"Aw, what a cute toddler," you may think, but you'd be wrong. That's Junrey Balawing, who is going to be crowned the unenviable title of World's Smallest Man when he turns 18 this June:
Continue reading
MEET Junrey Balawing, the Filipino who is about to become the world's smallest man - and a huge star.
At just 22 INCHES high, the 17-year-old is tinier than a one-year-old.When he turns 18 on June 12, he will take the title - smashing five inches off the current record.
The titchy teen has not grown since his first birthday, struggles to walk and cannot stand up for long.
But he beams with pride when talking about his likely world record.
He said: "If I were the smallest man in the world, it would be very cool."
Rhodri Phillips of The Sun has the story: Link
Video clip after the jump:Union Jack Earmuffs - $5.95
Are you a Royal Wedding fanatic? Are you tired of coworkers teasing you about your love of all things Will and Kate? Shut out the naysayers with the Union Jack Plush Earmuffs from the NeatoShop. Embracing the craze has never been so comfy.Be sure to check out all the fabulously funny Apparel & Accessories available at the NeatoShop!
Here's a super fun Name That Tune quiz with a delightful cast of animated characters. We scored 6 out of 10 - failing on the newer songs and killing on the older ones. See how well you do. Give the quiz a whirl here.
(YouTube link)
The world's simplest ad campaign -show your product with cute kittens. It just might work! -via Arbroath
How cute are these sloths? The entire family was made by a crafter in Hokkaido, Japan. See more pictures at Craftzine. Link -via Rue The Day
Jenny and Dave Prager brought us First Impressions of the USA last month. Some of the response they received from global visitors to the USA concerned the common greeting, "How are you?" Lakshmi says:
She wasn't the only one who was confused by the phrase, as well as "thank you", "you're welcome", and the constant smiles of Americans. Read more at Our Delhi Struggle. Link -Thanks, Dave!
“When I set foot at the Dulles airport in DC, the immigration/customs guy asked me how I was doing — and I was taken aback. Am I supposed to know this guy? Does this guy know my cousin? And so, is that how he knows that I would be here at the airport today? Did my cousin ask him to take care of me until he could pick me up at the airport? If so why didn’t my cousin tell me? I looked like a deer facing headlights.”
She wasn't the only one who was confused by the phrase, as well as "thank you", "you're welcome", and the constant smiles of Americans. Read more at Our Delhi Struggle. Link -Thanks, Dave!
(YouTube link)
Walt Disney Imagineering is updating the features of the Haunted Mansion. Here's a look at how they are changing the beloved "hitchhiking ghosts." -via Boing Boing
An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the USSR (now Ukraine) during a safety test became the worst nuclear accident in history on April 26th, 1986. Twenty-five years later, the area is still uninhabitable. The Big Picture has posted 34 pictures from that disaster and its aftermath, continuing to the present. This picture shows a helicopter spraying decontaminant a month after the accident. Some photos may be disturbing. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Reuters/Itar-Tass)
This brilliant animation begins with a man doing restoration on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The ladder he's working from is knocked out from under him and he sustains serious injuries when he falls to the ground. Can modern science put him back together? Perhaps, but he may have some trouble getting through airport security from now on.
Ghost Productions is a medical animation studio that produces surgical training, patient education and marketing materials for medical device manufacturers, hospitals, pharmacological firms, television stations, and public health organizations.
Link - Via Kuriositas
Detail from the Darke/Holmes study
by Michael Berry
H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory,
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The applications of mathematics can be bizarre. Soon after I arrived in Bristol in the 1960s, a senior colleague called me, saying that someone in the veterinary school needed help with mathematics — or was it physics? — and I seemed just the person to help. Cursing inwardly, I agreed to see the fellow. He was Peter Darke, a graduate student near the end of a Ph.D. studying horses’ hearts.
He showed me a paper by Gabor (Dennis Gabor, who invented holography) and Nelson1 and asked me to explain it. It took a while to understand. The idea is that a heart is like a little battery, pushing weak electric currents in a three-dimensional pattern round the body. The battery has a strength and a direction: it acts as a current dipole, represented as a little arrow — the heart vector. During each heartbeat, the vector (tip of the arrow) draws a loop - the heart loop — whose shape is a powerful diagnostic of health. Therefore it is useful to measure this loop, in a way that doesn’t involve killing the horse. Gabor’s paper gave the theory of a way to do that, inferring the heart vector by measurements of the electric potential on the surface of the horse. It is an ingenious application of Gauss’s theorem.
The Darke/Holmes study, which used the Berry approach to integrate over the surface of a horse.
Peter had spent three years preparing to implement this idea. He enveloped his horse in a coat he had made, of several hundred potentiometers, with electronics to measure the potential at each of them, fifteen times during each heartbeat, and he had arrived at the point where he had a huge file of all these measurements. But there was a difficulty: he knew only the most elementary high-school mathematics and so had no way to understand the formulas in Gabor’s paper. His specific question was: does the theory apply to a real horse, or only to an ideal cylindrical horse? Unlike the physicists’ mythical ‘spherical cow,’ this was real.
I learned that the formulas work for a horse of any shape, but they do assume uniform conductivity — a better approximation, apparently, for horses than for people. (Actually, it doesn’t have to be accurate: who cares whether the loop describes the real dipole inside the real horse? To be useful for diagnosis, it is necessary only that the loop be reproducible.)
