A Question of Religion

How much do you know about different religions of the world? Do you know your Rivan from your Beltane? Why not try this set of quizzes from the BBC to find out?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/tools/quizzes/

Letters of Note

Letters of Note is a blog-based archive of “fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes and memos”.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/

Tom Gauld’s Holiday Home Map

TOTD is in the holiday mood and likes this map by the cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld. It’s worth looking at the other items in his portfolio too.

http://www.tomgauld.com/index.php?/portfolio/map/

The Script Swap Shop

This new service may appeal to students in the creative arts or anyone who treads the boards in amateur theatre. Script Swap is a free service for anyone who wants to swap, sell or give away copies of stage scripts.

http://www.script-swap.com/

Dr Who Tube Map

Here’s yet another design based on the famous London Underground map. This time the theme is Dr Who, with the added bonus that every entry is clickable and takes you to a wiki page about one of the baddies.

http://www.crispian.net/DoctorWho/DrWhoTubeMap.html

Interestingly Shaped Islands

TOTD was recently sent some images taken from the International Space Station, including a view of the island of Juan de Nova off the west coast of Madagascar which looks remarkably like a hat. Here are some more islands with an interesting shape.

http://www.designswan.com/archives/islands-in-interesting-shape.html

The Code

The Code is an excellent series about Mathematics that is currently being screened on BBC 2. This member of the TOTD team has always been a bit maths phobic so it’s testament to the programmes accessible style that even I’m finding it both enjoyable and fascinating. To accompany the series the BBC has created a fabulous microsite full of math related games and puzzles that are both enormous fun and might teach you something along the way. But be warned some of the puzzles are fiendishly difficult

If your feel your up to the ultimate challenge you can take part in the Treasure Hunt. Solve The Code’s puzzles and find a real-life treasure hidden somewhere in the UK! Find out more at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/code/

Newsle

Newsle is a great site but only if you use it cleverly. Newsle claims to follow your friends in the news. When you go to its homepage it prompts you to import your Facebook friends, it then finds news stories about them and pulls them into a newsfeed. The problem is unless you have famous friends (which sadly TOTD doesn’t) you just get a load of stories about people with the same or similar sounding names that are of no interest.

So why are we recommending Newsle? Because it’s great for tracking famous people. So when you go to the homepage don’t import you friends just sign up for an account, skip the import process then search for your favourite actors, musicians etc. Now Newlse will scour the internet to find news stories, blog entries and tweets about your favourite people and display them in a handy newsfeed.

http://www.newsle.com/

N.B Site is still in Beta

 

NASA on the Commons

We’ve previously featured NASA’s wonderful image archive here on TOTD. Now NASA has joined Flicker’s ‘The Commons’ scheme where institutions share photographs with no copyright restrictions. There are some wonderful images on here and they are all available for use in the public domain.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons

Bletchley Park and Lightning Source

Today, Thing of the Day is off to Bletchley Park to have a look around the National Codes Centre:

http://www.bletchleypark.org/

We will also be visiting Lightning Source who print books on demand:

http://www.lightningsource.com/default.aspx

Should be an interesting day out.