The only good free-to-air TV station in Australia is SBS. It’s mostly government funded, and its charter to screen content that is designed for marginal and ethnic audiences. So it screens a lot of foriegn language movies and lots of stuff with genuine cult appeal. It’s done a whole bunch of new idents, and they are AMAZING. Some were done by Sydney studio, Mighty Nice, and some weren’t, but credits have been hard to track down. Enjoy.

From New Scientist, via Derrin Brown’s blog:

IMAGINE you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn’t.

Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round.

The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769). “If one competitor is strong and the other weak, it won’t change the outcome of the fight,” says Norbert Hagemann, who led the study. “But the closer the levels, the easier it is for the colour to tip the scale.”

This is just the latest piece of research suggesting that exposure to certain colours can have a significant effect on how people think and act. Up to now most of the research has focused on red clothing in sport, but other colours and settings are being investigated too. It is becoming clear that colours can have an important, unappreciated effect on the way your mind works – one that you really ought to know about.

More incredible work from Blu. The guy is a freak.

According to this post on Forgetomori, it looks like that snake might not have had arms at all. It just ate too much.

“I would say the poor animal had a lateral burst and the leg of its last meal is coming out. Or, better yet, its arm. I suspect it’s a frog’s arm – modern frogs and amphibians have four fingers in their front legs, in general, without claws.”

Just like this poor guy.

A hilariously catty article from the Telegraph: Dan Brown’s 20 Worst Sentences.

My favorite:

The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué.

A keen eye indeed.

Zach Galifianakis is very funny man. Since stealing the show in The Hangover, he’s started doing a series of awkward interviews for funnyordie.com descriptively titled ‘Between Two Ferns’. There’s some lovely weird moments in here. And for some pure Galifianakis genuis, you need to see Tim & Eric’s Absolut Vodka series.

Everyone loves to talk about the Beach Boys’ amazing vocal harmonies. Now someone has gone to the trouble of stripping away all the instrumentation, so we can hear the vocals in isolation. The results are truly beautiful.

I’m not sure I can believe this. It’s completely frightening, it can slither and scratch. Yipes!

I have missed you it’s true. I promise to love you more. So much so, I’ll make you a packed lunch that looks like the below. How could you resist.

Though I have become quite obsessed with the Japanese cuisine of late, this had taken the bento box to another level.

There’s the turkey roll, and, my favourite, the peanut butter, chocolate and banana roll for desert. Those little jelly things are mini cocktails. Yipes.