Pomparkour is supposedly a new "sport" that is described as parkour with ladders. This ad for a sports drink is raising eyebrows because it has no warning that these are professional stunt people and this should never be tried at home. In fact, we get a glimpse of how they did it in another video.
Did you hear the story about how Allie tried to learn how to ride a bike? She was deathly afraid of the contraption, and for good reason, which you can read about at Hyperbole and a Half. Link
Vandana Gurjar filed for divorce from her husband Hemant Chhalotre in Madhya Pradesh, India. Her grounds for the action included Chhalotre's impotence. That was a mistake. He turned around and sued Gurjar for defamation, and she was ordered to pay 200,000 rupees (£2,747)!
Mr Chhalotre had complained the impotence accusation "rendered him unmarriageable and sullied his prestige".
The amount of the fine far exceeds the annual income of millions living in India.
One supposes that a charge of cruelty or adultery might have been better for his ego, if not his reputation. Link -via Arbroath
I found out something neat about three-dimensional shapes. Many strange mathematical solids are constructed by rotating the plane of a two-dimensional shape around an imaginary axis. Think of the flat holiday decorations you fold out around its spine/axis. Once I understood what is called a "surface of revolution" in my mind, the construction of many odd mathematical shapes began to make sense.
A superegg is a mathematical shape constructed by rotating a superellipse around an axis to the formula of |x/a|2.5 + |y/b|2.5 = 1, where a/b = 4/3. (If you search for "superegg formula", you are liable to find something completely different.) But you don't want to bother with formulas, do you? Just look at it! From the side, the superegg looks a bit like a cylinder, but has no corners. If you cut one horizontally, the cross-section will be a circle. However, unlike a natural egg, you can stand the superegg on its end -either end, as a matter of fact, as it is vertically as well as horizontally symmetrical, although it has no straight lines that you can find -although the curvature is zero at the ends, the "ends" are actually quite small and appear to be rounded. The superegg was popularized by Danish mathematician and physicist Piet Hein, who used the shape in designs for household items such as furniture, ice cubes, and candles, as well as a novelty toy (sometimes referred to as a stress-reliever) by itself.
Torus
I learned about the torus from crossword puzzles. If the clue says "donut shape", the answer is torus. The solid is produced by rotating a circle around an imaginary axis, but in this surface of revolution, the axis is outside the circle. The resulting shape is a ring torus. Other torus shapes are produced when the axis is touching or slightly inside the circle. Some really strange mathematical shapes are produced when the rotating plane of the circle is not quite round, or is itself rotating around a point in the plane. A toroid is a ring or donut shaped solid produced by a surface of revolution not necessarily limited to a circle. For example, a square used in this manner will produce a ring that would be uncomfortable on your finger. A toroidal polyhedron is a torus constructed with or converted into flat surfaces, with the shape dependent on how many flat surfaces you use. Toroidal Polyhedron would be a cool name for a band.
Gömböc
You might remember Weebles -they wobble, but they don't fall down. However, if the heavy weight in the bottom of the toy ever came loose, you had a Weeble that fell down. In 1995, Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold questioned whether there could be a 3-dimensional shape that would always return to its original position without the help of internal weights. If a shape could be found that had as few as two points of equilibrium, one stable and one unstable, the shape would naturally return to balancing on the one stable point. For a long time, mathematicians thought the shape was impossible. But in 2006, Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi developed the gömböc. This odd shape has only two points it could possibly balance upon, and the point on top is too "pointed" to be stable. So, if you roll a gömböc around, it will soon right itself, returning to an upright position because of its shape, not because of any internal irregularities. It's a Weeble that doesn't wear out! Objet Geometries made the first fabricated gömböcs. They were numbered as a limited series (inside, using transparent materials of the same density as the rest of the object) and professor Arnold was presented with number one. You can buy one of your own.
