January 2010
2 posts
What you don't know about Nikola Tesla
Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the lightbulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply...
Sarah Palin, doing what she does best
… Presenting the sports news. Here’s a vid of Palin from KTUU-TV in 1988:
Welcome to 2010, by the way.
October 2009
2 posts
Thought Google was just a search engine?
Think again… Google also carries a good chunk of the world’s Internet traffic through transit arrangements (it’s one of the reasons why running YouTube costs them so little)… And this is what it looks like when something goes wonky at their end:
American politics aren't black and white...
… They’re blue and red apparently, according to InformationIsBeautiful:
September 2009
2 posts
And you thought you were dedicated to your work?
Dan Hanna’s spent the past 17 years (and counting) taking a photo of himself. He’s already collated a great deal of the photos into a video (available on YouTube), and he’s not done yet.
Go take a look at his explanation of his camera rig (no, not kidding) and surf around to other related projects. Surprising how many people do the same thing, but Dan’s certainly...
Space Telescopes aren't just for Space, you know
A recently released image from NASA, documenting the incredibly savage wildfires rampaging through the LA region of Southern California. Examine the full-resolution version and read more on the NASA web site.
August 2009
1 post
If Man walked on the Moon today...
Via Noumisphere
July 2009
2 posts
I spy, with my little eye...
The inside of Richard Winchell’s right eye, taken in December 2005.
I love thinking about the intricacies of our own bodies. For example, did you know that the skin covering our bodies is actually composed of three layers (the epidermis, the dermis and the subcutaneous layer) - and in each minute of each day, we lose between 30,000 to 40,000 flakes of dead skin cells, equating to about 4...
40 Years, 101 Muppets
Which Muppet was your favourite? I always loved Kermit the Frog and Oscar the Grouch, although a special place in my happy memories section is reserved for The Count. I can still be found impersonating him every so often.
The National Post’s also compiled an interactive guide to all of the Muppets, and you can find it on their web site at http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/muppets/index.html....
May 2009
1 post
Stephen Fry explaining the pointlessness of major...
Stephen Fry is one of those people who you have to respect for his ability to eloquently convey a point of view - and aside from the fact he is often entirely correct, you also have to admire his wordsmith abilities. Recently the erudite individual was questioned on the subject of MPs’ expenses (currently whipping major UK media outlets into a frenzy), and he concisely explains just why the...
April 2009
1 post
Bad Credit never looked so good...
… Or more rather, Jonathan Jarvis’ explanation of bad credit. For those who are still struggling with the finer points of the current credit crunch, this video will prove invaluable (and blackly entertaining all at once). A recommended watch.
(PS: watch this in HD if your computer and Internet connection is up to it, it’s well worth it!)
The Crisis of Credit Visualized...
March 2009
2 posts
Pause for thought: some quick facts
As described in the recent “Did You Know 3.0“…
Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million… Radio: 38 years TV: 13 years Internet: 4 years iPod: 3 years Facebook: 2 years
The number of Internet devices existing in… 1984: 1,000 1992: 1,000,000 2008: 1,000,000,000
Four exabytes (4x10^19) of unique information will be generated this year - more than the...
Hear that ringing in your ears? You're not the...
Everybody has their own problems, and some people, who you might not immediately expect to suffer, do indeed have their own issues to deal with on a daily basis.
A breakdown of the inner ear.
“It was like listening to the hiss of a TV that’s not tuned to a channel. I thought I’d go deaf or nuts. “I thought of killing myself.” Shatner eventually underwent tinnitus...
February 2009
3 posts
I looked into the Eye of God, and all I got was...
Well well… More wonderful images from Space once again. This time, it’s NGC 7293, aka the Helix Nebula:
This colour-composite image of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) was created from images obtained using the the Wide Field Imager (WFI), an astronomical camera attached to the 2.2-metre Max-Planck Society/ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile. The blue-green glow in the...
