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This ad by the Norwegian Accordion Association advertising the World Accordion Championship is just so perfect for those accordion bus (also called articulated bus)!
The Guide Horse Foundation trains miniature horses to serve as guide horses for the blinds blind people! Link – Thanks Tiffany!
A 21-year-old German tourist named Tobi Gutt learned the hard way the cost of a typo: he wanted to go to Sydney, Australia but bought tickets online to Sidney, Montana!
Seems Gutt had accidentally typed the wrong name into his web browser when he ordered his plane tickets online and wound up flying 13,000 miles to a place called Sidney, Montana.
The oil town only boasts about 5,000 souls and promises tourists such exciting events as "The Best of the West Beef Showcase," "The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial" and "The Lone Tree Gun Show."
The Abbotsford Police Department has a public service page on its website titled "How to Spot Grow Operations and Clandestine Drug Labs".
Here’s how to tell if your neighbor is a "farmer":
- Rental Accommodations: Almost all marijuana growers will utilize rental property, residence & commercial to avoid damage to their own properties. E.g. high humidity levels & alterations to accommodate the grow.
- Discarded Equipment: Sometimes growers leave equipment lying around the yard such as nutrient containers, pots, wiring, soil, root balls, aluminum shrouds and PVC piping. On garbage day, a grow-op residence most likely will not put out any garbage due to the fact that grow houses are commonly used for the sole purpose of growing marijuana.
Here’s how to tell if your neighbor is a meth cook:
- Windows blackened out or curtains always drawn.
- Unfriendly tenants appear secretive about their activities. Tenants display paranoid or odd behaviour; watch cars suspiciously when passing by their residence.
- Coming outside to smoke cigarettes.
- Chemical odor coming from the house, apartment, garage or detached building.
Link | Or, simply surf over to the DEA website and see if you live next door to one!
Ghost Riding the Whip [wiki], or simply ghostin’ is a hip-hop car stunt in which the driver gets out of a slowly moving car to dance around and on top of the vehicle.
Apparently, it should also be called "thinning the herd" or the "Darwin Awards dance":
“Ghost riding the whip” — a stunt in which a driver gets out of his car and dances around and on top of the slowly moving vehicle to a thumping hip-hop beat — has gotten at least two people killed, led to numerous injuries and alarmed police on the West Coast and beyond.
A fad among devotees of a West Coast strain of hip-hop music called “hyphy,” the stunt has been celebrated in song and performed in numerous homemade videos posted on YouTube.
“It did not take Einstein to look at this thing and say this was a recipe for disaster,” said Pete Smith, a police spokesman in Stockton. “We could see the potential for great injury or death.”
Someone has waaay too much time on their hands! See the "making" of the Post-It Notes Jaguar: Link [flickr]
If you like that, you’d probably like the Post-It Notes Elvis or perhaps the Blue Tape Audi.
Fans of logic game rejoice! If you like logic games like Samorost, you’ll like this game called Gateway. Link – via digg
We’ve featured photos from the Eye of Science before, but the website is so gosh darned awesome that we just had to do it again. This photo is of a cat embryo at 2 weeks gestation:
The brain (upper right) and the eye (black, upper centre) are visible, with the spinal cord running along the back to the tail (left side). The limbs have started to form (centre and lower right), and the remains of the umbilical cord can be seen at centre just above the tail (red). Internal organs can be seen under the front limbs (centre).
At this stage of development the heart and liver would be forming. A cat embryo takes 63-68 days to gestate. Magnification: x10.
Link (image 1) | The Eye of Science website
p>Ah, here’s the funniest song about censorship yet: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
From Astronomy Picture of the Day:
The International Space Station (ISS) will be the largest human-made object ever to orbit the Earth. The station is so large that it could not be launched all at once — it is being built piecemeal with large sections added continually by flights of the Space Shuttle. To function, the ISS needs trusses to keep it rigid and to route electricity and liquid coolants. These trusses are huge, extending over 15 meters long, and with masses over 10,000 kilograms. Pictured above earlier this month, astronauts Robert L. Curbeam (USA) and Christer Fuglesang (Sweden) work to attach a new truss segment to the ISS and begin to upgrade the power grid.
Link | ISS [wiki] | See also: Space Shuttle Discovery Fun Facts
If you think that buying diamond is an ethical dilemma, read this Foreign Policy article about the ethical issues of several common products.
Take for example, chocolate:
Beware of: Cocoa powder
The cost: Child labor. Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa (and most of the United States’) comes from West Africa, where nearly 300,000 children under the age of 14 toil in dangerous conditions on cocoa plantations. In the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the region’s cocoa is produced, more than 100,000 children work in near slavery, subject to both injury from the machetes used to harvest the plant and from toxic pesticides that are banned in the United States and Europe.
A 47-million-years-old fossil of a leaf-imitating insect suggested that camouflage was an ancient and successful evolutionary strategy (that still works even today!):
The 2.4-inch-long insect had physical characteristics similar to the oblong leaves of trees living there at the time, including Myrtle trees, legumes, such as alfalfa, and Laurel trees.
It also shared features with modern insect relatives in size, shape, and the designs used for camouflage. For instance, the fossil had foliage-like extensions from its abdomen.
