[Via]
Cooler-Than-You Guy: Then and Now
[Source]
Tabletop RPG Fans Behold: A Self-Loading LEGO Dice Tower
Rolling your dice by hand is SO yesterday, here’s the cool new way to do it.
New Hoth City [Pictures]
Tetra Tennis v3.0 [Video Mapping]
A beautiful video mapping show being projected on a tennis court at the French Masters series in Paris, Bercy / 2010. Enjoy!
[Vimeo]
Ewoks on a Stick [Picture]
[Via]
Babies learn that size does matter
Anyone who’s been to elementary school soon learns that larger children tend to hold the social power — or at least hold a physically dominant position. Now, though, it appears that lesson may be learned even earlier.
Researchers at Harvard and UCLA, led by an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen, made that discovery after showing 144 infants (aged between 8 and 16 months) a series of videos of cartoon block figures attempting to walk across a screen in opposite directions, with the two characters blocking each other’s path midway through.
It turned out that in situations where a larger figure “backed down”, the children were more likely to keep watching for a longer period than if the smaller figure gave way, suggesting that they expected the larger figure to prevail and thus considered that less notable.
The researchers then repeated the experiment with the eyes and mouths removed from the figures, simply leaving block shapes. This time there was no difference between the attention paid to different outcomes, suggesting that in the original experiment the infants’ expectations were based on human behavior.
By breaking down the results among different ages, the researchers also discovered that the youngest children didn’t display a strong pattern, suggesting that the mental link associating physical size to social dominance develops around the age of 10 months.
Personally, I’d like to show the babies some early incarnations of the Ultimate Fighting Championship when 175 pounder Royce Gracie overcame larger but less-skilled opponents. I’m not sure if that would fly with a university ethics committee though.
[Picture source]
IBM Centennial Film: 100 Years of IBM [Video]
A short film featuring one hundred people, who each present the IBM achievement recorded in the year they were born, from the oldest person to the youngest one. Enjoy!
[Via Reddit]
China Builds Jet-Propelled Super Soaker
Imagine, for only $456,000 (3 million yuan) you could build a squirt gun so powerful it could blast the skinny jeans off an army of hipsters before they could even say ‘Belle & Sebastian’. Now you know the awesome power that China’s Luoyang City’s fire department has at its command (insert maniacal laughter).
Made from a jet-fighter engine, this water bazooka is capable of spraying 4 tons of water per minute at a range of over 400 feet and can rotate a near-full 360 degrees. Although designed to fight skyscraper blazes, it probably won’t be long before it’s used to turn a peaceful political protest into the largest wet t-shirt contest ever. And just imagine how fast they can get all those stuck kittens out of trees! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty…FWOOOSH!!! (No actual kittens were harmed in the writing of this post.)
Gandalf or Dumbledore?
One of the most hilarious facebook update picture I’ve been given to read. So what do you guys think now? Gandalf or Dumbledore?