Amuse and baffle your relatives...

Creating life on a beach - sort of...

Check your wedding history free (for a bit)

To tie in with the Roayl Wedding, Ancestry.co.uk (one of the largest family tree tracing sites) is making the UK marriage indexes free for a short time.

They have more than 96.4 million records of marriages from 1837 to 2005, and The Royal Collection, detailing half a million people born into or descended from royalty, the peerage, nobility and the landed gentry free to access  from the 21st to the 30th April 2011.

Worth a look.

Cocktails for two...

A short memory from a long time ago.

Spike Jones and his City Slickers from 1945

3-D Pop stars - forget the real people...

Japan's newest singing sensation is a... Hologram. Really. They are actually selling tickets to projector concerts using a live band to accompany a virtual performers like Hatsune Miku. Regardless of being a Hatsune Miku fan or not, just seeing what technology can accomplish is pretty astonishing.

Miku's voice comes from Yamaha's Vocaloid synthesizing technology and is formed from a real person's voice,  Japanese actress (but not singer) Saki Fujita. So it can't really do everything.

Random Act of Culture

On Saturday, October 30, 2010, the Opera Company of Philadelphia brought together over 650 choristers from 28 participating organisations to perform one of the Knight Foundation’s “Random Acts of Culture” at Macy’s in Philadelphia. Accompanied by the Wanamaker Organ – the world’s largest pipe organ – the OCP Chorus and throngs of singers from the community infiltrated the store as shoppers, and burst into an apparently spontaneous rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus noon, to the delight of surprised shoppers.

That's the way to do it...

Many of those of us who travel from time to time would welcome this energy from a Philippines Airline:

The self importance award goes to...

Al-Ahram! Egypt's state-run and largest newspaper, whose editors weren't happy to see their Big Boss—President Hosni Mubarak—in the last place of this photo at the White House.  Fortunately, Photoshop made him win the race, even beating President Obama.

The photo was taken by Pablo Martinez Monsivais of the Associated Press, during peace talks in Washington, D.C. The Middle Eastern leaders—Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah of Jordan—were being guided to the East Room of the White House by President Obama.

This is the original

This is how it appeared in the newspaper:

Gizmodo

The known Universe

The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the precise location of every object ever observed in the sky. From quasars to pulsars to black holes to nebulas, it's all there.

The observable universe spans 13.7 billion light years, with the background radiation aftershock of the Big Bang as the oldest, and farthest, signal. At that end of the universe lies the oldest material in creation, which, thanks to billions of years of expansion, has accelerated to almost the speed of light. That layer forms an event horizon past which not even light can travel, ringing our universe in what is essentially an inside out black hole.

Clothes in the year 2000

Pathe news from about 1940