The Ants Go Marching...

Time-lapse is fun. Top Men like how it educates and entertains all at once. This time-lapse demonstrates how those pesky ants can be so darn handy to have around for cleaning up stuff.

(Thanks Kara!)

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M. Nightmare

We interupt this blog for the following entertainment review...

As Top Fans of M. Night Shyamalan, Top Men went to see The Happening this weekend. We have extensively exercised the scientific method (gratuitously recited in the film) and reached a conclusion...

It was not written and directed by Mr. Shyamalan, but by his twelve year old daughter Saleka Shyamalan.

What a twist!

(We hope we're right for his sake.)

We now return to our irregularly scheduled blog...

Nothing To Sphere

Ever hear of Contact Juggling? Neither had Top Men until we watched this video.

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Beautiful Machinery

Top Men have a very strange mix of right and left brain. Arthur Ganson tickles both sides so he gets our second honorary Wohba Top Mention Award.

Arthur gave a presentation at TED in 2004 and the video has just been made available. Top Men were entertained, mesmerized, and amazed.

(Thanks Top Women)

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Mars Landing

Top Men like space. And Top Men like Mars. And Top Men think it's good for the Teeming Masses to like space and Mars, too. So we're giving you plenty of time to mark your calendars for the landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander on the evening of May 25th (only 10 days from now.) Mars landings are not simple - Mars is littered with slight miscalculations.

In honor of this rather amazing achievement we've provided two videos for your enjoyment.

The first is a NASA production demonstrating how the landing will take place. No airbags on this landing - it's a good old-fashioned, rocket-blasting, nail-biting, potential-crater-making touch-down. Fun!

The second is a foward looking video - anticipating Mars in the spring of 2020. Very fun!

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Momentary Lapse

Time-lapse photography is always amazing. But Ross Ching has produced this standout, high-definition time-lapse video that Top Men feel is worth bringing to your attention.

The video has some striking pans. And amazingly he used a digital SLR - not a video camera - to capture the footage. He also provides a full (and we mean full) making-of video to show you how he did it.

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Art-ificial Intelligence

Top Men have never seen any species besides ours paint anything recognizable - let alone a self portrait. Sure it's probably just a trained and repeated behavior, but we buy paintings this-weekend-only from starving artists who do the same thing.

Besides, let's face it, for some reason we secretly want animals to be smarter than us.

Watch and wonder.

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Flying Penguins

This amazing breed of antarctic penguin has adapted an astounding way to battle the cold. It truly is an amazing sight to behold.

But Top Women have discovered that after a winter gorging themselves on jungle berries, they're too heavy to take flight back home again. Their berry-fattened bodies are easy targets for jaguars. This unfortunate scenario has begun a dire trend as other species of penguins are beginning to mimic the behavior and learning how to fly as well. The potential mass exodus has biologists from all over the world very concerned. The antarctic food chain will be so disrupted that many antarctic animals may soon follow by beginning northern migration patterns.

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Musical Magic

Top Men are simply amazed at this video. Granted it's not a finished product yet, and there are bound to be some limitations, but this is one of those tools that Top Men would not have believed possible.

It just further reinforces the strange fact that the most important musical instrument any band needs is a computer.

Web site is here.

(Via Tinselman!)

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I'll Tak' The Low Road

Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland (or Spain) afore ye;

'Cause ye'll be dead!

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M-Tranced

What happens when whiz kids who play with Legos and Tinker Toys grow up and become Top People? They invent M-Trans.

The ability of the individual blocks to connect, disconnect, and transform is entrancing to watch - like watching the first stages of an evolving robotic life form.

Suddenly Top Women feel a chill run up their spine.

Movies
Spec Sheet

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Huygens Again

Top Men promise this is the last Huygens descent post. It's been over three years since the thing landed on Titan, but we just stumbled across a large version of a movie we posted almost two years ago. This is an all the bells-and-whistles visualization (and auralization) of just about all the data fit to print. Geeks rejoice!

Here is the movie.
Here is a detailed explanation.

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Striped-bergs

Who knew that icebergs could come with stripes. The scoop is that blue stripes are frozen water, greenish stripes are colored by algae, and brown/black stripes are rock/stone/dirt. Top Women love how the world we live in never ceases to amaze.

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Over the Line (Rider)

Before you watch the videos below, you should go play with Line Rider for a few minutes - then you'll appreciate the INSANE amount of INSANE work by some INSANE guy.

Monumental - 35,000 lines, 5 minutes in length
Transcendental - 126,000 lines, 4 months to make

If those give you trouble the YouTube versions are here.

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Physics Phun

So many fun physics simulations - so little time! Here are two more...

- Phun - Downloadable physics sandbox. (Windows only for now.)

- Sketch - Simple stick physics.

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