YouTube comments are the butt of many jokes; read a few and you'll know why. Randall Munroe created an XKCD comic in which a character invents a virus that reads YouTube comments back to the commenters before they post. Read the entire strip here. Now YouTube has installed an "audio preview" button that reads a comment aloud before its posted!

Whether “audio preview” will make any difference to someone whose entire comment reads “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” (actual comment from a featured video) is to be seen. I’m guessing most commenters will skip right past it in an effort to get their “first!” comments in there.

The placement of the button is interesting. It’s exactly where the post message button used to be, meaning quick commenters will discover it only when they accidentally click the new button. Hopefully they’ll do this with their speakers up at work.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/YouTube_Commenters_Hear_Their_Own_Gibberish

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This is slow-motion video of fungus releasing spores. The rate of the release is the highest acceleration found in nature. The video accompanies a study by a team from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati. Link -via the Presurfer

New experimental technology comes to aid of the disabled in many forms that will knock your socks off! Mobility Now looks at ten mobility robots.

A mobility robot is a robot that is designed to help handicapped and disabled people move around. It might have wheels, but most often it will have legs so it can climb stairs and uneven ground. It might also take the form of a mobility suit, which is a kind of robot that surrounds the shape of your body, arms and legs.

Most of these innovations are from Japan, the robotics capital of the world, where a growing elderly population creates a huge market for such devices. http://www.mobilitynow.co.uk/top-10-amazing-mobility-robots-for-the-handicapped-and-disabled/ -Thanks, Jesper!

In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, try to remember when ten featured bands or musical groups released their debut albums. Was it in the 60s or the 70s? I am ashamed to say I only scored 90%, considering I was a radio disc jockey for 24 years. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19064

A new Lego tower at Rathaus Platz in Vienna has broken the world record by standing 96.73 feet (29.485 meters) tall. It was built over four days and contains almost 460,000 bricks!

The tower included 121 plates designed and built by 3,000 kids using 2 x 4 Lego bricks. The kids participated in the building process to celebrate 100 Years of the Friends of Children festival in Austria. The previous Guinness World Record was set at 96.13-feet (29.3 meters), last May in Legoland Windsor.

Link -via Digg

Previously at Neatorama: Earlier world record tower and the 10 Neatest LEGO Facts and Links.

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Animator and illustrator Mark Gervais created this window display for Halloween in 2007. If I saw something like this in my neighborhood, I'd probably faint, then I would watch it over and over! You can buy this display on DVD for your haunted house. Link -via Ursi's Blog

Being famous has its drawbacks. One is the possibility of stalkers. Popcrunch has compiled a list of 15 stories about celebrity stalkers, some that even changed history. Richard Gere, Halle Berry, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anna Kournikova, all became the victims of unbalanced people who wouldn't take no for an answer. Pictured is John Hinckley, who became obsessed with Jodie Foster.

He moved near her when she went to Yale University and slipped poems and messages under her door but after that didn’t work decided on a plot to assassinate the president to get her attention. Hinckley went for Jimmy Carter first but got arrested and in 1981 fired 6 shots at the newly elected Ronald Reagan, hitting him with one that ricocheted of the limo.

Link -via Gorilla Mask

A restored Ghostbusters Ecto-1 vehicle built for Universal Studios in Florida is up for bids on eBay. Talk about a stylish way to show up for a Halloween party! The current bid is $45,000. Link -via Digg

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When we first posted Cat Man Do by Simon Tofield, the overwhelming response was that cats are exactly like that. This time-lapse video proves it to be true. I was waiting for the cat to get a baseball bat! -via Arbroath

In the world of competitive barbecue, the team that calls itself Transformer BBQ stands above the rest... at least for its logo! It makes sense. The pig transforms into dinner! Link -Thanks, raphael!

Have you ever had an episode of drunk emailing that backfired on you? Once sent, an email message cannot be "unsent" when you sober up. A new Gmail feature from Google may prevent that from happening again.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.

Link -via J-Walk Blog

If you're not too busy playing online games today, you can help Jason Morrison and his wife name their baby!

My wife and I are expecting, and thus we have to pick a name for our new baby. We’ve perused baby name websites and tried the Freakonomics tactic of predicting popular names, but to be honest none of it was really working.

As a Googler, though, the answer should have been obvious - let the Internet do it! So that’s what we’re doing, opening up our baby’s name to an Internet-wide vote.*

* We do reserve the right to ignore the results of the poll completely. Otherwise we’ll end up with a kid named Mr. Splashy Pants. Actually, that has a nice ring to it…

Link -Thanks, Jason!

Matthew Inman, who created 9 Reasons Not to Date a Tyrannosaurus Rex and 10 Reasons It Would Rule to Date A Unicorn, has illustrated The 8 Phases of Dating. I think this may apply to marriage, too. Link -Thanks, Matthew!

People see faces when they look at the fronts of cars. What they see can influence what they buy. A consulting group arranged a research study to find out what personality traits cars appear to have, and which ones people would prefer on the car they drive.

Study participants assessed cars based on a system known as geometric morphometrics (GM), which allowed the men and women to rate certain traits on a sliding scale (such as "infancy" to "adulthood"). The traits represented maturity, sex, attitudes, emotions, and personality — all things that people infer from human faces at a single glance.

After rating car traits, participants then answered the question of whether they saw a human face, animal face or no face at all on the cars. They drew facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth on the car images whenever they did see faces.

Lastly, the study participants answered whether they liked a car or not. The study restricted car choices to passenger cars, because hulking SUVs would have skewed the results.

People overwhelmingly preferred cars that rated highest on "power" traits." High "power" cars like the BMW 5 Series tended to be lower or wider, and have slit-like or angled headlights with a wider air intake.

Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!

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Oh yeah, Take on Me by the Norwegian group a-ha, a big song in 1985. But wait... this song has been altered to match the video! That makes it worth a listen, doesn't it? -via YesButNoButYes