Ouch

Admission time: I’m an avid subscriber to Fail Army on Youtube. It’s pathetic, puerile stuff, but it’s also 10 minutes (or so) of mindless mindlessness each week. And it’s also a reminder not only that there are more stupid people than you out there, but also that they’re stupidly recording their stupidity. Double whammy.

This Tuesday’s offering was a compilation of stairs-related mishaps, and began with what remains the single most winceworthy and painful moment they’ve ever broadcast, of a BMX guy jumping down some steps and landing face first on the concrete floor at the bottom. Gravity wins again.
What quickly became evident, however, was that while this clip had previously stood out as being one that nearly made you revisit your last meal, there were plenty more where that came from. This was definitely the most painful episode they’ve ever done.
See if you can watch this all the way through without looking away or grimacing. (Pro Tip: You can’t.)

There now. Don’t you feel superior? And healthy?

That’s the power of comparing yourself with idiots. (And/or wearing a helmet.)

Nice choices, Mike

500px – the photo sharing site for proper photographers or “Grown Up Flickr” as I call it – has a new feature: a Guest Curators’ Choice page. This is where they get a top photographer, who acts a s a Guest Curator (who knew?) and picks his or her favourite photos from 500px. And first up is Michael Shainblum from San Diego in California. Here’s his 500px page, featuring amazing stuff like this:

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And here are his choices, including a couple of his shots and some from other photographers.
I particularly like this one:

11 which, as you can easily see, is by Erin Babnik. It’s called “Getting Close”, and it took some taking:

I must have gone through every position in the Kama Sutra with that tripod trying to get its feet secured around me, but to no avail. The solution involved lying prostrate on top of the boulder to get my face low enough to see the back of the camera, which was not the most elegant position I’ve assumed in the course of getting a shot, but it got the job done!

The softness of the flowing brook, against the sentinel peaks of the Dolomites  behind and the fresh, vernal light.
Beautiful.

Nice shot, Erin. And nice choices, Mike.

Holiday Snaps

Not mine, you’ll be pleased to hear. No. These are from the Rosetta holiday mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about these photos, save for the fact that they were ever even taken at all.

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You can surf through a couple of hundred pics, all the while marvelling that you’re looking at images taken on a piece of space rock moving at thousands of kilometres an hour, some half a billion kilometres from Earth.

It’s all rather humbling.

Physics Demo

The best branch of science is microbiology. I can say this for certain because I’m a microbiologist, so I should know. There are other sciences that are quite good as well, and then there are some that are OK, and then somewhere deep into the lower half of the list of good sciences is physics. Physicists would probably argue with this, saying that “without physics, there would be no gravity”, but this is plainly untrue. Without microbiology, there would still be bacteria, and it’s not like we’d all go floating off the surface of the planet if physics was suddenly abolished as a science.

Anyway, this isn’t their list.

I did see some physics demonstrated the other day though, and I was impressed. Not impressed enough to move it above anthropology, but impressed nevertheless. And so, I’m going to share the video with you, right here, right now.

What happens in the video isn’t unexpected – physics tells us what to expect and what physics tells us to expect, occurs – but it is still a bit weird and tough to get your head around. Allow me to demonstrate – bring forth The Coxmatron!

The lead in is actually really interesting too, but if you just want to skip to the mentally confusing bit, jump to 2:30.

Galileo hypothesised that falling objects would fall at the same rate regardless of their masses, and so yes, the only reason that a bowling bowl falls more quickly than a bunch of feathers is because of the added air resistance on the latter. And yes, you know that, but because you have never seen a bowling ball and some feathers dropped in the absence of air (until now), it’s properly weird to actually see happening, isn’t it?

PHYSICS!!*

* It’s nowhere near as good as microbiology, but still much better than biochemistry.

Don Pettit ISS startrails shot

While Chemical Engineer Dr Don Pettit was up on the ISS doing Chemical Engineering stuff, he also did some photography. And wow.

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Those yellow streaks are city lights as the ISS speeds over the surface of the earth, and the blue/white flares are lightning. The white vertical stripes in the distance are star trails.

There’s a bit more to this image than simple long exposure, but fortunately, Doc Pettit has also done a video so that when you’re up in space, you’ll be able to recreate his work. In the meantime, go and have a look at the Flickr album with the rest of his amazing photos.