Astronomical Clock

If you've got a Sony Ericsson phone and don't read instruction manuals, you might have a cool panoramic mode on your Camera that you don't know about. You take three shots and after the first, it overlays a half-transparent bit of the first picture so you get the second shot pointing in just the right place. Okay, the 'joins' are a bit wonky here but with the amount of beer drunk on the previous night, it's amazing I could do anything.

Anyway, you can see the Astronomical Clock in Prague on the left of the photo. Strongly recommended. The display on the hour is so underwhelming, you get to see a few hundred tourists wondering to themselves if that really was it. Then they'll start turning to each other, asking if that was it, and if they can go or perhaps hang on, 'cos that can't have been it. I'm afraid that was it.

People of Prague, What the Hell Are You Trying To Tell Us?

If, on the off chance that it's a sign saying it's okay to play football, drive and sledge a house, then I take it back - it's an excellent sign. But then, why they hell is it so randomly spaced? I didn't have OCD until I saw this sign. Why the hell is the car up there if the slegde is on the ground?

Some Guy in Cheadle Has Big Problem With Paving, No Problem With 50 Foot Phallus

Some guy has got three pages on examples of bad paving in Cheadle (this one's poorly set guttering with large crevices) but no problem with the 50 foot phallus in the high street. Check out the giant "Market Cross" half way down this page. NSFW.

Low Flying

M31

I'd like to show you the amazing astrophotography of Bob Fera - specifically an amazing composite image of galaxy M31 - but seeing as it's all copyright you'll just have to make do with this motorway sign.

If that's not good enough, check out his website here, and track down the Andromeda Galaxy. It seems he takes these from his home's observatory or some car park in California.

Noise Cancelling Headphones

I got to try these Bose QuietComfort 3 Noise Cancelling Headphones recently. They were amazingly good. I'd never used noise cancelling headphones before, and it was shocking to find out how effective they were. Very comfy too. And very expensive.

Breadbin News

Just spotted this on Grand Designs and it seems everyone else has seen it already. If you haven't, it's a breadbin. With a tail.

Heavy Sea

Container ship in heavy sea - the video keeps cutting to a shot below deck, showing the flex the ship is taking which is pretty amazing.

Non Stop Rock N Roll Voodoo Action

I think Vince Ray has a shop in London somewhere near Soho. As everyone should own some of his art I'll check it out and get back.

Software Bugette

Here's the engine from the F-22 showing its thrust vectoring capabilities, in somebody's garage by the looks of it.

Anyway, it's an expensive plane but six F-22's flying from Hawaii to Japan experienced some problems when they flew over the international date line and their software decided to wig out completely at the notion that the date to the east of the line is one day earlier than that to the west of the line. They lost a lot of important functions like navigation but managed to land safely thanks to the good visibility by follow their refueling tanker back to base.

Cillit Cillit Bang Bang

...Our fine scum cleaning friend.

Mountain Bike Downhill

Judging by the You Tube comments I'm not the only one who's jealous and wants to know where this is.

Dahon Misses Chance to Include Lycra

Nice example of a folding bike from Dahon. Yep, they've included carbon fibre bits. Nope, there's no lycra in sight here. Come on marketing, it's not rocket science.

MapMyRun

An excellent use of Google Maps over at MapMyRun. Being able to search other people's routes is great - some people have it so good - here's Key West, Florida.

Small World Voting

Rate the entries for Nikon's Small World - a light microscope competition. This moomin planktonic mollusc larva only gets 2.46 out of 5 somehow.

Most Dangerous Roads in the World

Here (except one is a footpath).

Should Science Speak to Faith?

Over on Scientific American...

Richard Dawkins:

...You would stop short of the following extreme:

“Dear Young Earth Creationist, I deeply respect your belief that the world is 6,000 years old. Nevertheless, I humbly and gently suggest that if you were to read a book on geology, or radioisotope dating, or cosmology, or archaeology, or history, or zoology, you might find it fascinating (along with the Bible of course), and you might begin to see why almost all educated people, including theologians, think the world’s age is measured in billions of years, not thousands.”