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From Sci-Fi Lists, here’s the Top 100 Sci-Fi Books of all time. See if you agree with the top 10 picks:
1. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
2. Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game (1985)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
5. George Orwell: 1984 (1949)
6. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
7. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
8. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1954)
9. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
10. Robert A Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)
There are many Mario "clones" out there, but this one by Markus Persson is very good – since the landscape and maps change with every game play, it’s an "infinite" permutation of Mario!
Link [requires Java 5.0, may not work w/ OSX] – via Heavy Games
In this 2004 short movie by Scott Smith (one of the finalists of Project Greenlight, an amateur filmmaking contest), this guy breaks every single one of the Ten Commandments (or is it the 7 deadly sins?) in just minutes, all before breakfast!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Scott Smith’s blog at Coudal – Thanks James!
Today’s Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro got me thinkin’: who started this whole bit about the mudflap girl?
The silhouette of the sexy woman certainly has worked its way from the back of truck’s mudflap into our pop culture consciousness. Now, you can find countless decals and t-shirts bearing the "trucker girl" figure. It’s even found on soaps, belt buckles, and … pumpkins!
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The mudflap girl even made it into a Super Bowl commercial (2006 ad for Honda Ridgeline, made by design company A52‘s Andy Hall), where she opened the door to the truck and saw another mudflap icon: Yosemite Sam!
Links: Ridgeline’s Super Bowl Ad [YouTube] | Bizarro Comic by Dan Piraro
Scientists at the Sydney University of Technology found that Toxoplasma gondii, a common parasite affecting between 30% to 60% of the world’s population, may have an unusual effect:
"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens”.
Link – Thanks Andrew H.!
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Salome, an infertile gorilla at the Bristol Zoo Gardens, UK, who suffered from premature menopause gave birth to a baby gorilla after given human fertility treatment!
Following discussions it was decided to lace her yoghurt with crushed up pills containing clomifene, a common fertility drug used by women to kick-start ovulation by blocking the action of the hormone oestrogen.
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Scientists in China said that snakes make better earthquake monitors than fancy-pants equipments:
Scientists said the serpents can sense a quake from 120km (75 miles) away, up to five days before it happens.
They respond erratically, even smashing into walls to escape, scientists said.
"Of all the creatures on the Earth, snakes are perhaps the most sensitive to earthquakes," Jiang Weisong, director of the earthquake bureau in Nanning, told The China Daily.
The reptiles respond by behaving extremely erratically, he said.
"When an earthquake is about to occur, snakes will move out of their nests, even in the cold of winter. If the earthquake is a big one, the snakes will even smash into walls while trying to escape," he told the newspaper.
So, instead of seismographs, the Chinese simply set up video systems monitoring snake nests! Link
Here’re an examples from the BBC’s list of 100 things we didn’t know last year:
The lion costume from the Wizard of Oz was actually made from real lions!
See 99 more fun facts here: Link | The 2005 List
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This year’s Rose Parade will have George Lucas as grand marshal, so naturally, stormtroopers, Royal Guards and other characters will make an appearance:
The scene was surreal — the troupe wore blue jeans, cargo shorts and T-shirts but had donned elaborate helmets of the Imperial forces. On the sidelines was the Darth Vader understudy, preparing in case the real one got sidelined.
They are members of the 501st Legion, an international organization of more than 3,000 people devoted to re-creating scenes from the "Star Wars" movies.
They painstakingly mold, sew and paint costumes to dress up as stormtroopers, Royal Guards and other characters, mostly to realize childhood fantasies — but also to appear at charity events and Civil War-style reenactments.
LA Times Article: Link (Photo by Damon Winter)
Meet Michael Perham, a 14-year-old boy who aims to become the youngest person to sail across the Atlantic by all himself:
A 14-year-old boy aims to make history on New Year’s Day by becoming the youngest person to sail across the Atlantic single handed. Michael Perham set sail from Gibraltar on Nov 18 and is on course to complete the 3,500-mile journey on Monday, when he docks in Antigua.
He started sailing at the age of seven and came up with the idea of the challenge three years ago after watching footage of a previous world record attempt and because, his mother Heather said yesterday, he "loves a challenge".
Bert Myers is a retired physician who studied photography under Ansel Adams. As part of his medical research, Bert worked with X-ray machines and started to use X-ray as his art medium of choice.
See fantastic X-ray images (some in color, too!) of vegetables, minerals, snail shells, and more: Link – via The Huge Entity
Richard Stein’s website has *everything* you’d ever want to know about Japanese Swords, and I mean absolutely everything: Link – via growabrain
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From the website:
The 114 photographs on this site are from Pol Pot’s secret prison, codenamed "S-21" during his genocidal rule (1975-79). Between 1-2 million Cambodians (and many thousands of foreigners) were starved to death, were tortured, or killed, during his brutal reign of terror.
When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 the S-21 prison staff fled, leaving thousands of written and photographic records. Altogether more than 6,000 photographs were left; the majority have been lost or destroyed.
Link – via metafilter
Surprise! The government can listen to everything you say, even when your cell phone is turned off:
A recent court ruling in a case against the Genovese crime family revealed that the FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a "roving bug." Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.
"The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them," James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News. "Any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device, which can allow eavesdroppers to pinpoint someone’s location to within just a few feet," he added.
This print ad is for Tide Coldwater detergent, and is captioned:
If everyone in New York City washed their laundry in cold water for just one day, the energy savings could be 5.7 million kwh. Enough to power every light in the Empire State building for an entire month.
A couple more pics at Innings
A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic:
Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.
Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.
"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said today.
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