have you ever wondered . . .

you know how you can see your breath when it's cold outside, well have you ever wondered if you could see a fart under the same conditions? if so, what would it look like? if not, why not? (i know the air down there is different, but that different?)... well, now i have both questions answered at the same time with a video of a fart in infrared...

if you thought the absence of ultra low hanging clouds in winter months had anything to do with the muffling effects of garments you'd be wrong as the video plainly shows familiar movement apparently unimpeded by the garments obviously being worn... what the video also shows, however, (and this sort of surprised me) is that the gas is cold (the warmer the object, the lighter the colour)...

colour my curiosity satisfied...

snowboard usb flash drive

y'know, as soon as i saw this snowboard usb flash drive on ohgizmo i immediately thought of my friend andrea complaining that she couldn't fit her snowboard inside her tiny little VW beetle... well andrea, if you've still got the car, i think this one will fit...

push free skateboard? what?

found this on ohgizmo
and now i'm really confused because i don't need to push with a standard skateboard... i'm not even any good as a skater, can't even do an ollie, but i can move the deck without pushing... so why would you need a special mechanism to make the deck go without pushing?... weird...

the physics of superheros

caught this on boingboing today... you may have heard about the physics of superheroes before or perhaps not... if you had you probably thought, as i did, that it was kind of a goofy idea...

well, now there are a series of videos (video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4) that display the true hilarity of it... no really, this guy (besides knowing far too much about comic books) has great comedic timing...

it's karylin smith's birthday today

it's karylin smith's birthday today (or so what passes for my memory tells me) but since i lost track of karylin ages ago (years before i lost track of my friend mark) i'm going to do the same thing i've done for mark and wish her a happy birthday here...

who is karylin smith? well, besides being a multi-talented musician and artist from york u, she was also one of the nicest girls i've ever known (and the first girl i ever asked out - not to mention the first to let me down gently)...

she was a great person, full of life, and i'm sure where ever she's gotten to she's having a great day so happy birthday karylin...

franco unamerican

i haven't really been posting much in the way of interesting multimedia lately so here's youtube video for a song i just can't get out of my head...



i keep meaning to check if i've got "the war on errorism" (the album this song is from) at home so i can bring it into work and listen to this (and other nofx songs) without browsing the net but oh well..

what i did on my summer vacation

my summer vacation? well, i did take time off work, and it was during the summer, so i guess that counts as a summer vacation...

the first thing i did was go to my cousin's wedding - and that meant getting dressed up, which just so you know is one of my not-so-favourite things... i'm not a fancy-pants sort of guy, but i bought a suit and people seemed to think it was acceptable so that was that... and the wedding was, i dunno, wedding-like? i haven't been to that many but they don't really impress me as being all that interesting... i think they must have some sort of social significance that i don't get...

whatever, that was the first day of my vacation, after that there was another 2 weeks... 2 weeks of building an interior wall - from scratch... cutting 2x4's to length (by hand, because apparently i am able to cut myself even with a hand saw so power saws wouldn't have been a very good idea), hammering them into position, toe-nailing them together with a hammer and nails for the most part (note to do-it-yourselfers: if you're going to frame a wall, use framing brackets/anchors and screws, i did on some trouble spots at the end and when i was done i wished i could take the other part of the wall back down and re-do it with the brackets - it's that much better), putting in insulation and a vapour barrier, cutting drywall and screwing it into place, etc... it's not a big wall but it's my first time building one and apart from some assistance holding the plastic for the vapour barrier in place and lugging around drywall before it got cut i pretty much put the whole thing in place myself so all that took me the whole 2 weeks... and yes, if it sounds like i left out some steps (like the taping and the mudding and the priming and the painting) it's because they haven't been done yet - ugg... so much work and now i'm not on vacation anymore so i gotta put in my 8-9 hours at my day job first before even thinking about doing anything about the wall...

but there's a method to my madness - it's all part of my newly decided exit strategy that a) let's me get the heck out of my mom's house (years of being the parent to your parent when they should be able to take care of themselves is hard, and apparently very expensive since i just recently did the math) and b) has the very important property of not making me the bad guy for abandoning my mom because if she does wind up having to sell the place at least it will have some/all the repairs it needs done so the place isn't a total hole... i actually feel better than i have in a long while now because it seems like freedom might just be within my grasp... hooray for me!

just testing out the new blogger features

i've converted this blog over to the new blogger beta system and am just playing around with the functionality... the template should look very much the same, although before it was just minima with my own personal preferences tweaked in and now it's minima stretch lefty (i guess i wasn't the only one who thought the modifications were useful)...

the new templates, although very nice with the ability to drag and drop things on to a page designer, don't seem to give me the same level of control as the old ones did (for example, i've yet to figure out how to change how my feed is reported so that people go to my feedburner feed instead of the native blogger atom feed)... but overall it seems neat... and i think i'm going to like labels...

i think it's time for some more demolition

and i don't just mean the walls i recently tore down in my room (cracked foundation -> water damage)... no i'm talking about a neat video that is apparently an episode of a british tv show called brainiac... i believe the thermite video i blogged about before (but whose previous link got broken) is also from that show - which really makes you wonder, what other destructive things have they done for the camera?

this one involves dropping miniscule quantities of alkali metals into a bath tub full of water... i remember my highschool chemistry teacher demonstrating both sodium and potasium reactions with water, but nothing like what happens with these more obscure metals ever happened in my highschool chemistry class (at least not while i was present)...

