beyond magazine

Weird Weight Converter

We like the Weird Weight Converter. Sometimes when we're sitting around, trying to figure out how many chests of gold dubloons we need to keep developing a piece of ads-free independent media, we like to distract ourselves by guessing how much a human eyeball might weigh. And then we like to wonder how many eyeballs it would take to make up the weight of let's say, a baby grand piano.

It's like the wikipedia of weighty things. Frees us up to move onto that inhabiting Mars idea. Oh and the question of those gold dubloons.

(1 baby grand piano = 8465.7504 eyeballs)

Gilmorisms.

Since it's going out with a whimper, we'd like to give a Colbert Tip o' the Hat with no wag of the finger to the Gilmore Girls. When it was good, it was very very good. And if you like the little tribute below, someone has also provided all the German and Russian, Dutch, and Czech references from the last seven years. When it comes to the power of youtube, ours is not to reason why.

Oh 7.

Seventy-seven things about '07. The first seven are:

1 Seven is the optimum number of hours of sleep for humans, according to a US scientific study.

2 Seven is seen as a lucky number in many cultures. Japanese mythology talks of Shichifukujin (The Seven Gods of Fortune).

3 The seven deadly sins, or cardinal sins, were refined by Pope Gregory I in the 6th century. They are pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

4 The seven virtues are humility, liberality, chastity, kindness, abstinence, patience, and diligence.

5 At a ceremony in Lisbon on 07/07/07, presumably at 7:07, the results of a global vote for the New Seven Wonders of the World will be announced. The 21 finalists include Stonehenge, the Kremlin and Timbuktu.

6 The superstitious believe that to break a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. The cure: to bury the pieces, or run them in a stream.

7 The average person's digit span (the number of digits they can recall in sequence) is seven.

via The Independent

Venice

I'm not sure why this fascinates me so much - the canals of Venice done entirely in MS Paint:

via gridskipper

Personality Test

From The New York Times Magazine (May 23, 2004). Bland Ambition: Ryan Seacrest by Allison Glock:

Our current culture is a pertri dish for Personalities. We have, as a country, become suspicious of excellence, wary of the smarty-pants. These days we gravitate toward the uncomplicated, the simple and the negligible goal of keeping it real. The realness in question is, of course, unreal, more of a gentle put-on, a feint of authenticity -- Jenny from the block, Paris Hilton with a pitchfork, George Bush in a flight suit, Ryan Seacrest in carefully manicured stubble.

For his part, Seacrest has taken the art of the Personality and refined it to the level of German engineering. He is not simply the next Regis or Merv; he is a brand new model. Regis can be cranky; Merv is a business shark. Seacrest has willing filed away any edges of himself, cast aside any ugly urges, embraced the manufactured self as actual self and been rewarded for his efforts with multiple, multiyear contracts netting him about $10 million annually.