The Denver Post has printed a gallery of color pictures taken by photographers of the the US Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information during the Great Depression and World War II. Most were transferred from color slides. The photographs are now part of the Library of Congress. Link -via Metafilter
The first day of the new mental_floss/Neatorama How Did You Know trivia hunt is up at mental_floss! Once again, you have a chance to win prizes from the NeatoShop each of the next four days, and more prizes for the ultimate winner next week. Check in every weekday, follow the clues to figure out the quiz, and you just may be a daily winner. Even if you aren't, the daily clues will help lead you to the ultimate answer next week! Link
Rick Norsigian's hobby of bargain-hunting at rummage sales has paid off big time.
Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45 -- negotiated down from $70 -- are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million, according to a Beverly Hills art appraiser.
Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates.
"It truly is a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career," said David W. Streets, the appraiser and art dealer who is hosting an unveiling of the photographs at his Beverly Hills, California, gallery Tuesday.
The photographs apparently were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams -- who is known as the father of American photography -- became nationally recognized in the 1940s, Streets said.
Salon writer Sarah Hepola moved to tiny apartment in Manhattan and found the lack of space severely affected her cat Bubba. Should she take him outside on a leash? Have you ever been able to leash-train a cat?
I know, I know, a cat leash is a ridiculous idea. Cats are too prickly, too willful to endure such pampered indignity. I might as well suggest my cat learn to make a delicious veal parmigiana, or play Bob Dylan songs on the harmonica. In five years of living in New York -- a city that prides itself on its vast parade of human experience -- I've only seen one cat on a leash. (Putting the ratio of strangers' penises to leashed cats at 2:1.) The New York Times wrote about a real estate broker on the Upper West Side who leash trained his cat, which suggests just how remarkable the feat is. Even the phrase "cat on a leash" has a campy spark of the impossible, like something you'd see in a Farrelly brothers movie, or hear about in a novelty song: "Cat on a leash! He don't eat quiche!" But if you start digging a bit into the world of cats on leashes, what you will discover is just how many people have already tried it.
After much angst, Hepola tried a leash on her cat and was surprised by how the adventure turned out. You might not be so surprised. Link
If you look hard enough, even the most outlandish legends have a grain of truth somewhere. Reports from antiquity of sea monsters may be fantastic, but they describe what someone at least thought they saw at one time. Consider the sea monk, described in 1546 (left). It sure looks like someone drew it from their imagination. But then look at the sea creature called a Jenny Haniver (right). Read about this and other monsters that may now be explained scientifically. Link -via Gorilla Mask
The new caption contest is up at NeatoGeek! This week, the featured picture is a comic by cartoonist Joel Watson (what you see here is only a detail). The best caption will win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop, so look around and pick one out to include with your entry. http://www.neatorama.com/neatogeek/2010/07/27/caption-contest-4/
The movie Caddyshack was released on July 25th, 1980. My, has that really been 30 years? What better to celebrate than a Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss! Test your recall of this now-classic film. I only scored 50%; you will do better. Link
Kyle Merriman recently visited Nara Dreamland, the abandoned Disneyland knockoff theme park in Nara, Japan that was built in 1961 and closed in 2006. He found it to be fairly intact, except for the fact that there are no people there and the weeds have grown everywhere. See the state of the park in a gallery of 56 photographs. http://www.brandknewme.com/?p=845
Previously at Neatorama: Nara Dreamland, an Alternate Universe Disneyland
This video of a lightning bolt was filmed at 9,000 frames per second. The entire minute-and-a-half video covers less than two seconds of real time. Is this cool or what? -via Dr. Isis
Geeks Are Sexy proves that some are indeed in this collection of costumed participants at Comic-Con 2010, last week in San Diego. In addition to these, they are asking for your cosplay photographs to be published in another post. Link
The term Flugtag is German for "flight day". The Red Bull Flugtag in St. Paul, Minnesota, was Saturday and the homemade flying machine competition took place on the Mississippi River. As many as 90,000 people turned out to see entry after entry plunge into the river. A new world record for these events was set by a team called Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies, whose glider flew 207 feet! After seeing the other nine top finishers in the video at the link, you will be even more impressed by that 207-foot flight. http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/99177024.html -via TYWKIWDBI
