I used to feel that I had some prowess at stacking restaurant coffee creamers. I would regularly stack them, towering high, more than 20 at a time — often, I’d run out of the coffee creamers at my table and adjacent tables, before the towers toppled.

Sometimes, I’ve stacked other things. And who hasn’t stacked coins?

This guy? This guy humbles me.

And by extreme, I obviously mean “suspended from the balloon, 10,000 feet off the ground, with hooks embedded in the skin of your back.”

And if you like this 30 second clip (no sound, apparently?) you’ll be thrilled to learn that it’s just part of a documentary called Feet Off The Ground that is being filmed.

News station KATU has the story:

34-year-old Zane Whitmore of Seattle (he used to live in Portland). He was pierced four times across his shoulder blades and the balloon was released over California’s Long Valley Caldera. The flight, which was on Saturday, lasted about 75 minutes.

“I felt like I was flying,” Whitmore said in the press release. “It was amazing to have a perspective on a landscape that no one has had before. As I drifted down low I was struck by the movement I saw on the ground, by how much life exists in the desert. It was actually a very peaceful experience.”

(here, via Boing Boing)

But I found his blog from this video he uploaded to Vimeo. His description says it all:

the day before I shot this video, i was [stand-up paddle] surfing with a couple friends and 2 sharks circled us for about 15 minutes. the next day, i decided to go back out at around the same time and take my GO PRO HD camera mounted on a 10 ft pole and do some exploring.
Sure enough within 5 minutes a 9 ft shark came out of no where and circled twice and slapped his tail on my board before disappearing. then a minute later a 7 ft young juvenile Great White swam circles around me for 12 minutes.

Not precisely the reaction I would have had, but the video is an amazing, scary look at sharks in fairly shallow water — and without the protective cage that they’re normally filmed from.

This is like the amateur version of Shark Week.

When you’ve got that much lightning action, you’re bound to overlap a few times. And that’s exactly what’s captured on video here — lightning strikes all three of the tallest buildings in Chicago. Simultaneously.

(Via Coudal.)

John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France each have won two sets, and they are tied in the fifth set at an incredible 59-59.

Better than the game, perhaps, is the coverage of this marathon.I particularly like Xan Brooks at the Guardian:

4.05pm: The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It’s tennis’s equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they’re watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.

On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.

Ooh, I can see the football out of the corner of my eye. England still 1-0 up!

Buzzfeed has highlights, but it’s almost better to read through the whole thing.

I guess we just didn’t ever get big enough hail.

Fast-forward to about 1:30 if you really wanna see it get crazy.

I think I may have to rethink that. I’ve recently come across two posts that detail infographic style resumés, and some of them have just blown me away.

Apparently, this is one of the first of the genre, by Michael Anderson:

Click on it, to see it full-size, or just take a little snippet, like the bottom, left-hand corner:

I can’t say that it adds anything to the “professional experience” or the “education and awards” aspect of a traditional resumé, but it sure gives me a great sense of the guy.

Since then, there’s been a relative explosion in the style. A lot of people seem influenced by the original, above. Others are doing interesting things with timelines and subway maps, as well as all the various forms of graphs.

But look at this Cthulhu of a resumé:

It’s by Gabriele Bozzi. Again, click on it, if you’d like to see it full-size. I think if you were sending an 11×17 resumé for some reason, this might work really impressively, but on my screen, at least, it’s too difficult to follow and make sense of. I definitely get a sense of a detail-oriented person, however.

There are plenty more examples, but I don’t want to give a whole overview of them here — two other people have already dont that. Check out the 18 compiled by Randy Krum at Cool Infographics. Or, Javier Tordable, a software engineer at Google, who goes through a few from other people before creating his own with interactive Google tools.

Amazing work. Guess I’d better dust up my skills!

Start: May 8, in Nova Scotia. He’ll wade into the Atlantic and start swimming. All the way across. To Britain.

