Using a high speed camera shooting at 2000 framers in 1 second this little video shows you what it looks like to pop a water balloon in slow motion. Amazingly, even at these speeds you’ll notice that no matter how hard you try to track the balloon’s skin retract it’s just too darn fast!
One second (pun!) it’s there then it isn’t! You’ll also get a kick out of seeing a Japanese Andy Warhol. 
[Link] – via Wired
Press play or watch it from YouTube – [Link]
A pensioner who created a labyrinth of tunnels under his house over 40 years has been forced to pay £300,000 for repairs carried out by a council.
Excavations by William Lyttle, 77, who is also known as the “mole man”, almost caused the property in Mortimer Road, Hackney, east London, to collapse.
…
In 2001, his digging led to a 15ft-wide hole in the public footpath.
An earlier news report gives an idea of the scale of his obsessive tunnelling:
AN eccentric known as The Mole Man has been banned from his £1million home after digging a 60ft network of tunnels beneath it.
William Lyttle, 75, spent 40 years burrowing under his 20-room house, removing 100 cubic metres of earth with a spade and pulleys.
It is now feared the street could give way. Philip Wilman, a surveyor for Hackney Council, told Thames magistrates: “There has been movement in the ground. He’s fortunate a London bus is not in his front garden. It’s liable to lead to catastrophe.”
…
The house is also filled with so much junk surveyors are worried about the pressure on the floors.
Young Me Now Me is a brainchild of Ze Frank (the man himself is an Internet phenomenon!). Basically, you can submit photographs of the "now" you imitating an old childhood photograph.
Here’s the gallery: Link – via Boing Boing
It’s only natural that the best-selling game of the 80s is being made into a movie. That’s right. Here’s a trailer for … Tetris, the Movie!
Link [embedded YouTube] – via Blue’s News
(It’s a making of a blockbuster! Get it? Okay, I know. I’m sorry but I couldn’t help it.)
Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo created this spiffy Spider-Pig and Homer Simpson desktop out of Finder folders and document icons.
Bigger picture here: Link
We posted about Dede Koswara, dubbed the "Tree Man of Java," whose hands and feet were covered in bark-like tissues, before on Neatorama.
Doctors operated on Dede back in January and have now removed growths from his hands and feet:
Dede’s ordeal began when he was 15 and cut his knee in an accident. A small wart developed on his lower leg and spread uncontrollably.
Eventually he had to give up work as a builder and fisherman, and scratch a living in a traveling freak show.
The documentary team took American dermatology expert Dr Anthony Gaspari to Indonesia to see if he could find a cure. Dr Gaspari, of the University of Maryland, concluded Dede’s affliction was caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection usually causing only small warts.
Dede’s problem was that he has an extremely rare immune system deficiency, leaving his body unable to contain the warts.
The virus was therefore able to "hijack the cellular machinery of his skin cells", ordering them to produce massive amounts of
the substance causing tree-like growths known as "cutaneous horns".
17-year-old Nicco Phillips was driving to school in Milwaukie, Oregon, when he spotted an animal in the road.
“I was coming down the street and he was just in the middle of the road,” Phillips said. “I just kept driving and I was like, ‘What is that?’ It’s like a big guinea pig, I guess, which kinda bums me out because I was hoping it was like a kangaroo or something.”
The animal was actually a Patagonian cavy, a large rodent native to central and southern Argentina. Link to story. Link to pictures. -via Digg
Hockey is a religion in Montreal, Quebec.
So it’s no surprise that someone made a Jesus Christ / Carey Price video on YouTube. Carey Price is the Montreal Canadiens’ rookie goalie. Talk about putting a whole lotta pressure on the young 20 year old!
Click play or go to link here.
Oscar, who is actually a female cockatoo, was given six months to live, but thanks to a diagnosis of a contagious beak-and-feather disease, she was spared… and that was twelve years ago! The near-naked bird with nothing more than a tuft of feathers on her head is enchanting people world-wide as she gives real meaning to beauty comes from within. She can also do a mean Mick Jagger dance too.
Video: YouTube
We’ve posed about Nicholas Jones’ book sculptures before, but it’s worth another mention. Here’s an interview with Nick at The Design Files (with lots of photos): Link – via The J-Walk Blog
To celebrate the coming of the longer and milder days of Spring, the Swiss city of Zurich burns a 43-feet tall bonfire called "Böögg".
And to make it more interesting, they pack the Böögg with explosives … Ursi has more on the story and a time lapse video: Link
Photo: Jack Anthony
Kudzu is a climbing vine introduced into the United States from Japan in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Expo as a forage crop and ornamental plan. In the early 1950s, US Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion.
Fast forward a couple of decades later, kudzu is a fast growing weed that has infested about 11,000 square miles of the southeastern United States. It costs around $500 million every year in lost cropland and control costs.
