Fun Friday Links: A Universal Language, What the Internet *Really* is, and Fruit Salad Trees

Welcome to Chelsi’s Number One Super Happy Fun Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration. 

The Noun Project: Building a Global Language

There are a lot of cases for visualizing information, but building a universal language has got to be one of my favorites.

Mapping Private Tech Transit

If you live in the Bay Area, there are at least two things you know to be absolutely true: San Francisco is full of culture, and Silicon Valley is full of well-paying jobs. WiFi-equipped shuttles provided by companies like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, eBay, and Electronic Arts allow tech kids to have the best of both worlds, as their routes run up and down the the San Francisco Peninsula.

This private network of tech transit had gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the S.F. population until Stamen, a local design firm, decided to map it in a project called The City From the valley. The results show just how massive the system actually is:

“We enlisted people to go to stops, measure traffic and count people getting off and on and we hired bike messengers to see where the buses went. The cyclists used Field Papers to transcribe the various routes and what they found out, which we recompiled back into a database of trips, stops, companies and frequency. At a rough estimate, these shuttles transport about 35% of the amount of passengers Caltrain moves each day. Google alone runs about 150 trips daily, all over the city.”

What *is* the Internet, Really?

Like many of us, journalist Andrew Blum had always thought of the Internet as a transcendent, amorphous thing. That is, until he was told his personal connection was malfunctioning because a squirrel was “chewing on it.”

In this fun TED talk, Blum discusses the places where the Internet exists in physical form.

Fruit Salad Trees (!)

Well, this is fun.

In 1990, the West family formed the Fruit Salad Tree Company. They offer four different types of trees, each of which bear up to six different fruits of the same family:

• Stone: peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots and peachcots.
• Citrus: oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangelos and pomelos.
• Multi-apple: between two and four different kinds of apples
• Multi-nashi: between two and four different kinds of Asian pears

Worst Best Death Scene in the World

You know how tons of people think the face melting thing in Raiders of the Lost Ark is the best death scene ever? I’d wager those people haven’t seen early 1970s Turkish classic “Kareteci Kiz” or “Karate Girl.”