DSD

The best part of this video may not be the ridicu­lous crossover machine, but the hilar­i­ous reporter with min­i­mal skat­ing skills (via Neatorama):

Via Neatorama, comes this swingin’ entry by Berke­ley grad­u­ate stu­dents Patrick Ben­nett and Ryan Miyakawa in the “What is Nano?” com­pe­ti­tion:

Phil Plait over at Bad Astron­omy has a great post fea­tur­ing some awe­some facts about everyone’s favorite star. Alright, you prob­a­bly know some of them. But there’s some good stuff in there. A cou­ple of my favorites:

Usu­ally, dam­age to the eyes from look­ing at the Sun hap­pens dur­ing a total solar eclipse. The eclipse itself doesn’t hurt you — after all, the point of the eclipse is that the Sun is cov­ered by the Moon! — but the dam­age hap­pens in the moments right after the eclipse. While the Sun is blocked, your pupil dilates to let in more light, so when the first sliver of the bril­liant Sun reap­pears your eye is flooded with light. This can cause dam­age to your retina called solar retinopa­thy. It’s actu­ally not heat dam­age, but pho­to­chem­i­cal; the flood of UV light actu­ally alters the chem­istry of your cells, dam­ag­ing them.

In gen­eral, the dam­age is minor and can heal well, though there can be some per­ma­nent though rel­a­tively minor effects (in other words, you still shouldn’t stare at the Sun). Usu­ally the dam­age is worse in chil­dren because their lenses let in more blue light (the lens yel­lows with age, act­ing as a nat­ural fil­ter for UV light). […]

Inci­den­tally, using sun­glasses to look at the Sun can actu­ally make things worse, since they block vis­i­ble light and your pupil dilates to com­pen­sate. If you want to observe the Sun — and I rec­om­mend it, because it’s fas­ci­nat­ing and utterly beau­ti­ful — then read Mr Eclipse’s guide to safe solar view­ing. It’s a site for sore eyes.

The Sun is not an aver­age star […] As with most things in nature, the num­ber of objects depends on the size. There are very few high mass stars, more inter­me­di­ate mass stars, and gazil­lions of low mass stars. Roughly 10% of all stars by num­ber in the Milky Way Galaxy are like the Sun, which means that very few are more mas­sive. Even being con­ser­v­a­tive, I’d say that the Sun is more mas­sive than 80% of the stars in the Galaxy.

Van­ity Fair has a dif­fer­ent kind of slideshow that has its own kind of his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance…

Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel, The Pretty Young Things

Time has a won­der­ful lit­tle photo essay fea­tur­ing pic­tures of Barack Obama as a fresh­man at Occi­den­tal Col­lege.

In 1980, when Obama was a fresh­man at Occi­den­tal Col­lege in Los Ange­les, he was approached by an aspir­ing pho­tog­ra­pher named Lisa Jack, who asked him if he would be will­ing to pose for some black and white pho­tographs that she could use in her port­fo­lio. […] Ini­tially, before she dug the film out from her base­ment, Jack never thought her pic­tures would have much life beyond her own dark­room.

As I sus­pect most high energy physi­cists do, I stay acutely aware of what’s hap­pen­ing on Lubos Motl’s blog. Today, he offered a par­tic­u­larly illu­mi­nat­ing anal­ogy describ­ing our rela­tion­ship to some cur­rent phys­i­cal theories

So we are some­what sim­i­lar to a prim­i­tive tribe that finds a wash­ing machine (pro­duced by some­one else). At the begin­ning, they will use it as a fridge. As their knowl­edge increases, they will learn how to do the laun­dry. How­ever, if they become even more skill­ful, they may update the device a bit — or press a hid­den but­ton — and use it as a fridge, too. I didn’t tell you: it was one of the wash­ing machines that can also cool the clothes down.

Via Design You Trust, comes this nifty video from 1950’s Italy. I guess it wasn’t enough just to have the trains run on time.

Brows­ing The Super­est again, I stum­bled across this, and couldn’t help shar­ing it:

This site is so ridicu­lous. I highly rec­om­mend start­ing from the begin­ning some­time, and work­ing your way through.

