Suspended posting

Not likely to be posting for a while. My Dad died this morning. Can't really talk about it.

My dream house

Built in a few months and cost just $3000 dollars in Wales currency. I could happily live in this house for the rest of my life.

Just as gorgeous on the inside as the outside:

Click for the full article to see the building specs and more photos of this wondrous abode.

The final frontier

I'm so old I remember when they sent the first chimp into orbit around the earth. The advances we've made in space travel have never ceased to amaze me to this day. This video shot across the old radar screen today. Didn't think I would watch the whole 5 minutes after the ridiculously long trailer before it, but it's so gorgeously edited and scored, seemed like it was over in seconds:


Tribute to last flight of Atlantis

[Full size version here]

Also a related video that I can't embed but so very cool. Click here to watch the International Space Station pass over an aurora. Makes me want to be an astronaut.

The McGurk Effect

This is the weirdest thing I saw on the internets all week. Even if you know the trick, you can't stop this effect unless you close your eyes. Spooky, but I love it. The human brain is so interesting.



If you can't see the video embed, you can go to the direct link.

Is there such a thing as a front yard flamingo pond?

Yeah, I've been MIA again. But always trying to get this blog on a regular schedule again. Anyway, Water Tiger found this great video, so let's start with this:



I love flamingos. Full size here.

Amazing grace

I always get in a weird deeply reflective mood on Sept. 11. every since the WTC attacks. I have very mixed emotions. I still grieve for those who lost their loved ones, to some extent I still relive the horror and disbelief as I watched the planes crash into those buildings over and over again as the teevee replayed the scene on an endless loop. There's more but I don't feel like hashing it all over again. So I'm just going to post this amazing video I found on the internets this morning.




You can see it in full size here. How the heck does she do that?

Mother of invention

Don't quite understand how this works. It appears to me that it would only make light when the sun was shining anyway. But it appears these people live in houses with no windows, so they would light during the day as well. Anyway, I do think it's very cool they figured out how to recycle junk to make something so useful

I left my heart in San Francisco

Actually, I've never been to San Francisco, but thinking of the song because I love this kind of stuff.

The world's largest kinetic toothpick sculpture, 'Rolling Through the Bay', is not just a standard work of art. It took sculptor Scott Weaver 3,000 hours and 100,000 toothpicks to construct it. Those 3,000 hours were also distributed over 34 years, making this a life's work! The only other material used was Elmer's Glue.

I'm so impressed by this kind of project. I tried to build a house out of popsicle sticks once. Or maybe it was matchsticks. It wasn't very big. I never finished it. I think I ended up turning the one wall into a raft and sending it down a river.

There's no place like home

I suppose everybody has experienced this. When you go somewhere new, the trip there always seems longer than the trip home. I always thought it was because you recognize landmarks on the way back, but the science says that's not why:

Their research found that the effect was caused not by increasing familiarity with the route but because people expected the initial trip to be faster than it was, making the trip back seem shorter.

"People seem to be too optimistic about the initial trip, so it feels longer than one expects," says Niels van de Ven, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and one of the authors of the study.

That appears to skew people's sense of what to expect on the way back "so they are happily surprised it doesn't take as long as they expected," says Anne Wilson, a researcher who studies the psychology of time at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

Of course, sometimes you so want to get home, that it still feels like forever on the way back too. But getting there almost always feels great. And the longer you're away, the cozier it feels to be back with your own stuff again.