A nice graphic by Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Fly Ball. Check it out full-sized and with short explanations. I’d love to see it expanded into all professional sports.

The site has a full series of these infographics, visualizing the shape of balls and ballparks, the records of World Series winning teams, the direction of home plates, and more.

• Translation Party is a fun little site that takes a sentence you type and translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until an “equilibrium” is found, that is until the words stop changing.
• Some Russian guy found what looked like an old airplane in a forest using Google maps. So he drove there to check it out and took pictures.
• A preview video of the new Mario game for the Wii. I love Mario.

I was thinking about metaphors that are named after people (like Achilles’ heel). I don’t know what to call this kind of phrase, since some listed below are metaphors and others seem more like philosophical situations. Either way, I’m calling them namesake metaphors, and I like them because they encapsulate a complicated idea or system, but they also remain historically rooted by their names. So I compiled a list. There are probably more of these, but it’s a difficult task for a google search. If you can think of any more, mention them in a comment.

• Achilles’ heel: A fatal weakness in spite of overall strength. The infant Achilles was dipped in the river Styx, held by his heel, and he became invulnerable where the waters touched him.
• Gordian knot: An intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke. Alexander the Great cut an impossible knot with his sword.
• Columbus’ egg: An idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip; and, after they gave up, he did it himself by tapping the egg on the table so as to flatten its tip.
• Archimedean point: A hypothetical, objective vantage point. Archimedes supposedly claimed that he could lift the Earth off its foundation if he were given a place to stand, one solid point, and a long enough lever.
• Midas’ touch: A blessing and curse that everything one interacts with becomes valuable but potentially useless. King Midas was granted a wish that everything he touched turned to gold, but it became a curse when his food and even his daughter became solid gold.
• Occam’s Razor: The principle that explanations should make as few assumptions as possible. Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as an heuristic maxim (rule of thumb) that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity, often or especially in scientific theories.
• Buridan’s ass: A figurative description of a man of indecision. It refers to a paradoxical situation wherein an ass, placed exactly in the middle between two stacks of hay of equal size and quality, will starve to death since it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one rather than the other. The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan.
• Morton’s fork: A choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives. The opposite of the Buridan’s Ass. The expression originates from a policy of tax collection devised by John Morton, Lord Chancellor of England in 1487, under the rule of Henry VII.
• Plato’s Cave: Knowledge allows us to see the true forms of things. In Plato’s cave, people watch the shadows on the cave wall and think they are real, but the philosopher, freed from the cave, can see the reality of the world.

Hilarious! It’s from here.

Every blog post, Digg submission, Wikipedia discussion, and Youtube clip has it. It’s the single comment that causes you to stop reading. Often it makes you close the tab, other times you must exit the browser, and in particularly awful instances you are forced to walk away from the computer. The fatal comment itself is not terribly offensive or earthshattering; usually it’s just the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The fatal comment serves a simple, unintended purpose: with its own stupidity, it makes you realize that you do not want to be reading these comments anymore. You have already spent five minutes more than you wanted reading these comments. It makes you realize that you are not going to learn anything else the farther down you read. It makes you wonder if the writer has just read the same blog post or watched the same youtube clip as you. The inanity of the comment is mindboggling and you just have to get out.

John Lurie is the unlikely starting place for the Russian equivalent of the lolcats meme. It started when someone translated his painting, “Bear Surprise”, with a humorous spelling error. The bear says “Preved!” instead of “Privet!” (hello). Soon photoshopped bears and people with their arms raised across the internet were given speech bubbles, and the meme even made the cover of Russian Newsweek magazine. Surprise!

There are quite a few English translations of the Baudelaire’s wonderful poem “Une Passante“. A few others are here, and I like the top one by Cat Nilan best.

None capture the flow and rhyme of the original french, but I go back and forth about whether I want a translated poem to read as literally as possible or to achieve an overall mood that is closer to the original. There are things I like about each of these translations, but I rarely like the effect of a rhyme scheme that I know is forced and different from the original (like the second one from the first link).

Sometimes better than Wikipedia’s articles are Wikipedia’s obscure and hyper-complete lists. This one is for modern company name etymologies.

Gems include:

Audi — Latin translation of the German name ‘Horch’. The founder August Horch left the company after five years, but still wanted to manufacture cars. Since the original ‘Horch’ company was still there, he called his new company Audi, the Latin form of his last name. In English it is: “hark!”.

Volvo — from the Latin word volvo, which means “I roll”. It was originally a name for a ball bearing being developed by SKF.

Lycos — from Lycosidae, the family of wolf spiders.

Sprint — from its parent company, Southern Pacific Railroad INTernal Communications. At the time, pipelines and railroad tracks were the cheapest place to lay communications lines, as the right-of-way was already leased or owned.

Pixar — from pixel and the co-founder’s name, Alvy Ray Smith. According to the biography “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” by Alan Deutschman, the ‘el’ in pixel was changed to ‘ar’ because ‘ar’ is frequently used in Spanish verbs, implying the name means “To Pix”.

There are quite a few other good ones (like Seiko), each, of course, with a link to the company wikipedia page.