While we’re on the sub­ject of Dar­win, here’s a good exam­ple of his the­ory in action.

Evo­lu­tion of the AT-AT

By the way, for the con­fused, that’s an AT-AT (All Ter­rain Armored Trans­port). It’s impor­tant to know these things.

In honor of Darwin’s 200th birth­day, there’s this inex­plic­a­bly awe­some poster.

It’s one of a col­lec­tion. (via boing­bo­ing)

These ARE the clothes I’m look­ing for! This thing actu­ally exists at shopecko.com.

The Real Trooper hoodie from Marc Ecko. Zip-front hoodie fea­tures “Storm Trooper” body and the hood looks like a mask. Zip welt pock­ets, rib knit sleeve cuffs and hem. 100% cot­ton. Machine wash. Imported.

Imported… from space! Also, here’s a review from a sat­is­fied customer:

Best Uses: Going Out, Wear To Work, Casual Wear [… A]s soon as i zipped up the hood i couldnt stop laugh­ing. i looked like an idiot. i love it.

It’s beau­ti­ful and omi­nous and crazy.
(Via Coudal Part­ners.) There’s also an extended ver­sion.

Not merely a curios­ity, this is almost cer­tainly the worst music video ever. Wow.

I know I just included this in a dif­fer­ent post, but it’s funny enough that I wanted to give it some atten­tion of its own. Here’s Mae the Sea Otter:

Microsoft Song­smith is a piece of soft­ware that attempts to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate back­ground instru­men­tals to go along with a vocal line. Via techcrunch:

the song-making soft­ware is inspir­ing a whole new genre on YouTube where peo­ple alter famous music videos and con­cert footage by strip­ping out the orig­i­nal instru­ments and replace them with tinny key­boards or folk ban­jos, and keep the vocals. The results are a twisted breed of clas­sic hits that are fas­ci­nat­ing in the same way that ter­ri­ble auto­mo­bile acci­dents are.

Here’s one of my favorites (there are many more at techcrunch):

I just have to add a few more:

• Soulja Boy — Crank That Swing
• Brit­ney Spears — Toxic

From telegraph.co.uk, here’s a bit of pos­si­bly the world’s best cus­tomer com­plaint let­ter, sent to indus­tri­al­ist Sir Richard Bran­son regard­ing a flight on Vir­gin Airlines:

Now I know what you’re think­ing. You’re think­ing it’s more of that Baaji cus­tard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mus­tard Richard. MUSTARD. More mus­tard than any man could con­sume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broc­coli and some pep­pers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had pre­pared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obvi­ously bro­ken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the pota­toes through the diges­tive tract of a bird.

(Thanks to Nathan for the link.)

An inter­est­ing pro­peller pic­ture via Global Nerdy:

The cheap CMOS sen­sor of an iPhone does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right. If you take a pic­ture of some­thing that moves very fast (like an air­plane prop) you can get some crazy pic­tures out of it since each col­umn rep­re­sents a slightly dif­fer­ent time. 

Hear­ing this story recently on This Amer­i­can Life reminded me about the ter­rif­i­cally ridicu­lous World’s Most Unwanted Song. It was care­fully com­posed accord­ing to poll data on people’s least favorite musi­cal ele­ments, and is vir­tu­ally guar­an­teed to offend your sen­si­bil­i­ties. From the com­posers’ notes:

The most unwanted music is over 25 min­utes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sec­tions, between fast and slow tem­pos, and fea­tures tim­bres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy pre­sented in abrupt tran­si­tion. The most unwanted orches­tra was deter­mined to be large, and fea­tures the accor­dion and bag­pipe, […] banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, syn­the­sizer […]. An oper­atic soprano raps and sings atonal music, adver­tis­ing jin­gles, polit­i­cal slo­gans, and “ele­va­tor” music, and a children’s choir sings jin­gles and hol­i­day songs. […] 

Here’s some more back­ground. Also, please, have a listen:

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