Let me propose an alternative seduction strategy. Instead of pretending to respect dopey opinions, how about a little tough love? Dramatize to the Young Earth Creationist the sheer magnitude of the discrepancy between his beliefs and those of scientists: “6,000 years is not just a little bit different from 4.6 billion years. It is so different that, dear Young Earth Creationist, it is as though you were to claim that the distance from New York to San Francisco is not 3,400 miles but 7.8 yards. Of course, I respect your right to disagree with scientists, but perhaps it wouldn’t hurt and offend you too much to be told—as a matter of deductive and indisputable arithmetic—the actual magnitude of the disagreement you’ve taken on.”

Lawrence M. Krauss:

In my lecture to the Catholic group, for instance, I took guidance from your latest book and described how scientific principles, including the requirement not to be selective in choosing data, dictate that one cannot pick and choose in one’s fundamentalism. If one believes that homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in the Bible, one has to accept the other things that are said in the Bible, including the allowance to kill your children if they are disobedient or validation of the right to sleep with your father if you need to have a child and there are no other men around, and so forth.

Apocalypse. Tomorrow.

I'm summing up here, but check out Wiki for more...

Jehovah's Witnesses expected a visible and dramatic return of Christ in 1873. And then in 1874. Soon after the 1874 disappointment, they decided Christ had returned to the earth in 1874, but invisibly.

Then armageddon was going to occur in 1914. Then 1915. Then 1925. Right now it's imminent.

So. Not great on dates. There's also a cap on the number that can get into heaven. 144,000 apparently.

JWs disagree with blood transfusions. When parents refuse blood for their children, hospitals can ask the courts to intervene but there are cases where the child has died before the court order can be obtained. It seems statistics are hard to come by. From the JW memorial...

I refused to allow myself, or my son, to recieve blood. The hospital was to petition the court in the morning to allow treatment against my wishes, but my son died before it could be accomplished...
- Buck Parker was one day old when he died

At least the parents will still have a chance of being in the lucky 144,000. Apart from that culpable homicide bit.

Magic or Physics

Physics.

Santa Monica, Washington Pier at 5am

Some really nice stuff tucked away in the forums of LuminousLandscape.

Mmmm.

Check over at EvilMadScientist for a genius sugar doughnut maker home-built 3D printer.

Arseole

Here's a molecule of Arseole.

Anyway, research suggests Gardasil, a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV) - the cause of most cervical cancer - could prevent more than 700 deaths a year in the UK. A committee of experts has recommended that all girls of 12 should have jabs. While senior doctors warn that hundreds of women will die of cervical cancer because government advisers have delayed a decision to introduce the vaccination programme, some ethical and religious groups oppose the scheme altogether.

Here's Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice :

Anyone giving this drug to a girl is telling her: "I think you are a slag".

Young women will be thinking they have more protection than they actually have. No-one will bother to warn them that they are not protected against Chlamydia and that even condoms offer barely any protection against sexually-transmitted diseases either.

And here's Colin Hart, the director of the Christian Institute charity:

It's basically a sex jab, encouraging the view that girls can be sexually available. It is a disease that you can only get through being sexually promiscuous.

Arseole is rarely found in its pure form. The molecule.

EasyJet EcoJet

EasyJet plans for more environmentally friendly flying - their design for short-haul routes features rear-mounted open rotor engines. In easyJet’s current configuration and operation, the projection for the eco-liner would generate less than 47g of CO2 per passenger km. For comparison, easyJet’s current operations generate 97.5g of CO2 per passenger km and the Toyota Prius emits 104g of CO2 per kilometre.

Dollar Koi

More dollar origami. I don't know the artist but you can probably chase it up over on DeviantArt.

Amazing Tabletop Football

Not much more to say.

MAV

Nice video here showing the latest Honeywell Micro Air Vehicle having a fly around. It's a tiny ducted fan design and I wish I got to play around with these things under the pretence of work.

Hubless Concepts

Quattroflex by Russian art student Alexey Bykov. Reminds me of the hubless Nulla bike...

Nice. Watch.

Elio Linea is a prototype watch by designers Pierre Haulot and William Boullier, which shows you time on a linear scale (like a computer downloading gauge).

Make An Origami Shirt Out Of A Dollar

...and get your food spat in next you go to the restaurant after leaving your smart ass tip.

Alley Cat Races

Check out a New York race on YouTube here. You can get a better quality version here, plus one in London! I've ridden Oxford Street a bit and it makes the London video seem even more insane.

Watch out though - it will make you want to grab that passing car/truck/bus for a free ride.

