Links Galore

Astronauts (and automated cameras) onboard the ISS captured some neat photos of the various hurricanes we’ve been having. (Thanks to my dad for the find!)

I’ve found what’s officially the best video on Youtube.

I usually leave posts about snacks to the experts, but I’m afraid I just can’t resist posting a link to this cake [NSFW, possibly, depending on whether you/your boss has a dirty mind] on my new favorite website, Cake Wrecks. It’s a blog that covers cakes that never should have happened.

Of which, surprisingly, there are many.

This guy is the most awesome roommate-seeker ever. There will be no ambiguity about things when you move in!

My problem with this sign in Japan is that I’m actually not sure it was mis-translated at all. The photos match the text quite well.

What I can’t figure out, though, is exactly what message it’s trying to convey.

It turns out that there’s a whole series of these, most seemingly conveying that cigarettes can burn other people. (Which, while true, is generally not why people take offense to smoking in the United States.)

Whatever you do, don’t ever, ever give a judge reason to sue you, or it’ll be The Case of the $54 Million Pants.

It’s unfortunate that this video has a title that reveals exactly why it’s so funny. Since it’s easy to miss what’s going on in the first few seconds, it’s an episode of COPS in which the officer has just been sent to get the resident out of a house that is on fire. You hear him say “10-4″ on the radio, and then he runs up to the door, saying, “We’re gonna have to kick this door in!” before he even gets to it.

And then… Well, just watch. You can hear what sounds like the fire department on the radio in the background. (Actually, it looks like PD was on scene before FD, so they were running into the burning building trying to search for residents.)

See a map of the Apollo 11 landing site and surrounding exploration compared to a football field. I found it interesting, but mostly I just want to close that tab.

Today I visited an old favorite site, Damn Interesting. If ever a site deserved that name, it’s this one.

This site was linked to from an article on laughter. It’s essentially a Chinese (?) menu that’s been horribly translated. It starts off humorous, gets tiring for a minute, and then rebounds, becoming more hilarious than I could have imagined. Note that it gets mildly profane at the end. If you’re viewing this at work, that may be a bad thing. If you’re viewing it at home, a Chinese food menu inadvertently turning vulgar is about the best possible outcome.

Then there’s this article on Chuck Bonnet Syndrome, a sort of visual hallucination that’s apparently more common than we’d believe. What I find interesting isn’t so much the hallucinations themselves, but the stuff going on behind the scenes. The article implicitly sets up an analogy to the brain as a computer (even measuring the eye’s throughput in megabits per second–I’m really not sure how that figure was derived). It could be said, then, that the problem isn’t with the person becoming insane, but with odd bugs in the firmware of their brain. Perhaps most interesting is that eyes actually have dead spots, which we ordinarily don’t notice due to some excellent interpolation. But they have an example graphic, which lets one “see” (err, not see?) the presence of a dead spot.

And then there’s this interesting tale of an airplane, practically fresh off the lot, that experiences myriad failures. I won’t spoil the “ending” (the cause of the problems), but I’ll say that I found the whole article pretty interesting. Err, damn interesting.

It looks like someone had a disturbed childhood.