Make your own Impossible Triangle
“This photo has not been edited one bit. This is a picture of the penrose impossible triangle that is sitting in front of me on my desk. If I look at it from the right angle, it appears exactly as it does in the picture above. Many people think it can’t be done. But it is actually possible! And now, you can build your own “impossible triangle” in less than 5 minutes!
How did I do it? First, I studied the triangle, look at all the angles. Next, I whipped out my trusty scissors and started cutting away. It was a blur of strips of paper flying in the air and hitting the floor. And when I finished with some very pretty snowflakes… I got to work on doing the impossible. The impossible triangle, that is.
Many other sources said it couldn’t be built, but I knew I had remembered seeing some pictures of it…
Honestly, after many hours of trial and error, I have come up with what I believe to be the best (and easiest) way to make your own. To make this incredibly easy, just download and print the PDF.”
Read more at Cool Optical Illusions (Thanks Tracey)
Ridley Scott to crowdsource documentary via YouTube
“Ridley Scott, director of films such as Gladiator and Alien, is to crowdsource a feature length documentary by getting members of the public to post snippets of a day in their life on YouTube.
Scott, who is collaborating with the State of Play director Kevin Macdonald and YouTube, intends to create a feature length documentary based on the clips called Life in a Day. The project aims to get individuals to upload to YouTube footage of a moment in their lives on 24 July.
Individuals whose footage makes it into the final film will be credited as co-directors and 20 will be flown to the Sundance Film Festival in January where the film will have its premiere. Life in a Day will also be shown for free on YouTube.
“Life in a Day is a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on 24 July 2010,” said Macdonald, who will direct the project. “It is a unique experiment in social filmmaking, and what better way to gather a limitless array of footage than to engage the world’s online community?”"
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @rogibson)
Researchers discover stone that proves humans arrived in Britain nearly a million years ago
The find, published in the journal Nature, pushes back the arrival of the first humans in what is now the UK by several hundred thousand years. Environmental data suggests that temperatures were relatively cool.
This raises the possibility that these early Britons may have been among the first humans to use fire to keep warm. They may also have been some of the earliest humans to wear fur clothing.
The discoveries were made in Happisburgh, in the north of Norfolk. At the time there was a land bridge connecting what is now southern Britain with continental Europe.
There are no early human remains, but the researchers speculate that the most likely species was Homo antecessor, more commonly – and possibly appropriately – known as “Pioneer Man”.
Remains of the species have been found in the Atapuerca region of northern Spain, and dated to 0.8-1.2 million years ago. So the species could well have been in Britain at around that time, according to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us
I first read Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot 10 years ago. It’s an incredible release that hasn’t aged at all and was released when the internet was just a fledgling. Having been sent this more than a few times I picked up the book again and browsed it’s glossy pages – it’s a fantastic read that we highly recommend. This great little homage is both humbling and appropriate, it shows how Sagan is such a huge influence on the scientific rhetoric all over the internet today and why his ability to grasp big ideas will live forever.
American woman wins lottery for a fourth time
“An American woman has been named the luckiest lottery winner in the world after scooping her fourth multi million pound jackpot.
Joan Ginther won £6.2m with the top prize from a scratch card bought from a store in Texas, pushing her total winnings to more than £14m. Her first multi million payout came in 1993 when she won £8m from a £20 scratch card. Mrs Ginther chose to take £180,000 a year for 19 years after paying tax on her win to give her a total prize of £3.6m. In 2006 she won a further £1.4m and again opted for a lump-sum payment of £1m after paying tax on the winnings. Two years later the 63 year-old who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, scooped a further £2m.
Incredibly, three of the tickets were bought from the same small convenience store in the town of Bishop, Texas. Friends said Mrs Ginther would return to her home town to visit her father and would drop in at the local store to buy a scratch card. Store manager Bob Solis said they sell 1,000 lottery tickets a day, adding: “This is a very lucky store.”
Experts said the chances of winning four lottery jackpots was more than 200 million to one. “This final bit of winning lottery must confirm Mrs Ginther as the world’s luckiest lottery player,” said a spokesman for World Lottery News. “We would be interested to see just how much she spends on lottery tickets and scratch-offs.”"
Read more at The Telegraph
The quest for the supersonic skydive
“Aircraft have been traveling faster than the speed of sound–no simple accomplishment–since 1947. Now Felix Baumgartner wants to do the same thing, in freefall. Sometime this year, Baumgartner plans to step out of a balloon-suspended capsule at about 120,000 feet, not so very far from the edge of space, and race toward the earth at a rate that could reach Mach 1 or even slightly above.
It’s an endeavor that requires intense and thorough preparation, as well as exacting technique. Baumgartner has been working toward the skydive for months with his Red Bull Stratos support team, and he’ll draw on his own experience of more than 2,000 parachute jumps, often extreme in their own right, if nowhere near the breathtaking ambition of this stratospheric undertaking.
The photo here shows Baumgartner in a high-altitude test jump last year, somewhere way above the Mojave Desert in California.”
See more photos and find out more at CNET News
Amazing Apple iPad Art
“This portrait looks like an oil painting you would see in an art gallery, but it is in fact a finger painting created using an Apple iPad. New York artist David Kassan, 33, paints his life models using a simple £5 app called Brushes. A three-hour sitting has been condensed into a five-minute timelapse video during which Kassan uses a variety of virtual brushes. You can watch the painting take shape from blank screen to finished artwork at 6’20. Comedian Stephen Fry, an Apple aficionado, tweeted about the video to his followers on Tuesday night after spotting it on YouTube.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Tracey)
End of tour
Since being home, work has intensified, and I rather rudely forgot to blog about the very end of the tour. Forgive me.
