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This mass-transit railway was a propeller-driven train suspended beneath a monorail in Glasgow, Scotland. The test track for the Bennie Railplane was built in the 1930s, but the system was never implemented wider because of the economic difficulties of the time. See more pictures at Dark Roasted Blend. Link -via the Presurfer
As much chaos and grief as Adolph Hitler gave Europe, his aspirations were much, much worse. Luckily, not all those plans turn out the way he wanted. Some were never implemented, for god reason. And others, like the V-weapons program, did not live up to the specifications.
It’s hard to read about the V-weapons program without picturing an Aryan version of Wile E. Coyote engineering the whole thing behind the scenes. Especially when rockets routinely failed for such hilarious reasons as “too steep,” “fell on airport” and “steam generator misbehaved.” According to one disgruntled engineer whose V-2 exploded only three seconds after ignition, “We just blew a million marks in order to guess what could have been reported accurately by an instrument probably worth the price of a small motorcycle.”
Of the nearly 6,000 V-2 rockets constructed, only 3,170 were actually launched. Of the 1,403 lobbed at England, nearly 300 somehow missed. And we mean they missed England, a 50,000-square-mile target. The V-2s aimed at London fared no better, with only 517 hits out of 1,359 attempts. It seems like you could consistently do better with huge, cartoonish catapults.
The plans that were abandoned were even more ridiculous. Read about them all at Cracked. Link
This image of the annular solar eclipse was taken last night by redditor Titibu. It is from a reddit thread of eclipse photos taken in Japan, where you’ll find many other great shots of the “ring of fire.” Link
This picture is from redditor FANGO. It’s from another thread of eclipse photographs, where you’ll find links to other great images. Link
Warning: this video is frightening and may induce vertigo. Last Tuesday, 19-year-old photographer Vitaly Raskalov and two friends climbed the Zolotoy Rog Bridge in Vladivostok, Russia. The next day, they climbed the even higher Russky Island Bridge. They may have never been caught if they hadn’t posted pictures and video on the internet, but caught they were, and were fined 300 rubles each. That’s about ten dollars US, so I hope they’ve learned their lesson. Neither of the bridges are open to the public yet. Link -via Cynical-C
Previously: Skywalking Is Not As Fun As It Sounds
Patton Oswalt stars as one of the original internet trolls in this hilarious comedy short. He’s hoofed, hairy and misunderstood-get to know one of the web’s most notorious figures, and you’ll find that he’s not such a bad guy after all!
(NSFWish due to one bad word)
–via Gizmodo
Hollywood may have movie stars home tours but 37-year-old Czech translator Petr Sourek has something even better: a tour of the homes of the corrupt Rich and Infamous!
"In the corruption segment, the Czech Republic has a lot to offer to both local and foreign visitors.
"The local corruption environment is extremely stable with moderate growth," CorruptTour says dryly on its website.
Their tour guide, wearing a funny orange hat and a waistcoat, is impossible to miss as he stands next to a black mini-bus with 26 tourists eager to embark on an "ornithological safari tour" of Prague's upscale "nests".
Resembling a Hollywood homes-of-the-stars circuit, this tour targets the residences of lobbyists and rich businessmen caught up in dodgy deals - "nesting birds", in the guide's words.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a change in his relationship status yesterday. The 28-year-old billionaire married his girlfriend of nine years, Priscilla Chan yesterday. Chan received her medical degree last Monday, on Zuckerberg’s birthday. They invited friends to what they thought was a graduation party Saturday, but instead it turned out to be a surprise wedding! At least it was a surprise for the guests, and was planned that way to ensure privacy for the ceremony, which took place in Zuckerberg’s back yard. Link
I
don't know the exact steps on becoming a successful criminal - there are
so many crimes that you can commit as step 1. But I suspect that steps
2, 3, and 4 usually involve not being caught.
That's not what happened here:
Police arrested a bank robber who made a series of bad choices this afternoon, including picking a bank across from the federal courthouse, running from the bank and in front of an Assistant Police Chief and a Lieutenant, and apparently failing to read the book found in his possession, "How to Be A Successful Criminal."
