Photographer Kerry Skarbakka explores the falling human body in a set called The Struggle to Right Oneself. You'll look at these and ask, "How did he do that? And how bad was he hurt?"

Using myself as model and with the aid of climbing gear and other rigging, I photograph the body as it dangles from dangerous precipices or tumbles down flights of stairs. The captured gesture of the body is designed for plausiblity of action, which grounds the image in reality. However, it is the ambiguiy of the body's position in space that allows and requires the viewer to resolve the full meaning of the photograph. Do we fall? Can we fly? If we fly then loss of control facilitates supreme control.

The photograph that first grabbed my attention was Skarbakka falling in the shower, but you'll have to look for that yourself because it's a nude. Link -via reddit

When is it OK to take an open flame on an airplane? When it's the Olympic flame, ignited in Greece and on it's way to Vancouver for the winter games.

After departing Athens, Greece on October 30th, the Olympic Flame has been traveling across Canada, now about 1/3 of the way into its 106-day, 26,000 km overland relay (another 18,000 km by air). Over 12,000 torch-bearers will carry the flame along a winding path covering all of Canada, passing through over 1,000 communities total - from Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary to smaller communities such as Gwa'Sala-Nakwaxda'xw, Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Moose Jaw and Sheshatshiu. The final destination: Vancouver's BC Place on February 12, 2010, where it will light the Olympic Cauldron and signal the start of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

The Big Picture has 33 photographs that follow the torch's journey. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(image credit: REUTERS/Andy Clark)

Diseases and conditions are often named after the doctor who first described or treated it. Years after the doctor is gone, people associate the name with the condition, such as Tourette's Syndrome.

Credit George Gilles de la Tourette for his modesty. When the French neurologist first described the illness that now bears his name in 1884, he didn’t name it after himself. Instead, he referred to the condition as “maladie des tics.” Tourette’s mentor and contemporary Jean-Martin Charcot renamed the illness after Tourette.

Tourette didn’t have such great luck with patients, though. In 1893, a deluded former patient shot the doctor in the head. The woman claimed that she lost her sanity after Tourette hypnotized her. Tourette survived the attack.

Mental_floss takes a look at 13 of those people and the ailments that made them a household name. Link

The first successful flight of an aircraft powered by the sun was completed in Switzerland yesterday as the Solar Impulse HB-SIA took off and landed safely. Solar Impulse founder Bertrand Piccard had dreamed of the day his plane would take flight for a decade.

With a good weather window on Thursday, test pilot Markus Scherdel was given the go ahead to take the spindly aircraft to up to take-off speed shortly after one o’clock local time. With the airplane lined up on the runway, Scherdel powered up the four motors using the on-board batteries and HB-SIA gained speed until he was able to lift off the pavement.

In a flight very reminiscent of the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, Scherdel flew 350 meters down the runway at an altitude of only one meter in a flight lasting 28 seconds.

The team hopes to achieve a 36-hour flight by next summer. Link to story. Link to website. -via the Presurfer

New Zealander Sandy Sanderson needed a new hobby to occupy his time as he recovered from a motorcycle accident, so he started making model cars from discarded aluminum cans. As you can see, he's gotten very good at making what he calls CanCars. See more of his creations at Jalopnik. Link -via Digg

Almost every site I've visited today seems to have a collaborative drawing board going at Flockdraw. So I got a new one for Neatorama readers to draw on. Let's see what you can do! Link -via J-Walk Blog

Update: Thanks to commenter sjberry for the screenshot from this morning! See the comments for more saved images.

(YouTube link)

Did you ever think you'd see hamsters playing musical instruments? -via Arbroath

The Ultimate Holding Company, a British arts collective, offered tattoos of 100 endangered species to people who are committed to preserving them as a project they call Extinked. One hundred volunteers were chosen out of several hundred who applied to receive a tattoo. Those who made it through had written about why they deserved to be a "lifelong ambassador" for their species.

Joe Richardson, founding member of the collective, is confident that the social experiment will rouse people to action. He was surprised to see how personal the tattoos were to the volunteers, who touchingly described their relationship to their chosen species in their applications.

One woman, who worked as a conservationist and wanted a tattoo of the crested newt, burst into tears when she got to the desk only to find they had run out of applications, he says.

The demand for certain species was so high that many volunteers didn't get their first choice - but most were still keen to take part. "The idea of the permanent loss of an organism that has taken millennia to evolve is so important to many people that they still thought it was worth doing," Richardson says.

Link -via Metafilter

Clayton Homes has an ad on a newspaper website offering a premium when you buy a new home -a can of beans! Link -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)

Can you catch the Gingerbread Man? This video is a "choose your own adventure" series, with important decisions to be made at key points. The best episode was in the basement. Sure, it's viral advertising, but that doesn't interfere with the adventure.

A study of the data from 5,000 individuals who participated in the Framingham Heart Study leads researchers to believe that loneliness spreads through social networks like a virus. The tendency to be a loner may be less of a character trait and more of a "state such as hunger".

They found loneliness is catchy with three degrees of separation. So a person's loneliness depended not just on his friend's loneliness but also on his friend's friend and his friend's friend's friend. Participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they were directly connected (one degree of separation) was lonely. For two degrees of separation, the number drops to 25 percent and 15 percent for three degrees.

The number of family members had no effect on loneliness scores.

Over time, lonely individuals become lonelier and transmit such feelings to others before severing ties. "People with few friends are more likely to become lonelier over time, which then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties," they write. Such friendless individuals ended up on the outskirts of their social networks.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Flickr user ~Oryctes~)

This company will make a tiny branding iron with your name on it! The product is a metal part that will replace the head of a disposable cigarette lighter. Fire up the lighter, and your branding iron will be hot in no time. Yes, it sounds dangerous, that's why the description says "for decorative purposes only." What could possibly go wrong? Link -via Bits and Pieces

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Deviant Art member =Sugarcoatidli3z crocheted this awesome Pikachu convertible ski mask because the weather was turning cold and she liked Pikachu. Now she's made the pattern available to anyone who wants it! Link -via Everlasting Blort

We first told you about Santa Claus' blog three years ago. Since then, Santa has been steadily updating his site with stories of Christmases past and present. In a three-part series, he kicks off this Christmas season by telling the entire story of how he and his gift-giving enterprise came to be.

Blitzen knew about my family fortune. And more importantly he knew about my desire to share my good fortune with the less-fortunate. He knew about how I followed my father's tradition of anonymously leaving small bags of gold coins on doorsteps on Christmas Eve. He knew that I had expanded the tradition to secretly pay-off debts of those that had suffered misfortune and to leave some of my hand-crafted toys with their children. I had shared with him how I wished I could extend my reach beyond the Drobak & Oslo areas to help the many others across Scandinavia. And that is why that following Christmas season, on the verge of winter, he told me about the elves.

Check the sidebar for Santa's other projects and interests, including his favorite charities. Links to part one, part two, and part three.

You may love Sesame Street, but how well do you know the Sesame Street characters? In Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to match the Muppet with a picture of the person who provides its voice. There is no option to select Jim Henson or Frank Oz, so this is more difficult than it would have been years ago. I scored 63%, which barely beat the current average of 59%. Link