In 1944, the Japanese Army sent then 23-year-old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the small island of Lubang in the Philippines to lead a guerilla warfare.

In 1974, nearly 30 years after the war was over, he finally surrendered:

By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world.

Link | Hiroo Onoda [wiki]

When Make Blog put a post on sandals from old auto tire, that’s creative!

But when Neatorama puts out sandals from old water bottles, that’s just sad…

(Forgot where I got this pic – if anyone knows the story behind it, please let me know!)

Life in New York City is tough on trees: compacted soil with high pH, pollution, and hot summer and cold winter make it hard for trees to flourish there.

So, Cornell grad student Naalamie Amissah, Professor of Horticultural Physiology Nina Bassuk, and plant breeder Peter Podaras developed a new, easier technique to clone oak trees:

"We have combined native cold-hardy trees with much shorter southern and desert species that can tolerate heat, drought, compacted low oxygen soil, road salt and the concrete-induced high pH soils common to cities," Podaras said. "Smaller-sized trees require less long-term maintenance and do not interfere with power lines. We believe these new extremely vigorous hybrids have excellent potential as the ultimate street trees and for backyard landscaping."

Link

Blip.tv has this video clip of the Escher-like chase scene of Richard Williams’ classic The Thief and the Cobbler.

Fantastic! Link – via Milk and Cookies

Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run …

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] via WFMU Beware of the Blog

Wim Delyove Delvoye is a Belgian artist who is famous for having unconventional art projects (such as cloaca, a machine whose sole purpose is to digest food and produce feces).

Wim has also been tattooing pigs (yes, oink oink pigs) since the 1990s. He could only do this in his "art farm" in China, where

Wim Delvoye [wiki] | Tattooed pigs photos at Cellar Image of the Day | Lenin Tattoo on pigs

Update 7/21/06: Wim’s cloaca machine website: Link – Thanks for the name correction & link, Uw Moeder!

Jan Bollaert draws some very cool neo-pop art (with lots of flowers). This one is titled "The Little Butterfly".

Link – via Xayide

From the website:

A single boat seemingly floats in midair in the beautiful crystal clear beaches in the Republic of Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

Link | Lots more neat photos at A Thousand and One

In 2009, when the National Ignition Facility reaches its full operative capability, it will have the most powerful laser in the world at 500 trillion watt.

On final approach, 192 laser beams will zing into a million-pound target chamber 33 feet in diameter, with 20-inch walls. To prevent any radiation from escaping, the chamber is encased by walls that are six feet thick. Each 20-nanosecond laser burst will blast target materials in the chamber with 500 trillion watts of power—1,000 times the electrical output of the entire U.S. over the same period of time. All that awesome power will be used in fusion research, in astrophysics (for example, studying what conditions might be like at the center of Jupiter), and in generating thermonuclear detonations for weapons research.

Link