Vegas Disaster

The Vegas adventure is over. Con man meet sucker, sucker meet con man.


I'm too old for this.


But out of the whole stupid adventure has come one good thing: my Black Angel. A cooler woman you have never met.


She told me, "You're too honest for this town, you're too ethical for this town, you're too Mr. Goody Two-Shoes for this town," and she was right.
.

The Double Slit Experiment

No, it's not the Olsen Twins first venture into pr0n, it's the foundational experiment that led to modern quantum theory. Unfortunately, the video ends before getting to the coolest possible conclusion to be made from the experiment: the Many Worlds Interpretation.

The phrase "many worlds" was first used by Bryce DeWitt, who wrote more on the topic following Everett. In each of these worlds, everything starts out identical, except for the one initial difference; but from this point on, they develop independently. No communication is possible between the separate universe, so the people living in them (and splitting along with them) would have no idea what was really going on. Thus, according to this view, the world branches endlessly. What is "the present" to us, lies in the pasts of an uncountably huge number of different futures. Everything that can happen does happen, somewhere.

The best fictional depiction of "the Multiverse," in which all of the potential Universes overlay one another simultaneously, is Stephen Baxter's "Manifold Time" - great, great read. Also well worth your (less than manifold) time is his brilliant sequel to HG Wells', "The Time Machine," called, "The Time Ships."

Photoshop Tennis Match...

Some funny digital wizardry on display in this thread on fark.com...

The Interstate System, in Rectilinear Fashion

Courtesy of Chris Yates. Definitely click to see larger version.

Springsteen Street

Bruce stopped to sing a song with street musician Jon Magnussen on the main drag of Copenhagen the day before his show there. Magic.

Clip comes from what looks to be a bootleg DVD called Tunnel of Love Express Tour 1988. Filmed in Copenhagen July 23rd 1988

Students Build Coffin for Dying Teacher

Reading, Rotting, and Rithmatic

A Dutch primary school teacher who is dying of cancer is overseeing one last project among her beloved pupils - they are making a coffin for her.

Eri van den Biggelaar, 40, has just a few weeks left to live after being diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Always popular at school, she asked the arts and crafts teacher to build a casket for her.

'Why don't you let the children make it?' replied her colleague and woodwork teacher Erik van Dijk.

Now the youngsters, who normally plane wood for baskets and placemats, are putting the finishing touches to what will be the final resting place for Miss Biggelaar. The children have sawed more than one hundred narrow little boards and glued them together, and only the lid needs to be done now.

The coffin is standing in the middle of one of the classrooms. Some of the children play with it, climbing into it and pretending to be U-boat captains.

While Biggelaar is no longer able to work, she is keeping track of the coffins progress, looking at sketch plans and being kept up to date about it by pupils, aged between four and 11, who visit her at home.

She says: 'Life and death belong together. The children realised that when I explained it to them. I didn't want to be morbid about it, I wanted them to help me.'

Welcome to Alabama, Guvnor!

The "Top Gear" team takes a challenge and goes border-to-border across Alabama in cars and pick-ups painted with slogans like, "Hillary for President," and "NASCAR Sucks," trying not to get shot or arrested... with rocky results.

Slowly I Turned...

Cockpit POV

Thirty cool cockpit photos.

The Dirty Mac do "Yer Blues"

Lennon, Richards, Clapton and Mitch Mitchell playing together as, "The Dirty Mac," from 1968.

Gas at 35 Below

Infrared Fart - video powered by Metacafe

Flying Boat

That right there is some clear water.

Guess Who's Coming for Dinner?

youtube Atheist BANNED for Citing Violent and Cruel Koranic Verses

A video maker named Nick Gisburne's account was banned for posting simply a video highlighting the violence passages found in the Koran. No commentary mind you, just the offensive verses one after another. For this offense he account was completely banned from YouTube. He has created this new account to show the offending video.

Such incredible hypocrisy... born of fear.

click the link above, then click "digg" to raise this story's awareness level.

The Science of Beer Goggles

When not become hot:

The effect can reportedly be traced to the nucleus accumbens. When you're looking at another human being, the nucleus accumbens is the area of the brain that decides how attractive that human being's face is. If you look at, say, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie, this area of your brain probably experiences increased neural firing. In other words, it's stimulated. As it turns out, alcohol, all by itself, stimulates the nucleus accumbens. So when you've have a few drinks, and you look at a face you may have judged as unattractive when you were sober, your brain, under the influence of alcohol, tells you that this face is in fact somewhat attractive. And the increase in perceived attractive seems to be directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed.

In a more recent study, this one conducted by researchers at England's Manchester University in 2005, scientists actually came up with a mathematical formula to calculate the extent of the "beer goggle" effect on a given individual in a given situation. Their reasoning for creating this formula is that alcohol is not really the only factor affecting the drunken perception of beauty. Other factors, according to their research, include:

How brightly lit the area is
The observer's eye-sight quality
The amount of smoke in the air
The distance of the observer from the observed
The formula goes like this:


β =

(An)2 x d(S + 1)
________________
√L x (Vo)2

where:
An is the number of servings of alcohol
S is the smokiness of the area on a scale of 0 - 10
L is the lighting level of the area, measured in candelas per square meter, in which 150 is normal room lightning
Vo is Snellen visual acuity, in which 6/6 is normal and 6/12 is the lower limit at which someone is able to drive
d is the distance between the observer and the observed, measured in meters


The formula works out a "beer goggle" score ranging from 1 to 100+. When β = 1, the observer is perceiving the same degree of beauty he or she would perceive in a sober state. At 100+, everybody in the room is a perfect 10.

450 Million Light Years from Home

I'm referring to the Abell cluster of galaxies, of course, not Vegas.

DEFINITELY click to enlarge.

Monologue by John Milius

Lighting a Match with One Hand

Coolest Way To Light A Match - video powered by Metacafe

The Dread

Why IQ Matters

Correlation does not equal causation. But it does equal correlation.

Embedded Video

This Year's Winner of American Idol

I've only seen one episode this year, and this clip above. My prediction: the 16-year old former crackbaby girl from the episode that I did see and this guy from the clip will be in the finals, and he will win.

Spiders on Drugs

The Changing Room