The spine of this 18th-century wooden book reads Historia Universalis.  But when the book is opened, a more fundament-al purpose is revealed:

The folio opens to reveal two oaken boards that can be folded out to form a closed square and one board lifted upward to become the seat, the hole in the middle ready to hold a chamber pot. The box rests on four small wooden pegs, the binding protected by a small brass plate at the foot. Condition: clasps possibly renewed in 19th century, seat cracked, old restorations, minor losses to calf.

An unusual example of the use of the book form to disguise travelling personal furniture, probably for use on the military field.

This commode-book sold at auction in September of 2008 for $1500.

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The video demonstrates an unusual phenomenon that is NOT an optical illusion.  The physical principles involved are self-evident once you see how the "magic ball" is constructed.  Best of all, you can make one of these at home with simple hobby-store materials and impress neighborhood children and intoxicated adults.

YouTube link.

Time lapse video from the fourth largest city in the Netherlands.

This is an ordinary Wednesday morning in April 2010 at around 8.30 am. Original time was 8 minutes that were compressed into 2 minutes, so everything is 4 times faster than in reality. The sound is original.

This is one of the busiest junctions in Utrecht a city with a population of 300,000. No less than 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses pass here every day. And yet Google Street View missed it. Because private motorized traffic is restricted here.

These cyclists cross a one way bus lane (also used by taxis and municipal vehicles), two light rail tracks and then a one way street that can be used by private vehicles.

Commentary at the link addresses the absence of helmets on the cyclists.

Via The High Definite.

An article in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1914 took note of the outrageously high salaries of professional baseball players.

[Tris] Speaker’s salary with the Bostons will be $18,000 a season for the next two years. Other players drawing down fancy stipends annually are: Mathewson, $15,000; Cobb, $12,000; Tinker, $12,000; Evers, $10,000; Wagner, $10,000, and Walter Johnson, $7,500...

A ball player receiving from $1,500 to $1,800 in the old days was considered fortunate by most of his fellows...

Ben Welter, who writes the "Yesterday's News" column for the StarTribune, offers the reasonable choice of Seattle's outstanding outfielder Ichiro Suzuki as a modern-day counterpart for Tris Speaker.  Suzuki's salary for the 2010 season is $18,000,000.

The thousand-fold difference between the 1914 salary and the 2010 salary needs to be adjusted for inflation.  Using one of the web-based inflation calculators, one can determine that Tris Speaker's $18,000 salary in 1914 would be equivalent to about $381,000 in 2010.  Suzuki's salary is 50X that, and Suzuki is not major league baseball's highest paid player - he ranked 12th in 2009, well below Alex Rodriquez ($33M).

Similar results could almost certainly be generated for all professional sports (and for many other professions as well).

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It is well known that stadium noise can influence play on a football field, typically by interfering with the opposing team's ability to communicate with one another while setting up plays.  Penn State personnel placed 11 sound meters in Beaver Stadium and found that the noise level could rise to 110 decibels (50X baseline) when the opposing team had the ball.  Then, in an empty stadium, they used a loudspeaker to generate noise and measured the sound intensity on the field.   This allowed them to map the locations at which the (loud) student body could be most effective.

To take advantage of this acoustic effect, Penn State plans to move the 20,000 seats in its student section squarely into the southern end zone when the entire stadium is reseated for the 2011 season. Barnard's computer model predicts that this relocation will quiet the east side of field slightly but increase the sound on the west side by almost 50 percent -- cutting the range of a quarterback's voice by another six inches and potentially causing more false starts and penalty opportunities.

Link, via Physics Buzz.

Shortly after Metropolis was released in 1927 it was acquired by Paramount Pictures, which drastically edited the film, cutting an hour of footage.  For eighty years efforts have been made to locate the deleted scenes; in 2001 a partially reconstructed version was exhibited to the public.   In 2008 an even more complete version was located in Argentina.  Except for a few frames, the Argentinian version appears to be complete, and film critics viewing it believe it offers new insights into the original film.

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”

Screening of the new version will begin this week in New York, and then in selected theaters around this country and in the UK and Ireland, followed in November by the release of a DVD.

Link.  Photo credit Kino International.

In an effort to position itself as a green company, Volkswagen has introduced a folding electric bicycle.

This folding, pedal-free electric bike designed by VW, made its debut at Auto China 2010 and is designed to fold up and fit in your spare tyre comparment. The Bik.e is capable of 12.5 miles on a full charge with a top speed of 12.5 mph, and it's designed to draw a charge from the car itself so you won't need to worry about plugging it in.