From Britain, he’ll hop on a bike and start cycling. Across Europe. And then Asia. Through a Siberian winter.

After crossing the Bering Strait (I don’t think he’s swimming it, but I won’t rule it out) he’s going to ditch the bike and lace up some runners. For a very long run. From Alaska all the way down to New York City.

Which he plans to reach somewhere around the end of 2011.

Wow. According to The Guardian, Martin has been intentionally putting on weight, so that he looks, well, chubby:

“At 6ft 5in and 22 stone [about 310 pounds] I’m not your average athlete,” he said. “It’s something I’ve consciously done. I need to gain weight for the cold, to get as much stuff between my internal organs and the ocean that’s trying to kill me. I think I’ll need 7,000-9,000 calories to sustain me each day and odds are that isn’t going to happen every day at sea. So it’s a calorie reserve and it helps with the buoyancy. The benefits of being chubby far outweigh the downsides for the swimming leg.” …

“The plan is to lose about a stone and a half every month for the first 10 months through the swim and the cycle so that I’m down to about 12-and-a-half stone [175 pounds] for the run.”

He’s previously cycled from South Korea all the way to South Africa, so he has some experience in long-distance, extreme style sports, but on his blog, he notes that spending all that time on the bike doesn’t leave you in great condition, necessarily:

When I finished my last bike ride in Cape Town in 2008 my back and shoulders were ruined from 14months and 22000miles of pedalling, my legs were unbalanced and completely unflexible and I had tiny wasted upper body and core muscles. I couldn’t swim more than 400metres in one go and my swimming technique could best be described as sloppy.

The £200,000 that the trip will cost is apparently being covered by corporate sponsors, but he’s accepting donations, which will all go towards his foundation, to help educated underprivileged children.

When I was in junior high, a solar oven, made of a small parabolic mirror, was a popular science fair project, and it was also much ballyhooed as a solution for the developing world or for science-y camping. Nowadays, I’ll bet it’s touted as a carbon-free environmental solution.

I even saw a speculative pseudo-science piece on A&E once that said such mirrors could have been the fabled Greek Fire. (Unlikely.)

But I never thought of supersizing it! Imagine the gold medals I would have won if I had had a solar oven that could melt steel.

So, how do you feel about your homemade guacamole, with that artfully shredded cheese, now?

I joked recently that card shuffling and the one-handed cut was the only practical thing I recalled learning in high school.

But now I feel inadequate:

Yes, it’s kind of an ad for clothing, and also for the magic instruction of Dan and Dave, but it’s also a pretty spectacular display of dexterity. Wow.

The curious little boy inside me wishes that they had spent some time (even with the chorus) exploring things like cutting the church off its foundation, and whether or not there was a basement. But still pretty cool!

(via Coudal)

No, there are no jetpacks, and no good flying cars. But my cellphone is basically about 2/3 of a tricorder.

And now there are genetically-altered bacteria that you can air-drop over a minefield, and they will glow where the landmines are.

From the BBC:

The bugs can be mixed into a colourless solution, which forms green patches when sprayed onto ground where mines are buried.

Edinburgh University said the microbes could be dropped by air onto danger areas.

Within a few hours, they would indicate where the explosives can be found.

But the real kicker? The project is student-led. This isn’t weird-o lab science. This is hands-on learning.

Wow.

If nothing else, the idea of bomb-proof wallpaper is a great excuse to smash wrecking balls into brick and film it for the Internet’s enjoyment.

However, the darn thing seems to work! Of course, I’m a little skeptical — if that’s a load-bearing wall, then wouldn’t the weight of the floors above collapse the building no matter what flexible wonder-wall is keeping the bricks together?

The designers say:

covering an entire room takes less than an hour. The wallpaper is so effective that a single layer can keep a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall, and a double layer can stop blunt objects (i.e. a flying 2×4) from knocking down drywall.

See more here.

Scientists now believe that this is the start of a new ocean, which will open up over the course of the next million years or so.

Wow.