Colored orientation

This is a bunch of city maps by Stephen Von Worley showing streets colored according to orientation:

San Francisco

London

Tokyo

New York

Spongebob, Freshmanpants

We're a few weeks into the new school year.  This still applies:

Two-fer merit badges

Today's two-fer: merit badges!

The first two are the official Boy Scouts of America merit badges for Geology and Orienteering (i.e. using a compass) respectively. 



There's also the brand-spanking-new-for-2011 merit badge for geocaching:

Then there's the imitators.  First the virtual imitators, from some artwork that ran with a Popular Science article on Five Contests That Recognize The Science Achievements of the Everyman








And then there's the actual imitators:
Nerd Merit Badges that you can actually buy, but are in no way affiliated with the BSA (shown = the BoingBoing merit badge)  They also have a collection of them specifically for Foursquare

And finally, the Fanboy Legion merit badges, also for sale:

I'm sure a quick internet search could find many. many more.

Orienteering in the Orient

The first post I made of Simon Bond's work was clever and artistic.  This one makes no sense.  If all you can see is a horizon line and three little dots, that's it.  Are those supposed to be The Three Wise Men?  It's a pun for pun's sake and the drawing, what there is of it, doesn't seem to add anything to the joke, if there is one.

Geohashing

Let's go with XKCD again to finish out the year and promote a new hobby: Geohashing.  Randall Munroe hinted at this pastime earlier in a Christmas-themed comic, but this time thoroughly threshed it out into a full-blown instructional, complete with interactive website.  I was going to try to determine whether the geohashing algorithm had any pattern or if it was fairly random, but somebody already did that here:
http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/The_Algorithm#Randomness

... which led to this next discovery: Did you know that geohashing has its own wiki?

Here's another odd hobby XKCD has originated:  http://xkcd.com/249/, photos of people doing it: http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/

By the way, the secret text that is revealed by hovering over the cartoon on the xkcd site is:

Saturday is game night.