Link
| And yes, "How
to Be a Successful Criminal
Talk about urban beautification! Japanese manhole covers aren’t just for covering holes in the ground, they’re colorful and artistic and often embody elements of Japanese culture.
Booooooom! has a rather impressive collection of Japanese manhole covers for you to peruse at the link below.
Seeing how nice they all look makes me want to grab some paint and beautify my city, too bad the local law enforcement won’t appreciate my artistic efforts!
How do you get really good at anything? Practice, practice, practice.
That’s hard to manage with dueling. So in the first few years of the Twentieth Century, a Parisian doctor named de Villers founded a school where ambitious men could develop their dueling skills without dying. This was an age before paintball guns, so they used pistols that fired wax bullets:
This remarkable academy is conducted by Dr. de Villers, and combats frequently take place there by way of practice. In these mimic duels wire masks are worn to protect the face and bullets made of wax are used, so that no injury may be sustained by the combatants. In all other respects, however, the conduct of the affair is carried through as on the “field of honour,” so that when the time comes — if it ever does come — for the scholars to take part in a serious duel they may acquit themselves with credit to themselves and disaster to their adversary — although this latter point is not of much importance.
Link -via Say Uncle | Photo: Bartitsu Society
In 1914, malaria was a serious public health threat to the people of San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Charles Campbell figured that the best way to reduce the mosquito population was with bats. So he built this giant roost for bats to live in.
But what do you do if you’ve got too many bats? Then you need to attract eagles with knives — as many as possible — in order to kill off the bats.
Link -via Offbeat Home | Photo: George Grantham Bain Collection
It’s hard to argue with the protest sign this guy is carrying, unless you’re one of those government intelligence types and you’re trying to conceal the truth about the existence of time travel technology from the masses.
I wish I could travel back in time to the moment this guy finished making his sign and snatch it up, leaving behind a note which reads “protest noted and acknowledged, have a nice day!”
It doesn’t get much kookier, or more twisted, than these strange drawings done in MS Paint by a friend of Redditor TheLittleClayroo over seven years ago.
If you’re familiar with, and like, the Dolan meme then these will be right up your alley, if not then you may appreciate the sick, silly sense of humor contained in each colorful scrawl.
Otherwise, unwind and enjoy a laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, and try to figure out what the heck this guy was thinking when he made these ridiculous drawings!
Link –via Geekosystem
That’s not a Beetle, but a Fiat. And it was parked right in front of the headquarters of Volkswagen’s Swedish division as a Google Street View car drove by.
Alternatively, as one MArooned commenter points out, maybe the car isn’t parked. Maybe that’s just where it broke down.
It is, after all, a Fiat.
The world’s largest LEGO tower resides in Seoul, Korea, where “it took 4,000 children 5 days and more than 50,000 bricks to build a record-breaking 105 ft Lego tower” all for the sake of world record fame.
Hopefully a stiff breeze doesn’t knock the tower over and send LEGO bricks flying across Seoul, making for an unpleasant surprise for anyone walking around barefoot.
And if you were already coming up with child labor jokes in your head while reading this article, hit the video link and prepare to ROFL!
What happens when the Bad Astronomer goes full hipster on Twitter? A new meme is born! Science-related hipster jokes are showing up with the hashtag ##BadAstrohipster.
The jokes aren’t limited to Twitter, either. You’ll find more at Fark and in the comments of any post that mentions the meme. Link to article. Link to Tweets.
The word is new to me: pleonasm, a phrase that uses more words than necessary to get a point across. Here are examples you’ve probably heard:
1. Nape of the neck. There’s only one nape, and it’s the back of your neck. It’s possible we get confused by the “scruffs” of animals’ necks since there are other scruffs out there. If you’re ever talking about a nape, though, you can drop “of the neck.”
2. False pretense. This is one we all should have known before. Although pretense technically means any “claim or implication,” the vast majority of the time, our usage of “pretense” already implies falsehood. For example: when’s the last time you thought something was both pretentious and genuine?
3. Frozen tundra. “Tundra” comes from the Russian word for Arctic steppes, and tundra is generally characterized by permafrost, frozen subsoil. Technically, there is non-frozen Alpine tundra, so-called from lack of vegetation, not temperature. Still, the vast majority of tundra is frozen. So, whether you’re talking about northern Siberia or poking fun at North Dakotan winters, this phrase is generally redundant.