Audio slideshow: Australian wildfires [BBC]
The bushfires raging across large areas of south-eastern Australia have destroyed entire towns and devastated local communities. Many people perished in their cars as they tried to drive to safety.
Here - accompanied by some graphic images and the sound of the strong winds that have been fanning the flames - eyewitnesses describe how they escaped, but how others were not so lucky.
View...
Hokusai's Second Wave, With Wires
This is a remix of a well-known woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai, the same artist who created the famous series of woodblock prints named Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
It was remixed by persons unknown quite a few years ago, taking the original, moving it through digital pixelation and into a starkly contrasting wireframe for the right half of the image. It’s a wonderful...
January 2009
2 posts
Bush's Farewall Salute
… Roll on the 44th. Has everybody bought their appropriately ironically intelligent T-shirts yet?
No Ordinary Mugshots
I’d not come across this particular chapter of desegregation prior to tonight, but the bloody and prolonged Freedom Ride protests that eventually helped rise to the American Civil Rights Movement are a moving and fascinating chapter in Western history. I’m British, so we have our own little piece of history (and we rightly celebrate Black History Month every year as a small, ongoing...
November 2008
1 post
Forty hours for a picture of some stars? It better...
And it is.
The Chandra Deep Field South, observed in the U-, B-, and R-bands with ESO’s VIMOS and WFI instruments. The U-band VIMOS observations were made over a period of 40 hours and constitute the deepest image ever taken from the ground in the U-band. The image covers a region of 14.1 x 21.6 arcmin on the sky and shows galaxies that are 1 billion times fainter than can be seen by...
October 2008
5 posts
Some day, man will go to the stars...
…But until then, we still have such wonderful products of mankind as the Hubble Space Telescope, which produced this remarkable image (HubbleSite link) a while ago, and was released by the Hubble Heritage Project earlier this month:
This month’s three-dimensional-looking Hubble image shows the edge of the giant gaseous cavity within the star-forming region called NGC 3324. The...
Buddy, could you spare a digit?
How does an estimated $11trillion of national debt sound to you? We’re reaching Iceland levels of impropriety here.
BBC News reports,
The US government’s debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure. The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month,...
The Fairlight CMI, the neglected pioneer of...
In 1975, I had just finished highschool and was looking for something to do. My school-friend, Kim Ryrie, played me a record called “Switched on Bach” which was recorded entirely using the Moog synthesiser. I thought this was really cool - electronic music obviously had great potential.
The record sleeve had a photo of the Moog synthesiser; rack after rack of electronic modules...
September 2008
6 posts
Word of the Day: Affluenza
Affluenza is a term used by critics of consumerism, a portmanteau of affluence and influenza. Sources define this term as follows:
affluenza, n. a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.by alex (de Graaf [1]) affluenza, n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep...
WatchFirearms, in super slow-motion.
I know that firearms are loathed by many as the source of many of the world’s ills, and personally I don’t like them either. However, when you put something in front of a super-high-speed video camera, it often takes on a strange kind of serenity and grace in its operation - even if its operation is firing a projectile at several thousand feet per...
4 tags
LHC? Nah, I'll take the LHD.
The Large Hadron Collidor is soooo last week. Say hello to my little friend, the Large Helical Device: Further reading: Large Hadron Collider Large Helical Device
And just to complement, because it is stunningly beautiful, here’s part of the LHC: Again, courtesy of Gizmodo.
Fine, Finer, Finest
Jem Finer is one of the most bizarre, unorthodox yet strangely compelling artists I’ve come across in the past decade. He loves to create, and create differently.
What he produces is art which often hasmore than one immediate purpose - half the fun is working out exactly what it means, aside from the obvious immediate impact or message… and after you leave wherever the artwork may...
3 tags
We Are All The Same, some of the time
Thought-provoking interactive art from Tim Wainwright, and if, like me, you know someone who has suffered with cancer (or you have suffered yourself) this will definitely make you stop and think for a moment.
View the presentation with your browser (and Flash) at http://www.timwainwright.com/cancer/flash.html.