Unconventional World Records

Like the classic tiger vs lion question, there’s no guarantee of the outcome of this battle.

Although rare, it would’ve been a very interesting match to watch. Apparently, only 4 cases have ever been recorded, and the alligator had won, or at least it was a draw.

The BBC reported in October 2005 that in one particular encounter, both died, with the alligatos’s tail protruding from the python’s burst midsection. The python’s head was missing: I wonder what happened to it?!

This was discovered by park ranges at the Everglades National Park, Florida.

The 13-feet long Burmese python tried to swallow the 6-foot long alligator whole, the alligator clawed, and the snake “exploded”. But by that time, the alligator was in no position to escape.

Usually alligators are the top of the food chain in the famed swamps, but the finding suggested that pythons pose a serious threat to the status quo.

Prof Mazzotti, a University of wildlife professor was quoted to have said: “Encounters like that are almost never seen in the wild… And here we are. They were probably evenly matched in size. If the python got a good grip on the alligator before the alligator got a good grip on him, he could win. The alligator may have clawed at the python’s stomach, leading it to burst. Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species. There had been four known encounters between the two species in the past. In the other cases, the alligator won or the battle was an apparent draw.”

Source

When I first saw its picture, I thought it’s just another photoshopped hoax, but digging deeper, I was shocked to discover that it’s a real plant, usually called the Peter Pepper, scientific name capsicum annuum var. annuum ‘Peter’.

It’s native to Louisiana and Texas.

It’s been called many other names, including Chilli Willy and Penis Chilli; and has been judged “Most Pornographic Pepper” by Organic Gardening Magazine.

Not surprising, since it looks like so:

Apparently it has always been grown more as an ornamental thing, rather than to be eaten, although it’s perfectly edible.

Sources
pepperjoe.com
chilly-willy.com
backwoodshome.com

Elisabeth Fritzl was 18 when she started to be kept hostage by her own father in a cellar under her home in a village near the town of Amstetten, Austria sometime in 1984. Hence, an innocent cellar became a dungeon, and her nightmare continued for 24 years, until April 2008.

Forgive me for immediately thinking that Austrians have a penchant for locking up people in cellars for long periods of time, no thanks to that other infamous case: Natascha Kampusch, now 20, who was kidnapped on her way to school at 10 in 1998. Her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil kept her for 8 years in a bunker under his house near Vienna. She finally escaped on 23rd August 2006. The 44-year old Priklopil, a telecomm technician / information specialist, killed himself on the same day by jumping in front of a train.

But Elisabeth’s case is sure going to be bigger - she’s confined 3 times longer, for goodness’ sake!

Apparently the house where Fritzl was kept

Her father, now 73, is believed to have sexually abused and beaten her all these years. Worst of all, he fathered his daughter’s seven (six surviving until today) children, the oldest of whom is 19 years old. In effect, he became his children’s own grandfather.

Strangely, all the kids lived with the guy and even went to school while all this time their mother was trapped in the dungeon.

Apparently Mrs Fritzl had it much much worse than Kampusch; where Kampusch was allowed out after some time, even following her captor on a skiing holiday, Fritzl was apparently locked up for the whole of the 24 years!!!

Naturally, Fritzl was found in an exhausted condition, but luckily stable condition and now under medical and psychiatric care.

Her father managed to trick everybody by telling that Elisabeth “had gone into hiding and left him with her children, only communicating with occasional letters.”

The case only came out into the open when the oldest child, 19-year-old Kerstin was admitted to a hospital after a bout with “a mystery illness,” which left her in coma for several days and is now fighting for her life.

The other kids are in their early teens. It’s to their credit that their school issued a statement saying: “the children are well behaved and have always had good notes in school.”

Source

The maker of some watches in Japan is trying to make it as difficult as possible to tell the time. Can you tell me what time is being shown by the following watches? And yes, they are real watches, and you can even order them online.

Give up? It’s showing 10:25.

If you think that’s complicated (personally I’d call it the Predator’s watch, like the self-destruct timer the alien in the movie wore), try telling the time from this watch, where even the website selling it says that it is “stranger than your mother-in-law”:

I give up too!

Source

Actress Megan Fox, 21 was named the world’s sexiest woman by top men’s magazine FHM for its 2008 edition of its annual poll, dethroning last year’s champ Jessica Alba, 26, who *only* finished 3rd this year, behind Jessica Biel.

Apparently “millions” of votes were received in total.

No doubt her starring in last year’s USD700 million-grossing “Transformers” helped increase her profile.

In contrast, the world’s most Googled woman, Britney Spears, barely made it to the top 100.

The rest of the top 10:
4th: Elisha Cuthbert
5th: Scarlett Johansson, 23
6th: Emmanuelle Chriqui
7th: Hilary Duff
8th: Tricia Helfer
9th: Blake Lively
10th: Kate Beckinsale.

