Random internet links of interest

This is a thread for links you find on the internet which are worth sharing or talking about, but not worth creating a whole thread for, because people will post in that thread a few times, but then it will die.

First up, this article about a dude's winter visit to a massive, abandoned monolith honouring communism in Bulgaria:

http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2012/02/buzludzha-buzludja-bulgaria/

So crazy and awesome.

Amazing. I approve of this thread.

Some pictures of another visit there in less snowy months.

Wow, those are amazing photographs and a cool story about the building's history. Thanks for sharing.

I want to go to there.

Looks like something out of a communist Skyrim!

This thread yearns for Gary Whitta.

GET OUT OF HERE STALKER

I'm declaring this the "cool abandoned places" links thread.

Here's Worcester State Hospital. Scroll down and check out the galleries.

Unusual airbrushed illustration inspires cartoonist

From boingboing

I'm still wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes.

From the comments: "Rob Liefeld lives in Colorado?"

And check out the animated gif someone linked in the comments.

Live Penguin Cam featuring fat penguins.

SCP Foundation.

Not everyone likes this kind of shit but if you're like me and get really into creepy stories you'll love some of these.

Be prepared to lose hours there, though.

Astronomy Picture of the Day is always awesome but today it's especially awesome: interactive Flash animation about the scale of the universe.

Live Ice bear cub
http://www.polarbearcam.com/?lang=da

That's a great link, thanks for posting it.

The universe, as expected, is Very Big.

And also Very Small.

I've seen that animation somewhere before and the thing I don't like about it is that the zooming in doesn't give a good sense of perspective. I think I'd like it more if things moved left to right or something. But it's probably just not possible for the human mind to grasp how big Mars is when a Chlorine Nucleus is the size of a golf ball (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.).

No, I've checked out APotD before, it's one of those sites that keeps falling off my radar for some reason, then someone links to it again and I vow this will be the time I remember to keep checking it out.

I don't recall having seen APotD before I found today's link but I may well have forgotten. At any rate I've saved the URL now.

The scale of the universe 2

Goes all the way from the Quantum Foam right to the size of the known universe, with tons of interesting information in between.

So, if I were the size of Quantum Foam, and I wanted to picture how big a human is, I would have to imagine something a hundred million times larger than the size of the known universe. Great.

I'm a fan of Minecraft and all, but does the size of its world really belong in that "scale of the universe" thing?

The man's gotta get hits somehow.

If you were the size of quantum foam you would be continually obliterating and re-forming since physical energy conservation laws don't apply, so you would probably be more concerned about that the the size of humans.

This made my day http://www.visualnews.com/2012/03/16/travel-posters-for-lazy-people/

There appears to be no way to buy them in poster form. Fail.

Sand flea robot jumps to & from roofs.

Hotel offers free WiFi... with hooks to insert its own ads. I'm rather surprised this isn't already widespread. There are a handful of very popular websites, should be easy enough to recognize them and patch in your own ads.

His analogy is off though (as they ware want to be), they're putting ads on your postcards.

Visually is always good for a nice graph: US mean center of population from from 1790 to 2010

We're the happiest people on earth even though we pay our own weight in taxes every single day... or something.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/07/copenhagen-really-wonderful-reasons?INTCMP=SRCH

A bit on the rosy side, but overall true.

I had to laugh at the requisite "but Denmark only has 5mil peeps" line in the article, since someone here was just complaining about that the other day.

Otherwise, sounds lovely. I really, really want to visit / move to Scandanavia someday.

In case you were wondering, this is still the best site on the internet: Procatinator

One of many favorites:
http://procatinator.com/?cat=34

Oh those crazy Belgians.

IainC posted that in the Youtubes thread earlier today SuperJay.

Then you're welcome, I'm happy to make it make it even more available! :)

Haha, I saw that too Quitch. Who knew a routine day in Belgium was so hum-drum boring?