One common in my area is “Where are you located at?” which could be two words shorter. Mental_floss has more, with dozens more in the comments. Link
Well, who among us hasn’t tried this approach? Unfortunately for this Russian man, he got stuck three floors down:
“An eyewitness reported to the regional rescue service that there was a man in the chute … The rescuers’ crew found a man, who was stuck at the fifth floor, in the garbage disposal,” a spokeswoman for the emergency services said.
Pictures released by the emergency services showed the glum-looking man sitting helplessly in the chute before he was cut out.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the man to make such a desperate attempt to flee his girlfriend.
Link | Photo (unrelated) via tootao
Stealing from shops by stuffing things in pockets is easy for thieves, but stealing guitars by stuffing them down your pants? Now that takes skillz:
Authorities say two men entered the Spencer's Music Store at 1717 S. Mur-Len Rd. in Olathe about 2:30 p.m. April 12. One suspect distracted the salesperson while the other suspect placed a guitar down his pants, then left the store.
Jeff Tice, Spencer's owner, said he noticed the guitar had been stolen.
"I looked up and saw an empty spot on the wall and no one was playing it in the store. So I realized it was not in the store," Tice said.
He checked his surveillance video and discovered the thieves stole two guitars worth more than $5,000.
"You can't make that up," Tice said. "It's huge."
What is so awesome that it merits pumping your fist victoriously for 16 hours? That would be pumping your fist victoriously for 16 hours. So James Peterson of Akron, Ohio superglued his hand closed and then pumped his arm continuously in an effort to get into the Guinness Book of World Records:
Fist pumping to the song Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, Peterson stopped just after 3 a.m. Saturday at Manny’s Pub on Brown Street near the University of Akron.
Peterson, an unemployed electrician from Green and self-proclaimed “veteran fist pumper,” said he did not suffer any serious pain from the 16-hour effort, but “I did get a nasty sunburn on my arm.”
If I ever meet Mr. Peterson, I’ll give him a high five and a fist bump to honor his achievement.
Photo: Paul Tople/Akron Beacon Journal
A woman in Orange County, California discovered that rock collecting can be a dangerous hobby, when the rocks she’d collected from the beach earlier that day suddenly ignited in her pocket!
Here’s the scoop:
Orange County Fire Authority officials tell the newspaper that the woman collected the rocks on a nearby beach, returned home and “was standing in her kitchen … when the pocket of her cargo shorts caught fire.”
“I talked to the paramedic who treated her, and in his 27 years in responding to calls near the beach, he’s never seen this,” Fire Authority Capt. Marc Stone told the Register. “The rocks were still smoking when firefighters took them to the hospital.”Now, they’re being tested. It’s possible, Stone said, that phosphorus in the stones may have caused the combustion.
And they say hobbies like rock and shell collecting are a safe and relaxing activity.
If you think completing the triathlon is hard, try doing it while juggling the entire way (yes, even while swimming). That's what Joe Salter did* last month.
This 31-year-old public school counselor from Pensacola, Fla., pulled off the incredible achievement on April 21 when he swam a quarter-mile while juggling three balls, then biked 16.2 miles while juggling two balls in one hand and ran four miles, also juggling.
Even more amazing: He did this all in 1 hour and 57 minutes
Salter, who has been juggling since he was 8, got into "joggling," the act of juggling while running, back in 2008 and soon became obsessed with that sport's Holy Grail: Completing a complete triathlon while juggling.
"For a long time, it's been a joke among the joggling community," Salter told The Huffington Post. "About 10 months ago, I started training to do it."
Almost as amazing as Salter's feat is the fact that there is indeed a "joggling community."
*yes, a mini-triathlon but still an amazing accomplishment
A “ring of fire” solar eclipse will be visible Sunday on the west coast of North America and parts of Asia on Monday morning.
In this weekend’s annular solar eclipse, the moon will slide in front of the sun and block 94 percent of its light. But because the moon is near apogee — the point in its orbit when it’s farthest away from Earth — it appears smaller to us, and will only cover most of the sun — leaving a ring of fiery light blasting the edges. (What, you thought it was a Johnny Cash reference?).
