Posted in DB Direct
Posted by Derren March 12, 2010 at 10:30 am
Last night was especially fun. A day off (Wednesday had been a travelling day from Eastbourne to Hull) always brings a slight scattiness to the performance, which was all part of the fun created by a terrific audience. Eastbourne crowds are lovely but famously quiet, so it was encouraging to really feel the presence of the audience again. The participants too were lively and fun – all very much appreciated. I really loved the show.
It was a real pleasure to meet so many of you afterwards too: thank you those of you who bought prezzies for me and the crew. Particular mention to the delightful Elizabeth who had brought far too many generous gifts wrapped in impressively home-produced ‘Derren Brown’ wrapping paper. Thank you all. And I know Coops was very impressed with his Roast Beef Monster Munch T-shirt last night: an excellent coup, I thought, pun intended.
It is such a sweet thing to occasionally be handed a little prezzie from someone who’s enjoyed the show, but please don’t go over the top with them. Think we’re going to need a bigger truck…
Today I must persevere with TV writing accompanied by the brilliant Iain: some pressure is on to assemble ideas into a produceable format. Together we shall pace my small room and sweat blood until a new nugget of sparkling televisual gold is alchemically formed. Or not: more likely we’ll settle on an idea that seems ridiculous in the morning. I’m also doing a TV interview this afternoon for BBC ‘Look North’, during which I shall insist on looking North. They want to do it in a dressing room, but I don’t think they’ve seen how small the dressing rooms are. I don’t have long to think of a few amusing things to have in the background… false goatees lined up on polystyrene heads, that sort of thing.
Thanking you.
x
55 Comments »
Posted in Art, Funny Ha Ha
Posted by Abeo March 12, 2010 at 10:25 am
“Jan Vormann, 26, has taken his project from its humble beginnings at an art fair in Rome and brightened up thousands of people’s days with his brightly coloured plastic version of Polyfilla. From the old quarter of Tel Aviv in Israel to the grand Bryant Park of New York, Mr Vormann has acted either independently or with the city’s permission to leave a little part of his childhood behind.
Estimating to have used upwards of 1,000 of the little Danish building blocks, Mr Vormann enlists the help of passers-by intrigued by his careful placing of the Lego bricks. “I like to think of my work as a Repair Manifesto,” said the Berlin-based installation artist. “My work draws attention to the smallest parts of our cities that are falling apart because of the brightness of the Lego. “It draws people’s attention through the coloured blocks and makes them aware that this wall or statue or construction is not complete anymore, for whatever reason. “In the case of my latest project in New York which I completed in early March, I simply wanted to help the Mayor Bloomberg brighten up the great city.”"
Read more at The Telegraph
6 Comments »
Posted in Amazing, Freaky Deaky
Posted by Phillis March 12, 2010 at 9:18 am
17 Comments »
Posted in Amazing, Interesting Theories
Posted by Abeo March 12, 2010 at 8:22 am
“The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.
The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists’ imaginations.
For centuries Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See “Einstein and Beyond” in National Geographic magazine.)
This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury’s orbit around the sun, which Newton’s gravity couldn’t account for.
The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein’s gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.
Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.
But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.”
Read more at National Geographic
2 Comments »
Posted in Interesting Theories
Posted by Abeo March 11, 2010 at 11:12 am
“For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.”
Read more at Science Daily
10 Comments »
Posted in Freaky Deaky, Technology
Posted by Abeo March 11, 2010 at 9:35 am
“Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it’s possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.
The experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of Viewpoint in APS Physics by Elbert van Putten and Allard Mosk of the University of Twente.”
Read more at Science Daily
3 Comments »
Posted in Funny Ha Ha, Pseudo-Science to Conspiracy, Technology
Posted by Abeo March 11, 2010 at 8:56 am
“A German woman has failed in a bid to force her country’s government to halt experiments at the world’s largest atom smasher which she feared would lead to the Earth’s destruction.
The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.
The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”
“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled.
CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.
Housed inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the collider was started with great fanfare in September 2008, only to break down after nine days for the next 14 months.
It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels which began last month.”
Read more at The Telegraph
6 Comments »
Posted in Amazing, Interesting Theories, Technology
Posted by Phillis March 10, 2010 at 9:01 am
The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.
By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their work produces can be seen in the image above. The peaks represent the presence of the molecule indicated.
The new data was collected by the Herschel Telescope, launched into space last year by the European Space Agency. Herschel’s HiFi instrument uses a new technique to do more-sensitive spectroscopy. It will enable scientists to better understand the chemistry of space.
The Orion Nebula is located about 1,300 light-years away. No very active star-forming region is closer to Earth. M42, as the nebula is also known, is 24 light-years across.
Wired (Thanks DG)
8 Comments »
Posted in Freaky Deaky
Posted by Phillis March 10, 2010 at 7:25 am
A 101-year-old woman in China has baffled doctors after growing a huge goat-like horn on her forehead.
Zhang Ruifang claims the growth first appeared only last year and has since expanded to be more than 6cm long. Now her family in Linlou, Henan province, are concerned about a second mark on the other side of her forehead.
“[At first] we didn’t pay too much attention to it,” said Mrs Zhang’s youngest son Zhang Guozheng. ”Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead — it’s quite possible that it’s another horn.”
9 News
18 Comments »
Posted in Freaky Deaky, Funny Ha Ha
Posted by Phillis March 10, 2010 at 6:52 am
Street signs warning Romanian drivers to be careful of drunken pedestrians lying on roads were erected by road safety chiefs worried about the “despairing” levels of accidents.
Officials in Pecica, a village town about 13 miles from the Hungarian border in the country’s west, ordered the bright red signs, complete with the phrase “Attention – Drunks”. The 10 road signs, which also show a person crawling on their knees while clutching a glass in one hand, were erected in popular nightspot areas close to the city’s bars and restaurants.
Telegraph
6 Comments »
