I recently stumbled upon a collection of maps in svg-format. The page and data is part of the wikipedia and the licenses of usage may vary, but some (e.g. the world map) are published under all-purpose-licenses.

The vector areas are even semantically grouped – thus if you select the area of France you’ll have French Guiana marked as well. I suppose this will be very useful for visualisation projects.

Collective intelligence is a wonderful thing.

Recently discovered artifacts on the island of rapa nui point towards technologically induced  cultural erosion. The newly excavated statues show a strong similarity to the world-famous “moais”. Yet, renown experts claim, that the expression and morphology of the statues give hints of a rapid technological development within the ancient civilisation of rapa nui.

“We are now pretty sure, that there has been some kind of communicative dissociation”, states J. Brenshnwnvt  “which in turn led to the decline and fall of the complete civilisation on rapa nui”.

Recently discovered maois hint toward a slightly different historical background of the easter island

Experts discovered a specimen of the long predicted “kuhliefumd” in a pond near Wiesbaden, Germany. Renowned biologists state that the kuhliefumd is actually the long discussed missing link between fish fingers and submarines.

As the examination of the pond and its inhabitants progresses, the age-old dispute concerning the grammatical gender of the habitat of a kuhliefumd rises again.

The kuhliefumd has finally been discovered in a pond near Wiesbaden, Germany

One of the most useful websites, as far as my experiences are concerned, is leo.org , a web dictionary translating german vocabulary from and to 5 different languages. I wrote a little bookmarklet, which allows to use the site via firefox in a command line style.

If I would like to know the word for “Eiche” in english, I would simply type <Ctrl>+<l> to get the focus into the address box, then enter “l” (my firefox bookmark keyword for the leo.org) followed by a blank which in turn would be followed by the target language abbrevation ( “en” for english in this case) and then finally followed by another blank and the term to be translated (“Eiche” or “eiche”, since capitalizing isn’t relevant for the results from leo):

After hitting enter, the bookmarklet opens the corresponding page from leo:

To get this working, the browser needs the following code entered into the address-field of the bookmark, like this:

Since the bookmarklet takes the target language as “argument”, you may as well query for the french word for “Eiche” by simply writing “l fr eiche” instead. The result looks like this:

Speaking of translations there is also the BabelFish-Plugin for firefox – extremely useful!

By the way:  you’re welcome use the bookmarklet, I publish it under the MIT license (okay, it’s perhaps ridiculous to call this bookmarklet software, but since there are queer people … ) :

javascript:
s      = '%s';
url    = 'http://dict.leo.org/?lp=%sde&lang=de&agent=firefox-de&search=%s';
t      = '';
qc     = 0;
chunks = url.split('%s');
for( i = 0 ; i < s.length; i++ ){
    if ( s.charAt(i) == '%22' ) qc = qc^1 ;
    t += ( s.charAt(i) == '%20'&& qc ) ? '^' : s.charAt(i) ;
}
args = t.split(/\s/);
args = args.length == 1 && args[0] == '%s' ? ['en'] : args;
nurl = '';
for( i = 0 ; i < chunks.length ; i++ ){
    nurl += chunks[i];
    if ( args[i] != undefined ){
        args[i] = args[i].replace( /\^/g , '%20' );
        nurl += args[i];
    }
}
location.replace( nurl , '<%20BR>' );

zipped js-code of the bookmarklet

Copyright (c) 2009 Ingmar Drewing

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.