13 of the Biggest, Strangest, and Most Devastating Sinkholes on Earth

One day you’re feeling satisfied with the fruits of all your yard work. The next day, your lawn is a gaping pit of mud. That’s if you are lucky - it could have been your house, neighborhood or, say, local interstate. Sinkholes tend to appear suddenly, and while particular regions are famously prone to sinkholes they happen all over the world. It begins with an innocuous leak in a rusty pipe. The earth beneath your feet quietly erodes until one day…whoosh. Whole buildings have been sucked into sinkholes. Entire roads have been knocked out. Here are some of the biggest and baddest sinkholes in the world.

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How to Build A Skateboard Launch Ramp

Building a skateboard launch ramp follows all the basics for building a large scale structure, only it’s much easier. First you have to decide upon your radius. Ten to Twelve feet is nice for mellow launch ramps and Eight to Ten Feet is better for an all around street quarterpipe. Cut two matching transitions and connect them with joists or cross braces and cut them to your desired width. Lay your plywood level with the sides and bottom of the ramp and screw or nail it down. You will now want to put masonite on the top of the plywood. One sheet of masonite and 2 sheets of plywood will be plenty strong. You will want to bevel the bottom edge of the plywood and Masonite to make the street to ramp transition smoother. Or if you really want to get trick use a piece of sheet metal as the middle man between the ramp and the surface. This will make your ramp last longer and you will not wear the masonite or plywood as quickly this way. This is a launch ramp you will want to move it around so you can cut holes in the sides of the ramp so you can move it around with ease.

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TOP 10 COOLEST COMMERCIALS BY MOVIE DIRECTORS

Advertising is now as big a part of movies as actors or special effects – it's a cold, hard fact of life that wherever there are eyes trained on a screen, there'll be some pen-chewing dickwad executive willing to cram a commercial on it. Product placement is all well and good, but what's the next logical step? Instead of forcing directors to sell your products in their movies, why not pay them shitloads of money to direct your commercials? The results are odd little mini-movies; an experience akin to hanging out with your favourite directors while they try and pick your pocket. We've picked the best of the bunch as an example of directors that have at least tried to turn advertising into art. Bend over and enjoy some corporate shaft: it's the future.

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Optical Illusions in Art

We love it when the picture plays with our mind

To achieve different angle, illusion or an unusual effect with only two-dimensional picture is a challenge many photographers and artists can't seem to pass by. The three-dimensional sculptures can increase the "I simply can not believe this is real" effect. But in every occasion we keep asking ourselves how the trick was pulled off, and such mind-games appear to be a part of the magic.

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HOW TO COOK AN ALIEN

The argument for eating Aliens

1. Aliens come here uninvited.
2. They ate Elvis.
3. They mutilate our cattle, and probe abductees by shoving probes in their rectum and performing other unspeakable acts upon unsuspecting victims.
4. They are plentiful, more plentiful than the strained seas and land resources, and they seem to be coming in increasing numbers (if you beleive what some people are saying).
5. They are Kosher meat.
6. They taste good if prepared well.
7. According to some,they mess around with the Space Shuttle, when astronauts launch sattelites.
8. Their meat is safer than British Beef.

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Korean beach

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Take That, Stupid Printer!

How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner cabal.

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How to get updated world weather maps as your desktop background in Ubuntu

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10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.

And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.

Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.

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How to move a 200-ton spectrometer across Europe

In November 2006, people living at Leopoldshafen, in Germany, witnessed a 200-ton container moving across the streets. It looked like an alien spaceship, but it was actually the main spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment, a project that will try to to measure the mass of the electron neutrino in 2009.

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Amazing 5,000-year-old skeletons laid on bed of flowers found in Sahara - proving desert was once green and lush

A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.

Researchers discovered the slender arms of the youngsters still extended to the woman in a perpetual embrace.

The remarkable cemetery is providing clues to two civilisations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.

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Johann Hari: We need to stop being such cowards about Islam

This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as "the Prophet Mohamed", so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it "a national security issue". Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones's publisher has pulped the book. It's gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticise religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticise government. We have to use it or lose it.

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This is your captain screaming

The plane was packed when, at 17,000 feet, the windscreen blew and the captain was sucked out. Nigel Ogden, who saved him by hanging on to his legs, tells his story for the first time to Julia Llewellyn Smith.

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Moytura

Many beautiful men fell there in the stall of death. Great was the slaughter and the grave-lying which took place there. Pride and shame were there side by side. There was anger and indignation. Abundant was the stream of blood over the white skin of young warriors mangled by the hands of bold men while rushing into danger for shame. Harsh was the noise made by the multitude of warriors and champions protecting their swords and shields and bodies while others were striking them with spears and swords. Harsh too the tumult all over the battlefield - the shouting of the warriors and the clashing of bright shields, the swish of swords and ivory-hilted blades, the clatter and rattling of the quivers, the hum and whirr of spears and javelins, the crashing strokes of weapons.

'The Irish Celtic Magical Tradition', Steve Blamires, 1992

The Battle of Maigh Tuireadh is the central story, the Jewel in the Crown of Irish mythology. It is a great epic tale of combat between the forces of Light and Darkness. The story was recorded in two versions in the sixteenth century; both of these, though they differ in some respects, follow the same thread which is thought to be based on a twelfth century manuscript. This in turn is known to be based on an ancient oral tradition which probably stretches back thousands of years. There are several folklore versions of the Battle, in particular Lady Gregory's version in Gods and Fighting Men. Here I offer my current version of this wonderful myth.

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Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years. (27 photos total)

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10 Most Decisive Ancient Battles

Everyone loves a good tale of battles and blood - which is clearly evidenced by the plethora of movies and movie scenes based on them. In this list, instead of just looking at great battles based on numbers or deaths, we are looking at battles that were strategically important or changed the methods of warfare. This list only includes battles from before the time of Christ…. read more at the bottom of the list.

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The 35 Greatest Speeches in History

If a man wishes to become a great orator, he must first become a student of the great orators who have come before him. He must immerse himself in their texts, listening for the turns of phrases and textual symmetries, the pauses and crescendos, the metaphors and melodies that have enabled the greatest speeches to stand the test of time.

There was not currently a resource on the web to my liking that offered the man who wished to study the greatest orations of all time-from ancient to modern-not only a list of the speeches but a link to the text and a paragraph outlining the context in which the speech was given. So we decided to create one ourselves. The Art of Manliness thus proudly presents the “35 Greatest Speeches in World History,” the finest library of speeches available on the web.

These speeches lifted hearts in dark times, gave hope in despair, refined the characters of men, inspired brave feats, gave courage to the weary, honored the dead, and changed the course of history. It is my desire that this library will become a lasting resource not only to those who wish to become great orators, but to all men who wisely seek out the great mentors of history as guides on the path to virtuous manhood.

I know that readers of blogs are often more likely to skim than to read in-depth. But I challenge you, gentlemen, to attempt a program of study in which you read the entirety of one of these great speeches each and every day. I found the process of compiling and reading these speeches to be enormously inspiring and edifying, and I feel confident that you will find them equally so.

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