OMG COW!!!!11

I use YouTube a lot. That's reflected in this blog of course, there is always something to catch my attention on YouTube.

But one thing that never catches my attention are the comments. I think they must be among the most pointless and puerile on the internet - and that says a lot.

If you've never read them, don't try. Instead, all you need is this description of the classic YouTube debate from Faulty Logic.

Although according to Brad Berens at Mediavorous, the inane comments are the secret of YouTube's sucess.

Fool's penguins

I've long missed April Fool's day, so I won't even try to pretend this is real... but it's a wonderfully convincing piece of work.

There's also a short video on how the effect was achieved. Yet another reminder that what we see is not reality.

Personal crowd

I talked last year about personal space and how the social rules for keeping your distance carry over into virtual worlds.

But this image of a Japanese wave pool, and the related YouTube video, graphically show the variations in social rules in different cultures. The idea of choosing to be in a pool with that many people is highly disturbing to my English notions of necessary personal space.

With the Internet being such a cosmopolitan place, I wonder how much these cultural variations in social rules affect us. It's not something I've noticed clearly, although I have certainly noticed that online the rule tends to be "tolerate difference, or go make a niche"

Image: © kilian-nakamura.com, used with permission.

Silvered swindle

I love buying jewellery, but luckily my tastes don't run to anything expensive. I'd rather a string of glass beads than something with gold and diamonds. But I do enjoy silver, and have ended up with a pile of necklaces that desperately need cleaning.

So looking around for the best way to clean them, I came across "pristine2u", who sell "electrolytic cleaning plates". Which looked good, despite their badly spelt FAQs, until I found a handy video on YouTube:

I tried this myself today, and got great results. So I think rather than a £12 plate "specialy made from several diferant metals", I'll stick with a pound or so's worth of foil.

Camouflaged controversy

I've had this wonderful invisible octopus in my YouTube favourites for a while.

That has to be one of the best camouflage jobs possible, wonderful!

Today I found that the images come from a talk by David Gallo at Ted.com. From the title of the talk, it seems he is making a point about "intelligent design", a theory I've always thought has more to do with our lack of imagination than anything else.

As Sir Arthur Eddington said, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

Wonderous water

Here's an amazing water feature made for Jeep. It's programmed to release water in such precise amounts and with such precise timing, that it forms distinct patterns as it falls. The video is not the best quality, but the effect is stunning none the less.

Ninjas!

Japanese TV often seems particularly strange to Western eyes. Here's a great dance that originated on a Japanese children's show:

But then, we invented the Birdie Dance...

Credit: Braydie on #uncyclopedia

Cornflour tentacle monster

I've played with cornflour (corn starch) a few times, mostly when I was supposed to be mixing it up for cooking. It's strange stuff.

Here it's taken a few steps further (or tentacles further?) with cornflour vibrated at 80Hz.

There are a lot of these games with cornflour on YouTube, culminating in a swimming pool of the stuff, allowing people to actually run over the top of it. I think I'd like to try that.

Dance Monkey Dance

I've been on a funny track for the last few posts, so here's one that's a bit more thoughtful.

Ernest Cline is, says Wikipedia, a comedian, spoken word artist and screenwriter. This piece is one that makes me sit and think every time I see it. It's something I've had in my bookmarks for a while, and won't be clearing out.

From cute to hugs

I'm not sure I like the direction this blog is going...



Now I'm not a great one for hugs, but it's striking how much some of those people really seemed to need a hug.

There's more on this at http://www.freehugscampaign.org/

Credit: BillK and Rieke