While the probability of, say, an American between 6’6″ and 6’8″ being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it’s a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller.
LeafSnap is a new mobile app that can identify a tree’s species by looking at a photograph of the leaf. It’s the first of app of its kind, and a field guide for the twenty-first century. Using facial recognition algorithms to analyze the leaf’s contour, LeafSnap then selects a match from its index of species. If it’s not entirely sure (let’s be fair—leaves of different species can look rather similar), it will bring up a list of possible identifications. You can then browse through the collection to determine which tree’s leaf you’re holding. To make this easy, LeafSnap has a botanic dossier on all of its trees, including all sorts of information about the tree’s habitat, growth, and critical specs (are the fruits poisonous or sweet?), as well as a collection of photographs that show the tree’s seeds, bark, flowers, and fruits. The tree’s entire life cycle is captured in a pocket-sized album. (via Art Botany)
As many as 10 commuters thwarted a kidnapping attempt on a teenage girl at a Metropolitan Transit Authority station in South Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon by tackling the would-be attacker, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman said. Sheriff’s transit deputies received a report of a disturbance on a train just after 2 p.m. When they arrived, witnesses told deputies that commuters at the station had wrestled a man to the ground after he grabbed an unidentified teenage girl from behind and tried to drag her away.
“Eight to 10 people wrestled him to the ground,” Whitmore said. “The bystanders refused to let this occur. They brought this man to the ground, and there was a fight. It was an aggressive fight.” The teenage girl broke free and ran away, Whitmore said. The attacker fled on an arriving train. The suspect is identified as James Alfred Bennett, a 46-year-old registered sex offender with a criminal history. When Bennett arrived at the Imperial station, waiting deputies arrested him, Whitmore said. He was booked on suspicion of attempted kidnapping
Mary and Joseph are made of sausages and cloaked in bacon, while the Three Weiner Wise Guys sport tin-foil crowns. Christ himself is a mini chipolata, and he ain’t gonna freeze this year — his new Bethle-HAM is set to 350 degrees. (via Heavenly Grease - A Pork Nativity Scene - Slashfood)
These invisible shoes are technically wedge ankle booties. The mirrors on them reflect the shoe’s surrounding area, thereby camouflaging itself and making itself “invisible (via Your Next Shoes)
The ALPHA experiment at CERN1 has taken an important step forward in developing techniques to understand one of the Universe’s open questions: is there a difference between matter and antimatter? In a paper published in Nature today, the collaboration shows that it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. This development opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.
The Satellite Collection by Jenny Odell is a series of six digital prints made by collaging cut-out imagery from Google Satellite. This one is called 125 American Swimming Pools. (satellite prints)
There is an artificial tornado in the Mercedes Benz museum. The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building’s corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof. It is also more than 100 feet tall—making it the official world-record holder for the World’s Largest Artificial Tornado. (via BLDGBLOG: Mercedes-Benz Tornado)
