UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

The Neural Correlate Society holds such an annual contest. According to them:

The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community.

For 2007, the first prize went to Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonesi and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University, Canada with their entry entitled “The Leaning Tower Illusion”:

Perhaps the fact that it’s very striking, yet very simple is the main factor that contributed to its triumph. We have 2 pictures The Leaning Tower of Pisa, put side by side. They are actually the same picture, yet your eyes will tell you that the tower on the right leans somewhat more, as though the picture on the right was photographed from a different angle.

The explanation, as given by the contest website is:

The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as
separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.

Source
Neural Correlate Society’s best visual illusion contest

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Can you imagine a rat weighing 1 tonne, and what your cat would do?

Truly the King Kong of the rodents, luckily it died between 2 and 4 million years ago, long before humans appeared on Earth. It used to roam the swamps in South America.

The skull is 20 inches long, suggesting that its body is 10 feet long!

Compare the size of its skull with a modern rat

The skull was found recently on a beach in Uruguay, and it’s confirmed to be a new species, dubbed Josephoartigasia Monesi, a member of the order Rodentia.

The biggest modern rat, the already-huge 60 kilogram capybara, seems very small in comparison.

Before this, the biggest rat ever found was the Phoberomys pattersoni which was found in Venezuela in 2003, weighing an estimated 700 kilograms.

An artist’s impression of the monster’s face would’ve looked like (looks more like a hippopotamus than a rat, doesn’t it)?

Now here’s a good news: it was not carnivorous, since its grinding teeth are miniscule. That means it only ate, albeit in large amounts, soft vegetation, fruit and plants in the deltas.

Source
Yahoo! News, 15th Jan 2008

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With the passing of Sir Edmund Hillary, New Zealand’s greatest hero, on the 11th of January 2008 at the age of 88, the world has lost one of its living legends.

My definition of a living legend, at least from the Malaysian perspective is a person who has been prominently featured in school history text books for at least the last 40 years and STILL alive today.

Very tough call, not many people can do that.

From the Malaysian perspective, perhaps only the following people can be considered so. Please correct me where I am wrong, and any additions are welcome:

Dr Mani Jegathesan, probably Malaysia’s greatest ever athlete, being still the only Malaysian sprinter to make it as far as the semifinals of not one but two Olympic 200m events. His time of 20.92s, set at the 1968 Mexico Olympics (yes, that’s 40 years ago) is STILL Malaysia’s national record.

Chin Peng, 83, long-time leader of Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and was involved in the famous Persidangan Baling of 1955.

Shamsiah Fakeh – synonymous with rebellion, leader of Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS), a left-wing political party in Malaya, set up in 1946. She has been sensationalised with sentences such as: “How could a beautiful Malay girl join the communists and achieve high rank at that?”

Rashid Maidin was a living legend until his death in September 2006, because he was a Malay senior leader of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and was with Chin Peng at the Persidangan Baling.

Lee Kuan Yew, 84 first PM of Singapore.

Other contenders that I can think of are in the entertainment industry, like Christopher Lee, 85, famous for his portrayal of Dracula between 1958 and 1974, then people like Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, but I doubt it if they ever appeared in school history textbooks?! Encyclopedias of course.

The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, 77 will be a living legend next year, since it will be the 40th anniversary of his moon landing.

Mark Spitz, 57, the man who won the most gold medals at a single Olympics (seven in 1972), will be a living legend in 2012.

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Music videos have been around for many years, but the modern form of music videos came into huge prominence with the advent of MTV in the early 1980s. Primarily being a marketing device, their complexity and hence costs have increased steadily over the years, and nowadays a music video costing more than USD1 million for a 4 minute song is the norm.

You can say the music video craze peaked in the 1990s, because 8 of the most expensive music videos ever made are from that era, the other 2 from the 21st century.

The champ is Michael Jackson & Janet Jackson’s “Scream”, directed by Mark Romanek, made in 1995.

It cost USD7 million; that’s equivalent to USD9.6 million in 2007.

Length is about 4 minutes and 45 seconds, I’ll leave you to work out how much it costs per second.

It has a science-fiction theme, and went on to win several MTV Video Music Awards and a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video.

I think nobody would dispute that the video still looks impressive today, even though it was made more than 10 years ago:

Click here to see the video

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On 6th January 2007, the unthinkable happened. Former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist Slash shared the stage with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and played some parts of the classic “Welcome to the Jungle,” with a Gibson Les Paul (one is on display at Guitar Point near Servay, Penampang – costs more than RM10,000) plugged into a pair of Marshall half-stacks. You know what that means? It means sonic heaven for guitar fans like me.

It came at Las Vegas, during Gates’ final Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote speech before retiring from Microsoft.

So basically, it was Gates’ final day at work at Microsoft, the company he founded more than 30 years earlier, and Slash played guitar at his retirement party. The mere thought of that happening is so cool that if there’s any chance it happening again, I think I should gonna book quite a few Vegas vacations in advance.

I’ve seen seen Slash play live with Guns N Roses once, 16 years ago, at Manchester City Stadium. Of course they played “Welcome to the Jungle” then. It was simply… electric!

Happy retirement Bill.

Note about the video: the young woman at the beginning of the video is Guitar Hero world champion (didn’t get her name).

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…as in movies that have been allowed to be publicly screened by the authorities.

“Comolot” is Malaysia’s first movie which deals with homosexuality. It’s written and directed by Amy Ikram Ismail, 24.

Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia. The penalty ranges from a fine to 20 years’ imprisonment.

Apparently the movie was released in July 2007. It seems that you can’t actually buy this movie yet – you can only catch it at selected locations/dates.

It’s about Danial (played by newcomer Remy Ishak) who’s engaged to a girl named Juwita (think diamond rings), who finally left her for his true love, Aiman (played by Ben Quariel).

There’s a scene there that’s quite shocking for Malaysian standards: Juwita goes to Danial’s place, and finds 2 mens’ jeans, condoms and KY Jelly in his bedroom. A bigger shock awaits here in the shower, when she finds Danial and Aiman there, naked, in erotic embrace.

The film also touches on religious sensitivities, when at the end, Aiman gatecrashes Danial’s wedding ceremony and the two of them holding hands as they enter a car, and share a kiss inside it.

I think it’s safe to say that Yusof Haslam will never ever direct a film, let alone write the script, for a film like this.

I can sense a revival in Malaysian moviemaking, with the advent of people like Yasmin Ahmad, Osman Ali and Amy Ikram Ismail.

The short film runs for 8 minutes plus:

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Being that the term “baby boomer” derived from the US, it’s only fair that the first baby boomer is considered to have been born in that country.

A little background: baby boomers are those born between 1946 and 1960. There are an estimated 80 million Americans who did.

Kathleen Casey-Kirschling is the first baby boomer, having been born 1st January 1946 at 12:00:01 a.m. She’s also the first to apply for social security benefits, for which she will be eligible in 2008.

She hails from New Jersey and now a grandmother.

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