Friday, July 18, 2008

Friday Links!

Bask in the warm glow of Friday links and enjoy your weekend.

From Jason Maskell, a link to a story about the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension exercise program (first marketed in 1922). Author Todd Levin decided to follow the program for a month, and finds out that exercises were only part of the plan.

Steven Kreuch sent me a link to the Unbreakable Fighting Umbrella, and the video is quite impressive in an "oh, shit" kind of way.

From Scott Ray, a link to Eight Natural Wonders that have been added to the UN Heritage List.

From Sirius, a look at bugs who bite--in extreme close-ups, and the pictures are spectacular. Next is a sand artist, and I don't mean castles. Just take a look at these incredible images. And the hat trick, with a link to an article about about the "parachutes" of ancient reptiles.

From the Edwin Garcia Links Machine (who I met last weekend, and he's every bit as entertaining as his links), a link to Western Spaghetti, a stop motion film that is totally outstanding. Also from Edwin, and it's classic, is a video of a driver accidentally destroying a bank drive-through. It's only about fifteen seconds long, but you'll watch it more than once. And in a week devoted to videos, here's an absolutely astounding video of a non-Newtonian fluid on a sub-woofer.

Andrew Shih sent me a link to a story about the plasma scalpel, and you might want to put that snack down while you're watching the video. The website where that story appeared, Science Punk, has a ton of interesting videos to watch as well.

From DQ Film Advisor and Nicest Guy In The World Ben Ormand, a link to a story about ReCaptcha, which basically uses those "identify this text" boxes when you fill out Web forms to assist computers in recognizing faded ink or blurry words. I did a very poor job of describing it, but it's an interesting story and an ingenious idea.

From Michael O'Reilly, a link to proposal for utilizing the International Space Station that's very provocative. In short, let's send it somewhere.

I've mentioned the conversion of 2D photos into 3D images before, but Kadunta sent me a link to Make 3D, a Stanford website where you can convert your own photos.

From Geoff Engelstein, a link to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and it's both really clever and really funny (and written by Joss Whedon).

From Gregg Bornwright, a link to two concept art sits (linked earlier by Penny Arcade): ships and robots. The art is fantastic and the designs are jaw-dropping, so take a look.

Site Meter