Holiday Lights

Hey everyone, now that Thanksgiving is over and everyone is out shopping, when they return they will begin to setup holiday light displays and though these I am sharing are not new, they are awesome Trans-Siberian Orchestra musical displays (side note: I am really disappointed that they are not coming to the Puget Sound area this year). Enjoy the videos!

Flying Snakes

Even though I didn't see the movie Snakes on a Plane (looked kinda silly) I guess flying snakes can be cool, and maybe even a little scary. Today I read an article about actual flying snakes.

It was a really cool article and the video is fun but beware, something more scary than flying snakes might happen if you read the article and watch the video - you might learn something! Yikes, learning on the Mullet of Blogs, what will happen next?

More Space Views

I just found this article about a set of windows on the International Space Station and some of the pretty amazing pictures taken from this vantage point. This is a little more high-tech than the balloon and paper airplane setup from the earlier post but both are pretty impressive. Below is one of the pictures, showing an astronaut leaning on the viewing area.

If that wasn't enough, here is another picture. This one is of Egypt and the string of lights down the middle is the Nile river valley.

Paper Plane in Space!

When I was younger I participated in OM and one of the events I did was on flight. We built various types of aircraft to accomplish different feats like stay in the air the longest, fly the farthest with a set amount of force, etc. Now just barely 20 years later a few people launched a paper airplane into space! They did this with the help of a helium balloon and at 3-feet wide the plane is considerably larger than what I was working on in elementary school. Here is the article about this along with the photos that the camera that was attached to the plane took. The photo above is one of them. I think it is pretty awesome that they did this, don't you?

Totally Awesome!

I saw this article about how a 15 story hotel was built in only 6 days, I was interested, so I read it! Pretty simple huh? Now wrapping your mind around any construction project you see try to imagine anything being done in a matter of days let alone weeks. I have been watching a remodel of a grocery store near my house for over 2 months and the demolition and reconstruction of another grocery store nearby also for 3 months. Neither project has made any great progress in a matter of days, though the tear-down of the one store was pretty quick, about 3-4 days and another week+ to haul away the debris. Now that you have read my examples and thought of your own, read the article I linked above, it is very brief and then watch the video posted here below. Enjoy!

Lite-Brite Video

This is a really impressive music video that was done with a Lite-Brite. Another really amazing music video was in a post earlier this year on the Mullet of Blogs. I found this video in a piece I read this afternoon, here. Enjoy!

Climb Dance

Before Gran Turismo video games or any of the ultra graphics systems and games that have come around in the last few years, there was film and television. This 1989 5-minute film is really fun and I just couldn't look away. This is the Pikes Peak race to the top of the 14000+ foot peak. Just watch and enjoy!

Train Set - Awesome Train Set!

This is pretty darn awesome! I got the text of this post and the pictures out of an email that was forwarded to me and there is a video at the end that is really a must-see.

This is the world's biggest train set.Covers 1,150 square meters / 12,380 square feet…Features almost six miles of track and is still not complete…Twin brothers Frederick and Gerrit Braun, 41, began work on the 'Miniatur Wunderland' in 2000. The set covers six regions including America , Switzerland , Scandinavia , Germany , and the Austrian AlpsThe American section features giant models of the Rocky Mountains, Everglades , Grand-Canyon etc…...and Mount RushmoreThe Swiss section has a mini-Matterhorn The Scandinavian part has a 4ft long passenger ship floating in a 'fjord' It is expected to be finished in 2014, when the train set will cover more than 1,800 square meters / (19,376 sq ft) and feature almost 13 miles of track, by which time detailed models of parts of France, Italy and the UK will have been added…It comprises 700 trains with more than 10,000 carriages and wagons The longest train is 46ft long The scenery includes 900 signals, 2,800 buildings, 4,000 cars - many with illuminated headlights... ...and 160,000 individually designed figures Thousands of kilograms of steel and wood was used to construct the scenery... The 250,000 lights are rigged up to a system that mimics night and day by automatically turning them on and off The whole system is controlled from a massive high-tech nerve centre In total the set has taken 500,000 hours and more than 8 million euro to put together, the vast majority of which has come from ticket sales Here is a video from their website that is pretty darn cool as well!

Timescapes

A friend of mine posted a trailer clip of this on facebook today and it was pretty awesome so I wanted to share a few more here. The website is timescapes.org where you can watch more trailers.

TimeScapes: Rapture from http://vimeo.com/timescapes on Vimeo.

Timescapes Timelapse: Learning to Fly from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.