What really gets your attention on the show are the bumpers. Each of them features complex physics-driven devices that accomplish the mundane task of displaying the show's logo. Here are several of them in one clip:
These kinetic contraptions are in the similar vein of art as those illustrated by US cartoonist Rube Goldberg and UK cartoonist W. Heath Robinson.
Japanese kids who are fans of the show enjoy making their own devices in a similar vein and showing off in videos. Here's one brilliant example:
What you see here is the full height of one Jyoti Amge, of Nagpur, India, who is currently the world's smallest woman in the Guinness Book of World Records. She is currently 18 years old, and stands just one foot, eleven inches in height. She has a condition called "achondroplasia", a genetic mutation which causes extreme dwarfism.
Aside from being doll-sized and having a voice exactly like a Smurf on helium, she's a regular person in every other way. Certainly, as a teen girl, she thrives on the attention now, but she has some unique challenges ahead of her...
This image is neither a joke, nor a 'shop. It's taken from the March 7, 1938 issue of Life Magazine, viewable courtesy of Google Books here. What you're looking at is a meeting of the German-American Bund, an unsuccessful grassroots attempt to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany within the United States in the 1930s. This particular meeting happened in Hackensack, New Jersey, with Reverend John C. Fitting "honoring" George Washington as "the first Fascist" who "knew democracy could not work".
I hope that was as jaw-dropping for you to read as it was for me to type.
The German-American Bund was formed from the remnant of a previous pro-Nazi American group, the Free Society of Teutonia. The Long Island History Journal has an extensive article about them here. But briefly, the group only lasted a few years, predictably drawing criticism both in the United States for radical demonstrations such as this one, and from Nazi Germany as well, who were concerned with the supposed Socialist influence of the group. They did thrive well into 1939, when a massive demonstration at Madison Square Gardens with its elected leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, marking a derogatory speech about President Roosevelt and his New Deal. Details on all of this and more are also at traces.org.
Since American and German ideals in the early 1940s mixed like oil and water, it should come as no surprise that the effort broke off. After much backlash on the part of both countries, the group broke up, and Kuhn was later convicted of embezzling funds from the Bund.
Just worth mentioning yet again, there's a lot more Nazism in recent United States history than most people think there is.
Notable to think how, in 1964, such speculation as this poster makes was still viable in the popular mind. Cities? Little moon men? Canals? Ray-gun fights? Sure, why not?
Made by the same stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen, who was also behind 20 Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts.
On August 22nd, 2011, a 5.8 earthquake hit Washington, DC, home to the Smithsonian National Zoo. While mostly non-destructive, it did rattle a few cages and nerves. This afforded a rare opportunity to observe the various animal's reaction to the quake.
About five to ten seconds before the quake, many of the apes abandoned their food and climbed to the top of the tree-like structure in the exhibit.
The red ruffed lemurs sounded an alarm call about 15 minutes before the quake and then again just after it occurred.
All the snakes began writhing during the quake.
The ducks immediately jumped into the pool.
The beavers stopped eating, stood on their hind legs and looked around, then got into the water.
The lions all stood still and faced the building, which rattled during the quake.
The flamingos rushed about and grouped themselves together, where they remained huddled during the quake.
The deer immediately ran out of the barns and appeared agitated during the quake.
The giant pandas showed no reaction whatsoever.
In addition, after the quake several animals began vocalizing in alarm and annoyance, notably an orangutan, the howler monkeys, and the female deer.
Here's a news story reported after the incident, with naturist Jeff Corwin:
In 2006, a mother named Lydia Fairchild went to apply for public assistance in Washington state. By law, herself and her two children had to be tested to prove that they were related. When the DNA test results came in, no one could prepare themselves for the shocking results.
Although Fairchild had given birth to both children, her DNA and theirs showed that they weren't related. Worse yet, the welfare system in Washington could take this as a charge of welfare fraud and even talked about taking her children away.
