It used to be possible to force a copy of a Google form by editing the sharing url.
This was a mighty useful feature – you could create a nice pre-workshop survey and allow colleagues to make their own copies and modify them as they please.
You could create and share in-class quizzes for others to use. Got a cool exit ticket? Excellent. Give’r here!
No more.
Why, Google? Whyyyyy?!
Here’s a neat visualization by redditor stephenholzman of age-specific fertility rates in the US & Japan over time. #rgoals
I came across this neat visualization of reddit. The method used to generate it is reported in the research article “Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media”.
In addition to being a fascinating analysis, the way in which I encountered this publication was interesting from an academic perspective. It warms my heart, really.
The creators, Prof. Zachary Neal and Dr. Randy Olson, did an AMA on it not too long ago as well, where they linked to all of the open-sourced tools they used to create it. That AMA was then archived by the The Winnower, which claims to be “a scholarly publishing platform that offers traditional scholarly publishing tools to traditional and non-traditional scholarly outputs—because scholarly communication doesn’t just happen in scholarly journals.” Truly amazing. The AMA thread was assigned a doi, which I have never seen before!
I’m so impressed. https://doi.org/10.15200/10.15200/winn.143886.62183
Concerthotels has a cute little rhythm challenge posted on their website called “Got Rhythm”?
Very entertaining. You listen to a track, tap along and then try to keep the beat as the track ends.
Essaytyper – an amusing find given my present writer’s block … Created by @baygross. As a grad student, I will attest that this site offers at least 2 minutes of harmless fun, followed by 20-80 minutes of lamenting your life choices.
Patatap is a very cool sound app! You can get ported versions for mobile in the App Store & on Google Play, but I’ve only tried the browser version at http://www.patatap.com/ . Highly amusing, best paired with recreational intoxicants (Caesar-with-pickle highly recommended). Cost me hours of productive time.
I’m a huge nerd with a terrible procrastination habit. I surf aimlessly for hours. Wikipedia is the best, most awesome thing ever (and it provided ~70% of my university education). Visit http://listen.hatnote.com/ for a lovely sonic realization of Wikipedia’s recent changes (including new users, edits, & newly created articles). Gorgeous.
100,000 Stars is a lovely visualization developed by “some space enthusiasts at Google”.
I personally recommend enjoying it with a rum and coke. It’s a fantastic toy – I zoomed in and out repeatedly, hurtling from the edge of the galaxy into the sun.
Try it for yourself by visiting http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/
Today’s 5 minutes of woolgathering yielded Seaquence.
It’s a neat composition experiment. You create small wave creatures controlled by a step-sequencer — these wander about in the “sea,” generating neat patterns as voices rise and fall in volume.
You can click & redirect the wave creatures — I enjoyed positioning them in clusters on opposite ends of the space and rapidly shifting the ‘window’ between them. Tonnes of fun. I imagined my little critters tumbling about cacophonously in a single drop of water. Here’s a sample.
According to their website, Seaquence was created by Ryan Alexander, Gabriel Dunne, and Daniel Massey, with support from Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco).
Here’s an oldie-but-goodie. I’ve been scribbling things using Mr. Doob’s procedural drawing tool Harmony for a few years now, and it has brought me hours of joy. Can’t get enough of it.
It’s quite simple; you have a drawing area & can set your background and brush colours. Select a brush, change its size, and enjoy yourself. The tool lends itself well to rapid sketching, and interesting shading experiments.
Here’s a tree drawn only using the ‘Ribbon’ brush:
Check out other projects by Mr. Doob while you’re at it. Incredibly productive individual.