Stock photographs are convenient to use, but some stock images have been so over-used that they have become cliches. Here are the top ten stock photo cliches. 11. Two hands in a handshake. The connotation is supposed to be one of agreement and co-operation. Frequently one of the hands is female or black, but bonus [more...]
Stock photographs are photographs that have already been taken and are being offered for sale or use, as opposed to photographs that are commissioned in advance for a specific purpose. The enormous advantage of stock photography is that it is very much cheaper than custom photography. If you want a picture of penguins in Antarctica, [more...]
A mulching lawnmower is one that chops up the grass clippings very finely before driving them downwards into the lawn where they decay and return their nutrients to the earth. It has several advantages over a mower that collects the clippings and must be emptied regularly, Mowing is faster because there’s no need to stop [more...]
It sounds like a “no-brainer”, doesn’t it, that your adventure activities provider needs to be insured? But it turns out not to be so clear-cut as that. The RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a British charity) says this in relation to the adventure sport of coasteering: The RNLI advises only taking part in coasteering as [more...]
Coasteering involves traversing the coast and interacting with the sea and the rocks. It’s is an odd type of adventure activity because it is mostly operated and promoted by the organised outdoor activity industry in the United Kingdom, especially in Pembrokeshire (Wales) where it originated. If you were doing this with your friends, you wouldn’t [more...]
The name Blue Lagoon suggests a piece of paradise from the tropics, however there is also a Blue Lagoon in the United Kingdom. It’s near the town of Abereiddy in Wales. The lagoon is a former steep-sided slate quarry that was flooded after it was abandoned. Today it is connected to the ocean by a [more...]
“Tombstoning”, the practice of jumping from a height into water, is an enjoyable recreational activity. However, it is associated with a steady stream of rescues, injuries and deaths. If the risks are mitigated, jumping into water is a relatively low-risk activity. Many of the injuries and fatalities are caused by hitting rock instead of water. [more...]
Tombstoning is a perjorative term coined by the media and the health’n’safety brigade to describe the practice of jumping off high places into water. Others might call it “jumping into the sea”. The media like the emotive term because it fits into compact headlines. A headline of “Tombstoning craze kills boy” works better for them [more...]
A vasectomy is a surgical procedure which cuts and seals the tubes that carry sperm from the testicles towards the penis. After a successful vasectomy, the man’s ejaculate no longer contains sperm and he cannot father a child. It’s considered a straightforward procedure, and is much simpler than the corresponding procedure for women (tubal ligation). [more...]
Surely fashions come and go, without anyone “deciding”? Well, actually, there are individuals and organizations that give a “guiding hand” to the whims of fashion. The Color Marketing Group is an association of people who work with color. They design with color, market color, and teach color. The Group holds regular conferences and workshops at [more...]
Most people are familiar with the words canine (relating to dogs) and feline (relating to cats), but many other animals or animal groups get their own adjective. These are called collateral adjectives, and are generally derived from the genitive form of the Latin genus name. Here is a list of collateral adjectives. Ant: myrmecine. Bear: [more...]
There are so many image file formats to choose from. Which should you use for your images? For images that are going to be uploaded onto the web, the answer is usually easy: Is the image a photo (or a graphic that looks like a photo)? Use JPG. Is the image animated? Use GIF. For [more...]
In 1945, Sydney’s Technology Museum was renamed the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and until 1988 its exhibits were open to the public from premises in Harris Street in the inner Sydney suburb of Ultimo. And what a museum it was! I was a regular visitor as a child in the late 1960s. Outside [more...]
It’s common to hear about an interesting new web service that has opened for beta testing, only to find that you need an “invite code” to register. Even mainstream services such as Google’s Gmail started out by requiring an invitation code. Why is this a common way for beta sites to start up? One reason [more...]
Naturally, Stonehenge has experienced weathering and collapse due to the passage of time. But even if we disregard those changes, there is no way that Stonehenge can be regarded as a preserved “snapshot” of its original form. Stonehenge was not designed and built to the current layout. The design we see today is the result [more...]
The anti-teen sound is a sound that can only be heard by teenagers and other young people under about 25 years of age. As we age, our ears start to lose sensitivity to high-pitched sounds. By the age of 50, the average person can’t hear sounds with a frequency above 12kHz (twelve thousand cycles per [more...]
Bitcoins are computer-generated digital tokens. You can buy stuff with them, yet bitcoins differ fundamentally from banknotes, coins, and digital currencies—not the least because you can mint bitcoins yourself. Paper money, minted coinage, and digital currencies each require a central authority to issue the stock of the currency. Digital currencies also require a central authority [more...]
Rome is Italy’s largest city and its capital. Rome’s many historic sites include the Pantheon (the oldest intact Roman temple), the Temple of Vesta (with its Corinthian columns, and once guarded by the Vestal Virgins), and the Roman Coliseum (known in its heyday as the Flavian Amphitheater after the family name of emperors Vespasian and [more...]
Inflation has eroded the value of the penny to the point where many people will no longer pick up a penny when they see one in the street. But how does this stand up to cold-blooded economic analysis? Suppose it takes three seconds to pick up a penny. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, [more...]
At paid Q&A/Research site Uclue, a customer asked the researchers to investigate his uncanny feeling that major air disasters frequently occur within 15 days of each other. A researcher named Bowler was able to list the large crashes and show that there was no 15-day pattern. But how close to each other do fatal air [more...]