TagMaps is a really cool little toy from Yahoo’s research labs that I just stumbled across. It’s using heavy concentrations of tags on Flickr and overlaying them on a map, allowing you to zoom around the map and see how people have tagged their city. Here’s the official verbiage:

TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.

The World Explorer engine analyzes the information tied to the photos (such as location and tags) to find the main “attractions” in each location and in every zoom level and compute their “importance”. We use the tags, on the map, in varying font sizes, to represent these attractions.

Here’s a sample of the World Explorer, centered on Seattle…

(via Flickr Central)

I’d heard some time ago about the teen repellent noise — an ultrasonic tone that teens can hear, but adults can’t due to natural hearing loss as people age, that gets annoying enough to drive teens away.

It was named the ‘Mosquito’ because the sound resembles that of a buzzing insect. And it works by emitting a harmless ultra sonic tone that generally can only be heard by people aged 25 and under. In trials, it has proven that the longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes.

Crime Reduction Officer Bob Walton elaborated further: “Effectively, it’s a transmitter which sends out a specialised frequency noise which according to the manufacture is particularly audible to young people under the age of 25.

He said: “I’m in my fifties and when it’s turned on all I can hear is a very faint buzz. But I understand from young people who have been exposed to the noise, it is very annoying.”

Amusingly, not long after this started being used, the concept was appropriated and adapted by teenagers for use as a cellphone ring tone that they could hear but that their parents or teachers could not. Clever kids!

Here’s a site that has a selection of a few different ring tones at various frequencies, from 8 kHz up to 22.4 kHz, so you can test your own hearing abilities and see if you’d be able to hear (or be annoyed by) the tones.

My results:

Apparently there’s enough to spare these days…

In South Plainfield, New Jersey: Severed hand found in nude dancer’s home.

A severed hand was found at the home of an exotic dancer who decorated her home with skulls, and she was charged with improper disposition of human remains, authorities said.

Friends said the hand had been given to the woman by a medical student.

[…]

Kay’s mother, Patricia Ann Kay, told the newspaper that her daughter bought the skulls from a mail order catalog. She said her daughter has always been fascinated with the macabre, and when she was a girl she collected animal skulls and snake skeletons.

“She has a flair for the dramatic,” Patricia Ann Kay said. “I have never tried to stop my children from doing whatever they want. As long as they are happy, aren’t hurting anyone, and it’s keeping them out of the poor house.”

In Springfield, Virginia: Customer at Market in Springfield Cuts Off His Hand

Igbal Asghar reached across the counter at Super Halal Meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer’s second order, goat meat.

When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer’s severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw, Asghar said. The customer ran down the Springfield store’s center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was “not a terrorist.” Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand “for Allah.”

[…]

Asghar said the man’s son told him that evening that his father was on medication for mental problems. Dan Schmidt, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, said authorities believe the man had mental health problems. Schmidt said he did not know whether doctors planned to try to re-attach the man’s hand.

Bizarre.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation – Main Theme From” by Erich Kunzel; Cincinnati Pops Orchestra from the album Symphonic Star Trek (1996, 1:43).

Seattle’s two alt-weeklys, The Stranger and the Seattle Weekly have been battling it out in this town for far longer than I’ve been around to witness it. In the time I’ve been here, though, I’ve pretty much settled on grabbing a copy of each when I’ve got time to read both; if I only have time to read or skim one, I’ll generally grab the Stranger (if for no other reason that it tends to be more entertainingly snarky).

Each paper has been re-vamping their respective websites over the past year or so. Last year sometime, the Stranger waded into the weblog world with Slog, which after a somewhat clumsy start has been running strong (and was doing the best reporting in town on the Capitol Hill shooting at the time). Not long afterwards came Line Out, focusing more on the local music scene.

The Seattle Weekly just stepped up to the plate today, going live with not just one but three blogs: The Daily Weekly (“News, Politics, Media”), Post Alley (“Seattle Arts & Culture”), and Mossblog (an online companion to Knute Berger’s ‘Mossback‘ column.

While things just went live, so it’s going to be a bit before they really settle in and get in the groove (they’re in the process of figuring out how to turn comments on), it’s a promising start.

One nice thing I noticed immediately, though, is going to end up making me more of a regular reader of the Weekly rather than the Stranger: easy to find, obvious RSS feeds for everything. Where the Stranger is only providing RSS feeds for their two blogs, the Weekly has RSS feeds embedded into every page (for easy auto-discovery by web browsers or feed readers), easy links on every page to specific RSS feeds for that section of the paper, and links on every page to their main RSS page, which lists all their available feeds — including one catchall feed for the entire current issue.

Admittedly, it’s not perfect — while the Daily Weekly gets a full-text feed (yay!), the main issue feed has only one-line summaries (boo!). While I can understand why they might not want to go for a full-text feed for their entire issue (after all, it is advertising dollars that fund the paper), I do wish they’d at least provide a better summary — a paragraph, whether hand-crafted or just one single opening paragraph lifted from the article. Single-sentence descriptions might catch my eye, but all too often, they just don’t give enough context or information to really grab my interest.

At the same time…even that single line description is a lot more information than the Stranger gives me when they get a new issue up. So kudos to the Weekly…and hey! Stranger! Step it up, will ya?

“Supernaut” by 1000 Homo DJs from the album Supernaut (1992, 6:42).