Bored with your old couch at home? Maybe you don’t have enough chairs when visitors come over, luckily designer Stefano Grasselli has come up with an awesome and fun solution. Introducing the Tetris couch. Continue reading “The Tetris Couch”
Category: General
Double Rainbow Guy Sells Out
Paul Vasquez, double rainbow-guy does advertisment for Microsoft.
Remember double rainbow guy? If you haven’t seen or head of it let me give you a quick explanation. Two months ago a video was released on to YouTube of a guy getting extremely emotional while witnessing two rainbows. The video went viral and at the time of writing has been viewed over 14 million times.
It turns out that Paul Vasquez (the double rainbow guy) has SOLD OUT to Microsoft! Below is a video for Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery featuring Paul himself. Continue reading “Double Rainbow Guy Sells Out”
World’s Most Dangerous Toys: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
The most spectacular of our new educational toys was the Gilbert Atomic Energy Laboratory. This was a top job, the result of much experimentation and hard work. We were unofficially encouraged by the government, who thought that our set would aid in public understanding of atomic energy and stress its constructive side.
If you thought choking hazards in toys were bad then spare a thought for American kids in the early 50’s.
Introducing the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory. This toy lab set was produced by Alfred Carlton Gilbert between 1950 and 1951 and sold for $49.50US (which is equivalent to about $380 – $400US dollars today). So if you were lucky enough to have well off parents back in the day you may well have been ‘lucky’ enough to get your hands on this radioactive fun set.
There was some incentive to fork out the $50 as the set also came with a book that explained to kids how to prospect for uranium with a $10,000 prize offered by the US Government to anyone who proved successful.
The kit contained a U-239 Geiger counter, electroscope, spinthariscope (a device for observing individual nuclear disintegrations), a Wilson cloud chamber, nuclear spheres, three batteries, a “Learn How Dagwood Split the Atom” comic book. It also contained three low-level radiation sources: Alpha particles (Pb-210 and Po-210), Beta particles (Ru-106), Gamma particles (possibly Zn-65) and four Uranium-bearing ore samples.
Due to its rarity the Atomic Energy Lab is now a highly sought after collector’s item and can fetch a price of up to 100 times it’s modern day equivalent retail price. Continue reading “World’s Most Dangerous Toys: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab”
Troll Psychology: A discussion on ‘internet bullying’
An interesting suggestion was put forward to me on Yahoo answers the other day by ‘Patricia’ who said that I should write an article about internet bullying and more specifically why the internet bullies; or trolls are compelled to purposely to post inflammatory comments on websites in the first place. Please be warned that this article does contain some strong language, if you are easily offended please do not read any further.
What is a troll?
Before we begin we need to define exactly what a troll is. According to Wikipedia a troll is “In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”
The definition in my opinion is spot on but it certainly doesn’t tell us what motivates an internet troll. Not being one myself I can not really tell you with any kind of first person experience. I can offer you the opinions of others though.
Why so aggressive?
In my own opinion I do not think there is any singular reason why people feel like they need to be trying to insult others on the internet but rather a combination of a number of factors. A very nice article about exactly this came from Michael Marshall of the prestigious New Scientist publication back in 2007. You can read the full post here but here are some points that I found interesting: Continue reading “Troll Psychology: A discussion on ‘internet bullying’”
8 Ways To Get Through A Boring Day
Everyone has suffered it before, long slow days at work where nothing exciting is happening, there is nothing to keep you occupied and the clock seems like it’s stuck in suspended animation. Well I have taken the liberty to compile a quick list of time wasters for crappy work days. Continue reading “8 Ways To Get Through A Boring Day”
Hello world!
Hello readers!
I’ve just installed WordPress and decided to begin my very own Blog. So the big question is, why did I decide to write a blog in the first place?
Well, there is no single answer but I will mention a few things that inspired me. The first and probably the primary reason is that I seem to have a lot of spare time! Most of this time is spent doing a lot of non-constructive things like watching TV or playing the X-Box 360 (I am playing Modern Warfare 2 at the moment).
Secondly, I thought it might make for an interesting social experiment, to see how many (or how little) people are actually interested in what I have to say.
Thirdly, I currently work a very boring job which generally involves me sitting in front of a computer trying to look busy for eight and a half hours a day, Monday to Friday. There are occassional moments of excitement but in this time I have read a lot of other blogs, spent a lot of time on YouTube and I am continually discovering new and interesting things from all around the internet that I think are worth sharing. A lot of the time it is harder trying to look busy than it is to be actually doing work! So hopefully this will give me a good chance to pass the time when there is absolutely nothing to be done at work. Continue reading “Hello world!”