This isn’t going to be a regular ‘feature’, but last week I did enjoy linking to some of my favourites sites from the previous 7 days, so have three more…
Open Culture’s Foreign Language Learning Podcasts
http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2006/10/itunes_learn_fo.html
Last week, Lifehacker directed its readers to Open Culture - a website dedicated to (quoting the FAQ) exploring “cultural and educational media… that’s freely available on the web, and that makes learning dynamic, productive, and fun”.
On this website are audio and video ‘podcasts’ consisting of a wide range of topics including art and culture, technology, and even law and business school lectures. The section that got me reaching for the bookmark was the ‘Foreign Language Lessons Collection’. Here you can find a wide selection of podcasts to help you learn a new language - consisting of everything from Arabic and Chinese to Tagalog and Spanish!
Mind Hacks on Quinn Norton’s ‘Sixth Sense’ (and the loss thereof)
http: //www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/05/quinn_norton_has_her.html
Mind Hacks is a website dedicated to finding out how our brains - and consequently, we - ‘work’ through psychology and neuroscience. In this article however they discuss something different: the story of Quinn Norton and the loss of her ‘Sixth Sense’.
No, she couldn’t see dead people, but she could feel electromagnetic fields. How? She had a magnet implanted into her fingertip resulting in her being able to “know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like“.
Her Wired article on how body modification can extend the human senses is very insightful and her final journal post regarding the experiment is almost existential. Well worth the read.
Nature Photography and The Orton Effect
http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0106/dw0106-1.html
The ‘Orton Effect’ is the name given to a technique where - usually nature - photographs are given an almost ethereal glow through a method sometimes known as ’soft focus’. You can see an example image here (courtesy of n8ive). It’s essentially the same as taking two photos and layering them together, one on top of the other - with one in focus and the other out of focus.
Not a new technique, this type of photography is also relatively well-known but nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to have an online how-to document to hand for reference.
Oh, and it’s named after Michael Orton who pioneered - or at least popularised - the technique.
It seems same-sex issues and knives account for half of the top ten most complained about adverts of 2006, but were they really that bad? In short, no - only two of these five actually had their complaints upheld, and these are both - in my opinion - still dubious decisions. Seriously, does this 
In this advert, the GPA blamed religion as the sole or primary motivation behind most homophobic incidents and - unsurprisingly - this brought a torrent of abuse and complaints from many religious groups both within and outside of the police force. There’s an