steve barrett

Judging by the look on her face when she turned around I’ve got a slight feeling she didn’t like that so much.

Look closely, the one guy pulls out a switchblade.

If you care this much about your lawn, you might have psychological issues. On the other hand, if you’re isolated on an island with no power or entertainment, fuck it, might as well mow the lawn.

Licorne Nuclear Test

The Licorne Thermonuclear test was one of 4 French nuclear tests carried out around 1970. This paticular test was an air detonation. The 914 kiloton payload was suspended from a helium balloon and set off at an altitude of around 500 meters. As you can see the resulting blast was, like most nuclear blasts, quite spectacular.

Licorne Nuclear Test

What strikes me about this test was the vibrant photos of the mushroom cloud. Most often photos of nuclear tests are black and white grainy film slides that keep you detached from the vividness and reality of the true blast. As you can see from the photos this test was carried out a bright and sunny day under a baby blue sky.

R&D in knives has been pretty slow for the past few thousand years. This year a company called Wasp announced a new weapon that is leaps and bounds beyond the knives, you, me, and the cavemen were familiar with. The Wasp Knife has a cartridge of compressed air in the handle, when the knife is pressed into tissue the air is forced through the tip of the blade into the body of the victim. The instant balloon of air causes major ruptures which are pretty damn devastating. Enough talk, check it.

This little gif is pretty impressive. It speaks volumes to the intelligence of birds. It also reminds me of a speech given by Joshua Klein at TED 2008 about the intelligence of crows. Joshua created a machine that passively teaches crows through a series of steps to use a vending machine, in theory with widespread implementation the vending machine could be a way to use crows to help pick up litter or some other task that is mutually beneficial.

Joshua talks about a trick learned by crows in Japan where they drop nuts into traffic to be crushed by cars, then wait for a red light to safely retrieve the soft and nutritious insides. His speech is most definitely worth a watch if you find this topic interesting.

And sometimes mom’s don’t exactly do things the way they ought to. What was this lady thinking?

Look, I did my fair share of wild and crazy things in my school days. It wouldn’t even be a stretch to say a few of them were life threatening. This kid, however, takes it up a notch. How he got on top of a schoolbus without anyone noticing is a true feat. Then having the balls to hop off onto the hood and blatantly film the driver’s reaction is straight up outrageous.

You’ve gotta give it to him though, this is some tasty video.

This one is definitely worth a look. This isn’t computer graphics, its as real as it gets. Apparently its an exhibit at BMW’s museum in Munich. As you can imagine, its obviously computer controlled, most likely hundreds of motors reeling up string that suspends these balls in space. With some advanced animation and programming you can see how cool of an effect it creates.

The BMW Museum itself is a work of art. Created in the shape of a BMW logo there’s no doubt what you’re looking at is a BMW facility.

These bears were caught on camera using playground toys much in the same manner that humans do. Pretty interesting seeing these mammals acting so much like us.

This just highlights the problems that might arise from urban sprawl moving into the habitats of all kinds of wildlife. Its not just rabbits that are getting caught in our back yards.