What do you get if you cross Bill Bailey, a short animation, mathematics, and a dinosaur. I’m still not sure. But this made me laugh.
(features a couple of minor rude words)
Category: Culture
Galactic Timelapse
We all like a good timelapse. Well. I like a good timelapse. Here’s one from outer space, looking at earth from a satellite.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Ping Pong Robot…
One day I will have a robot servant. Even if all he does is play table tennis with me…
And he won’t just one of these boring robots who serves the ball and nothing else…
No. He’ll be a fully functional opponent (this gets impressive at about 2:36… well, it’s impressive the whole way through…)
Words I hate that should never be used in any form of media…
I need to write this so that I can move on. If I had a therapist I’m sure they’d tell me this.
There are two words, well, three actually, but two phrases, that make my blood boil, my eyes bleed, my ears steam, and my hands beat furiously against whatever surface is nearby.
The first is a radio bugbear of mine. It’s a totally unnecessary, superfluous, tautologous, heap of annoying annoyingness. You know. It is horrible. It is completely redundant. You know. I’m listening to you talk, and if I know what you’re talking about there’s probably no reason to be talking. You know. From football players, to coaches, to chefs, to reporters, the “you know” rate, when you notice it, can be up to four or five a minute.
But that pales in comparison to my reality TV bugbear, the idea that as soon as you enter into a competition, with prize money, because you’re essentially a show pony, you are on a meaningful “journey”… the idea that you then must refer to your journey at every opportunity as a journey, while having the narrator talk about your journey, and the hosts asking you about your journey, is putting your audience through a journey. A journey of hackneyed, and cliched, writing of the highest order. Please stop. That is all. You know.
Let your fingers do the parkouring…
This is surprisingly fluid, and a little bit dizzying.
Via Stellar.
The Extreme Improbability of Your Existence
What is truly bizarre is that there are those who use extreme improbability to argue against the existence of God. I saw Richard Dawkins essentially make that argument in Brisbane last year… anyway. Mind. Blown.
You are a miracle.
Via BoingBoing
The Mike Tyson Song
This song has some very rude words. But it is very funny. A song made up of quotes from the rather deranged ex-boxer/ear-biter Mike Tyson.
Via Richard W on Google+
The Mystery of the Giant Lego Man and his Lego Army
This chalk painting is pretty amazing. Am I right?
And is apparently a response to the re-emergence of Ego Leonard (wiki), the giant floating lego man who has washed up on beaches around the world. Most recently in the US.
It is possible that the chalk artist is the man behind the giant. The newspaper running this story didn’t really like the old “artist uses a mysterious giant lego man to sell stuff” trick. But it’s fine by me.
Here, lest any mystery be left unsolved, is the drawing behind that magical chalk art.
Via BoingBoing
Old Chinese Choir goes Ga Ga…
Give this a few seconds to get warmed up, and it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, today, possibly.
Perhaps an analogy of what happens when old people try to do music for young people? A lesson for U2 to learn.
Web 3.0: Why cloudsourcing is cool
Let me tell you what the latest cool thing I like to watch on the Internet is (you’re forgiven for thinking all I do is watch YouTube videos and look for dumb stuff). Crowdsourcing. Or, Cloudsourcing. The basic idea, for those who came in late, is that you have a good idea, you need funds, so you throw it out there and see if the internet will help. It works for everything from charity to book publishing, from inventing new products, to new science projects.
And it’s cool. It takes the power of social networking, and the nature of the internet, and actually applies it to something.
Here are some crowdsourcing sites that I’ve found. I’m sure there are others out there.
Kiva.org – Kiva is a microfinancing site where you can provide loans to needy entrepeneurs from around the globe. I love it. I’ve funded a few coffee farmers. You can start groups and stuff – and the Christians and Atheists are battling it out for generosity supremacy.
Santos here is a coffee farmer. He’s trying to raise $350.
Kickstarter.com – Kickstarter is a hub for funding inventors, artists, and people who are creating new products that don’t fall into those categories. Funding a project normally buys you some share in its success (ie a version of whatever it is you’re funding). Here’s an example – a project called Etchpop – which will buy a company a laser cutter to make wooden block type stamps for people. $25 will get you a wooden stamp if they get funding.
RocketHub.com – RocketHub is just like Kickstarter, only its currently running a campaign to fund science projects. This Sea Turtle conservation project looks pretty cool.
Loudsauce.com – Loudsauce is perhaps my favourite. If you’re into a cause you can chip in to having advertisements produced and aired. All their campaigns are currently funded – but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
This FairTrade soccer balls campaign looked fun.
Unbound.co.uk – Unbound is a book publisher. But not just any sort of book publisher – a classy one… at the moment you can support one of my favourite blogs, Letters of Note, as they head towards publishing a book.
Fiverr.com – Fiverr is a bit different, and I’ve linked to it before, but it is so much fun. And so cheap. You can get Mario to make you a video for $5 (here’s my version). Bargain.
Urban Animals: A photo project that would have been funny before Ohio
I think two weeks is about right… I saw this the day before a pack of wild animals from a crazy man’s crazy zoo wandered crazy town and got shot by some crazy cops. It wasn’t really “funny” then… nor is it now, but these are composite images created from people’s animal photos on Flickr, and one man’s architectural works.
More here.
The monster infographic
Pop Chart Labs produce beautiful infographic/poster things. Here’s their latest – a visual guide to all the monsters ever invented… well… almost.
There’s a zoomable version here.
Tumblrweed: Stocking, possibly the new “new planking”…
Stock photography has the capacity to be pretty awful. Mixing random keywords together in the hope that the internet will discover and fall in love with your generic image is a recipe for some pretty awful photo composition.
So stock photography is great fodder for mockery, and thus great fodder for a single serving tumblr. Enter “Stocking is the new planking”…