I believe I left you in Northampton. It was followed by a return visit to Milton Keynes, and then up to Leicester. The audience in Leicester was great. Largely due, if I remember correctly, to a rowdy bunch of students sat in the stalls. Apart from one moment of blurting out the ending for all to hear, this gaggle of girls were a welcome source of liveliness. It was a fun show, though sweltering, at least backstage.
The final night was Nottingham. And the audience seemed to know it: the crowd was truly wonderful. In the audience was Peter Jackson and family, along with Rick Baker, the special FX genius. I was pleased they had chosen to come to such a good show. The final night would have been all-round wonderful, had it not been for the moment in the show some of you will know when I make my way up into the circle. Every first night in a theatre I familiarise myself with the route up from the stalls, but this night I forgot the way. I left the stalls to realise I had to re-emerge into them a moment later as I had gone through the wrong door. I asked an usher to show me the route, and this is where the trouble started. He took me out and pointed me in the direction of the long route up through the foyer, which was not what I was after, but faced with no other option, I left the auditorium again and ran up the stairs. The idea is to appear in the circle before the audience get bored with my absence, but the usher’s instructions turned out to be too vague, and I arrived on the next floor up and faced with several doors to choose from. I asked at the bar to be quickly shown into the circle, and received blank confused expressions, from a staff who seemed to have no idea what the circle was. ‘I’m in the middle of the show, quick, please, show me how to get in’. The bar staff still had no idea. One guy pointed and seemed to be suggesting directions, so I told him to go ahead and show me. He didn’t seem to see the urgency, so I physically grabbed him, apologising, and made him go ahead. He took me though a door and pointed up some stairs and said ‘left’ or something. I went down the stairs and there were two sets of doors. I only saw one and went through, came out when I realised it was wrong and tried the other. Some stairs took me up and I shot through a door into some part of the fly rig (the system of scaffold and beams that hold the lights). I came back out, back to the bar, sweating and yelling ‘Oh for fucks sake’ as i went, and burst through another door. This one took me down, too far down… and I emerged at the side of the stage to see Jennie or Iain looking at me in despair. Another ‘For FUCK’S sake’ and I ran back out, through another door and I was suddenly out on the street, in my evening tails, the door locked behind me and faced with nothing that appeared to be an entrance to the theatre. After a moment’s further panic I found one, and ran into a startled box-office staff member asking how he could help. Thank God this man, finally, had the basic knowledge of the theatre and understanding of my predicament to actually run up and take me to the doors at the side of the circle. I appeared, panting and furious, after what seemed like ten whole long minutes of leaving the audience without a performer.
Of course Peter et al presumed it was all part of the show. If you were there that night, it really wasn’t. What a way to finish.
Iain and I travelled back the next morning with our guests and attended the opening of Ray Harryhausen’s exhibition at the Film Museum, County Hall, just by the London Eye. Ray was there celebrating the wonderful exhibition and his 90th birthday. It’s well worth a visit: I believe it runs for a few months. After some meetings about the television projects I went to see All My Sons at the Apollo theatre, which is the finest thing I have seen for a while. And on the back of a friend’s Vespa pootling through London after the play, it felt like I was finally back home.
We are now all taken up with telly-business. Some exciting and stupidly ambitious projects are underfoot, and they should be broadcast towards the end of the year. I have also, these last few days, taken a moment to peek at ‘Glee’, under much pressure from well-meaning friends, and as a huge fan of Glenn Close, ‘Damages’. The former has largely left me cold (doubtless my failing) but the latter is terrific. I so rarely watch TV so this feels like a naughty treat after so much work.
Talking of which, I must get on. I hope you’re all having nice evenings.
Planck telescope reveals ancient cosmic light
“This is the extraordinary place where we all live – the Universe.
The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos. It took the 600m-euro observatory just over six months to assemble the map. It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths – much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.
Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. “It’s a spectacular picture; it’s a thing of beauty,” Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News. Dominating the foreground are large segments of our Milky Way Galaxy. The bright horizontal line running the full length of the image is the galaxy’s main disc – the plane in which the Sun and the Earth also reside.”
Read more at BBC News
You can also see a video about how the image was captured on Physorg
‘UFOs’ spotted in Reading
“Mobile phone footage has captured the moment that several UFO’s were spotted flying above Reading, Berkshire. The video was captured by Lizzie Zuowen Tang and Jo Mingjiao Xue who claim to have seen 21 flying objects between 4.45 and 5.53 in the morning.
Ms Tang said: “Their shapes were like rods which pointed in the direction they were flying, but they were rotating at the same time when flying forward. “They flew very slowly without the noise which planes generate when flying, so at first we thought they were meteors, but then we immediately realised that they were definitely not meteors because their speed was much slower. “We think that they were flying at a very high altitude and we saw two of them generate a very strong light flash for a few seconds when they were flying.”"
Being a skeptical lot we don’t beleive in UFO’s but are open to convincing evidence. This hardly counts as some as it’s so poor but it’s hard to make out what they actually are. Certainly not conventional aircraft of any sort – but maybe our readers have an idea?
Head over the The Telegraph to watch the video
