A couple of interesting websites I found recently

Hey guys, I thought I'd just share with you a couple of interesting websites I've stumbled across fairly recently. They are each totally different and unrelated so there's no real overall theme to these links.

First up, and probably most interestingly, it's a Reddit subthread called Today I Learned. I've been browsing this as much as ATS recently if I'm being honest, there's a lot of great information to be found here. I imagine it would be a great resource for regular thread-starters or even just people on a coffee break.

I'll just throw in a random example of something I learned on there recently. You know how when you glance over to a clock and it seems to take slightly longer for the first second to tick by for some reason? It's an actual thing called Chronostasis.

Chronostasis (from Greek χρόνος, chrónos, "time" and στάσις, stásis, "standing") is a type of temporal illusion in which the first impression following the introduction of a new event or task demand to the brain appears to be extended in time.[1] For example, chronostasis temporarily occurs when fixating on a target stimulus, immediately following a saccade (e.g., quick eye movement). This elicits an overestimation in the temporal duration for which that target stimulus (i.e., postsaccadic stimulus) was perceived. This effect can extend apparent durations by up to 500 ms and is consistent with the idea that the visual system models events prior to perception.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few of you already know about this link but for the rest of you there's a huge variety of topics to be found so I hope you'll find the time to check it out.

Next up there's an interesting little website called Akinator, the Web Genius. This is quite an interesting link for me even though it is pretty trivial and just for fun. Basically you think of a character/person (could be Winston Churchill, could be Snoopy, anything really) and then answer the questions it provides. It's not foolproof but the accuracy is pretty incredible and in my personal experiences it figured it out 6 out of 7 tries. The one it couldn't get was Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam but I think I may have incorrectly answered one of the questions so it might have been my fault. I wondered what sort of algorithm it used but their FAQ page says they're not telling lol.

This last two links here are just plain weird/artistic/creative, I'll thow them both in together, however, as they are the sort of sites you may only visit once.

Alpha Beta Fox :: Something/Nothing. It's hard to describe. It's almost like an interactive music video. You move around with arrow keys and interact with the scene as it plays out. Make sure you try clicking different things, or even clicking+dragging. I'm not sure how this would affect anyone with photosensitivity issues or seizures - there are certain parts that are neon coloured and flashing (though not too bright) on a dark background so I'll just say be careful.

The Quiet Place. This is one for those of you stuck to a phone, stuck to social media, stuck to being connected. Just take three or four minutes and relax at the quiet place. I'm the sort of person who doesn't use social media and my mobile/cell phone is so old it doesn't even have a camera or internet, and even I found this link to be relaxing but poignant.

Well, I hope next time you're stuck with nothing to do for a couple of minutes you'll check some of these out, as random as they are. I honestly can't recommend the Reddit link enough to you guys considering the platform I'm sharing the link on. Take care!

Akinator was pretty cool. Got 2 of 3, my third was a great but not super well known musician a reply to: BelowLowAnnouncement

a reply to: BadBoYeed

Yeah it's pretty good. If it doesn't guess correctly you can keep going until it either gets it or gives up and asks you (I think it adds the answer you give to the database after that so the next time someone thinks of your character it has the answer). It can even give you tongue-in-cheek answers sometimes. I was randomly mashing "Don't Know" and "Yes" over and over and it said "I think of ... A Guy Who Gambles On Everything ... A smart guy who answers randomly". It even guessed correctly when I thought of my mother lol.

Do you remeber 20 questions? One person thinks of something and the others have to guess it in 20 or less questions with only yes and no answers?

We were on a drive once and someone pulled out a small ball maybe a little bigger than a hockey puck. I thought of a telephone pole and began answering its questions that popped up on its little screen. As the questions progressed I could not find any discernible patterns of questioning, like narrowing down certain groupings for size or shape or whatever and son of a gun, when all the questions were ask by this little ball sitting in my hand, it popped out 'telephone pole.

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

I remember the game but I never got the chance to play it myself, I was a little confused what you meant by a ball 'til I Googled it and remembered lol.

Yeah I'd love to see a visual representation of how it figures it out, I suppose some of the most basic questions are the most helpful to it. "Is it alive"/"Is it human"/"Is it male" - those seem to be the kind of questions that significantly reduce the amount of remaining possibilities.

Thanks! I appreciate the distraction.

The Akinator made me laugh several times as it figured out my characters surprisingly fast at times.
It missed on Wil Wheaton once, but then got him right.
I did beat it with Nellie Oleson as my character.

