From the category archives:

Fun

“There were posts about a secret military project in China…”

by Renee Corea on January 10, 2010

This segment of Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker features “John” discussing his bed bug ordeal.

It’s rather more touching than funny. There are many inspired touches, polyurethane, and “CONDOR,”* and a quarter mile of crevices. But it’s the conspiracy theories that are dead-on:

Supposedly, their psychological warfare guys were breeding bed bugs and they were using operatives to secretly spread them into the homes of western targets like… um, US trade negotiators…

There were very strange things on the internet.

I found this cheering. I hope you enjoy it.

Oh and, incredibly, bedbugvictims.com is still available. Some spam web farmer somewhere is slacking.

*Updated: ALL CAPS.

{ 4 comments }

Elie Zananiri’s Rats ‘n’ Bedbugs

by Renee Corea on May 1, 2009

in Fun, Statistics

Rats ‘n’ Bedbugs Screencast from prisonerjohn on Vimeo.

This is the project page with links to the application, images and video.

In our experience generally people don’t read fact sheets or FAQs, not until they have bed bugs, and often not even then. Delivering bed bug education is plenty challenging. This makes you think, yes? Thanks are in order to Elie’s freaked-out-by-bed bugs girlfriend for inspiring the bed bug portion of the proceedings!

{ 0 comments }

Rats and bed bugs: a mainstreaming idea

by Renee Corea on April 6, 2009

in Fun, Statistics

We missed Elie Zananiri’s interesting statistics visualization project idea:

By prisonerjohn via flickr.

From Elie’s post, Rats vs. Bedbugs:

The project would start with a simple animation of an uneasy person with 6 rats on his left and a bunch of bedbugs squirming on his right. The user would then click on one of the two sides, which will take her to the in-depth visualization.