I had originally planned on doing something more coherent, serious, and possibly even editorial today, but then I decided to get caught up on my Twitter feed, and then suddenly I had all these awesome stuff to share, so guess what?

More random stuff shall be flung at your eager noggins today, so be prepared to either open wide or duck.

For instance, here’s a simply eye popping visual from the world of science, specifically, the fun you can have with super powerful rare earth neodymium magnets.

WARNING : The following video is rated NSFICP (Not Safe For Insane Clown Posse) :

I really want a copper tube and a big ol magnet like that now. That’s really happening, folks, no special effects, no video tricks, no strings, wires, mirrors, or sleight of hand. Just a strange and wonderful interaction in between the extremely strong magnetic field coming from the magnetic and, I am guessing, the impurities in the copper in the tube (copper being non-megnetic, if I recall correctly) which create just enough tug to make the magnet fall at a slow, majestic pace.

I don’t blame the fellow in the clip for saying he could do that all day. It is mesmerizing. To see something which seems so wrong and yet so beautiful fills me with a sense of wonder at this weird wacky wonderful world of ours.

It also gives me the idea of creating a sort of dynamic art piece, where a clear vacuum tube brings the magnets up to be dropped into a clear tube (yes, the hard part would be making a clear tube with the right spacing of ferrous rings to recreate this effect) and float back down again. It would make a marvelous visual, completely arresting. I could see such a rig being mass produced for the sort of market that buys other visual toys, although the magnets alone would make the thing fairly expensive.

But imagine just watching the magnets falling like they are in space… it would be would amazingly cool objet d’art.

Moving along, we have this rather neato little chart of what the sounds familiar animals make sound like to people who speak many different major world languages.

I am fascinated by the study of onomatopoeia around the world. After all, languages vary wildly in their approach to the problem of communication between humans, and for the most part, there is little commonality that is meaningful to us non-linguists.

But with onomatopoeia, we have a common starting point. One of the first things we learn as children is what sound the cow makes. Why? I think it is a sort of proto-language development step. After all, when we are small, we are much closer to being little animals than we are to being adult humans, and we are intensely curious about how all the other little animals talk.

And we take advantage of this, as adults, by using it as a way to engage our little ones in their first exercises in associating an image with a sound, which is exactly what we will want them to do when they learn to speak, read, and write.

Going back to the chart, the most variation seems to be in the dog sounds, which, as a friend pointed out, makes sense, because dogs come in a far larger variety of shapes and hence sounds than cat, ducks, or cows.

But for the most part, we are looking at the same basic sound represented in the phonemes of various different languages. Nobody out there thinks a dog goes “wooolah woolah” or a duck makes a sound like “hoooooooogah” or anything like that.

Good to know that we all have some things in common, isn’t it?

Finally, we have this rather extraordinarily epic piece of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic fan video, called simply PONIES : The Anthology.

Be patient, it seems like nothing is happening at first, but at about a minute and a half in, things kick off.

Oh, and there’s some fucking swearing, so you will just having to fucking deal with it.

In form, it’s rather like those Anime Hell or YouTube Poop videos, but less about abusing your brain and more about having a lot of fun with video editing, pop culture references, and (presumably) like totally every episode EVER of the show.

It’s really amazing how good people are getting at syncing the mouth animations from cartoons to pre-existing audio, isn’t it?

It’s getting to the point where you can make your own original cartoon show just from frames from another show.

Hmmmmm. Nah, too much work.