Jack Anthony has a photo gallery of abandoned houses in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina that have been taken over by kudzu, noting that they make "interesting natural sculptures": Link – via Cynical-C
The D.U.C.K.man, a website created by Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. and dedicated to Donald Duck illustrator Don Rosa, has a neat scan of the Donald Duck Family Tree.
If you’ve ever wanted to know how Scrooge McDuck is related to "Dirty" Dingus McDuck, here’s your chance: Link – via AQFL
BTW, most Don Rosa comics have the letters D.U.C.K. (for Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno) hidden somewhere in the first panel. This is because Disney does not allow personal signatures in the comics.
When HP released upgrades to its high-end workstations, a company official released a statement praising the product that is so chockful of inane corporatespeak that someone just has to do something about it.
So Rob Beschizza of BB Gadgets created a game called Super Blockquote, based on the popular arcade game Breakout, where instead of bricks you get to destroy words:
HP released upgrades to its swanky high-end workstations, aimed at animators and other top productivity bananas. More dreadful than the specifications, however, were the words of John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP.
Boing Boing Gadgets has deemed the standard HTML blockquote insufficient to reveal the expressive power of his business English. Hence, Super Blockquote, which arms you against the marketroid oppression of Thompson’s prose.
Play it here: Link [Flash game]
Next time you think that a cloud looks like a company logo, it may not be simply your imagination.
Inventors Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover created a process to make "clouds" (basically soap based foams mixed with helium) in practically any shape you’d like (like the Mickey Mouse ears to the left).
They named their creation floating logo clouds "flogos": Link
A statue recently installed on the German bordertown of Simbach is causing a stirr in the neighboring town of Braunau, Austria.
Why? Because the statue is of a naked man riding a giant fish, symbolizing the personification of the Inn River, which marks the border between Germany and Austria. That’s all fine and good, except Braunau noticed that the naked man is "mooning" their town!
Deputy Mayor Helmut Bogner, said: "This creature has his butt straight in our face. We, the people of Braunau, don’t appreciate this gesture and we want it moved."
And the statue’s name? "Aenus" the Latin name for the River (suuuuuree!): Link [translated from German, with larger photo] | Ananova article
In his project "Excelsior 1968", John Martz of Robot Johnny turned the photographs of every single person in his mother’s 1968 Toronto High School yearbook into cartoons:
Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.
Link: Flickr Gallery | You can also buy the project in book form – via Laughing Squid
Scientists have recreated what they believe to be the voice of Neanderthals.
Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech.
Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11.
“They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn’t have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language,” he says.
New Scientist has very short audio clips contrasting the Neanderthal and modern human speech. Link -via Yahoo News
(image credit: Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich)
Americans are far from alone in the world, but from the perspective of many young Americans, we might as well be. Most young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 demonstrate a limited understanding of the world, and they place insufficient importance on the basic geographic skills that might enhance their knowledge.
I got all the questions right, but I’m not a young American. Link -via Geek Like Me
38 years ago today, April 17th, 1970 the capsule from the Apollo 13 mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and the whole world breathed a sigh of relief.
Apollo 13 launched from Cape Canaveral on April 11, intended to be the third manned lunar landing. The crew — James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. — experienced a slight vibration shortly after launch, but things were going normally until 55 hours, 55 minutes into the flight.
Oxygen tank No. 2 exploded, causing No. 1 to fail and start leaking rapidly. Warning lights started blinking. The astronaut’s supplies of air, water, light and electricity were imperiled … 200,000 miles from Earth.
They didn’t land on the moon as planned, but just making it home alive was an amazing accomplishment. The film Apollo 13 (based on astronaut James Lovell’s book Lost Moon) recounted the story of their close call and McGyver-like operations. Wired has more details. Link
Hooray! It’s time for this week’s collaboration with What is it? blog: can you guess what this pistol is for?
Place your guess in the comment section – you’re playing for fun and fame this week. No t-shirt prize. More clues (size, date, and close-up photos) at the What is it? blog.
Update 4/18/08 – the answer is:
A gunpowder tester, photographed at the Frasier International History Museum.Because gunpowder varied in explosive power, gunsmiths needed devices to test particular batches. By the 1500’s, elaborate powder testers were available. This one resembles contemporary military pistols and may have belonged to a military gunsmith. Pulling the trigger ignited a measured amount of powder in the tube atop the tester, turning and locking a spring-loaded, numbered wheel. The number at which the wheel stopped indicated the powder’s strength. The development of self-contained cartridges during the 1800’s made powder testers obsolete.
Congratulations to RevRagnarok who got it right!
“The ball is put into a slightly protruding base to keep it in place when stirring and drinking.
“Users gently move the cup, like you would when swirling a glass of cognac, and the action pushes the ball around.
“The ceramic ball mixes all various sugars and milk at the same time, thus eliminating the need for a spoon.
“When you drink, the ball is blocked by the gravity in the recess of the glass.”
The company, Ana Gram, has made prototypes and is looking for a manufacturer. Link -via Digg
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