The idea is not particularly to use the bike for emergency breakdowns; it's more for helping you reach a destination that the car alone cannot access, or where parking is not available where you want to go.   Apparently this is not just a concept - the bikes will be marketed, although pricing information has not been released.  A video at the link shows the bike in use.

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This video clip comes from the BBC's new "Life" documentary series.  All of the David Attenborough nature documentaries are superb in terms of photography, as this segment illustrates.  The music is wonderfully appropriate, and the humor... well, for that you have to wait until the very very end.

Mike Leyde, a 56-year-old California man has "broken" the game of Bejeweled 2.  After playing several hours per day for three years (2200 total hours of game time), he achieved a score that can never be beaten.

"The highest score the game is capable of calculating is 2,147,483,647; that’s 2 to the 31st power minus 1. We had to give the game some sort of maximum displayable score, and figured that was high enough, no one would ever get that many points.

Mr. Leyde reports that he only plays classic games like Tetris, Minesweeper, Spider Solitaire and Video Poker - not the "hardcore" games that his children play.  Explaining his feat, he said "“If you’re going to invest time in something, you might as well be as good at it as you possibly can."

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Who knew it was so complicated?  Apart from the different techniques of the maneuver itself, there are a variety of social connotations and implications.  This video explains the details.

Found at Swimming Freestyle.  Previously at Neatorama: Rob Wants to Give You a High Five.

Officials at a nursery school in Pemberton, England, confiscated the cheese sandwich a two-year old brought to school.  The sandwich was considered to be inappropirate because it did not include either lettuce or tomato.

Wigan Council has since confirmed that the straight-up combination of cheese and bread contravenes its healthy eating guidelines — and fully supported the cheese-snatchers. “The centre has a list of recommended healthy food, according to national guidelines, which children are encouraged to eat,” said a spokesman. “A cheese sandwich would not feature on the list.”

Clearly in a situation like this there are two sides to the story, and the media may be focusing on the family's side because it makes for more interesting press; there may be other issues between the family and the school, or concerns re the child's diet.  It seems reasonable to take the news with a grain of salt (or if you're British, with salt substitute).

Two links. Image credit Luke Leitch/Times Online.

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This military all-purpose tool looks like something that should have been marketed by Ron Popeil.  And don't laugh at the title of this post - the shovel does actually slice and dice.  And it could probably julienne.

The boar in the photo is a life-size model weighing 150 kg - part of a test conducted by Germany's ADAC automobile club in response to a growing number of roadkill incidents involving large mammals.  Hundreds of thousands of wild boars roam freely in Europe.  If you encounter a boar in the road, the appropriate response may be counterintuitive:

Unfortunately for the animals that stray onto roads, ADAC recommended that drivers do not swerve to avoid them. Trying to spare the animal's life by shifting to the opposite lane entails the far greater danger of smashing into an oncoming car, it said.

That recommendation will be music to the ears of a variety of scavengers, including perhaps some humans.  Two years ago poachers in England were leaving jam sandwiches in the roadways in order to lure deer into roadkill situations.

Link.  Photo credit ADAC.

If so, a recent report at CBS News offers a cautionary reminder that improper disposal of copy machines may pose a security threat, because the copied images may be stored on the machine's hard drive.  For demonstration purposes, CBS purchased four used, discarded machines:

The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

But it wasn't until hitting "print" on the fourth machine - from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records.

Photocopy machine hard drives are supposed to be encrypted or wiped before resale, but obviously such is not being done.  And, as CBS notes -

The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas - loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore.

In a related story, during the Cold War, the CIA collaborated with the Xerox Corporation to install a camera inside a machine used at the Soviet embassy.  The project was so successful that dozens more such camera were installed in embassies around the world (embassies of friends and foes).   That fascinating story is recounted at Edit International.

Link, via.

At  most libraries books are hand-sorted by library staff and unpaid volunteers.  The NYPL was having problems because of the large volume of books being processed, and they had difficulty finding people to do the work.  They have now installed a $2.3 million book-sorting machine that operates like an automated airport baggage carousel.

On one side of the machine, which is two-thirds the length of a football field and encircled by a conveyor belt, staff members place each book face-down on a separate panel of the belt. The book passes under a laser scanner, which reads the bar code on the back cover, and the sorter communicates with the library’s central computer system to determine where the book should be headed. Then, as the conveyor belt moves along, it drops the book into one of 132 bins, each associated with a branch library.

A video at the link explains that books can now reach their rerouted destination in one day instead of two, and that this is accomplished with about one-third the previous number of human employees.

Link.  Photo credit Uli Seit.