Long and Perhaps Tedious

But worth it, I think.

This is a cool video of useless machines that people have built. Although useless, the machines definately have a cool factor to write about.

Something Silly

Test: What's the song?

Answer in comments.

Forget your eyes

This is shockingly amazing.

Synaesthesia Illustrated

If you have synaesthesia, then you might see colours like this: Chromatic-full screen. I highly recommend that you also check out some of the interesting variations on the top right.

The idea is pretty simple. A full rotation takes 3 minutes. The largest circle will travel the circle once. The second largest (which is imediately to its left, at the start) will travel around the circle twice, the third three times, and so on. The patterns are really fascinating.

(Hat tip: Crooked Timber)

Fun Villains Advertisement

What Accent?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The West
The Midland
Boston
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Nerdy Post

Star Wars on Earth?

Yes, Storm Troopers are coming to a neighborhood near you and NO it will not be as cool as it sounds. Anyway, it looks like they already invaded Paris, is New York next?


All of these are from photographer extrordinaire Cedric Delsaux.

If I Had Kids

If I had kids, I would most certainly get them this.


Isn't that cool? It is a mini circuit board that allows kids to move around the circuits and build different machines.

According to the website, there are 500 different projects to build with this board alone, some include:

Digital recording device

Electronic lazy cat

Flying saucer launcher

Digital text display experiments

Fully functional AM/FM radio

Light-controlled music

Lie detector

Electronic racing game

Voice controlled rays of light

Light meter

Digital timers

Dog whistle

Maybe I'd be buying it for them because I'd want to play with it, but come on, it IS a cool toy isn't it?

Imagination

A long time ago I stumbled upon a really fun site by GE. It is called Imagination Cubed.

Go have a look and play around a bit. It'd also be a fun thing for kids to play around on.

So Bad it's Good?

This video is titled "Best Fight Scene Ever." I guess that might be true if you understand 'best' in a sarcastic way, but otherwise it might get the title "Worst Fight Scene Ever."

Regardless of the title, it's worth watching, either because it's so good or because it's so unbelievably bad.



(Disclaimer: It gets minimally graphic at the end, but nothing that you wouldn't see in something rated PG: for violence.)

On a Completely Morbid Note

Someone at Metafilter asks:

Do you think a super strong person could yank off his own head?
Like one of those strong-man competition guys (the ones who lift those big boulders and carry around telephone poles), or some other freakishly stong person, could one of them actually kill himself by ripping off his own head? Or would other physiological factors make this feat impossible?

There are 33 replies thus far, some of which are quite involved. For example:

I don't think so, and I'll tell you why: it's because the major muscle group involved in doing this is the triceps, and the triceps is quite weak when the elbow is flexed 90 degrees or more.

I doubt that anyone's strong enough to rip off an adult person's head at all, although I'm not certain that a powerlifter who rigged up some kind of mechanism to transfer the power of his squat to someone's neck might not manage it.

If you Google for autodecapitation, you'll find a couple of articles about men who tied ropes to fixed objects, tied the other end around their necks, got in their car (one an SUV, the other a Geo Metro), and then accelerated away. They succeeded; the SUV, which we assume weighed somewhere around 5000 lbs, was estimated to be traveling 30 mph at the unhappy moment.

Huh, this gets more interesting as you read more about it. Black Jack Ketchum apparently was decapitated during his hanging; the rope was too long, but a photo of the scaffold on the internet shows it couldn't have been much longer than 12 feet. So the energy necessary to decapitate someone shouldn't be much more than that necessary to hurl a man 12 feet in the air; it'd have to all be brought to bear on the neck in a pretty quick movement, though, and I doubt that's possible.

And you get really short responses like:

It's not a question of where he grips it, it's a simple question of weight ratios.

And finally, the questions about fiction start coming, namely:

We always contemplated the very zen question of whether Superman was strong enough to pull his head off.

So, if you're still interested, go and weigh in yourself.

Kid Celebrity Photos

For all of you out there with less than stellar looking children, there is hope. After all, look at Demi Moore when she was a kid... not so hot looking, although, Bjork was cute.

Below are a few for guessing. Find the answers at: Celebrity Kids.

Please make your guesses in the comments... no cheating please.




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