If you're into seriously hard rock -- I mean, like enough to actually shake the Earth -- than a Foo Fighters concert must be a blast. One such event in Western Springs, New Zealand was actually detected by seismographs in the region:

The first vibrations were recorded around 7:30pm, part way through the Tenacious D set, but the biggest shakes started at 8:20pm when the Foo Fighters took the stage, and then it all went quiet at 11pm when the gig ended. The concert vibrations were recorded as a semi continuous harmonic signal with a peak osculation of 3Hz, ie the ground was shaking 3 times per second in a nice rhythmic motion. There are lulls in the signal between the songs and peaks in signal intensity during the songs.

The cause of the shaking is most likely the weight of the 50,000 fans dancing, as 50,000 fans is equal to around 5,000 tonnes of mass moving(or moshing)on the ground for the duration of the concert. This set up a nice harmonic vibration in the ground which was recorded in our nearby borehole seismometers.

Perhaps, in the future, bands will compete to have the most seismically active concerts.

Link -via I Heart Chaos | Image: Wairakei GeoNet

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We've previously seen efforts to recreate the horrifying terror of snowmen built and destroyed by the malevolent Calvin. The is the contribution of a model maker to the genre. He made the figures out of sculpey and Playdough and added the visual effects with Adobe After Effects. Look at his behind-the-scenes shots at the link.

Link -via Comics Alliance

You can't use tools. Typing is going to be hard. And the less said about using the bathroom, the better. Still, you will look gorgeous with nails like these. The artist known as Dzine has composed an enormous photobook of amazing fingernails around the world. View a few sample pictures at the link.

Link -via The Hairpin | Book Website | Photo: Catherine Wong

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Kids these days with their telephones and their artificial intelligences...they're just plain spoiled. Why, in my day, when we wanted to communicate with our personal digital assistants, we had to use the telegraph. And it worked just fine. Now they can just use their high-tech phones to talk to Siri. No doubt it'll lead to dancing or worse.

Link -via DVICE

Korean artist Sang Sik Hong makes lovely curved sculptures by arranging thousands of drinking straws of varying lengths. He's especially fond of depicting lips which, from a distance, appear to be carved from marble.

Link -via NotCot | Artist's Website | Photo: Zanthi

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There's no way that Santa will miss their neighborhood at night! Last year, the people of Bainbridge Circle in Murrieta, California decorated thirteen houses with elaborate Christmas lights. Then they synchronized them to flash to a variation of "The Little Drummer Boy." The project required 45,000 lights, 130 extension cords, 17 wireless controllers and a whole lot of programming.

-via Borepatch | Previously: Animated Christmas Lights Play Slayer

Tomomi Imura combined HyperText Transfer Protocol status messages with some of the Web's funniest cat pictures. View the whole set at the link. I've never encountered a 418 error, but now I really want to.

Link -via Boing Boing

Like Ford Prefect from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a lot of people just don't pick up on sarcasm. People have proposed various solutions, such as a new punctuation mark. Another is the use of reversed italics -- tilting text to the left instead of the right. Like this:



There's an online movement...well, a just a website, so far, to promote the use of a sarcastic font. Do you think that we should use it?

Link -via Dave Barry | Image: BBC

A baby seal with serious cuteness and boundary issues slipped through the cat door of a house in Tauranga, New Zealand. The human residents returned to find it relaxed and making itself at home:

Swoffer said at first she though the cats had brought in a rabbit, or perhaps the noise was an intruder. But she knew it was something different when the dog didn't react.

"I got a shock. It's kind of like finding an elephant in your house," she said.

The baby fur seal, however, was not perturbed.

It waddled its way into the lounge and onto the couch, where it then took a nap.

The owners were charmed by the seal, but that doesn't mean that you should follow his example. When a human does this, it's a smidgen less cute. Watch a video of the seal at the link.

Link -via The Mary Sue

Just think of the noodles as sticky spiderwebs. Go ahead, dig in.

-via That's Nerdalicious! | Photo credit: unknown

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Mika is practicing her English by explaining the plot to Episode IV while an animator hilariously adjusts the movie accordingly. This would actually be a brilliant assignment for any foreign language teacher because it tests language acquisition in a fun way. "Next week, Billy, I want you to retell Dude, Where's My Car? in Koine Greek." At the link, you can watch Mika's explanations of Avatar, The Matrix, and more.

Link | YouTube Channel

Allegedly, this is a photograph of the beginning of a nuclear detonation. It was taken in 1952 during the Tumbler-Snapper tests in Nevada. At this point, the fireball is about sixty-six feet across. How was the photographer able to get a shutter speed fast enough to do it? He used a Kerr cell, which is a device that uses polarizing filters to block the passage of light.

Link -via The Presurfer

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Not only can this Bearded Dragon play Ant Crusher, he does it really well! Keep at it, fella. You could earn a paycheck from this someday.

-via Kottke

There's an Far Side cartoon from the 1980s which shows two parents looking hopefully at their video game-playing teenager. They fantasize about his future career as a professional gamer. The joke is, of course, that this is an absurd hope for their indolent son who is developing no practical skills.

Larson's prediction was too pessimistic. There are now people who, for money, serve as bodyguards, tutors, guides, or just plain meatshields for other online gamers. Brian Crecente hired the services of one for half an hour at the price of £5:

"Essentially," Smith tells me, "I become the client's buddy in the game. I won't go for kills of my own, only when necessary to stop the client's ‘life' being cut short."

And Smith was good to his word. Earlier this month I hired the teen to escort me through 30 minutes of Battlefield 3 online matches on the Xbox 360. We met up online and appeared together on the battlefield.

Smith took plenty of bullets for me, becoming a sort of human shield during the many times I wasn't observant enough to notice an enemy drawing a bead on me. He was even more useful as an in-game guide. He was a sort of Battlefield 3 golf pro, suggesting weapons, equipment and play styles to me over headphones as we played.

One of the wonderful things about the World Wide Web is that it greatly reduces geographic barriers for building communities or businesses. If you have a specialized skill that doesn't require physical interaction, you can stretch across the world and sell it. In fact, I'm doing that right now.

Link | Image: Electronic Arts

Erin Pearce's Etsy store is called "What the Hell Is This?" That's the best possible name for an Etsy store. Or a blog. Or a restaurant. It'd be a terrible baby name, but a great restaurant name. Anyway, she sells beetles that she's dressed up like Jurassic Park characters.

Link -via The Mary Sue