Daily Photo

This was too good a photo to pass up.

Perhaps this DVD isn’t the best on the subject. (Try this one or this one or this one.)

There’s also the Marathon Training Assistant shirt. My dad used to race greyhounds; lovely sweet dogs, but, being bred athletes, you will get remarkable fitness walking them several miles a day.

I understand the people who made this also make one on training an adopted cat. Our adopted stray, Tabs, is at my feet now. Training him basically required supplying food on a predictable basis. He knows a good gig when he’s on one.

Photo: “I think this speaks for itself” by Jimena, posted to The Daily WTF, 23 January 2009.

As I say in nightclubs, having a camera means you’ll never need a pickup line. Spencer Tunick gets hundreds of people to pose naked for photo installations on a regular basis.

This photo is from Amsterdam in 2007, for the Dream Foundation. Tunick took the photo of women standing across a canal (on a perspex bridge, so it looks like they’re just floating there) and then put it in place over the same canal as an installation. This is it from another angle.

On May 6, 2007, he got about eighteen thousand people to pose naked in the Zócalo, the principal square of Mexico City’s.

I tend not to get that many models at once. Also, mine wear more clothes.

Photo: “20070623-173001-4908″ by reggestraat, taken 23 June 2007 in Jordaan, Amsterdam with a Canon PowerShot Pro1. CC by 2.0.

This is the world’s largest solar furnace, in Odeillo in the Eastern Pyrénées in southern France.

Have a look at the large version of this picture. See the pixelation-like effect in the reflection? That’s lots of flat mirrors.

Just imagine the bugs you could fry with this baby.

If you don’t have the cash on hand for that many mirrors and a building to mount them on, the goddamn lunatics at Google have achieved similar results with a Fresnel lens. Note the array of fried pennies. You can also make a proper solar furnace with a Fresnel lens.

Photo: “Four solaire” by Daggett2008, taken 29 August 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, banana-car! I have no idea who the dude in the car is or who made the thing. That’s in San Francisco, though.

This banana car appears to be a mutant bicycle descendant. There are a couple of batshit insane brothers, Steve and Spade Braithwaite, working on a truck with a banana frame body, though. “The project so far: It’s starting to look like a wireframe banana.”

There’s apparently a banana car mod for Grand Theft Auto, though I can’t find a site for it anywhere that doesn’t look like it’ll do unspeakable things to about half the people browsing to it …

Photo: “Banana car” by Mega Hammond, 18th September 2006. CC by-sa 2.0.

I’m Australian. So I think everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is wrong. (Which includes me, because I live in London.) We only play on the upside-down joke when selling you dreadful tourist rubbish in Swanston Street. Honest.

Why do seagulls fly over Australia upside down? So they can save it for New Zealand.

If you’re an American visiting Australia and want your compact discs to play, don’t forget to follow every bit of advice here.

What I want to know, though, is if, when YouTube did its April Fool’s Day upside-down video prank, the videos were right-way-up in Australia.

Photo: provenance unknown.

I must admit, I’ve cheated on this one — the original is indeed 3.2 kilobytes of severely overcompressed demotivator.

JPEG compression is a wonderful idea. The discrete cosine transform turns a series of points into a series of sine waves, which add up to form your image. You can drop higher-frequency components as you wish when making the image, thus meaning you can get a good-enough approximation at way better compression than you’d ever manage with lossless (as with PNG). The same sort of compression is used with video (MPEG) for the same reason: you’re basically not going to really see the difference.

The minus point is for things with sharp edges, such as line drawings or text. In which case PNG is going to be what you need to resort to.

Of course, there’s saving space … and there’s severely overdoing it.

Photo: provenance unknown. Clever, though.