Look what happens on this podcast when the host clicks the button to play the podcast.

Snip from 1934 Los Angeles Times article about lizard people who lived in tunnels under the city 5,000 years ago. This legend is a long-lived chestnut. A hi-rez scan, more at Strange Maps, and: Reptoids! The Flickr uploader, vokoban, has lots of great stuff.

News story, auto-translated to English in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. More on Google Maps. (thanks, BB reader Kjetil Rydland in Norway!)

Video link. Actor Brian Cox attempts to teach Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy to Theo, age 2 1/2. (Thanks, Lisa Mumbach!)

Donald Scruggs of Chino, CA was awarded a patent in 2007 for a self-boring coffin. (Via Random Good Stuff)

The official Muppets Studio channel on YouTube just keeps getting better and better. First "Bohemian Rhapsody," now this: Beaker performing the Kansas prog-rock classic "Dust in the Wind," and being pelted by caustic overlay annotations from anonymous strangers. Video Link: Beaker's Ballad.(via Laughing Squid)

A Munich-based design studio is proposing a unique alternative to washing clothes by hand in developing countries. Swirl is the concept design for a giant candy-striped ball that you can stuff your clothes in; roll it around using removable handlebars or by kicking it around, and that rolling motion launders the clothes inside. It has the added benefit, the studio claims, of doubling as a giant soccer ball and a water transporter. What do you guys think? Good idea? Bad idea?

Swirl main page (via Inhabitots)

This article reports on people who think that playing with a pink Ouija Board can "leave a person's soul vulnerable to attack." Just think: this is the 21st century, and people who believe (or pretend to believe) this are currently walking the Earth. It's as amazing as discovering a lost tribe of Neanderthals.

It's designed for young girls ages 8 and older, but some say the mysterious product is a "dangerous spiritual game" that opens up anyone, particularly Christians, to attacks on their soul.

"There's a spiritual reality to it and Hasbro is treating it as if it's just a game," said Stephen Phelan, communications director for Human Life International, which bills itself as the largest international pro-life organization and missionary worldwide. "It's not Monopoly. It really is a dangerous spiritual game and for [Hasbro] to treat it as just another game is quite dishonest."

Phelan, who has never played the game, said the Bible explicitly states "not to mess with spirits" and that using a Ouija board will leave a person's soul vulnerable to attack.

New Scientist surveys the latest in wireless power, from highly directional lasers to magnetic induction. Paging Nikola Tesla -- your meme is ready! From New Scientist:

The idea of wireless power transfer is almost as old as electricity generation itself. At the beginning of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla proposed using huge coils to transmit electricity through the troposphere to power homes. He even started building Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, New York, an enormous telecommunications tower that would also test his idea for wireless power transmission. The story goes that his backers pulled the funding when they realised there would be no feasible way to ensure people paid for the electricity they were using, and the wired power grid sprang up instead.

Wireless transmission emerged again in the 1960s, with a demonstration of a miniature helicopter powered using microwaves beamed from the ground. Some have even suggested that one day we might power spaceships by beaming power to them with lasers. As well as this, much theoretical work has gone into exploring the possibility of beaming power down to Earth from satellites that harvest solar energy (New Scientist.

Long-distance ground-to-ground wireless power transmission would require expensive infrastructure, however, and with concerns over the safety of transmitting it via high-power microwaves, the idea has been met with trepidation.

I like this illusion.

From Forgetomori: "After a trip of 10 minutes inside this Mandelbrot fractal (be sure to check the HD version on Vimeo), the original image you saw would be "billions and billions" of times larger than the whole Universe."

The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were "actually" traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.

You might like to know that this animation took me about two days to set up. My computer then rendered day and night non-stop for just over a month to produce the animation. The resulting twenty-eight anti-aliased 1280x720 AVI files (each just under 2GB) were each watermarked at full frames (uncompressed) Then I stitched them all together uncompressed. I also added the audio track at the same time. This was all done in Virtual dub. (except watermarking) The final watermarked Avi with audio is a whopping 46GB - Then I compressed it to 495mb so I could upload it onto vimeo. I think it still looks fairly crisp
With the compression settings adjusted to achieve the highest quality, the resulting file size was about 1.5GB and looks absolutely sweet!

(by Garrison Dean for io9)

Often when we frown, it means that we're sad or grumpy. But how much does the frown also exacerbate the bad mood? To study this, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology PhD candidate David Havas tested individuals who had received Botox treatments to stop brow-wrinkling. The subjects were asked before and after Botox treatments to read statements that were angry, sad, or happy. The Botox seemed to slow down the time it took the subjects to read and understand the angry and sad statements but not the happy ones. This supports the theory that facial expressions do affect the brain's ability to process some emotions, a concept Mark looked at in 2008 in a guest essay on Good. From the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

"There is a long-standing idea in psychology called the facial feedback hypothesis," says Havas. "Essentially, it says, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. It's an old song, but it's right. Actually, this study suggests the opposite: When you're not frowning, the world seems less angry and less sad."

The Havas study broke new ground by linking the expression of emotion to the ability to understand language, says Havas' adviser, UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg. "Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language is disrupted."

Practically, the study "may have profound implications for the cosmetic-surgery," says Glenberg. "Even though it's a small effect, in conversation, people respond to fast, subtle cues about each other's understanding, intention and empathy. If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message."

Such an effect could snowball, Havas says, but the outcome could also be positive: "Maybe if I am not picking up sad, angry cues in the environment, that will make me happier."

In theoretical terms, the finding supports a psychological hypothesis called "embodied cognition," says Glenberg, now a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. "The idea of embodied cognition is that all our cognitive processes, even those that have been thought of as very abstract, are actually rooted in basic bodily processes of perception, action and emotion."

This is part of a series of over 2,000 photos in the Flickr group called World of Rear Load Garbage Trucks. There's a group for front load garbage trucks, too. (via Telstar Logistics) Photo via Pip Wilson's Flickr