Here's a photo which showed up on Yahoo's most emailed photos list. Apparently it is a giant rockfish which was caught by a NOAA vessel in the Bering Sea according to the caption on the photo. The guy in the photo is holding up a 38 inch ruler to the fish to show how big it is.

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Here is a photo of a duckling with four legs which poped up on the most emailed photos on Yahoo. Apparently the duck was discovered in England at a duck farm.�The two extra feet don't seem to be as correctly formed as the normal two feet of the duck. Hard to tell if the extra legs are usable or not as well. Makes you wonder what�they feed ducks in England and are they down river from a nuclear power plant to get their extra mutant on.

Check out the full sized photo of the mutant duck with four legs.

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Here's a video of that prehistoric shark that was caught off the coast of Japan. It looks like a cross between an electric eel and the flying dog from the Neverending Story. Apparently�the shark�died shortly after the video was filmed.

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Some guy found an old Fallout Shelter handbook at an Arts Festival and has scanned a few of the pages and put them up on the web. The cover of the handbook shows your normal 50's family living underground in their normal clothes. Some of the advertisements that go with it include a geiger counter, an air pump system, an age chemical toilet, and a portable toilet stand. The movie,�The Day After,�portrays it somewhat differently after an attack which doesn't look at all like the cover of the Fallout shelter handbook.

Check out the full page scan of the fallout shelter handbook plus other pages inside it after the jump.

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I found this video which claims to be the first level of Super Mario Brothers 3 done with legos. I counted the frames and I see about 5 frames per second which would be a total of 160 frames as the video is 32 seconds long. The sheer volume of legos that the person that put this togather had to move to represent each frame is amazing. I don't see movement around the edges of the frame where the legos are so I don't believe they used multiple trays to put the legos on. I'll wager they did use some kind of scanline system where all of the legos in a single horizontal line were attached to a single piece so they could just move the entire line over to the left one space in each frame (plus whatever changes from Mario crossing the scanline).

Check out the video of the lego Super Mario Bros. 3 level below or click over and view it on the host site.

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Here's a pretty crazy resonance video I found over on a video site. You maybe have seen some of our other blogs where they use resonance to form patterns in sand and water. In this video which is similar a guy has about a�30cm�diameter piece of paper covered in moss spores. The paper is vibrated and it causes all kinds of crazy patterns to form in the spores (powder). The different frequencies cause different patterns to form. He focuses on two patterns in the video where the spores spin around like a galaxy in the center of the paper; first clockwise and then counterclockwise.

Watch the full video of this crazy spore paper resonance below or click over and view it on the host site.

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Here's a video I found on Google Video of a Tornado rendered in Maya. The partical effects seem to be done pretty well and it looks like the tornado is ripping through an oil refinery or some such. There are all kinds of what look like sheet metal particles swirling around outside of the body of the tornado itself. And where the tornado moves through the refinery there are explosions and fire gouting up into the air. The video doesn't perticularly look very real but they did add a camera shake effect so it would seem like someone was holding the video camera.

Watch the full video of this 3D rendered tornado for yourself below or click over and view it on the host site.

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So apparently there was a tortoise named Addwaita who has lived in a zoo in India for the last ~131 years or so. The zoo was founded in 1875 and the tortoise started living there then. The�info for the photo states that the tortoise was around 250 years old and just recently died from liver failure. He was believed be to the oldest living tortoise according to the information with the photo. Aren't tortoises suppost to be one of the oldest living creatures (reptiles?). This guy outlived all the zookeepers over a 131 year period though so I guess the tortoise really does beat the rabbit in the end.

Head over and check out the full sized photo of this ~250 year old tortoise.

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So here is another video from CeBIT I found which shows a 'Mixed Reality Interface'. Basically there is a smooth table with various objects on it which are also represented in 3D space in the screen behind the table. So when�you move the block or ball that is on the table it also moves that object inside the virtual 3D space on the monitor. I don't know if they have some kind of position tracker in (or under) each object or it reads objects dynamically via a camera or some such. There is also a camera object which the guy can move around on the table and it moves the view in the virtual 3D space around as well. I was trying to come up with some real world applications for this kind of thing and some of the things I came up with were: a real time battleplan interface for the military (think minatures in WWII movies), creating virtual 3D movies ala stop motion but you're moving the realworld objects around�for the virtual world camera, and possibly air traffic control. It would also make a pretty cool video game interface. The host site has a link to the creaters of the interface in the video and a link to the guy who captured the video.

Check out the full video of the mixed reality interface below or click over to view it on the host site.

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I found an amusing photo over on Yahoo under their most emailed photos category. Apparently it is from a fashion show in Spain which features a woman in a bikini wearing pirate garb (ARRRRRRRRRRRG!) She has the pirate ship captain hat, a toy cutlass, and an eye patch. Oh yeah and she's wearing a somewhat Caribbean themed bikini. Do you look for excuses to dress like a pirate? While wearing a bikini? Which leads me to pose the question "Is there room for a pirate themed blog with everything pirate on it?".

Check out the pirate chick in the bikini and post a comment on what you think about a pirate blog.

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