World Livestock Auctioneer Championships

These audio clips from the World Livestock Auctioneer Championships are fun to listen to. The newest ones have the best audio quality.

[via kottke.org]

Small, Yes, but Mighty: The Molecule Called Water

Natalie Angier’s short appreciation of water, which, before you scoff, is a pretty amazing substance despite its ubiquity. “Pulled together by hydrogen bonds, water molecules become mature and stable, able to absorb huge amounts of energy before pulling a radical phase shift and changing from ice to liquid or liquid to gas. As a result, water has surprisingly high boiling and freezing points, and a strikingly generous gap

Hurdles and treadmills

Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear hurdles while running on treadmills. There’s something Sisyphean about their task. No word on whether any of the contestants were able to take off.

[via kottke.org]

Statetris

Statetris: “Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.” There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.

[via kottke.org]

Cats need to navigate an obstacle to remember it

 

Here’s a cool study: Alberta biologists appear to have demonstrated that spatial memory in cats is cemented not when a cat sees something — but when it navigates around it. Merely perceiving something, for a cat, isn’t enough.

In their experiment — pictured above — they had a cat step halfway over

Zicatela

Taken from the north end of Zicatela Beach in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. The clay being mined from the beach shows up here as brown streaks in the foam. It’s hard to judge the scale with no surfer in this shot, but this wave’s face was probably 20-25 feet. [via konaboy]

Meat hair

Photographs of girls with meat hair.

I hardly know whether this constitutes as art.  It’s gross!

What I think of the footy

Watching Carlton vs Melbourne last Sunday was a bleh bleh bleh boooore. Both were bottom-of-the-ladder teams hoping to lose so that the loser gets first pick in next year’s player selection.

My theory is that in a game like this, both teams should try to kick goals for each other. At least then they’d try a little harder.

Never Lose Hope

North Korea: Lee

In North Korea there is room for only one god – the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung. It is estimated that some two hundred thousand people are languishing in prison camps spread around the country, and tens of thousands of these are Christians. Author Soon Ok Lee met with some of these captives during her own six years in prison. In her book Eyes of the Tailless Animals, she writes that imprisoned Christians, who worked all day as slave laborers, were forced to keep their faces downcast, eyes on the ground. It was forbidden for them to look up toward the sky for one reason only. Their captors knew that they believed in the God who made heaven and earth.

During her imiprisonment, Lee was not a Christian, and she saw many Chrisitans die. “Yet they never denied the God who is in heaven. All they had to do was say they don’t believe in religion, and they would have been released.”

One night in Feburary of 1992 Lee witnessed a gruesome scene. The imprisoned workers were almost done for the day, and she saw eight Christian prisoners carrying a big kettle holding molten iron. “An officer called to them, using vile

Your Love is Like

Rick Pino singing Your Love is Like (thx, md!)

[Can't see it here? View via youtube]