as always, i love me some demolition... kaboom!

urinal based video games

more from boingboing... it seems that some folks are such compulsive gamers that they have to figure out how to play video games while relieving themselves, and this didn't just happen once but at least twice... i love how the second one has worked out a way for girls to play too...

now they have to figure out how to incorporate number 2... i'm envisioning a bird's eye view of military targets scrolling by down below, and of course the words "bombs away"... or perhaps instead of military targets one could see a more literal bird's eye view of cars and people's heads, but ultimately with the same interface...

biodegradable phones?

y'know, it's things like this that finally make me realize what the real reason for creating biodegradable consumer electronics is - it's the environmentally friendly (and thus politically correct) version of planned obsolescence...

i think the reason the cell phone companies want biodegradable cell phones is because people hold on to their phones for too long... if the phone starts rotting after a little while then you're basically forced to purchase a new one and thus pay more money to they cell phone companies...

very alien plants

i saw alien planet on discovery channel a while ago and i found its depiction of alien life forms very interesting (though the preference for bipedal creatures over quadrapedal creatures was a little unrealistic)... as such it's definitely worth a visit to boingboing to see this Video: plants with lots of eyes. Ew ew ew ew.... not just eyes, either, but also beaks and various other alien things...

and the graphics are incredibly realistic (much better an that alien planet show), which is part of the reason why the video is so creepy...

convergence in the animal kingdom

ok, so what animal creeps you out the most? is it a spider? a rat? a snake? maybe a bat?

i know that some folks are really afraid of snakes and now it seems they've got a whole new reason... flying snakes... ok, so technically they don't fly any more than flying squirrels fly, but still... check it out, they even have video footage...

personally, i'm not a big fan of anything that has the gift of flight, and the thought of a snake swooping down on me from some tree somewhere is kinda scary... it's like nature took an already imposing animal and mixed in one of the few abilities other animals have that could actually make it worse...

comment aggregation

i was chatting with a friend today and during the conversation i mentioned something that i later realized would make a good blog post...

i mentioned that i had been using the comment aggregation service co.mments... up until about 2 weeks ago i had no idea what that service was but now i know and i'm finding it very helpful...

essentially it's a way to track comments that you make on blogs and the replies you get all in one place (so that you don't have to go to a bunch of different sites to see if people have responded to your comments and what they've responded with)... it keeps checking those conversations periodically and the ones that have updates rise to the top of the list (so that new material is always easy to find)... also there's an rss feed for new comments in your list of tracked conversations so that you can keep track of them in a feed reader the same way you keep track of sites you enjoy reading... some sites have rss feeds for their own comments but how many individual comment feeds do you really want to subscribe to?

there are some imperfections of course... some sites it just can't figure out how to track (lack of standardization among blogs i guess) and some blogs have the comments for an article on a completely different page than the article itself so that you can't refer back to the original article when you follow co.mments.com link to the comments page... it would also be nice if i could re-read old comments right from the co.mments.com tracking page instead of having to go back to the original (right now you can only see new comments on the co.mments.com tracking page)... other than that though, i'm finding co.mments.com to be a good time saving device for participating in discussions in blog comments...

tank chair

i've heard of arm chair warriors but that's a little much, isn't it? and besides, where's the large calibre weapon that's supposed to be mounted on it? i mean it is supposed to be a tank chair after all...

ok, well, actually the tank chair is just an all-terrain wheelchair, but still - doesn't it look like there should be some sort of cannon in front?

[found on ohgizmo]

more from feynman

i've blogged before about richard feynman and well, here i am doing it again...

i stumbled across this interesting video on google that's basically an interview with feynman... it's not not nearly as heavy with the science as the lecture videos were, but still very interesting... at least it's interesting to me... he talks about his experiences and opinions, what he knows or rather doesn't know (at least not really) about the world - that sort of thing...

they call me google

you know you've become a rich source of valuable information when the people you work with start calling you google...

really, i can't think of a nicer nickname to have...

explosive chocolate bombs

yes, that's right, chocolates that actually explode... i couldn't let that pass, that's just too neat... found on boing boing...

problems at bloglines

bloglines is down at the moment... if you're not familiar with bloglines (i've mentioned it before) it's an online news feed (RSS, ATOM, others?) aggregator... that means it pulls in new content from a whole bunch of different sites (that the user selects) so that the user can read all that new content in one place instead of having to go to who knows how many sites (in my case about 150)...

i was getting a generic timeout message before and it was very frustrating, but now they're showing the bloglines plumber (this rotund guy in overalls - and really, i think we'd all be happier if plumbers wore overalls - and a pipewrench see the picture here)... i realize now that the plumber actually makes me feel better about the service outtage - it's really weird but i'm not so frustrated anymore... maybe because i know that now someone is actually working on the problem (even if it's not that guy)... i think maybe more sites should use something like the bloglines plumber when they're temporarily down...

useless inventions

here's an oldie i never got around to posting... it's from last year, i hope the links still work...

what's that word? shindogu? i think that's it... ok, this definitely qualifies as a useless invention... it ranks right up there with the motorized icecream cone... it's a motorized marshmallow stick...
T3 - Electric marshmallow toaster

i think i see a pattern here... i wonder, what can i stick a motor in in order to make a lot of money... i've got it - a motorized door knob!

[via Gizmodo]