M of the M

Mario of the Month for December. Found: here.

Trapping antimatter

Gizmodo has a report about trapping anti-matter for the first time.

A little bit of history

They are auctioning off a mint Apple I computer, expected to sell for $161,600 - $248,200. This machine came out in 1976, with 8K of RAM and a computer that ran at 1 Mhz. The computer I wrote this on has a million times more RAM and has two processors that run over 2500 times faster.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for November. Found: here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for October. Via: here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for September. View original (and source): here.

Amazing gymnast pulls off an amazing sequence of flips

 It seems they won't let me embed this, but check out this amazing gymnast doing flips.

New bar bet

Image via WikipediaHere's a new bar bet: Ask people to bet what the fifth-most-traded currency in the world is, after the U.S. dollar, the yen, the pound, and the euro.
Answer: Surprisingly (I think) the Australian dollar. I would have gone through China (the one doing the trading), Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and a lot of other countries before I'd have guessed Australia (if I ever would have)....

Italy Soccer "Training"

Title also, for the video I was talking about previously see Double Rainbow.

Gizmodo has an interesting article about how the iPhone (and probably other digital cameras) can distort fast-moving objects, with propellers being the most common example. This iPhone video of a propeller is from the comments; there are lots of other examples in the article. Weird effects happen because "as it turns out, most digital cameras don't actually take a picture the instant you hit the button. What they actually do to capture an image is scan over the frame either vertically or horizontally. So basically, not all parts of an image are recorded at exactly same time (the top right could be a little ahead of the bottom left, etc.). Hence it being called rolling shutter."


It is cool to think that if our eyes had rolling shutters, this is how we might see the world too, with fast moving objects seeming to move in and out of existence or bend in strange ways. It's a great example of how perception is not necessarily reality.