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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Top Snow

With winter ending tomorrow, Top Women thought it would be appropriate to send off the final flakes of frozen precipitation with a flurry (ahem) of awesome snow sculpture videos!

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A Bigger Tigger

At 100 times the size of a housecat (almost twice the size of a lion or tiger), this liger is what Top Women need to collect our many runaway lab rats. The catch is Top Men have to clean the litter box.

And we'd prefer a breed of liger without the skills in magic.

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Illusional

We interupt our normally scheduled post for this amazing optical brain-hack illusion. It takes a minute, but the effect is bizzare.

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πday Friday

Pi was calculated to 1,241,100,000,000 decimals in 2002.

Reciting those digits at four digits per second would take almost 10,000 years.

Makes Top Men feel like celebrating.

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Easy Glider

Kind of a Fred Flinstone meets George Jetson thing going here.

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