As for Today I Learned, I anticipated a little more from that than I got. Was disappointed by what appear to be ads or specific political/societal hooks within the listings such as "TIL there is a proposal to allow for the free movement of people between Canada, the U.K., New Zealand and Australia, which in a poll of 67,000 people, over 90% were in favor of" and "TIL that more than 1,000 experts, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have signed an open letter urging a global ban on AI weapons systems"

I was surprised to learn of Weird Al's sad loss of his parents though. It's still a good thread.

originally posted by: gottaknow
As for Today I Learned, I anticipated a little more from that than I got. Was disappointed by what appear to be ads or specific political/societal hooks within the listings such as "TIL there is a proposal to allow for the free movement of people between Canada, the U.K., New Zealand and Australia, which in a poll of 67,000 people, over 90% were in favor of" and "TIL that more than 1,000 experts, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have signed an open letter urging a global ban on AI weapons systems"

Hmm, I never really saw it like that, in terms of political/societal hooks, but I can see what you mean. I figured it was just people being people and expressing their political agendas/opinions at every opportunity. Still, these pages come and go fairly quickly with it being TodayILearned, but I'll try to view it from your perspective for the next couple days as I browse it.

The quiet place was nice

a reply to: BelowLowAnnouncement

Checking out more, but flagged already without finishing the OP, based on the chronostasis portion alone. I always thought I was just noticing lag in cheap school and later office clocks, or that it was just an "optical illusion" (which it sort of is.) I've noticed it for years and never would have thought there would be such an interesting explanation for it!

a reply to: BelowLowAnnouncement

OK, now I've had a chance to check out all of the sites you listed in the OP. I'm bored as hell because I'm way ahead of things at work this month, so I'm getting sucked in deep.

Akinator - really impressed by a couple of the more obscure "characters" and how easily it was able to find them correctly when there were probably several possibilities which could have fit. Going to try again after clearing my cookies and web history, as I feel like it must be using some "inside info" besides just the questions.

SomethingNothing - I forgot about your suggestion to click, etc., to interact with it at first, then saw that again and
went back to it. Most fun 20 seconds of the day so far. This could be a job-ender. I'm saving it for home.

The Quiet Place - that really was nice. I'm not a social media user at all, but the message still applies. I may actually go to the quiet place a few times a day until I get back into the habit of meditation as a matter of standard practice.

Akinator is pretty cool. I just played it a few times. For one of the games I started, I was thinking of Hitler. Akinator asked maybe 2 or 3 basic questions, like "Is your character real? Is your character a male?" And then all the sudden he hits me with "Has your character participated in World War 2?"
I swear it's psychic.

a reply to: dogstar23

Nice! The SomethingNothing and Quiet Place links are so far removed from my usual web browsing habits but there was something really well done and captivating about them, especially the SomethingNothing link - very abstract but, as you touched on, it's entertaining and somehow stimulating lol.

And yeah the Quiet Place, the music is so relaxing I forget to hit space bar a couple times every 'playthrough'.

Anyways, I'm glad you got time to check them out, thanks for the feedback dogstar23.

a reply to: trollz

Haha yeah, Hitler was one of the first ones I tried too, I bet that poor little Genie has to spit that name out hundreds of times daily. When I was thinking of Muammar Gadaffi the last question it asked me before it guessed was "Does your character have a big nose", very odd lol.

Akinator got "The Terminator" and "Marilyn Monroe" correctly. Didn't get "Dalek". "Borg" came back as "Boris the Animal". Assuming there's around 1 million famous people, each question could reduce the choice by 50% to 10%. Male/Female, starred in a movie, uses a gun, kills people, good guy/bad guy, is a robot, wears a white dress, is alive/dead, is a real character, originally from a book/movie/comic, it would only take a handful of questions to ask. But determining the best question to ask is the hard part.

originally posted by: BadBoYeed
Akinator was pretty cool. Got 2 of 3, my third was a great but not super well known musician a reply to: BelowLowAnnouncement

Yikes, that web genie is creepily accurate, tho I did stump it on Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Russian-born dancer.

originally posted by: stormcell
Akinator got "The Terminator" and "Marilyn Monroe" correctly. Didn't get "Dalek". "Borg" came back as "Boris the Animal". Assuming there's around 1 million famous people, each question could reduce the choice by 50% to 10%. Male/Female, starred in a movie, uses a gun, kills people, good guy/bad guy, is a robot, wears a white dress, is alive/dead, is a real character, originally from a book/movie/comic, it would only take a handful of questions to ask. But determining the best question to ask is the hard part.

It's not just famous people it does though, you can get some interesting answers if you play around with it. I managed to procure "Akinator's Mother", "Akinator's Grandmother", "BMW" as in the car company and it even gets the answer "My D*ck" (I was just thoroughly testing the algorithm, for science, get off my back!) if you let it question you long enough lol.

Edit:

Some of the questions it ends up asking are things like "Does your character walk on 2 legs", "Is your character attached to you" and "Does your character have a face" so I'm not sure how outside-of-the-box you can go with the answers but it certainly seems to anticipate some weird ones.

Wow, I actually beat the Akinator!!

My 'character' was Ada Lovelace (Countess of Lovelace), the mathematician daughter of the poet Lord Byron...

Akinator you may also download it on iTunes and Google Play. There was a time when we played the app all day long

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