DSD

Heli­copter blades mov­ing through a dust cloud cre­ate a strik­ing halo:

Basi­cally it is a result of sta­tic elec­tric­ity cre­ated by fric­tion as mate­ri­als of dis­sim­i­lar mate­r­ial strike against each other. In this case titanium/nickel blades mov­ing through the air and dust. It occurs on the ground as well, but you don’t usu­ally see it as much unless the air­craft is land­ing or tak­ing off. The most com­mon time is when fuel is being pumped. When large tankers are being fueled they must be grounded to pre­vent sta­tic elec­tric­ity from dis­charg­ing and cre­at­ing explo­sions.

This video has the awe­somest com­bi­na­tion of yum­mi­ness and sci­en­tific accu­racy I’ve seen in years. Sci­ence is delicious!

Some very nifty murals from artist John Pugh (via Neatorama)

The incred­i­bly life­like scenes are actu­ally huge works of art, painted on the side of per­fectly intact buildings.

Even that woman peer­ing into the ruin above is not real. The paint­ings, which have fooled many, were cre­ated by John Pugh, who spe­cialises in trompe l’oeil — or ‘trick of the eye’ — art.

I could not help smil­ing for this whole clip. It’s just great. Wow.

Bobby McFer­rin demon­strates the power of the pen­ta­tonic scale, using audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion, at the event “Notes & Neu­rons: In Search of the Com­mon Cho­rus”, from the 2009 World Sci­ence Fes­ti­val, June 12, 2009.

Oh, the joys of Google sug­gest. One of these things just doesn’t belong…

Finally, a good expla­na­tion for some pic­tures of St. Sebas­t­ian that hith­erto had always mys­ti­fied me.

(Part of an adver­tis­ing cam­paign for Comics Museum Lucca.)

An amaz­ing lit­tle stop-motion film set to Copland’s Hoe­down from Rodeo by Eleanor Stew­art at the Glas­gow School of Art.

So amaz­ing. Inter­na­tional version:

And for this ver­sion, in addi­tion to a cat, you need an exer­cise ball:

An arti­cle in today’s Boston Globe described an intense stand­off between Pres­i­dent Obama and a house­fly that thought it could be a whitehousefly…

Dur­ing a White House tele­vi­sion inter­view with CNBC’s John Har­wood, the pres­i­dent tried shoo­ing the fly away, say­ing, “Hey! Get out of here.”

Har­wood offered, “That’s the most per­sis­tent fly I’ve ever seen.”

Obama paused for a moment, seem­ing to study the fly’s flight path, and then he sud­denly slapped his right hand down on his left. The fly had bugged its last com­man­der in chief.

“Nice!” Har­wood said to the sounds of a few claps in the back­ground.

The look of con­cen­tra­tion is price­less. Also, I think that fly took up about $1,000 of pres­i­den­tial time.

Not sure what’s going on here, but it’s amusing.

Found this gem in Bal­akov’s lego Star Wars flickr set:

There’s some more good stuff up there — for instance the Prints pho­to­set, which con­tains this iconic image:

Wow. Just wow. See if you can guess what’s wrong with this recent post at Pho­to­shop Dis­as­ters…

The won­der­ful and mes­mer­iz­ing Offi­cial White House Pho­to­stream included a par­tic­u­larly fan­tas­tic photo recently:

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff mem­ber can pat his head dur­ing a fam­ily visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. The young­ster wanted to see if the President’s hair­cut felt like his own. (Offi­cial White House Photo by Pete Souza)

What could be better?

Totally awe­some stop motion film from Patrick Boivin (via Design You Trust).

Some­one pointed out an amus­ing Google maps anom­aly to me today involv­ing two places near and dear to my heart. Here’s the result of a search for “chi­nese restau­rant st. john’s road cam­bridge:”

Trin­ity Street Chi­nese Restau­rant‎ in Cam­bridge, MA?

This may be very con­fus­ing for those who live near Har­vard square — the restau­rant doesn’t exist. But note the phone num­ber… +44 1223 358281. That’s a UK coun­try code. Turns out Google maps is con­fus­ing the St. John’s St., Cam­bridge above with this St. John’s St., Cambridge:

St. John’s Street, Cam­bridge UK

Where there is in fact a chi­nese restau­rant.

Gender-Neutral Rooms, Neg­a­tive Reac­tion — you should read it because my sis­ter is awe­some. Also, that’s a good picture!

National Geo­graphic has an incred­i­ble pho­to­gallery about the most com­plete mam­moth ever found: “A near-perfect frozen mam­moth resur­faces after 40,000 years, bear­ing clues to a great van­ished species.”

A Nenets boy ten­ta­tively exam­ines Lyuba out­side She­manovsky Museum in Salekhard, Siberia.

This is totally bril­liant. My favorite thing ever today. Science!

(via Boing­Bo­ing)

Stole the title from my favorite arti­cle series on Seri­ous Eats. The evi­dence is quite strong this time.