The formulas involved integration, and Peter didn’t know what an integral was, so it was hard to explain how to add up all those measurements. A complication was that what had to be inferred was a vector, so he needed to know, at each point on the horse, the components of the perpendicular to the surface of the horse with respect to the three symmetry directions of the horse. After some discussion, we made a ‘cos-theta-meter,’ and I left him to it, and never saw him again.
Further detail from the Darke/Holmes study.
But a year later, I received two papers from him,2 reporting the outcome of all that arithmetic. To my surprise, he had indeed calculated fifteen vectors for each heartbeat, and thereby deduced the heart loops for several horses in different states of health. At the end of the paper were the usual acknowlegements to colleagues and funding agencies. For technical help, he thanked me; and for financial support, he thanked the Horserace Betting Levy Board (financed by racecourse gamblers).
The moral of this is that applications of mathematical knowledge can be unexpected; you may find yourself taking a surface integral over a horse.
References
1. “Determination of the Resultant Dipole of the Heart from Measurements on the Heart Surface,” D. Gabor and C.V. Nelson, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 25, 1954, pp. 413-6.
2. “Studies on the Equine Cardiac Electric Field. I. Body Surface Potentials, II. The Integration of Body Surface Potentials to Derive Resultant Cardiac Dipole Moments,” P.G.G. Darke and J.R. Holmes, Journal of Electrocardiology vol. 2, 1969, pp. 222-234 and 235-244.
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
by Michael Berry
H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory,
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The applications of mathematics can be bizarre. Soon after I arrived in Bristol in the 1960s, a senior colleague called me, saying that someone in the veterinary school needed help with mathematics — or was it physics? — and I seemed just the person to help. Cursing inwardly, I agreed to see the fellow. He was Peter Darke, a graduate student near the end of a Ph.D. studying horses’ hearts.
He showed me a paper by Gabor (Dennis Gabor, who invented holography) and Nelson1 and asked me to explain it. It took a while to understand. The idea is that a heart is like a little battery, pushing weak electric currents in a three-dimensional pattern round the body. The battery has a strength and a direction: it acts as a current dipole, represented as a little arrow — the heart vector. During each heartbeat, the vector (tip of the arrow) draws a loop - the heart loop — whose shape is a powerful diagnostic of health. Therefore it is useful to measure this loop, in a way that doesn’t involve killing the horse. Gabor’s paper gave the theory of a way to do that, inferring the heart vector by measurements of the electric potential on the surface of the horse. It is an ingenious application of Gauss’s theorem.
The Darke/Holmes study, which used the Berry approach to integrate over the surface of a horse.
Peter had spent three years preparing to implement this idea. He enveloped his horse in a coat he had made, of several hundred potentiometers, with electronics to measure the potential at each of them, fifteen times during each heartbeat, and he had arrived at the point where he had a huge file of all these measurements. But there was a difficulty: he knew only the most elementary high-school mathematics and so had no way to understand the formulas in Gabor’s paper. His specific question was: does the theory apply to a real horse, or only to an ideal cylindrical horse? Unlike the physicists’ mythical ‘spherical cow,’ this was real.
I learned that the formulas work for a horse of any shape, but they do assume uniform conductivity — a better approximation, apparently, for horses than for people. (Actually, it doesn’t have to be accurate: who cares whether the loop describes the real dipole inside the real horse? To be useful for diagnosis, it is necessary only that the loop be reproducible.)
The formulas involved integration, and Peter didn’t know what an integral was, so it was hard to explain how to add up all those measurements. A complication was that what had to be inferred was a vector, so he needed to know, at each point on the horse, the components of the perpendicular to the surface of the horse with respect to the three symmetry directions of the horse. After some discussion, we made a ‘cos-theta-meter,’ and I left him to it, and never saw him again.
Further detail from the Darke/Holmes study.
But a year later, I received two papers from him,2 reporting the outcome of all that arithmetic. To my surprise, he had indeed calculated fifteen vectors for each heartbeat, and thereby deduced the heart loops for several horses in different states of health. At the end of the paper were the usual acknowlegements to colleagues and funding agencies. For technical help, he thanked me; and for financial support, he thanked the Horserace Betting Levy Board (financed by racecourse gamblers).
The moral of this is that applications of mathematical knowledge can be unexpected; you may find yourself taking a surface integral over a horse.
References
1. “Determination of the Resultant Dipole of the Heart from Measurements on the Heart Surface,” D. Gabor and C.V. Nelson, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 25, 1954, pp. 413-6.
2. “Studies on the Equine Cardiac Electric Field. I. Body Surface Potentials, II. The Integration of Body Surface Potentials to Derive Resultant Cardiac Dipole Moments,” P.G.G. Darke and J.R. Holmes, Journal of Electrocardiology vol. 2, 1969, pp. 222-234 and 235-244.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
You know when you were a kid and would absentmindedly doodle smiley faces on dollar bills? Well it seems now there is a whole artistic community of currency defacers out there. Maybe part of the national budget crisis arose from all the cash that has to be taken out of circulation because George Washington has been replaced with Darth Vader. However, these portraits would make Andy Warhol proud.
Death Star Planetarium - $29.95
Do you know someone who has trouble falling asleep at night? Maybe they would sleep better under the Star Wars Galaxy.
The Death Star Planetarium from the NeatoShop allows you to transform any darkened room into your very own planetarium. Now you can finally get cozy and relax under the Star Wars galaxy, or the Earth's night sky, all from the comfort of your own bedroom.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Star Wars items and Gifts for Geeks!
You have to wonder about the culture that creates a market for a toy like this. If you are afraid of your children using chemicals, why would you be interested in a chemistry set at all? Link -via The Daily What
