

Just your typical collection of funny sounds.

Touch Effects - mindless play from Microsoft.

...to school an intelligence and make it a soul? ~John Keats