Rocket Science

Here's the small X43 Scramjet attached to the nose of a Pegasus rocket, hung under a B-52. I think. You can see the plan - drop it high up, get really fast, then fire scramjet. The first one went a bit wrong and they blew it up, but by the third flight it had achieved just under Mach 10 (I think that's 1.8 miles per second). It faced the massive friction-generated temperature of 1900 degrees Celsius - they used carbon-carbon (space shuttle panel material) and water was circulated behind the leading edges to keep it from melting.

It's not just NASA - the Australians are really big on developing Scramjet engines. The University of Queensland Hyshot program (with international help) has reached Mach 7. I guess they want the potential London-Sydney flight times of 2 hours.

Black Hole Gonna Eat You. Possibly.

Here's the ATLAS detector from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - there's a man standing at the bottom of the picture - which is the particle accelerator thing at CERN in France/Switzerland that smashes protons together.

This ATLAS detector bit is the worlds largest superconducting magnet. To test it, they cooled it down over a six-week period last year to reach –269°C . It was then powered up reaching 21 thousand amps. Afterwards, the current was switched off and the stored magnetic energy of 1.1 GigaJoules, the equivalent of about 10,000 cars travelling at 70km/h, was safely dissipated. I think it measures particle mass by seeing how much their path is deflected.

Anyway, the LHC is really powerful and I think it gets switched on in November if they get their finger out. People inside and outside of the physics community have voiced concern that the LHC might trigger one of several theoretical disasters capable of destroying the Earth or even our entire Universe, including the creating of stable black holes. The CERN people were nice enough to commision a report you can read and they think it's unlikely.

They conclude "no basis for any conceivable threat".

Running the Numbers

An interesting series of work by Chris Jordan coming to the Von Lintel Gallery in New York. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something - here's part of an image depicting 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

Thanks to Mikul for that.

Royksopp - Remind Me

Here's the nice video for Remind Me by Royksopp. It won the 2002 MTV Europe Music Award for best music video.

OK Go - Lego Style

OK Go's video for "Here it goes again" has been viewed 18 million times on YouTube. The video won the Grammy for "Best Short-Form Music Video" in 2007 and the YouTube 2006 Video Award for "Most Creative Video". Well, here you can see it in Lego.

The Simplest Motor In The World

There's loads of homopolar motor videos out there but this sums things up well. It's a battery, magnet and wire. I don't fully know why it works - it's not a simple Force-Field-Current explaination. I think there's some crazy quantum mechanics explaination. I'll find out and let you know. You are shorting a battery - don't have one blow up in your face.

Sony's Flexible Display

This prototype from Sony is pretty amazing, despite a few bad pixels.

Solar Powered Plane

More solar powered plane plans here, with the aim of building a plane to fly round the world by itself, all solar powered.

Telescope Shows Carbon Can Pimp Anything

This is a top-of-the-line Celestron telescope, but even a cheap and nasty 'scope is enough to give you a life affirming experience. Go on. You could get run over by a bus tomorrow and you'll never have seen the moons of Jupiter. This one has got a carbon fibre tube. Mmmm.

It's My Desire

Magnolia, decluttered home? I recommend you change all that, starting with an Electric Six Danger! High Voltage themed room with this wallpaper, spotted in a local boozer. Not a Gay Bar. Gay Bar.

Apollo 16

It's a panoramic print. PANORAMIC. On the moon. ON. THE. MOON. Check it out here. Starting at $59.

Flight of the Navigator

Here's Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor. 168 highly polished panels working out at £70,000 each by my reckoning is maybe 1000 times too much but anyway, the result's great.

Remember that film? It was great.

Bridge Building Game

Download from CripticSea.

Piggy Mirage

I saw one of these yesterday and it really is amazing. Your brain says the object is just sat there on the top in full, normal three dimensions and yet your finger goes right through it.

Egg Beaters

Yes. It is wrong to drool over bike pedals. These are Crank Brother Egg Beaters btw. You pervert.

Fixie

Here's Alta Bike's fixie offering. Bullhorns off-the-shelf. Genius.

New Feature - Knitting News

It's Bjork. In some kind of woolly jumper.

What is this?

Over here. Is it a design house that was used for the Nike Crab advert (by Neill Blomkamp of Tetra Vaal fame - see previous post)? Is it a Japanese website showing drawings of slightly scary robots? I don't know yet. Amazing photo' whatever.

