Ever wondered where all the superheroes go when they’re too old to continue as caped crusaders? They never seem to get old in the comics, and yet technology changes around them. Weird.
But now, the secret is out. There’s some sort of Superhero nursing home out there…
Chuck Palahniuk may have been a bit of a nihilistic fatalist when penning this line in Fight Club.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.
But he’s right. In a way.
Have you ever wondered how many people have ever lived on earth?
I have.
The modeling here is interesting. And here’s an infographic from Flickr that seems to be based on the same research.
This means, as the Whitlams famously suggested, that if someone is one in a million there aren’t just five more in New South Wales – there are in fact 106,000 people just like them who have lived throughout history.
If you took the 200 biggest countries in the world and weighted them by population and laid their flags on top of each other with those weightings determining the opacity of each layer you would end up with a flag like this.
We know this because these guys decided to create a new global country – a one world government of sorts… look out conspiracy theorists.
The exploding whale video is one of my favourite YouTube videos of all time – and is in fact one of the most popular ever uploaded.
The journalist who reported the story in 1970 has now written a book about the story.
“We’re hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats.”
Now he’s pigeon-holed as the whale guy.
Linnman, now a reporter and morning host for KEX Newsradio 1190 AM in Portland, said not a day goes by that someone doesn’t mention or reference the story to him.
He has learned to accept his fame and people’s undying interest in the bizarre story by writing a book, “The Exploding Whale and Other Remarkable Stories From the Evening News,” featuring detailed accounts of his day on the beach along with some of his favorite feature stories from his career.
I hate ten pin bowling. Fairly passionately. It’s a crappy game. Mostly because I’m terrible at it. Gutter ball after gutter ball. Maybe I should invest the $1,500 that one of these remote controlled balls costs.
A while back I wrote about how church announcements can be really boring. Here’s one church’s attempt to alleviate the announcement induced slumber.
I can’t decide whether or not this is funny or stupid.
These cardboard box Transformers costumes will not effectively disguise you as a robot. But they’re cool.
You’ve no doubt spent years trying to fake a news clipping to give your bizarre scar a fitting explanation.
Well. Here you go. A press clipping generator.
The Know Your Meme Team recruited Weird Al to explain the Autotune trend taking the world wide web by storm.
Some readers may know that I occasionally enjoy watching wrestling – especially with Tim.
I also enjoy a good tilt shift time lapse.
Here are these two interests combined at Hulk Hogan’s recent Australian tour.
Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
A bunch of mathematicians (no doubt uni students) have attempted to solve the dilemma of distributing pizza slices evenly to people who have made equal contributions to the pizza buying cause. This article explains.
The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?
It’s complex. Apparently. If you have two diners, and the pizza is cut an even number of times, the trick is to take alternate pieces.
It has been known since the 1960s that when N is even and greater than 2, an answer to the first question is for Gray and White to choose alternate slices about the point P of concurrency.
The conclusion – from the paper that’ll cost you $20 to buy – was this:
It was conjectured by Stan Wagon and others, that for N=3,7,11,15,…, whoever gets the center gets the most pizza, while for N=5,9,13,17,…, whoever gets the center gets the least. We prove this Pizza Conjecture by first showing its equivalence to a (pretty wild) trigonometric inequality. This inequality is proved with the aid of a theorem that counts lattice paths. Our main theorem is sufficiently general that, as a bonus, results concerning the equiangular slicing of other dishes are obtained.
One can only assume all this would be easier with one of these plates.
I’m a sucker for badly sung covers of popular songs. I remember discovering Grum Lee’s now defunct website of purposefully bad acoustic covers sung with a French accent and thinking it was terrific. The site is dead – but Grum lives on, immortalised in YouTube…
Here he is singing a Dandy Warhols number.
The reason I post this is because I just watched this video Dave Miers posted today of a kid on a ukelele murdering the lyrics to that annoying Jason Mraz song.
If the question of what cereal to eat in the morning is something you can’t tackle without a decent breakfast – thus creating an infinite loop of hunger – then you need this great flowchart. It even takes into account the fact that Australians have a more limited range of cereals to choose from (and perhaps less inclination to make a choice).
