A very selfish post

All right! All right! I admit it! This is a very very selfish post. This blog has never been about me, but . . . I have finally succumbed to the evil empire of Youtube and have made my first (and most likely last) Youtube video. If you ===>CLICK HERE <===then you can finally be assured that this blog is not written by a seven foot tall bald vampire who has a minor stutter and an major nose hair problem. I would also really appreciate it. Be sure to comment here and there. Thank you.

To keep this post from becoming entirely narcissistic, here is a somewhat short list of things not related to me.

• In the UK, the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) is typically taken around age 16. One GCSE is taken per subject. In response to the English question, "Describe the room you’re sitting in," one student wrote, "f- off." Chief Examiner Peter Buckroyd decided to stick to the scoring guidelines and awarded the student 2 marks out of a possible 27. He commented: "It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling. . . . If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill.” Source.
  
• Japan now has three singing roads. Built by the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute and designed by Shizuo Shinoda, grooves are cut into the road at specific intervals which produce melodies when vehicles drive over them. "It works like the head of a record player on a vinyl album." Here is an English video explaining the roads, and here is a Japanese video with clips of the roads. The recommended speed is 28 mph (aprx. 45kph). One Japanese blogger advised, "Driving too fast will sound like playing fast forward, while driving around 12mph has a slow-motion effect, making you almost car sick." Source.
• Here are two visual illusions to puzzle over: In the first illusion, both A and B are the same size. In the second illusion, are the two outer prongs rectangles or cylinders?
  

A bit of everything

In Barboursville, West Virginia, when 12-year-old Megan Templeton picked up a seedless watermelon in a bin at Walmart, she was stung by an inch-long scorpion. She is fine. Source.


14-year-old Sam Hawthorne slept walked into the teeth of a dead, souvenir shark on his bedroom wall. The shark teeth embedded themselves into Sam's cheek for 15 minutes, but he survived with only a small scar.
My favorite part is the highly misleading article title: "Shark Attacks Boy in his Bedroom!" and the sentences: " The teenager survived a terrifying ordeal when he was bitten in the face by one of the killer beasts – in his own bedroom. . . . Jaws struck in the middle of the night at the family home." Source
As of posting this, the home-video of a laughing Swedish baby has over 50 million views on Youtube. The video can be seen here.
Michael Agger sorted through 57,840 comments on the video, dividing them into the following categories: armchair pediatricians, drugs, actual analysis, good wisecracks, the horror, sounds like, predictions, sell-out advice, look-at-me, mean, religious and insane.
Michael condenses all 57,840 comments into: "cute, cute, cute, evil, spam, I think the baby is ugly, How can you think that!, cute, cute, I want to have a baby, cute, baby is high, look at my videos, cute, just like my kid, cute, LOL, cute, cute, etc., etc." Source.
P.S. I will be on vacation this week, but I have programed a post for the 30th and the 3rd.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

• Toyota has succeeded in designing robots with the dexterity to play the violin and the trumpet. Here is a video of the violin-robot, and here is a video of the trumpet robot which shifts from foot to foot while playing. The robots are 5 feet tall and white. USA today politely commented: "Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic."
• Taking things a step further, David Levy of the University of Maastricht predicts that by 2050, humans will be able to have sex with, and marry robots. He predicts that Massachusetts will be the first state to legalize human-robot marriages and compares the it to interracial and same-sex marriages. He also sees marriage to robots being attractive to "shy," "ugly" or "unpleasant" people. Levy predicts that these robots could cut down on pedophilia and human prostitution. Levy says: ""Once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon. . .Love and sex with robots are inevitable. . .The question is not if this will happen, but when." Levy's next paper is on the ethical treatment of robots with regards to sex and love. Source

Cool but not for the easily dizzy.

Use those pennies!