Fun With Sodium Acetate

Sodium Acetate is the main constituent in pocket hand warmers.

Heating crystals of Sodium Acetate Trihydrate to 100^°C, mixing them with water and cooling causes them to form a super-saturated liquid that is somewhat unstable.

A simple touch of a finger is all it takes to cause the liquid to crystallise, in quite a spectacular manner.

Leaping Lemurs

The Sifaka lemurs, from Madagascar, in this short documentary are both graceful and very, very cute.

Energy Crisis Averted

Thanks to Dump Trumpet for the link to this video, explaining how two fundamental physical truths can be harnessed to provide perpetual motion.

Wanted

This trailer for "Wanted", starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, looks excellent. Come on 2008!

True Knowledge

Here's an interesting video, taken from the website of true knowledge, an internet research company from the UK that has developed a search engine based on semantic content, rather than statistical data.

"Search" is not quite the right term in this case. The tool is more a kind of inference engine, which answers natural language questions by performing lookups and calculations over a database of facts.

All that's required now is a neural interface and my dreams will have finally come true!

Duelling Telsa Coils

Thanks to Good Math, Bad Math for pointing me to this wonderful video of two Telsa coils being controlled so that the sound they generate forms a lovely duet.

I think they should bring out an entire album of this!

Tiny Dancer

With apologies to Elton John, here's a very cute act I found via Spluch.

Amazing Multi-Layer Mural

This is a video of artist Lewis Lavoie creating a large mural from a number of smaller ones.

It reminds me of Salvador Dali's portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

She's Obviously Not A Septic

I definitely want this kid on my trivia team when she's old enough to get into the pub!

Can Can

I have no idea whether there's some kind of trickery going on here, but these videos I found via Neatorama are pretty impressive.

Peggy Learns A Lesson

My dear friend Jeannine sent me a link to this video, starring her son Michael (who plays Peggy's father, Jim), for which he and his friends won the Best Comedy prize in the Stanford heats of Campus Moviefest.

String Theory In Two Minutes

Brian Greene, who you may know from his television series and book The Elegant Universe, ran a contest asking people to produce a video of no more than two minutes' duration, explaining String Theory.

He recently announced the winner.

Most of them are pretty good. But, it's still far too complex for my depleted set of brain cells.

I think I'll continue to confine my study to the much simpler subject of G-String Theory :-).

Teleporting Baby, Part 3

Here's a further installment in the teleporting baby series I've posted about previously.

I don't think this one's quite as funny, but your mileage may vary ...

Waitless

Waitless brings together a list of techniques for getting things done in a more expeditious fashion. Some I've seen before, but they're still clever.

If the baby soothing one really works, that's pretty impressive and incredibly useful to know!

I have a feeling they don't intend you to put the Turbo Parking one into practice :-).

Sure, it's a Sprint ad, but the content is still interesting ... and the style of the videos is kind of cute, too.

Non-Newtonian Fluids

The viscosity of a Non-Newtonian fluid increases under stress, effectively turning it into a solid. This makes it possible to walk (quickly) on the surface of such a liquid.

I found this nice demonstration of its properties via Crooked Brains. The liquid, in this case, is a mixture of corn starch and water.

International Cephalopod Awareness Day

I was quite embarrassed to discover that I had completely missed International Cephalopod Awareness Day, which was on October 8th.

To redress this terrible oversight, here's an amazing video showing why octopuses and sharks should not be made to share the same tank ... don't worry, no cephalopods were harmed during the making of this film :-).

!ekirtS

My dear friend Susan sent me a link to this video. Pretty damned impressive!

Nice Claymation

Also found on the Wooster Collective blog ...

Amazing Animated Graffiti

At the end of a long journey this morning, following many links, I arrived at the Wooster Collective, which is a blog about street art.

It included this wonderful animation, done by repeatedly drawing over the same wall, using what appears to be charcoal. Truly amazing!

Do go and take a look at the blog, because there are many wonderful pieces there.

One Laptop Pogue Critiqued

I'm no great fan of David Pogue.

However, he recently did quite a decent review of the One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 hardware, including a video showing off it's features.