Yet there were the birth certificates, listing her as the mother. She could also call upon her obstetrician, Dr. Leonard Dreisbach, to testify in court, as he had been present when she had given birth to the children. But what's more, Fairchild was also pregnant at the time with a third child - and the court insisted on having a state-appointed representative at the birth to witness it personally, and draw DNA samples right there at the hospital. The results from this DNA test came in two weeks later - and again, she showed as not having been the mother of the third child!
As the court date for welfare fraud drew near, Fairchild's attorney happened by luck across an article about chimerism in the New England Journal of Medicine. In chimerism, an organism can be born with two distinct groups of cells in the body, forming two completely different sets of DNA. This can occur when two separate sets of fertilized ovum can fuse together in the womb - in other words, genetically speaking, Lydia Fairchild was actually two people walking around in one body!
After a hectic series of tests of more people in Fairchild's family tree, it was determined that this was the case. The case was resolved, Fairchild got her family assistance, and everybody learned something new.
Lydia Fairchild on YouTube (NOTE: this TV show claims four children; the original Wikipedia article I link to says two children with one on the way. I'm going with confusion stemming from possibly having a fourth child by the time this episode was produced.) :
This katydid was photographed in 2005, in Lake Erie Metro Park in Wayne County, Michigan.
Pink katydids are extremely rare; about 1 in 500 katydids are born this way. The color is the result of a condition called erythrism - it's a similar effect to animals who are born albino. As opposed to the usual coloring, pink katydids have no camouflage advantage.
Why would you go to your ex-girlfriend for dental work after you'd dumped her? Wouldn't you, you know, expect it to be awkward?
And then let her knock you out with anesthetic? Whatever the original reason he was there to see her, it must have been serious enough to warrant some dental surgery.
Um, how long does it take to pull out all 32 teeth? Wouldn't this take all day?
Apparently he didn't realize his teeth were gone until he got home? Look, I've had a tooth or two out myself. You know. Believe me. Even if you weren't awake for it, your mouth feels different afterwards.
He says afterwards that he didn't have any reason to doubt her?
Things just keep not adding up here. The source appears to be the UK Daily Mail, not renowned for its standards, and reporting on a story from Poland at that.
But it's still too bizarre to pass up!
UPDATE! THIS STORY WAS A HOAX!Yahoo updates us. I knew it all the time. There were too many loopholes here.
Which still makes it a fascinating incident. Why did the reporter fabricate such an unbelievable story from whole cloth? This wasn't just a mistake - NO bearing on reality was found anywheres near a dental practice in Poland. Daily Mail reporter Simon Tomlinson (soon appearing at an unemployment line near you) just plays dumb. Why, Simon, WHY???
On June 4th, 2004, a construction worker named Marvin Heemeyer was upset as a result of a zoning dispute in Granby, Colorado. So, what would you do? Would you picket city hall, complain about it in your blog, write your assemblymen? Heemeyer chose a more direct approach.
He pulled out of his garage in a bulldozer which he had spent months modifying himself with layers of concrete and steel, as well as mounted rifles and cameras so he could see where he was going. He then went on a rampage throughout the city, damaging property to the tune of $7 million and threatening the lives of anybody who got in his way. This was no ordinary snap to rage; he'd been planning it for months and likely was looking for an excuse to use his "Killdozer", as he called it.
Heemeyer's had a "shit list" of targets and he hit every one of them, demolishing the property of anyone in town with whom he had had a dispute, no matter how petty: his own former place of employment, the concrete plant, town hall, the local newspaper office, and the homes and businesses of individuals.
Being a modified super-villain vehicle, Heemeyer's monstrosity was unstoppable. Police fired guns and dropped flash-bang grenades to no avail. However, when the "Killdozer" became stuck in the rubble, Heemeyer shot himself inside the cab of the machine and the town's siege was ended.
His grandiose exit from this world earned him some grudging respect, some calling him "badass", and while he certainly deserves points for style, we must not forget that overall his actions were cowardly and - need we say it again? - petty. The rest of us put up with more slings and arrows from the jerks of this world without more than a grumble than what took Heemeyer over the edge. He was not getting revenge for gross injustice. He had a problem with the world, and he was determined not to solve it without going out in a blaze of "glory" to feed his petty ego.
