weekend diversion

Nothing to do with astronomy or physics (except for the perils of gravity), but this TV show is hilarious: Ninja Warrior. I don't get the channel G4 here in Tucson with expanded cable, but this is basically the Japanese version of the American Gladiators event: The Eliminator! If you have some time to waste, watch it sometime. The contestants and the annoucers are hilarious...

I remember being a kid and taking karate lessons. How cool was it to go somewhere for the purpose of learning how to kick ass? It was fun, of course, and one of the things you learned how to do was to attack (strike, kick, and punch) with your entire body, not just with your limbs. Maybe the coolest parlor trick we learned was how to break a wooden board with our bare hands. (I remember surprising the hell out of Leon Hodge years later in High School by doing it in a history class one day; Hi Leon!) We also heard the story that the way this worked was that you compressed air molecules so much…

Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to need to learn video editing to make this outreach thing work. I might do well to follow the lead of this guy, who's a Norwegian named Lasse Gjertsen, and who's posted a video of him "playing drums and piano." Well, playing drums and piano kinda. But damn, I would love to have those editing skills...

So I am preparing an audition video to be Dangerman this weekend, which will go up on youtube and get posted here next week. In the meantime, as promised for the weekend, I have a new weekend diversion for you: the archer fish, a.k.a. toxotes jaculatrix (hee hee). But what makes it so cool? Oh, I don't know, how about this slow-motion video: Did you see that?? It's a fish that hunts insects by shooting them with water, and then eating them when they fall into the water, often catching them before they ever leave the air! What's really amazing about this is that the fish needs to be able to "…