Fun Friday Resources

Here’s a fun website: How far back in time can you understand English? It’s a story in sections, each section going back 100 years from the one before. It’s a fascinating experiment, and the author of the piece takes you back through the experience and explains what you saw happening to English in the process. It’s like a one-page history of the English language.

Here’s another fun one: Color, a game where you are shown a color for five seconds, and then you have to recreate it with hue, saturation, and brightness. The point is that humans cannot remember color. (One summer at Governor’s Honors, the theatre tech teacher had their students play a game where each drew a paint chip sample from a hat, look at it, then go into another room and pull that color from a pile of color chips. Same result: it was hit and miss.)

Step one: you have five seconds to analyze the color.

step two: Now you have to use the sliders to replicate the color you just saw.

Step three: you see how close you came. (This was a different color from the first screenshot.)

Their evaluation of your efforts can be… amusing.

Finally, here’s a lovely video of the United States as viewed from the International Space Station as it passes over us. It’s long but fascinating. I remember my first flight to the west coast, flying over what seemed to be completely uninhabited terrain — except almost always there were signs of humanity: roads, power lines, irrigation circles, etc. It’s interesting to watch for that alone. I wish it had popovers to let you know where you were so you could go check it out on your preferred mapping site, but one can’t have everything.