Of course, this ring of fire will be so awesome we shouldn’t look at it. And it’s relatively rare; the last one was in 1994, but strangely, we’ll have another in May 2013. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user José Ángel)
A quiz from 1948! How fun!
You can be a real he-man and still like to make a cheese souffle. To find out, though, how strongly masculine or feminine your interests are study these six sets of pictures, check your preferences, score yourself.
I saw the first picture, reproduced here, and said, “Neither!” Both of those fabrics are hideous, and unless it’s for a young child’s room, you should always go for solid color draperies. Other questions were just as difficult, but the apparent answer for each sex is quite obvious. Link
A man was arrested in Shepherdsville, Kentucky on misdemeanor charges of endangering the welfare of a minor. He had gone into a bar to drink and left his son behind in the car.
According to an arrest report, 59-year-old James L. Osborne was seen walking into The Electric Cowboy, a bar on Dixie Highway, near Oak Park Drive, early Saturday morning, shortly before 2:30 a.m.
Witnesses say he left a young boy inside his vehicle.
When police arrived, they approached the boy and asked him his age. It was determined that the boy was 17.
He was 17? When I was 17, I was in college! It’s likely that the son was his designated driver. Link -via Arbroath
A house in Tokyo, Japan, by Sou Fujimoto Architects stands out because it’s completely transparent, made from a plastic frame, some transparent panels, and lots of open space. The idea was inspired by our distant ancestors who lived in trees and could never expect privacy. The split-level house has minimal furniture and, as far as I can tell, no bathroom. It looks pretty in daylight, but imagine all the people staring at the occupants at night! However, this concept may never have permanent residents. Completely open walls above the ground floor wouldn’t adhere to building codes for residential structures. See more pictures at Bored Panda. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Iwan Baan)
You can’t fool all the people all of the time. But in in T. Mills Kelly’s class Lying About the Past, you can learn how to fool a lot of people once. Kelly is a history professor at George Mason University, and in this class, students learn how easily historical documents can be falsified, manipulated, and used to deceive the public.
The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens’ memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today’s pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.
Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. “Things like that really, really, really annoy me,” fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful.
Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to “consider yourself warned–twice.”
This time, the class decided not to create false Wikipedia entries. Instead, it used a slightly more insidious stratagem, creating or expanding Wikipedia articles on a strictly factual basis, and then using their own websites to stitch together these truthful claims into elaborate hoaxes.
The 2012 hoaxes didn’t turn out so well, as one didn’t gain much notice and the other one was posted on reddit, meaning that it gained more scrutiny than the perpetrators foresaw. The students learned a lot about the dynamics of the internet anyway. Read the entire story at The Atlantic. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: “Lisa Quinn”)
It was 1955 and the Space Age was about to launch. It would impact popular culture, art, architecture and design. And yes, even guns. That year, Robert Hillberg designed the Whitney Wolverine, a nickel-plated aluminum semi-automatic pistol that sported the flowing lines and curves of that era. It looks like a raygun, but instead fires .22 LR rounds.
Video Link -via Weer’d World
The beauty of email is that seconds after you hit "Send," it magically appears on the recipient's inbox. But what happens in between?
Google has created The Story of Send, which illustrates the journey made by the bits of Gmail data as it zips across "the pipes" of the Internet: Link - via The Verge
The Music Box is a project in New Orleans that consists of nine shacks made of reclaimed building materials. But they’re constructed to create sounds, which the group of artists, musicians, and engineers who made them call “musical architecture.”
The new instruments inside are Rube Goldberg contraptions that bring to mind the ingenuity of Southern jug bands. There’s a twisting staircase that pumps out tones from organ parts retrieved from a church flooded during Hurricane Katrina; a giant stand-up bass with a weed-whacker line for a string and a bathtub for a resonator; a tall, weather-vane–like structure hooked up to an analog synthesizer. “It reacts to rain, sunlight and wind velocity and uses those variables to modulate an ever-present, droning E major chord,” explains its inventor, Quintron, a New Orleans musician who conducts Music Box performances. The concerts attract hundreds who wait in line for a chance to sit in a small set of bleachers.
Read more about The Music Box at Smithsonian. Link -Thanks, Perrin!
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