To fill young minds with a passion for learning and a fire to empower your conquest of the world is the bliss of the teacher. Embrace the challenge of teaching by building fail-safes into your doomsday devices so that they can never be used against you.
John Farrier's Blog Posts
Khaleesi, a 4-year old English Bulldog, loves to watch TV. Recently, she watched Guillermo del Toro's 2015 horror film Crimson Peak. She became alarmed when a supernatural menace approached and attacked a young girl.
"Run, run!" she barks. But the girl foolishly ignored Khaleesi.
The pup is really too young to be watching such scary movies.
-via Laughing Squid
(Image: Stride Gum)
UPDATE: He did it! And Aikins survived! You can watch the amazing video here.
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Master skydiver Luke Aikins has had some close calls during his 18,000 jumps. But now he's taking new risks because for this jump, he won't have a parachute. Or a wingsuit. He's just going to jump out of a plane and, hopefully, land in a net on the ground.
Hollywood producers first pitched this insane idea to Aikins a couple years ago. He dismissed it immediately, but has contemplating it ever since. Aikins talked to France 24 news:
He said as much to his wife after a couple Hollywood guys looking to create the all-time-greatest reality TV stunt floated the idea by him a couple years ago.
"I said, 'You won't believe these guys,'" the affable skydiver recalls with a robust laugh. "'They want me to jump out without a parachute.' She said, 'Oh, with a wingsuit.' I said, 'No, they want me to do it with nothing.' We both had a good laugh about that."
But in the weeks that followed he couldn't shake one persistent thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale?
Because if anyone could, Aikins wanted to be that guy.
The net, which is still under construction, will be a third of the size of a football field and held aloft 20 stories high by cranes. The design needs a bit of refinement:
The landing target, which has been described as similar to a fishing trawler net, has been tested repeatedly using dummies.
One of those 200-pound (91-kilogram) dummies didn't bounce out. It crashed right through.
-via Dave Barry
It was 9:15 in the morning in front of the Irish Nobleman Pub in Chicago. The temperature was already 80ºF and rising rapidly. The owner of the truck had locked his German Shepherd inside for over an hour.
A gang of 4 men walked along the street, smashing the windows of parked cars and snatching goods inside. When they got to the truck, they broke in to steal a laptop computer. The dog took the opportunity to leave the truck.
Video footage from a security camera in front of the pub captured the incident. Pub owner Declan Morgan tells CBS News that he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for the truck owner:
“He didn’t think it was a big deal that his dog was in there for an hour. I told him I would’ve smashed the window if I knew the dog was in there.”
YouTube user RenoGeek and his son visited a children's museum. While there, the toddler tried to fill a wire mesh bucket with water. Unfortunately, the bucket was defective. It couldn't hold any water at all. I hope that he was able to get a refund for his admission ticket.
-via Tastefully Offensive
(Unrelated photo by Hey Paul Studios)
Some men eschew wearing condoms during intercourse because the plastic barrier reduces the sensitivity of the penile skin. Dr. Shengxi Chen, a biochemist at Arizona State University, thinks that he's found a solution to that problem. His condom mimics the reaction of water to human skin. USA Today explains:
Most condoms repel water. That's the opposite of human skin, which loves and contains a lot of water, making condoms feel unnatural, Chen said.
Chen added materials to latex to create condoms that are eight times more water-loving than natural latex condoms, as well as stronger and more flexible, according to his tests.
It feels smoother and softer, and it's proven under a microscope: Water flows into the material as opposed to sitting in a ball on top, and the texture appears smoother than most condoms, he said.
Chen is currently seeking FDA approval to test his condom on humans.
-via Glenn Reynolds
(Photo: SymGym)
There's no need for a video game to plant you on a couch. You can get a complete workout. SymGym provides that with an exercise machine that controls a video game. Pump your arms and your legs to move, turn, dodge, punch, and more.
There are already exercise platforms for video games, such as Kinect and Wii. Gizmag explains that SymGym is different because it provides variable resistence based upon situations in a game. For example, heavy objects in the game are heavy in the machine. Running uphill in the game is physically harder on the player. This provides a more realistic gameplay experience.
-via Bit Rebels
Stepping on a LEGO block is painful. Running on them is even worse. But, precisely, how much worse? The researchers at Dude! Where's My Challenge? decided to find out. They took turns pouring LEGO blocks onto a treadmill while a colleague ran on it barefoot.
It turns out that LEGO blocks provide a suboptimal running surface. The gentlemen endured the torture long enough to cut themselves while performing this feat.
Content warning: foul language.
-via Geekologie
For 40 years, professional luthier Linda Manzer has made some of the finest guitars in the world. So she was the right craftsman for Danish musician Henrick Andersen to approach to build this bizarre instrument.
The Medusa has 52 strings, which include harp strings, as well as 3 necks. Manzer designed it to reflect a crazy cartoon that Andersen drew:
In the video above, Manzer describes the Medusa, then Andersen plays it. Impressively, he does so with only 2 hands.
-via Laughing Squid
Adam Winrich is a master of the whip. He's set 21 Guinness World Records related to his art. Most recently, he added to that list the longest whip ever cracked. Watch Winrich snap a whip that is 238 feet and 3 inches long!
Even with a 2-handed overhand throw, it's amazing that he was able to create enough energy to send a wave through the manila rope for such an incredible distance.
-via Gizmodo
(Photo: Robert Bejil)
What gets your heart pumping and your head banging? It's definitely not lyrics that include words such as "committee" and "approximately."
Iain, a data scientist, blogs at Degenerate State. He conducted a statistical study that determined which words are most and least likely to be associated with heavy metal music. You can see his computational methods and detailed results here.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
At 2 AM on Wednesday, Michael Davis of Shreveport, Louisiana took his car to a self-serve car wash. While spraying it with a pressure washer, a man pointed a gun at him and demanded his keys and money.
Davis closed the distance with his attacker, then sprayed him in the face. When a second criminal came at him, Davis sprayed him, too.
Both attackers fled the scene, though their actions were captured on Davis's dashboard camera. Davis tells Fox 61 News: "The whole situation to me was almost surreal."
(Image: Google Maps)
On December 6, 1917, Finland declared independence from Russia. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of that event, its friendly neighbor, Norway, would like to give it a mountain.
The Norwegian government is considering ceding the peak of Mount Halti, which is on the Norwegian-Finnish border, to Finland. At 1,365 meters tall, Mount Halti would become the tallest mountain in the country, nudging out another mountain, which is 7 meters shorter. The Guardian reports:
The originator of the idea is a retired geophysicist and government surveyor, Bjørn Geirr Harsson, 76, who learned last year that Finland would celebrate the 100th anniversary of its independence from Russia on 6 December 2017 and recalled being puzzled by the location of the border when he flew over Halti in the 1970s.
Harsson wrote to the ministry of foreign affairs in July 2015, pointing out that the gesture would cost Norway a “barely noticeable” 0.015 sq km of its national territory and make Finland very happy.
-via reddit, which includes this important point of etiquette:
This guy is amazing! He doesn't need rope or hooks. He moves so quickly up the enormous tree that his method looks more like running that climbing. And since he's been caught on camera doing it, he'll have to submit to the government in keeping with the Mutant Registration Act.
-via Geekologie
Would you like to refill your tank for free? At this gas station in Samara, Russia, customers could get gas for free, provided that they pumped it while wearing bikinis and high heeled shoes. The tabloid Daily Star reports that the venture was very successful, leading to cars queuing up for the duration of the 3-hour event.
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