When I was tiny, among my favorite toys was the Playmobil gas station, which I guess offered its own commentary on the times. But this Playmobil airport security checkpoint set makes me a bit sad. Not Armageddon (that’s so ten months ago), but sad. (Via Off Center.)

Is it just me, or is the “foobars are a conversation” meme totally played out? The first hundred Google results for the phrase “are a conversation” reveal that among other things:

• Blogs are a conversation.
• Books are a conversation.
• Markets, of course, are conversations.
• Links are a conversation.
• You are a conversation.
• We — (hu)mankind — are a conversation.
• Church services are a conversation.
• This woman’s paintings are a conversation.
• The mass media in toto are a conversation.
• Political systems are a conversation.
• Website hacks are a conversation.
• Noises are a conversation.
• Funk and hip-hop are a conversation.

I could go on. At what point does (did?) this phrase lose all effective meaning?

Speaking of miniature photography, these photos of a model railroad set are so incredible I’m actually reposting them from Boing Boing, even though you probably already saw them thrice by now.

The free fonts are almost always not the best fonts, but here’s the best of the free fonts, which are all pretty good. (Lifehackular.)

Saving this for future use.

Matt Yglesias notes a fascinating tidbit from Franz de Waal’s Our Inner Ape:

Scientists used to consider the frequency band of 500 hertz and below in the human voice as meaningless noise, because when a voice is filtered, removing all higher frequencies, ne hears nothing but a low-pitched hum. All words are lost. But then it was found that this low hum is an unconscious social instrument. It is different for each person, but in the course of a conversation people tend to converge. They settle on a single hum, and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting. This was first demonstrated in an analysis of the Larry King Live television show. The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.

Related: This 2000 Discover essay on “the psychology of dominance.”

Revel in the pointlessness of this. (Thingtacular.)

Snarkommenter Saheli has written out her thoughts on creating a massive global database for volunteering, an especially useful resource post-disaster. Go read Saheli’s thoughts, at Socialtext and on her blog. I posted some thoughts on her blog and I’ll cross-post an excerpt in the extended entry of this post.

Read more…

Engadget says iPod 6.0 will be able to show episodes of shows like “Desperate Housewives,” downloadable for $2 a pop. Insanely hot. Update: Here’s Apple’s press release.

Jakob Nielsen gives a succinct overview of user interfaces from command-line to WYSIWYG. Clicking on menus to choose commands represented an improvement over command-line interfaces when the range of available choices was still small, Nielsen says, but today, menus provide a poor navigation interface. Noting Microsoft’s new UI announcement, Nielsen heralds the age of results-based user interaction, where you choose what you want your application to do by selecting from a gallery of possible outcomes.

Note that command lines aren’t exactly going anywhere. The other day, at a conference, Jarah Euston mentioned how fond she is of Yubnub, the Web’s command line. Anyone else using it?