UK government chief drug adviser sacked

Professor David Nutt, the government's chief drug adviser, has been sacked a day after claiming that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol. Nutt incurred the wrath of the government when he claimed in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. ... "The home secretary's action is a bad day for science and a bad day for the cause of evidence-informed policy making."

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The Front Flip Long Jump

Here you see someone doing a 20 feet (6.1m) somersault long jump. This technique is not allowed in official long jumps due to safety concerns.

Here is an article about the style from before it got banned.

July 29, 1974 The Flip That Led To A Flap The sport's august officialdom is alarmed by a new long-jumping technique that could endanger a few necks—and the 30-foot barrier [...] In contrast, Ecker points out that the flip enables the jumper to take off from the board almost at full speed and at a more desirable higher angle. When he tucks and rolls into a somersault, wind resistance is cut. And since rotation is working with him rather than against him, his feet will land—assuming correct execution—well ahead of his body, and the latter should follow on through so that he does not fall back in the pit. In practice, the hardest part of the new technique to learn is landing. "Wiping out in the flip," Delamere says painfully, "is coming down butt first." To preclude that dire end, the East Germans reportedly have theorized that a half-twist should be added to the flip so that the jumper lands facing the board. Few things in sport prove as easy in competition as on paper, and the flip is no exception. While the dynamics of the new technique may satisfy the laws of physics, the danger factor is at least a worrisome possibility. More...

We will never know if this technique would allow people to jump further than the current record of 8.95m until the technique is officially allowed and the pro jumpers try it. What's for sure, is that it would make the sport a lot more interesting to look at.

This happens when you only wank with one arm

Supposedly he trained one arm to gain the advantage in arm wrestling, but we all know what he used it for. More pictures and video...

Adobe Photoshop CS5 - Patchmatch

The project is a collaboration between Adobe, Princeton University, and the University of Washington. Presented at the technical papers session at SIGGRAPH ‘09 in New Orleans this August.

A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches.

What does that mean? Just watch the video, it's quite impressive.

Hole in One

This is his lucky day:

Different angle. 
Less impressive, but this guy wins a million dollars with his hole in one:

Larry goes to the market

Larry is drunk. And craving for a beverage.

The surprising science of motivation

Some of us had a discussion a while ago, about using incentives and bonuses to motivate people to work harder. Here is a TED talk where Daniel Pink makes the case that incentives and bonuses often don't work or can even be counter-productive. (watch this video Douche)

I'd really like to work at a company that applies the alternative organizational structures as some of the companies he mentions.

Four Shades of Blue Optical Illusion

Seems somewhat similar to the Cornsweet Illusion.

In Soviet Russia, bus misses you!

Domtoren plays the theme song of Star Trek

To commemorate the 25th anniversary (17 October 2009) of The Flying Dutch Star Trek fanclub, the Domtoren in Utrecht rang its bells to the theme of Stark Trek: The Original Series. It's a bit hard to actually hear the song in there, they should have chosen the theme of The Next Generation which is much more recognizable IMO.

Awesome Trampoline Training

Oliver Lemieux trains on the Cirque du Soleil trampoline wall at their Montreal headquarters.

While Olympic trampoline jumping requires more skill, it just doesn't look as cool as this.

special list

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Google Street View Guys

As you might notice the driving scenes are just sequential Street View images played like a movie. Brilliant :)

Lakeman bij DWDD

Zombies are born to be alive

Why isn't there a zombie musical?

recent comments

I added a new working recent comments widget.

World's Largest Firework (almost)

This video supposedly show the largest firework exploding:

I did some digging and I did find a picture of the largest firework before it explodes: It's 120cm in diameter and weighs 450kg! It's called Yonshakudama and it shoots to a height of 850 meters and blooms with a diameter of 800 meters. More pics... More digging shows it's not the largest ever.

The largest firework is thought to be the Universe I Part II, used in a festival in Japan in 1988. The 1,543lb (700kg) shell burst to a diameter of 3,937 feet (1,200m) -Times

However this was not an aerial shell, but it was on a raft in a big lake.

Wikipedia in your pocket

Fuck the cheatsheet, I'm bringing my Wikireader! with 3 million articles in my pocket, I'm ready for my timemachine! It has a monochrome touchscreen and three buttons and uses a microSD card to store wikipedia. You can update it freely by downloading the 4 GB image which contains wikipedia. It costs 99 USD and can be bought on their website.

Technology Quiz

"If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness. If you do poorly on the quiz, as most people likely will, then just let that inspire you to study up more on how things work and where raw materials come from." How useful are you?

Lego + Arduino PanoBot

I made some test panoramas with my PanoBot made from Lego and an Arduino micro-controller today. It makes 70 megapixel images, but I should reprogram it for gigapix fun.

