By 2020 Over 50 Billion Devices Will Be Hooked Up to the Internet

Global Trends for 2011

via: TIG Global Blog

If It Were My Home

   The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?

   IfItWereMyHome.com is your gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use our country comparison tool to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. Start by selecting a region to compare on the map to the right, and begin your exploration. Aside from giving you a categorized comparison of countries, this website also displays a brief history of the chosen country. Here is some background information about my country - Canada:

Image via Wikipedia

A land of vast distances and rich natural resources, Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867 while retaining ties to the British crown. Economically and technologically the nation has developed in parallel with the US, its neighbor to the south across an unfortified border. Canada faces the political challenges of meeting public demands for quality improvements in health care and education services, as well as responding to the particular concerns of predominantly francophone Quebec. Canada also aims to develop its diverse energy resources while maintaining its commitment to the environment. 

The land now occupied by Canada was first inhabited approximately 16,000 years ago by aboriginal peoples. Starting in the late 15th century the British and French explored and settled along the eastern seaboard. The 19th century saw a rapid influx of European immigrants as the westward push that characterized the continent's development continued. 

The beginning of the 20th century saw Canada's early involvement in World War I due to British control of its foreign affairs. In 1919 Canada joined the League of Nations independently of Britain taking control of its own foreign policy. Canada declared war on Germany during World War II three days after Britain, with the first Canadian Army units arriving in Britain in late 1939. 

Today, Canada is characterized by its socially democratic programs such as universal health care, the Canda Pension Plan, and Canada Student Loans. In 2006 The Economist ranked Canada the third most democratic nation in its Democracy Index, ahead of all other countries in North and South America.

via: IfItWereMyHome.com

SmartphOwned - Fail Autocorrects and Awkward Parent texts

Smartphowned is a humor site featuring autocorrection fails and awkward parent texts. Users can upload images or share their conversations using our unique iPhone message builder.

Here are some notable funny texts:

Akinator - The ultimate character guessing internet genie

Akinator is a little fun website that can guess a person, character or anything for that matter. It is an Artificial Intelligence program that can find and learn the best questions to be asked by the player. All you have to do is answer around 20 questions honestly about who you are thinking about and the answer will magically appear by the magical powers of the Akinator.

Go ahead and try to think of something or someone that this internet genie will not be able to guess.

via: Akinator

OMGFacts - Facts with a wow factor in them

Another recommended entertaining website with some educational value added to it. Find out plethora of random facts and the background information on them. From sex to science, all of the facts are fun and interesting to read. OMGFacts, 

Here are some of the Top Facts from the website:

• Having sex can reduce a fever because of the sweat produced. 

Powers of Ten

An awesome documentary film that depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten. The video starts zooming out of our Earth to the cosmos and then travels back to Earth and zooms in to magnify the human cells, to eventually reveal the atoms. This short movie has also been adapted into an interactive website - Powers of Ten.

via: YouTube

Hardest World Languages

   Lets face it in our vastly interconnected world which is mostly caused by globalization, nowadays many people know more than one language. This can be very beneficial because one can easily communicate with others when they are abroad and can pretty much find their way around that new city easily. I, myself know three languages, in which I can fluently converse; they would be: English, Ukrainian and Russian.

   If anyone is interested in learning a new language for themselves, there is a vast amount of free tutorials, videos and lessons on the internet. One great resource is book2 - a website with hundreds of free mp3s that let you learn a new language anywhere you are ("The 100 lessons help you to quickly learn and use a foreign language in various situations").

   This leads to my next point - I wanted to find out what languages would be the hardest to learn from an English speaking perspective. My search led me to this great pictograph:

cncntrc, an artistic monthly archive

cncntrc is a tumbler page that caught my attention while browsing for some cool images on the internet. It contains pictures, short videos, animated images as well as short eloquent quotes. The biggest factor that made me bookmark this page is the sheer quantity of very emotive and picturesque art that is archived chronologically by each month. The very minimalistic layout and the pure quality of the artwork posted there is majestic. This blog is a sure keeper in my bookmarks, so if you like my previous art-related posts you will definitely love cncntrc.

Here is just the tip of the iceberg of the amount of art that can be found over at the said blog:

Failblog - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

Here is another iteration of funny site reviews. Today we will examine the FailBlog. This site consists of videos, pictures and .gif images. The site also prominently features pictures and videos of someone or something failing at something. All the content is captioned with the words "fail", "epic fail", "X Fail", "X; You're doin' it wrong" (X being the activity at which the subject has failed), "Things That are doing it", "M thru F; fails in the workplace", and "Probably Bad News", although occasionally there are some cases of "wins".

Without further adieu, here are my Top 5 Fails:

Movie Barcodes

TRON (1982)

This is a really interesting idea of representing movies in a totally different way! MovieBarcode is a tumbler page who's creators have reduced motion picture movies to a simple color graphs. That is, the frames from each given movie have been compressed into one large picture, sort of like a bar-code. Every movie has a certain hue, tone, color and depth to it and this project tries to organize this information into one graphical interface.
Check out few more of my favorite movie barcodes after the break:

Wolfram|Alpha - Computational Knowledge Engine

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people - spanning all professions and education levels.

Their service has helped me a lot throughout my time at the university. You can use it at Work, Home, School and Play. One of the best examples for leisure time uses of this website is plot cool images with equations.

Enter this Formula:
PolarPlot[(1 + 0.9 Cos[8 t]) (1 + 0.1 Cos[24 t]) (0.9 + 0.05 Cos[200 t]) (1 + Sin[t]), {t, -Pi, Pi}]
into Wolfram|Alpha and find out for yourselves.

MLIA - My Life Is Average

One of the most entertaining website about the average lives of other people, it contains the three things that are required to make someone's day.

1. Irony. 

2. Randomness 

3. True Life events.

Here are some examples from the website:

• Today, I found out my great grandpa worked on the Titanic and was granted free passage on the boat to America. On the way to the boat he hit a cow, while riding a bike, and missed the boat. Yes, my entire family's life was saved by a cow. MLIA  

Failbook - The Facebook of Fail

This is another funny blog that lists all things related to fails on Facebook. I hope by now, everyone knows about Facebook. It is essentially the most popular social networking site that connects millions and millions users from around the world. This is where it gets interesting; many of these users post profile updates and other such content and some of it is classified as fail or in other terms they make fun of themselves or the situation they get themselves into.
Finally, I present to you some of the best Facebook Fails:

Texts From Last Night

This is a regularly updated blog with a collection of text messages sent in by their users. The texts tend to be funny to outright bad and thus are categorized under: "Bad Night" or "Good Night"

So I will post some of the "Best Nights of All Time" quotes:

• i just walked into a room at this party and someone yelled "dibs!"...