GSX-R/4 concept (back in 2001)

The Suzuki GSX-R/4 concept featured an engine from their GSX-R 1300 'bike. Why do these works of art never go into production?

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Book and associated Flash site here.

Biggest Engine for Biggest Ship

It the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C which goes into the Emma Mærsk container ship. Look it up for more info, else just say "feck that's big".

All Is Full Of Love

Here's Bjork's All Is Full Of Love video, in fecking huge format if you're used to YouTube. Directed by Chris Cunningham (check his video of Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" - NSFW), the video received multiple awards including a Grammy nomination in 2000 for Best Short Form Music Video (it lost to Korn's excellent "Freak on a Leash").

Phew.

Tetra Vaal

Check out this excellent video short by director Neill Blomkamp. You might know the Citroen Transformer adverts - well that's this chap. The digital effects of dirt and texture are excellent. If you're not sure the first time you watch it whether it was computer generated or real then you know they've done a great job.

It's like a vision of the future. 50 years? 100 years? But with stupid rabbit ears.

Blender F1

Here's the 2006 winner of the Blender F1 competition. Blender is a free, open source 3D content creation suite. The annual Blender F1 challenge rules are simple - design the Formula One car of the future (in Blender, gotta be open open-cockpit).

Cycling News!

"London is experiencing a cycling renaissance" says Mayor Ken Livingstone. The number of people cycling in London has risen 83% in the last seven years.

Very good hydration levels here.

28 Weeks Later Trailer

...and here's the trailer for 28 Weeks Later. Great reviews about a zombie movie. Right, I'm going to see it. Even better than the first one apparently!

Bourne Ultimatum Trailer

You can check out the trailer here. They were filming for it in Lower Marsh, London just a couple of weeks ago.

The Evils of The Evils of Evolution

Yes. You're reading that right. Over at Answers in Genesis we learn that believing evolution is the foundation for such evils as abortion, pornography, homosexuals and lawlessness. Here they are on Drugs and Evolution...

"My naive belief in evolution had three important practical consequences:

1. It strongly encouraged me to look to drugs as an ultimate source of comfort and creativity.

2. It led me to the conclusion that God, if He was around at all, was a very distant and impersonal figure, separated from humanity by very great distances of space and time.

3. It led me to increasingly abandon the moral values I had been taught at home, because when man is viewed as an arbitrary by-product of Time + Matter + Chance, there is no logical reason for treating men or women as objects of dignity and respect, since in principle they are no different from the animals, trees, and rocks from which they supposedly came."

Here's some more...

"Trotsky … another monster brainwashed by evolution"

"World's worst mass-murderer was influenced by Darwin at 19"

AiG are a US tax-exempt organization with offices in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. They are currently building the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The projected cost is around US $27 million - it opens on 28th May. Rather worryingly, AiG executive director Ken Ham derides Christians who abide by the idea that they must tolerate “all religious ways, beliefs and practices.” Referring to an organization in his native Australia called “Toleration” that opposes teaching creationism, Ham says,

“Do you know what tolerance of all religious ways, beliefs and practices means? It means an intolerance of absolutes. Christ said, “I am THE WAY,” (not one of the ways),--THE TRUTH (not one of several different and acceptable approaches to truth). If anyone is intolerant of absolutes, they are intolerant of Christ.”

Oooookkkkaaaaaayyyyy... Walks backwards out of room.

He Will Be Pleased

Over at Flying Pig. You can also see a video over on youtube.

A Flying Spaghetti Monster model to download print out and make. Once complete turn the handle on this cardboard curiosity and the Flying Spaghetti Monster waves his noodly appendages. Let the pasta power of the FSM help with your tricky decisions, turn the handle and ask yourself "What would Flying Spaghetti Monster Do?"

Joan

You can have a chat to Joan, winner of the 2006 Loebner Prize Bronze Medal - no silver or gold medals have been won yet...

Judge: But can't a machine think?
Joan: It may be possible.
Judge: And conscious?
Joan: Not after I'm done with you.
Judge: What are you going to do to me?
Joan: Nothing. I just wanted to talk.
Judge: What about?
Joan: Being tested like this.

Science vs Faith Flowchart

Great flowchart over at WellingtonGrey showing the difference between the science and faith method.