Web sites for teens

Wired has an article about what teens like in a Web site: large type, more images, and interactivity. They like to lean back in their chairs and view the screen from a distance. They want text leavened with images. And they want to be doing something and not just reading. For details, read “Wired: What Web sites do to turn on teens.”

Wired based their article on a study done by the Neilsen Norman Group.

View Comet Holmes from Ontario

Comet Holmes is a large, fuzzy ball visible to the naked eye. Check the Discovery Channel to see where look for it.

This might well be one of the brightest and largest comets of our lifetime, but unless the skies clear we won’t be seeing it.

"Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms" by Thomas L. Hankins

One of the beta readers on Edward Tufte’s discussion group recommended this article: “Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms: A Particular History of Graphs” by Thomas L. Hankins. Here is one of its illustrations:

Charles Joseph Minard’s carte figurative of traffic on the major railroad lines of Europe. (From Marc Desportes and Antoine Picon, De l’espace au territoire: L’amènagement en France XVIeXXe siècles [Paris: Presses de l'École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 1997], page 87.) Collection École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées.

Why do people laugh at Creationists? 4

Here we go again: Creationist Kent Hovind opens his mouth to change feet:

New bone beds are found near Grande Prairie, Alberta

New “bone beds” of dinosaur fossils are found near Grande Prairie. From the article:

The Grande Prairie area was one of the few above water during many parts of the Cretaceous period…. A bone bed at Pipestone Creek, discovered in 1974 about 30 kilometres from Grande Prairie, has long been the region’s best area. Horned dinosaurs and other plant eaters have been the most common finds in the bed, where bones of many species and specimens are being excavated from stone.

It’s believed to be the remains of a river where many dinosaurs died at once, and has as many as 150 bones per square metre — five times that of Dinosaur Provincial Park, near Drumheller.