links for 2009-03-02

  • "From Awazu Onsen in the Hokuriku region of Japan, we at Houshi welcome you to our home page. We've a lot to tell you about as our history dates back to the year 718-some 1300 years ago-when our hot spring is said to have burst forth from the earth. That's a lot of pleasurable bathing and relaxed minds and bodies."
    (tags: travel japan)
  • "Good news, doodlers: What your colleagues consider a distracting, time-wasting habit may actually give you a leg up on them by helping you pay attention.
    Asked to remember names they'd heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn't. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander."
  • "Advisory Service For Squatters is an UNPAID collective of workers who have been running a daily advice service for squatters and homeless people since 1975. It grew out of the former Family Squatters Advisory Service, which was founded in the late 1960s. ASS publishes The squatters Handbook, the twelfth edition of which is the current one, and has sold in excess of 150,000 copies since 1976."
  • "An encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages"