Friday Morning fun: Groovy Dancing Girl

The dance moves that this girl runs through are amazing. Really cool to watch. And of course, I like Techno.

:)

Taking your dog skydiving?

Xtreme pug skydiving is the title of this video. And it's pretty interesting. This guy thought he would take his dog skydiving with him. LOL
I'm not sure what would posses you to do that. It just doesn't look fun to me. Though the dog looks like he is having a great time.

YouTube having trouble this morning

Not really sure what is going on, but it seems that YouTube is having some type of outage this morning. So the posts on this blog that point to YouTube, are not working right now.
Hopefully whatever is wrong will be resolved shortly.

Ron's Slip n' Slide Extravaganza

It seems that building home made slip n' slides is the thing to do these days. First you had the 535 foot slide and now you have Ron's Slip n' Slide. It's only 60 feet long, but personally I think this slide is way more dangerous.
In fact, I'm not sure I would want to get on it. That whole jump and the end of the slide just doesn't look that safe.

Via Gizmodo: How to Mod your Parents' House into a 60-Foot Slip 'n' Slide

UK teachers want RateMyTeacher and YouTube shutdown

Teachers are demanding that sites like RateMyTeacher and YouTube be shutdown. The Professional Association of Teachers claims that they only want to ban the sites in an effort to stop Cyberbullying of teachers. But as many people have pointed out, banning specific sites would not stop cyberbullying. Sites like RateMyTeacher have been under attack by teachers unions from the beginning. The idea that students could rate their professors in an environment that is not controlled by the school has never been welcomed by the education industry.
RateMyteacher is a great tool for students, especially those in college, who are trying to decide which professors to take. I certainly could have used it during my college days. Unfortunately, it can also be used by disgruntled students as a place to attack professors they don't like. But that doesn't diminish the usefulness of the site.

Via TecDirt: UK Teachers Union Demands YouTube And RateMyTeacher Be Shut Down

Tiger attack with 12 foot leap!

The amazing video above shows a tiger leaping 12 feet into the air to attack a forest ranger who was sitting on top of an elephant. It seems that a rogue tiger had been reported in the area, and a team was sent out to deal with it. Tigers being a protected species, they were not planning to kill it.

The tiger was tracked to the field in the video, where an attempt to take it down with a tranquilizer dart was made. The ranger who fired the dart, missed. This so enraged the tiger, that it attacked.

After the attack, the video cuts off, but the rest of the story has the park ranger who was attacked and another park ranger falling off the elephant they were riding. At which point the elephant attacked the tiger in defense of the rangers on the ground. Eventually the tiger was driven off. The ranger who was attacked lost three fingers and had bad lacerations on his arm and side.

For the entire story, check out Terryorisms: Tiger Attack Video & Story

Kinetic Sculpture

The guy in the video above is named Theo Jansen and he works in Holland. Uses the crank shaft model to translate pedal movement into the circular motion of a wheel, thus maintaining his "animals" level with the ground on impact. All of his "animals" are powered by wind and nothing more. Even though he is an artist rather than an engineer, he and others have recognized the potential applications of his sculptures in the robotic field.

Here is his official website where you can watch several more videos and see a lot of pictures of his sculptures. www.StrandBeest.com
For a few more videos check out the links below.

Shift Happens Video

Found this very interesting video presenting a bunch of facts about how fast our world is changing. Can you even really conceive of where we will be or what we will be doing in the future.
Some of the stats from the video below:

• The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004
  
• 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online
  
• There are 106 million registered users of MySpace. If MySpace were a country it would be number 11th largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico)
  
• It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the last 5,000 years…
  
• There are 2.7 Billion searches performed on Google every month. To whom were these questions addressed before Google?
  
• The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.
  

Via Where is the Puck? and Global Nerdy

Amazing Ping Pong ball tricks

Watch the video above for some really amazing trick with a ping pong ball. Some of these tricks are just unreal.

Gashlycrumb Tinies reading

Table of Malcontents pointed me to this YouTube video of a reading of the The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. Definitely worth watching. And if you missed it, check out my previous post about this very morbid little alphabet book. An alphabet of death