While the rest of you sit around trying to figure out how to get rich, and complaining that your degree isn't worth anything in the job market, David Rees makes money sharpening pencils.
Granted, David Rees is also a satirical comedian whose clip-art comic "Get Your War On" is syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and he has other comic projects afoot, and he's also a blogger over at Huffy-Poo, but that's all just his rent money. His true passion in life is producing the ultimate sharpened pencil, and he has a video here explaining his business:
No pun intended, but you may be asking yourself, "What's the point in all this?" Well, see, it's a satire. It's a commentary on our society at this point in time, when the very pencil itself holds quaint nostalgia for most of us in this digital age. Along with the sheer uselessness of most of us, now that all of our jobs went away. Along with our sloppy, feckless, ignorant society that doesn't give a shit about doing anything right anymore.
Watch this man. If he can put all this thought, this care, this attention to detail into putting a nice cone on a number-2, could the rest of you maybe be bothered to spell a word or two per sentence correctly? Turn on your turn signal once in a while? Hang onto your trash until you walk that ten feet to the next trash can? Yes... yes you CAN!
Scenes of nightmarish chaos form the attractions at this park in Lazio, Italy. The place is known as "The Park of the Monsters", and though you might think that fascination with monsters - to the extent of building monuments to them - is a recent idea, this park dates to the 16th century.
Sculptures include Cerberus, Pegasus, Proteus, plus many other figures of mythology, random bears, dragons, and other large brutes, and one particularly grotesque face whose gaping mouth forms a gate. Also, one house purposefully built to lean several degrees to the side, in case you thought the Tower of Pisa was the only tilted building in Italy.
A genealogy researcher has come to the startling conclusion that humans - all 7 billion+ of us - come from one big family tree, and furthermore that its roots are located in Egypt.
In "Common Ancestors of all Humans", Humphrys makes a strenuous case that we're all a lot more interrelated than we thought. It isn't even anything remarkable to say that we're all related - this has been claimed by anthropologists before. But this site goes the step further and concludes that the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu, circa early 2500 B.C., is the great grand-daddy of us all.
One of the effects that goes into this is the phenomenon of pedigree collapse. This states that if you must insist that none of your ancestors were related, then you have a binary family tree that can only go back 30 generations before maxing out at a billion people - greater than the population of the world at the time! Thus, it is logical to conclude that in a world where the human population is always increasing, we would necessarily have had to have gotten those offspring from a smaller pool of ancestors.
This quote from the Wiki sums up the situation nicely:
"Small, isolated populations such as those of remote islands represent extreme examples of pedigree collapse, but the common historical tendency to marry those within walking distance, due to the relative immobility of the population before modern transport, meant that most marriage partners were at least distantly related. Even in America around the 19th century, the tendency of immigrants to marry among their ethnic, language or cultural group produced many cousin marriages."
If you're not already feeling a little queasy from the incestuous implications, consider that most religions have a creation myth involving an Adam and Eve figure, so they've been going around saying as much for years.
I don't normally blog current Slashdot stories here (if you wanted those all the time, you could just go to Slashdot!), but I have to make an exception on a blog named "Mind--blown" when the story is about something that, well, can literally blow your mind.
"Several patients reported profound changes just minutes after the stimulator was turned on. One said the room suddenly seemed brighter and colors were more intense. Another described heightened feelings of connectedness and a disappearance of the void."
Doesn't that make you want one too? Imagine if it also makes you smarter, more concentrated, more creative, more productive...
Patients also report experiencing spontaneous happy thoughts, such as memories of playing with children or seeing flowers bloom in the spring. Yeah, it sounds like the perfect drug alright. With no side effects. Ladies and gentlemen, the next Microsoft, the next Google, will be the Deep Brain Stimulation Corporation, "putting a smile on your face with a wire in place!"
