Something cool thread

[China]

Pop art: Father turns his young children's line drawings into brilliant illustrations during monthly business trips away

 

For any father, time spent on the road away from his children is difficult.

 

Fred Giovannitti, who spends a third of the year away, wanted to make sure he had a shared hobby with Freddie, aged eight, and Sofia, six, to make sure they stayed close.

 

So the inventor and part-time tattoo artist from Delaware took to colouring in his children's drawings when had to work away from home, and he has transformed them into amazing works of art.

 

 

 

Click on the link for more

[Mad Mike]

Merry Xmass

 

[Spearfeather]

With the weather approaching, I thought these pictures were " cool ".

 

 

As the saying goes, no two snowflakes are exactly alike. Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov's collection of high-resolution magnified flakes makes this widely-held belief more convincing.

The Moscow-based photographer captured dozens of structurally diverse snowflakes, showcasing the complexity of each one against a dull backdrop.

 

 

 

 

Never really thought of a snowflake looking like that.

 

 

 

 

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/snowflake-photos-alexey-kljatov/20716778

Edited December 8, 2013 by Spearfeather

[Mr. Sinister]

Natural color image from the NASA Cassini spacecraft showing Saturn, with Earth & Moon, Mars & Venus in the background:

 

 

 

Very Hi Def image is here:

 

I just saw this illustration (along with images of Titan and it's surface/geographical layout) on one of those TEDTalks episodes on Netflix. Pretty neat

Edited December 8, 2013 by Mr. Sinister

[China]

With the weather approaching, I thought these pictures were " cool ".

 

 

 

 

 

Never really thought of a snowflake looking like that.

 

 

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/snowflake-photos-alexey-kljatov/20716778

 

You should read the story about Snowflake Bentley.

Edited December 8, 2013 by China

[Spearfeather]

 

You should read the story about Snowflake Bentley.

 

Interesting story.

[Corcaigh]

[Chew]

[War Paint]

This video generates a few seconds of a hallucination effect after the viewing.  I was skeptical at first, but it worked on me.  It's pretty trippy.  Just follow the directions exactly.  Click on it to view it at full screen.  WARNING: IF YOU SUFFER FROM SEIZURES, I WOULDN'T WATCH THESE.

 

 

This second one is actually better.  The effect lasts longer.  You just stare at the center until the video is over.

 

Edited December 16, 2013 by War Paint

[btfoom]

Fishermen free shark in dramatic rescue effort on Western Australia beach

 

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/nature/post/fishermen-free-shark-in-dramatic-rescue-effort-on-western-australia-beach/

 

Predator measuring 10 to 12 feet is unhooked and helped back into surf at a time the government is considering a cull to make waters safer

 

December 09, 2013by Pete Thomas

As Western Australia considers culling large sharks as a means of potentially reducing the number of attacks on swimmers and surfers, dramatic footage has surfaced showing WA fishermen releasing a 10- to 12-foot tiger shark that had been hauled onto the beach.

 

The rescue was drawn out and may be disturbing to watch as the shark lies on the sand, helpless, while one of its rescuers covers its head with a red towel and another tries painstakingly with pliers to remove the hook. At one point, a fisherman sits on the shark’s back, bending its dorsal fin (see video at link).

 

 

 

It was an incredible video, watching the people work with the shark - and how big the Tiger shark is.  Check it out.

[Corcaigh]

From Switzerland, balancing cube 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y

Edited December 23, 2013 by Corcaigh

[HighPlainsDrifter]

672 rounds! Fully automatic rubber band gun:

 

http://www.guns.com/2013/12/17/unleash-672-rounds-elastic-fury-rubber-band-machine-gun-video/

Edited December 23, 2013 by HighPlainsDrifter

[Jumbo]

youse younger guys better remember decades from now what I've been saying...how advances in genetics/evolutionary biology/neuroscience/brain function/ nanotechnology/processing power and AI will all entwine to hugely change the way we frame the human experience in every which way....(or not )

 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/tech/innovation/hive-minds-how-swarm-robots/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

[China]

The Mystery of the Blue Flames - Kawah Ijen Volcano, Indonesia

For over 40 years, miners have been extracting sulfur from the crater of Kawah Ijen in Indonesia. To double their meager income, the hardiest of these men work nights, by the electric blue light of the sulfuric acid exhaled by the volcano.

