Wednesday, August 27, 2008

This has been around for a while, but it can't be overstated that Johnny Lee is a freaking genius. What he's accomplished with the Wii remote in this video is mind blowing. He has a few more interesting projects on his website at johnnylee.net.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

YouTube user Levinater25 found what appeared to be a glitch in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 game, allowing Tiger to chip a shot into the hole while standing on water. He dubbed this the "Jesus shot".

In a brilliant marketing move, EA Sports made a video response to Levinator25, letting him know that it wasn't a glitch after all.

The thing to note about this isn't so much EA's video, which is awesome, but the web-savviness of the company. Responding to Levinator25's video this way was a great piece of damage control, showed the company was not going to be heavy-handed toward its users, and practically ensured the video would go viral, creating a small but effective marketing phenomenon.

Monday, August 25, 2008

APOD has a picture of the earth during a solar eclipse, as seen from the Mir space station.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Paul Hunt is a comedian and women's gymnastic coach who has some amazing comedy gymnastic routines on YouTube. As colour people say in one of the videos, you have to be very good to make things look so bad. They're literally laugh-out-loud funny, and a nice coda to the end of the Olympics.

There's a video for a floor routine and the beam, but my favourite is the uneven parallel bars. I think he's better when he has an apparatus to work on.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Not getting enough of the human Olympics? Try the addictive Dolphin Olympics.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Gizmodod says this video of slow-motion lightning is the coolest thing they've seen. And they're right -- it's pretty damn cool.

If you watch it enough, you'll see that the path the lightning takes to the ground is the same one traced out by the "feelers" at the start. Amazing.
Flickr user KCIvey has pictures of former Saturday Night Live writer and funnyman Al Franken at a fundraiser where he draws freehand a map of the US from memory while answering questions about healthcare and other topics. For the skeptics, there's also a video on YouTube of him doing the same thing. I've always liked Al Franken, and I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat.
We're one step closer to the invisibility cloak, people: researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a material with a negative refractive index which causes light to bend around it.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

At the risk of changing the focus of this blog entirely to energy/alternative fuel source news, I will be pushing out a few links in that direction. Not only will this give me an opportunity to keep up on news in this area, but I feel it's important because I'm really concerned about peak oil and the energy crunch. I think there's still a window to do something about it, but North America needs a comprehensive alternative/renewable fuel program today. Everything from food production to the strength of the economy to personal freedoms are threatened by massive oil shortages, and it's questionable if we'll have the 10-15 year window we need to implement the sweeping changes necessary to prevent a sweeping society collapse.

Anyway. Onward and upward. EcoGeek has a couple of interesting posts about potential biofuels that aren't soy and corn. One plant, Jatropha (wikipedia), is being farmed heavily in India, producing nearly 10 times the biodiesel of corn and growing in areas that were previously unusable for farmland.

The other post was about camelina sativa (wikipedia), also known as false flax. While the article says there hasn't been a lot of long-term study surrounding this plant, over 40,000 acres have been planted in Montana, and the company Great Plains has been working with it for over a decade. Like jatropha, camelina has an oil content of approximately 40%, and can produce up to 100 gallons of oil per acre. It's also a good rotational crop for wheat, and can be grown in fields that would typically be left to fallow.