One Man Band

This is Cigo Man Band from Croatia.

Just for fun here's Pixar's One Man Band

mechanical tumor

This mechanical tumor indicates the cpu load.

i wonder if this guy can laugh about it.

poop school

poop school
Imagine being educated at a 'crappy' school like this. I can't even begin to imagine the students this school produces.

World's Highest Dive

The current record stands at 53.9 m (177 ft) and was set by Oliver Favre in 1987. However I couldn't find video of that. But there is video of the previous record at 52.4 m (172 ft) set by Dana Kunze.

Spider Season

Spider Wranglers Weave One-Of-A-Kind Tapestry

This week in New York, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled something never before seen: an 11-by-4-foot tapestry made completely of spider silk.
....
"The spiders are harnessed ... held down in a delicate way," Godley says, "so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there's a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o'clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o'clock. They're in boxes, they're numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature."

Difference between Arial & Helvetica

I remember a discusion we had some time ago about this 2 fonts. anyway Arial is for gay people

greyworld kinetic art

Most of greyworld's early installations were sound based, but recently they have made some great kinetic art. Monument to the Unknown Artist is one of them. It looks like an ordinary bronze statue, but it strikes various poses and even mimics nearby people.

Here is another video which shows the inner workings of the statue. Another great work is The Source.

Wiki: A cube of 9×9×9 (729 in total) spherical balls are suspended on cables that run the full 32 metres height of the main atrium of the newly designed building. These spheres, controlled by a computer running Python scripts, can move themselves independently of each other, forming dynamic shapes, characters and fluid-like motions that reflects the nature of the stock market itself. The sculpture opens the market each morning at 8am, with the spheres breaking free from their default cube arrangement to form elegant patterns and shapes.

Video

Pure water ice in the subsurface of Mars

Scientists are seeing sub-surface water ice that may be 99 percent pure halfway between the north pole and the equator on Mars, thanks to quick-turnaround observations from orbit of fresh meteorite impact craters on the planet. "We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars' climate today," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, a member of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, which runs the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "The other surprising discovery is that ice exposed at the bottom of these meteorite impact craters is so pure," Byrne said. "The thinking before was that ice accumulates below the surface between soil grains, so there would be a 50-50 mix of dirt and ice. We were able to figure out, given how long it took that ice to fade from view, that the mixture is about one percent dirt and 99 percent ice." Scientists used several instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, in quick succession in detecting and confirming highly pure, bright ice exposed in new craters, ranging from 1.5 feet to 8 feet deep, at five different Martian sites. More...

Widespread water may cling to moon's surface

"A large portion of the moon's surface may be covered with water. That is the surprising finding of a trio of spacecraft that have turned up evidence of trace amounts of the substance in the lunar soil. ... The first detection was made by India's Chandrayaan-1 probe. The spacecraft, which failed in August after less than 10 months in orbit, was the first lunar orbiter to carry an instrument capable of measuring how much light is absorbed by water-bearing minerals.

"There's nothing else it could be," says Carle Pieters of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, leader of the Chandrayaan-1 instrument team that made the detection. ... But seemingly not in great quantities. Harvesting water from a baseball-field-sized swathe of soil might field "a nice glass of water", Pieters told New Scientist. Nonetheless, it might provide a resource for future lunar explorers."

BBC wildlife expert: Let the panda die out 'with dignity'

Is this mr Wiggles' new hero?

The BBC wildlife expert Chris Packham has questioned the millions spent trying to save the giant panda from extinction and suggested that the bamboo-eating bear should be allowed to die out "with a degree of dignity". The zoologist, who has replaced Bill Oddie as a presenter on BBC's Springwatch, risked criticism from wildlife conservationists in an interview with the Radio Times in which he describes the giant panda as a "T-shirt animal" on which too much conservation money is wasted. "Here is a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac. It's not a strong species," he said. "Unfortunately, it's big and cute and a symbol of the World Wide Fund for Nature and we pour millions of pounds into into panda conservation "I reckon we should pull the plug. Let them go, with a degree of dignity." More...

How the Drinking Bird works

Pretty complex toy.

More @ wiki. You can buy one here.

Interesting way of visualizing classical music

Apperently this guy got this idea from a hallucination.

The Music Animation Machine displays a score without any measures or clefs, in which information about the music's structure is conveyed with bars of color representing the notes. These bars scroll across the screen as the music plays. Their position on the screen tells you their pitch and their timing in relation to each other. Different colors denote different instruments or voices, thematic material, or tonality. And each note lights up at the exact moment it sounds, so you can't lose your place.

Some examples:

Beethoven 5th Symphony

Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ

Debussy, Clair de lune

More videos... I think it's a very nice way to appreciate the music without having to be able to read notes. It's also interesting to see the differences between different pieces and composers.

Doubt cast on cannabis, schizophrenia link

A British study has cast doubt on the supposed link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, but at least one Australian researcher says the study needs more evidence. Previous research has suggested cannabis use increases the risk of being diagnosed with either psychosis or schizophrenia. This latest study, led by Dr. Martin Frisher of Keele University, examined the records of 600,000 patients aged between 16 and 44, but failed to find a similar link. "An important limitation of many studies is that they have failed to distinguish the direction of association between cannabis use and psychosis," the authors write in the September edition of the journal Schizophrenia Research. [...] They argue that if cannabis use does cause schizophrenia, an increase in cannabis use should be followed by an increase in the incidence of schizophrenia. According to the study, cannabis use in the United Kingdom between 1972 and 2002 has increased four-fold in the general population, and 18-fold among under-18s. Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29 per cent between 1990 and 2010. But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact, some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased. More...