"I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of
submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering
at sea." --H.G. Wells, 1901
"What is dangerous is for Americans not to be in the
market. We’re going to reach a point where stocks are correctly
priced, and we think [that point is] 36,000." --James Glassman,
Wall Street analysis author, 1999
"The Japanese don’t make anything the people in the U.S. would
want." -- John Foster Dulles, 1954
"The expectation on the iPod is that Hewlett-Packard’s version
will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly." -- Rob
Enderle, 2004
"Over the next century, Law will be simplified. Lawyers will have
diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed." --
Junius Henri Brown, columnist, 1893
"Of all the nations, [Germany] is probably the least corrupted by
the lust of conquest...." -- Boston Daily Globe, 1901
"In 20 years, [bigotry and war] will be over. People are simply
going to learn that they can get more from being groovy than
being greedy." -- Arlo Guthrie, 1969
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- Lord Kelvin, 1899
"Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten
codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in
spelling and appearance." -- Johannes Trithemius, German scholar,
1492
"This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently
of no value to us." -- Western Union management memo, 1876
A solitary acacia tree which was once regarded as the most isolated tree on Earth. It grew in the Tenere region of the Sahara in northwest Niger, over 400 KM from the next nearest tree. It was so famous that it was used as a landmark for traveling caravans. In 1973, a drunk driver managed to kill the tree by running over it with his truck. How you get so drunk that you manage to mow down the only tree for 400 KM on a flat desert is beyond explanation.
Great Banyan
In terms of sheer ground cover, this is the world's largest tree. Residing in a botanical garden in India, this species of Moraceae is over 250 years old and spreads by the method of dropping areal roots from its branches, creating an effect that looks like a whole forest rather than one tree. It covers an area of about four acres and has a road encircling it that is 330 meters circumference, but the tree continues to grow past even this boundary. Banyan trees around Asia routinely become objects of legend for their extreme age and spread.
Pando
In the Fishlake National Forest, Utah, there is the quaking aspen colony of trees which are all fed by a connected root system and thus count as a single clonal colony tree. This means that the tree just keeps spreading out roots, the roots shoot up more trees, and so on. This makes it count as the world's heaviest known living organism weighing over 6,600 short tons. It is also one of the oldest known living organisms, estimated at the age of 80,000 years old. This makes it older than the entire history of the modern homo sapiens (us) species. Given that the colony can even survive forest fires by simply replacing the trees with new stands from its roots, it could simply be immortal.
Hyperion
Hyperion is a coastal redwood growing in Redwood National Park in Northern California. It is the tallest tree in the world at 379 feet tall at last measure. Redwood National Park is also home to many giant trees, including the famous one that you can drive a car through. Standing amid a Northern California Redwood forest can make you feel like a fairy-tale dwarf.
The Moon Trees
There is nothing remarkable about the moon trees, except that they are planted from seeds which NASA took into moon orbit on the Apollo 14 mission. The idea was to take tree seeds into space, bring them back, and plant them next to other trees to see if they develop differently. No significant difference has been seen in them some 20 years later. They constitute five different species, planted in various locations around the US, and some of them have even been given away.
The petrified trees of the US
There are several petrified forests declared as national parks in the United States, in Washington, California, Arizona, and Mississippi. While the trees are no longer standing, they are the fossilized remains of once-living trees now turned to solid stone, in a process called "permineralization". Petrified wood is the only instance of fossilization in which a 3D specimen of the organism is preserved. The various forests date back to some 255 million years ago.
This was a futuristic "booth babe" at the Instruments, Electronics and Automatic Exhibition in London in 1968. At the exhibition by Honeywell Controls, LTD.
Anybody remember Honeywell? They're still around, but they've been long gone out of the computer business. Those of us who were running around "dinosaur pens" in the 1980s remember Honeywell logos in the vicinity of a Halon dump switch, and also stuff related to the aerospace industry.
Darn, I wasn't even going to post today, being Easter and all. But I got bored by night and moseyed around and stumbled upon this. Least appropriate thing I've ever watched on Easter.
