Whimsy: November 2015 Archives
College Football Data Warehouse
Records of divsions, conferences, teams, players, bowl games, and playoffs from the early days of the sport to the present.
Capture network streams from BBC iPlayer (TV in the UK only; radio around the world) for later listening using this Perl application. It is up-to-date with the BBC's recent changes in streaming methods. It's a command-line tool -- no GUI. get_iplayer documentation can be found here.
For example:
get_iplayer --type=radio --get "Missing Hancocks" --modes=flashaaclow --aactomp3 --force
looks for any programme with Missing Hancocks in the title, looks for a flash AAC stream for the program, converts the received AAC stream to MP3 (the default is MP4), and the --force option overwrites any previous recording.
In lieu of --get followed by a title, you can specify a particular programme ID with an option of this form --PID=b06qht29, where the string after the equals sign is the eight-character programme ID that appears in the BBC iPlayer URL for that episode.
It's a joke, but it cuts close to home: "'We understand that the 1993 Camry was tremendously dependable, but, honestly, there's just no excuse for driving a 22-year-old car at this point,' said Toyota spokesman Haruki Kinoshita...."
Here's How Crazy-Long German Words are Made | Mental Floss
The animation at the link "takes you, step by step, through what's involved in creating Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word," which means "Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb Barbara's bar is sold." A commenter at Language Hat breaks the word down as follows: "Rhabarber-Barbara-Bar-Barbaren-Bart-Barbier-Bier-Bar-Bärbel." Further comments at that link discuss the use of "rhubarb" as a nonsense word for background noise in films, German use of "rhabarber" as we use "blah, blah, blah," and the Quebecois practice of growing rhubarb on compost heaps.
Novel Rocket: Tips for Writing Speculative Fiction
J. Wesley Bush, author of Knox's Irregulars, and several other writers of science fiction and fantasy talk about the work of creating a fictional world that provides an engaging and immersive environment for a story.