[China]

[skinsmarydu]

This is a really neat article.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/01/21/ask_metafilter_a_decades_long_mystery_over_a_series_of_index_cards_with.html

[Dan T.]

Here's a baby with an old soul...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMg0CfuRRnc

[Chew]

^^ Thanks little one, for helping to restore my faith in humanity.

[Jumbo]

http://news.msn.com/pop-culture/british-museum-prototype-for-noahs-ark-was-round

 

 

 

Noah's Ark could have been round, according to building instructions on a recently discovered, 4,000-year-old cuneiform clay tablet at the British Museum.

LONDON — It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.

But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow — the original Noah's Ark, new research suggests, was round.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old tablet from ancient Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle — as well as the key instruction that animals should enter "two by two."

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It's also the subject of a new book, "The Ark Before Noah," by Irving Finkel, the museum's assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered in the jagged cuneiform script of the ancient Mesopotamians.

It turned out, Finkel said Friday, to be "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."

"It was really a heart-stopping moment — the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat," said Finkel, who sports a long gray beard, a ponytail and boundless enthusiasm for his subject. "That was a real surprise."

And yet, Finkel said, a round boat makes sense. Coracles were widely used as river taxis in ancient Iraq and are perfectly designed to bob along on raging floodwaters.

"It's a perfect thing," Finkel said. "It never sinks, it's light to carry."

Elizabeth Stone, an expert on the antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia at New York's Stony Brook University, said it made sense that ancient Mesopotamians would depict their mythological ark in that shape.

"People are going to envision the boat however people envision boats where they are," she said. "Coracles are not unusual things to have had in Mesopotamia."

The tablet records a Mesopotamian god's instructions for building a giant vessel — two-thirds the size of a soccer field in area — made of rope, reinforced with wooden ribs and coated in bitumen.

Finkel said that on paper (or stone) the boat-building orders appear sound, but he doesn't yet know whether it would have floated. A television documentary due to be broadcast later this year will follow attempts to build the ark according to the ancient manual.

The flood story recurs in later Mesopotamian writings including the "Epic of Gilgamesh." These versions lack the technical instructions — cut out, Finkel believes, because they got in the way of the storytelling.

"It would be like a Bond movie where instead of having this great sexy red car that comes on, somebody starts to tell you about how many horsepower it's got and the pressure of the tires and the capacity of the boot (trunk)," he said. "No one cares about that. They want the car chase."

Finkel is aware his discovery may cause consternation among believers in the Biblical story. When 19th-century British Museum scholars first learned from cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians had a flood myth, they were disturbed by its striking similarities to the story of Noah.

"Already in 1872 people were writing about it in a worried way — What does it mean that Holy Writ appears on this piece of Weetabix?" he joked, referring to a cereal similar in shape to the tablet.

more at link (cool pic of tablet)

[Kindred]

Edited January 29, 2014 by Kindred

[China]

http://news.msn.com/pop-culture/british-museum-prototype-for-noahs-ark-was-round

 

 

 

Noah's Ark could have been round, according to building instructions on a recently discovered, 4,000-year-old cuneiform clay tablet at the British Museum.

 

 

Translation error.  Not round, but spherical.  The Ark refers to the planet earth.  The earth is a ship containing each of the species from an ancient civilization in a galaxy far, far away that was destroyed by a flood (of stellar radiation) eons ago.

Edited January 30, 2014 by China

[skinsmarydu]

Ancient astronaut theory?

Edited January 30, 2014 by skinsmarydu

[China]

Ancient astronaut theory?

 

[Stugein]

Science Fiction Spaceship Size Comparison Chart

</nerd>

[mcsluggo]

they have that...without the death star..??? really???

 

sheesh.