Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac – The Consumerist.

Strangely Beautiful Map Shows Territory Controlled In The Fast Food Wars – The Consumerist.

Down for the Count by poopbear via Boing Boing

Chilean Earthquake Tsunami Travel Time Estimates | zero hedge.

The author, Scott Berinato, has more visualizations than the one I’ve pasted below but you can see how a Venn Diagram of Twitter’s data could be useful for marketers and modern sociologists. In this image, Berinato compares the search terms “Apple,” “Google,” and “Microsoft” to one another to see how frequently they were tweeted.

As you can see, Apple was mentioned more often that their competitors. But as the author notes, Google was hardly mentioned at all. What this suggests needs further research but it might imply that Google is not as hip or popular as almost everyone else would have you believe. Still, its cool just seeing such data represented in some more manageable way.

Jeff Clark, who runs the site Neoformix, has all types of visualizations including the frequency of words used in the latest State of the Union Address and links to other visualizations like the Daytime vs Nighttime Population of Manhattan.

If you’re into marketing, sociology, statistics, or just freaky facts, I’d recommend visiting Clark’s site pretty often. While he doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, I’ve “subscribed” to is using Google Reader’s new “follow changes” feature. If he adds any more cool visualizations, I’ll post them here.

Neoformix [via Four Ways of Looking at Twitter - Research - Harvard Business Review]

How did I not hear of this sooner? Big Buck Bunny is an open source movie! Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, BBB is an HD quality short film created entirely out of open source software. A team of animators were flown to Amsterdam in October 2007 and only seven months later, the movie premiered.

Because its free and available under the CC license, I’m downloading it as I’m typing – so I can’t tell you how good the movie is. But at almost 10 minutes long, I’m hopeful its a good representative of how high definition animation can be created by using GPL’d software.

Big Buck Bunny

When SF2 Championship Edition came out for the SNES, I went out and bought the console, the game, and two arcade quality fighting sticks just so I could play the game at home. I’ve owned almost all the other SF2 variants and the other SF derivatives including SF EX3 for the PS2. Feeling nostalgic, a good friend of mine gave me his SNES and SF2: CE after I started searching eBay for a system. For Christmas, my wife got me Street Fighter IV because she knows how much I’m into the series. I’ll probably pick up the next version of SFIV and I’m saving up for the official SFIV arcade stick from Mad Catz.

Not having a PSP or other portable console system, I can only enjoy the game when I’m at home… but not for much longer. Capcom recently announced it was going to release an iPhone version of the game. As you can see from the image below, courtesy of IGN, SFIV will use a virtual D-Pad and buttons to control the characters.

Notwithstanding the reservations I have on the controls (virtual control pads on the iPhone can be hit or miss depending on the publisher), the graphics look great and if the gameplay is the same, I’ll be purchasing the iPhone version when it comes out in March. I swore I read that it should run on both the 3G and 3Gs versions but I can’t seem to find the link which said that; if I find it, I’ll update the post with that info.

Street Fighter IV for iPhone Revealed – IGN [via MacLife]

Anyway, from The Awesomer, I found this little animated short story. I’m already looking forward to seeing what Sønniksen and his team come up with next.

Vegeterrible from Henrik Sønniksen on Vimeo.

A swinging Mexican fiesta goes bad when a very hungry rotten avocado crashes the party and starts devouring the guests… Vegeterrible is a film about the last tomato’s fight for survival.

A while back, I read an article on Boing Boing that covered one man’s experiment of showering without the use of soap or shampoo. Lured by the idea of naturally soft but not greasy skin & hair, I thought about performing a similar experiment one day. But because I didn’t want to go to work during the two week “normalization” period, I never fully embraced the idea. I did manage to go soap free for nearly all of January but still used shampoo as I didn’t want to show up at the office with natural dreads.

But with the paternity leave I get from work and the added vacation I attached to the back of it, I had time to let my body adjust to a soap free lifestyle. Its been two weeks since I last used soap to wash (other than my hands when handling the baby or food) and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the results. I don’t know if I’ll stay soap free when I go back to work, though.

First, the two weeks to adjust is probably a variable – my skin didn’t take that long to get used to being soap free but my hair still feels greasy at times. And for the most part, I feel clean all day. Only very late at night do I feel like I could use another shower. I still use deodorant – the natural kind from Tom’s of Maine – so I’m using some kind of odor protection. And I feel I get the best results when I use a washcloth – something I’m not sure if Richard Nikoley used for his experiment. And while my skin feels soft, it still feels a little dry – using hot water doesn’t help in that area, though.

As I mentioned, my hair still feels greasy at times. In January, when I first tried being sans soap, I still used shampoo because I knew I’d never be able to go to work while my scalp adjusted. With my time off, I went all in and didn’t use shampoo. And, at first, my hair was really greasy. But after a week, I noticed only the areas closest to my scalp were greasy. If I keep it up, I might be able to go without shampoo. But I’m not sure I want to.

My wife says she never noticed I stopped using soap in January. She could tell I stopped using shampoo and I think for that reason, I’ll go back to using it after this weekend. I might also go back to using soap as I noticed the time it took me to shower increased – probably because I wanted to make sure I got every area with the wash cloth. There is also a certain amount of paranoia I have about the experiment. I didn’t detect any foul body odor and neither did my wife. But I know I stopped using soap and, for some reason, I’m conditioned to think that soap equals clean and if others knew I hadn’t used soap, they’d think badly of me. Worse yet, they’d actually be able to smell me when I couldn’t detect my own scent.

If anyone else has tried showering without soap or shampoo, what were your results? How long did it take you to normalize and did you ever go back to using cleansers? Despite the comments saying their experiments have been a great success, I still remain a little skeptical – even after performing my own personal hygiene experiment.

I took this a while ago but only got around to editing it now. There was something about the symmetry of the snow on the window sills that caught my eye.