The most powerful rocket motor on the planet is tested

The booster rocket that is to push U.S. manned space flight back on track, to the moon and beyond, passed its first real test firing Thursday (sept 10) in front of the engineers who built it and NASA officials who say it's the only way to fly. More...

Alligator Snapping Turtle

This one evil version of a turtle. In this episode of dirty jobs you can see how big and fucking evil they can get. For more information about this monster you can check the wiki page.

The greatest humanitarian ever, died last weekend

Norman Borlaug, who died on September 12 aged 95, won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his achievement in promoting the use of more productive cereal strains in order to feed the world’s vast population of the starving; his efforts to introduce hybrid cereal varieties into agricultural production in Pakistan, India, Mexico and other developing countries are estimated to have saved about a thousand million people from dying of hunger. Borlaug spent his life on the borders of traditional agriculture and biotechnology and stood at the centre of the greatest and most dramatic success stories in world farming — the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were once widely predicted. But Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” was not “green” in the modern sense. High yields demanded artificial fertiliser, chemical pesticides and new soil technology. As a result of this he was vilified by many in the environmental movement in the securely affluent West, some of whom argued that higher food production sustains more people and thus poses a threat to the natural environment. More...

Norman Borlaug @ wiki What bothers me most is the criticism this man has received from rich naive misanthropic ecotards in the west. They've always argued that saving the population of the developing countries was a bad thing, because it would destroy the environment with all the extra people and scary chemicals. This is just ridiculous, firstly from a humanitarian standpoint. How can any compassionate person argue that letting people starve and die in inevitable wars that follow hunger is a good thing? But even from a rational ecological standpoint feeding the developing world was and is a good idea. If these people were starving, do you really think that they would have preserved their forests? No, they would cut them down for extra agricultural lands. High yielding agriculture puts less pressure on the environment because it concentrates farming to a smaller area. Furthermore, the only way for these countries to develop is by having a stable food supply. Once there is enough food, less people have to farm, and more people move to the city. Development has always led to reductions in fertility. Just look at the west where some countries even have negative population growth. Once the developing countries are sufficiently developed, then they can start worrying about the environment.

Mitchell and Webb - Double Roles

Testing Extreme G Forces on Humans

wiki: John Paul Stapp, M.D., Ph.D., Colonel, USAF (Ret.) (11 July 1910–13 November 1999) was a career U.S. Air Force officer, USAF flight surgeon and pioneer in studying the effects of acceleration and deceleration forces on humans. He was a colleague and contemporary of Chuck Yeager, and became known as "the fastest man on earth".

Greenland Ice Canyon and Disappearing Meltwater Lakes

Mechanisms like this could really speed up melting and sea level rise beyond what the conservative models predict.

Super Slow Motion Exploding Building

You can actually see the high speed detcord firing. Also, see a bus exploding in super slow motion.

finally!

Time Lapse of Station Fire, Los Angeles County

Related to the last post. Too bad about the fire, but at least it yielded some pretty pictures.

Boeing 747 vs Fire

wiki: The Evergreen Supertanker is a Boeing 747-200 commercial airliner that was modified into an aerial firefighting aircraft by Evergreen International Aviation. With a capacity of 24,000 US gallons (94,850 litres), the Supertanker is the largest aerial firefighting aircraft in the world, almost doubling the capacity of the next largest firefighting tanker aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 known as Tanker 910. The Supertanker entered service for the first time in 2009, fighting a fire in Cuenca, Spain. The tanker made its first American operation on August 31, 2009 at the Oak Glen Fire. Here you can see it fighting real fires.

This is how a political interview should be conducted

Jeremy Paxman, grilling politicians when they dodge the question.

Dutch Police Fail

At 47.000 plants, the Dutch police proudly thought they had raided one of the "largest marijuana plantations" ever, turns out to be an industrial hemp farm for research by Wageningen University. The police even claimed the value of the plants at 4.5 million euros, which is ridiculous because industrial hemp barely contains THC and is not suited for smoking. You would also think the drug police would be able to spot the difference between industrial hemp and cannabis. The police had already started destroying the crop when the University found out about it and supplied the permit. source 1, 2

Odin Made a Kill

Quite a large rat. I think it must have been Odin because it was lying in our garden.

Astronomers find coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth

The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. No human is thought to have ever been there but it is expected to yield images of the heavens three times sharper than any ever taken from the ground. The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that is 4,053m high up on the Antarctic Plateau. It is not only particularly remote but extremely cold and dry. The study revealed that Ridge A has an average winter temperature of minus 70C and that the water content of the entire atmosphere there is sometimes less than the thickness of a human hair. Full article...

A slightly larger telescope than Hubble at this place, could take some images better than Hubble. Though it must be pretty difficult to build here, it must be cheaper than in space.

Fart detector

``After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high ranker, and a voice rates it on a scale of zero to nine,” he says. “If it ranks a nine, a fan comes on to blow it away. It even records the noise so you can play it back later.” After a few months of construction, they began field tests. “Well, the sample data wasn’t the entire school, but we definitely tested it,” Salas says.`` Would be a nice instrument for a fart competition.

Mitchell and Webb: Best invention EVAR!

Seriously Annom

You're taking this to far...