World’s Strangest

The online dating website OkCupid has performed a statistical analysis of the photos their users post, in order to study patterns. Which types of photos result in the most dates, for which types of people? Does it help to show off your body, or to look interesting? How do users’ representation of themselves change as [...]

What if you came back to this blog tomorrow and suddenly found most of our content now hidden behind a paywall? How much would you be willing to fork over for your daily _floss fix? Okay, take a breath. Relax. Don’t worry! We have no intention of doing any such thing. I just raise the question [...]

I’m not sure who is responsible for this chart, especially since there appear to be several versions available online, including a few for purchase. You can view a larger image at the link. If you look at the key in the lower left corner, ABV stands for “alcohol by volume”, IBU stands for “international bitterness [...]

There’s some debate over whether “internet addiction” is even properly classifiable as a behavioral disorder, but if it is, there’s certainly a not-insignificant percentage of folks in the U.S. that would qualify. For whatever reason, it seems that the most shocking statistics I hear about internet addiction come from Asia. South Korea boasts of being [...]

I was poking around the Reagan Library’s online archives (just for kicks) when I found this photo, captioned “Princess Diana dancing with John Travolta in the entrance hall at the White House. 11/9/85.” You can see the President and First Lady in the background. I found this image roughly 33 seconds into my visit, which [...]

The V&A is, of course, one of the world’s premier museums of design and decorative arts. They have recently announced that over a million items from their collections are now accessible online. People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to [...]

The web is full of online tools, but I bet that you just use a handful of them every day. Indeed, the hardest thing about using online tools is finding them – sometimes you have to wade through a lot of mediocre tools to find the one that suits your need. Well, here’s my list – [...]

Okay, so I’ve been on an online date or two. (And by that, I mean a date that occurs in the “real world” arising from first contact on an online dating site.) I’m currently dating a very nice lady I met via OkCupid, a quirky dating site that’s most notable because it’s free (although there [...]