Archive for October 7th, 2009

The Biggest Threats To Our Youth

World Record Pumpkin Weighs 1,725 Pounds

It’s coming up to Halloween, and that means pumpkins, however there’s one pumpkin that puts all others to shame – it weighs 1,725 pounds!

The gigantic pumpkin was grown by Christy Harp – a math teacher from Ohio. Mrs Harp and her husband Nick, grow pumpkins on their family farm, each year engaging in friendly competition.

“Last year he beat me by 200 pounds. This year I beat him by 400 pounds,” she said. “Very good year! My pumpkin, my side of the patch! We separate the patch and never step foot on the other side!”

At one point in August, Mrs Harp said, her prize-winning pumpkin was growing 33 pounds per day.

The previous record holding pumpkin was a mere 1,689-pound specimen grown in 2007 by Joe Jutras of North Scituate, RI.

Link

Photoshop + Image Recognition = PhotoSketch = Win

PhotoSketch has got to be the coolest program that I have ever come across. It’s a piece of software created by five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, that uses Photoshop and image recognition technology to create a picture based on your sketch.

Here’s how it works:

“Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – anything from seagulls to a Mercedes, whatever tickles your fancy,

Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.

Step 3. PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop.”

Here’s an example in which a cheetah and a motorcyclist have been sketched with a desert background. PhotoSketch then gets to work and conjures up a mind-blowing picture.

Before:

After:

This video explains how it works.

Wow, just wow!

Via Mashable

Top CEO Compensation Ladder

Don’t be fooled – those aren’t phone numbers.

Via Digg

Shady Optical Illusion

Watch what happens to these 4 shades of blue when a pencil is placed in between each shade.

Google Logo Celebrates Barcode Anniversary

Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent of the barcode and to celebrate, Google has changed it’s logo to a barcode, which when scanned with a barcode scanner would read ‘Google’.

The first patent for the barcode was filed by inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. The original patent applied to a system that encodes data in circles and can be scanned in any direction. Through the years, this system has evolved into the rectangular barcode with strips of black and white line which is what we normally see on various items.

Via Search Engine Journal