Uitstroom spaargeld DSB bank

annom edit, NRC economie PDFs: page1, page2, page3
bron: NRC

"Italy: Premier Vows to Stay On"

"Two days after Italy’s highest court deemed unconstitutional a law granting Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi immunity from prosecution, Mr. Berlusconi said he had no plans to step down. “I am the best prime minister ever,” he said at a news conference on Friday, Italian news media reported. “I am absolutely the politician most persecuted by prosecutors in the entire history of the world throughout the ages.” He said that he had spent “200 million euros on judges,” only to be corrected by associates, adding, “Excuse me, on lawyers.” Mr. Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding company was fined $1.1 billion last week for bribing judges in the 1990s. There are three cases pending against him concerning his business dealings." - new york times.

Playing GTA 4 in your browser

TechCrunch article to accompany the video.

GTA 4 is rendered externally by OTOY, and being played in a browser. This means that you could play this or Crysis on your iPhone, or anything, as long as it supports html. If this works and is affordable it means no need for a powerful pc anymore.
However it might also mean that game piracy becomes impossible. If developers only release games via these streaming services, you won't be able to play them without paying. Besides the graphics might be so good that even if you could download it, you couldn't play it.

OnLive is another service that is attempting to deliver something similar.

One of the funniest FAILS ever!

Ultimate Slow Motion Bullet Video

The Shimadzu HPV-1 High Speed camera offers up to one million frames per second. It maintains excellent 312 x 260-pixel resolution at all recording speeds to permit detailed analysis of high-speed phenomena.

This is what it can do:

This video is long, but amazing. it show different bullets hitting different targets and even projectiles hitting bullets in mid flight.

Quagmire discovers Internet Porn

From the new episode of Family Guy. Quagmire didn't know about internet porn cause he though computers were for geeks. This is what happened when he found out.

Also South Park has begun airing new episodes!

Medievil helpdesk

This one is specially for expandable asset, but some of us will see our parents and/or girlfriend in it.

Giving the Firefox Status Bar more PNWAGE

There are a lot of fun things you can add to that boring status bar at the bottom of your browser. After reading a compilation of the top 50 Firefox Status Bar addons for your toobar. I found a few good ones and installed them. These include For all our geeky stat needs there's Extended Statusbar One I use a lot is Forecastfox. It has a nice looking 3 day forecast with extra info on mouseover. It also has buttons to a 5-day and an hourly forecast. Finally there's a button that shows the cloudradar over Europe. Now if I could only integrate buienradar into this, it would be perfect. Then for the geek's e-penis there's the TabCounter it counts how many tabs are open and also keeps a record of the most tabs opened ev3r! You see the little counter at the right bottom of the image. The TabCounter stat window is only displayed when you click the tab button On the bottom of the picture above you also see the very handy IE Tab. It is currently set to Firefox, but click it and it will render the active tab like Internet Explorer does. Can be very handy when there are stupid sites that aren't optimized for Firefox. Another slick tool is the Download Statusbar. It does open a new status bar above the regular one (but it auto-hides when not in use). It is very compact and packs in more useful features than the standard download window, including: -Stop downloads and save them for the next browser session. -Option to start virus scanner when a download completes. Finally, there's the mostly useless (except for web-techies) but fun Flagfox. Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website's server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information. Now that you've messed up your toolbar it's time to organize, and that's where Organize Status Bar comes in. It's a bit user-unfriendly but it does manage to arrange the status bar as you see fit (mostly). Now if only I could add an addon that allowed me to put a few bookmarks, like buienradar, and the readability Annom posted, into the status bar of Firefox. Do you have any other gems that belong in the status bar? Please comment... (and I added the new tag Firefox (if you click on it you will find a few more Firefox addon related posts))

Elephant Birth

Readability tool

READABILITY is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading. It uses a standard font and column size. I have been using this for a while and thought I would share. I really like it. It's a simple bookmark on which you click to make a page readable. Especially useful for people with wide screens and websites that use this full width for text. This is only for people who actually read more than 140 characters on the web.

a tip from this nice australian man

Wouldn't you guys love to have him over sunday morning as a jehovah's witness. His YouTube channel.

Helvetica vs. Arial

A quiz testing wether you can distinguish Helvetica and Arial. Don't mean to brag, but I got them all right... Wait a second, yeah, sorry, did mean to brag...

dekus:

t-shirt with the human ingredients

t-shirt with the human ingredients on it. For me personal it misses some % of alcohol

Compilation of 100 YouTube hits

There is a list at the YouTube description.

sketchpad drawing attempt 2

I made this 1 with the help of a photo.