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.