FHM Online’s US Editor JR Futrell was quoted to have said, “Megan Fox is the deserving winner of this year’s FHM title. She’s young, she’s hot, she’s a rising star and her sex appeal has definitely transformed this year’s list. She’s got a great future ahead of her.”

She made no.68 in 2006 and no.65 last year, meaning her ascent is nothing less than meteoritic.

Source

… and I am not talking about equipment only available to NASA, to be put on the Hubble telescope to photograph distant galaxies or stuff like that. I am talking about stuff anybody can buy and carry around, if they have the resources of course.

In the course of upgrading one’s photography equipments, there might come a time where the usual elements of rivalry and “my stuff is bigger than yours” is taken to extremes, and showing off of the following gadgets or similar could take place.

First up, the ultimate telezoom lenses for your DSLR. The zoom range of 200-500mm is not extraordinary, but the maximum aperture of f/2.8 throughout the focal range is. Perhaps the wow factor is worth the task of lugging this 15.7 kg monster around. And yes, be careful, it might be mistaken for a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) launcher!

While a lot of tele lenses have a distinct cannon barrel look, Sigma have apparently done all they can to enhance that trait, giving the lens a leafy green finish. The end result is an extremely fast tele zoom lens that could easily be confused with a surface-to-air missile launcher.

If you think possession of the above makes you the king of the photography world, think again. Next up, a truly extraordinary lens, the Carl Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* 1700 mm F4, apparently the only one ever made 2 years ago for a Qatari. Don’t even think of lugging this around: it weighs 256 kg, that’s even heavier than The Big Show. It’s a 1,700mm f/4 lens medium format (equals 750mm in 35mm SLR format). It’s reputed to be the largest non-military tele lens in the world. You can guess that the price paid was in the region of several million Euros. Interestingly, the intended use for the lens is reportedly “antelope photography”.

The small blob on the right would be your camera

Next up is the world’s ultimate point-and-shoot digital camera. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the USD42,000, 5kg humongousity that is the Seitz 6×17”. It is unique in that it basically scans the view through the lens. End result: 160MB images in a panoramic format. It’s incredibly quick: a full-sized frame of 21,250 x 7,500 pixels is done in a mere 2 seconds.

Don’t you think you’d look rather silly bringing this around?

How about the world’s top DSLR camera? People usually rave about Canons and Nikons, but how about Hasselblads? Usually extreme high end products bear brands that most people never hear about; Hasselblad’s flagship camera is the Click here to read more

The Hottie and the Nottie, released in February this year, directed by Tom Putnam and starring Paris Hilton received “exceedingly negative reviews across the board,” including from top online movie review sites.

In April 2008, the film is ranked number 1 in the seminal guide to movies, Internet Movie Database (IMDb) bottom 100 (rating of 1.1 out of 10). That means, out of the hundreds of thousands of movies from almost 100 years of motion picture history, this is the pits, the absolute worst of the worst.

In the same month, Rotten Tomatoes said a mere 5% of critics gave the film positive reviews, out of 55 reviews.

Metacritic reported that it scored 6 out of 100 (17 reviews), meaning “extreme dislike or disgust.”

IGN gave it a 0 star review: “Hottie and the Nottie presents a problem because there are just no words to adequately express how clumsy, trite and deeply offensive it is from start to finish.”

Rolling Stone gave half a star: “the half-star was because it takes guts (or gross dim-wittedness) [for Hilton] to appear on screen again after House of Wax.”

You could be forgiven if you think reviews do not usually match the general public’s reception, but in this case, you’d be wrong: it was a total box office failure, a massive bomb. The movie’s collection on opening day was a mere USD9,000. It grossed only USD27,696 on its opening weekend. If you think that’s not too bad, consider the fact that it opened in 111 theatres! That means each theater only collected an average of USD249, meaning only 28 persons seeing the movie per theatre on its opening weekend, or only 4 PER showing!

Watch how the movie get bashed by top movie review TV show Ebert & Roeper (movie trailer follows):

Click here to see the video

The Riemann hypothesis (a.k.a. the Riemann zeta-hypothesis) was formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859.

As of today, 150 years later, it is still unsolved, despite intense efforts from many top-class mathematicians.

Fermat’s last theorem might have taken longer (300 years) to be solved, but the point is that it has been solved, whereas the Riemann hypothesis continues to confound the experts, despite the USD1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the first correct proof.

As for the rest of us, I think it’s safe to say that we don’t even *understand* the problem, let alone finding its solution:

The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is a conjecture about the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function ζ(s). The Riemann zeta-function is defined for all complex numbers s ≠ 1. It has zeros at the negative even integers (i.e. at s = −2, s = −4, s = −6, …). These are called the trivial zeros. The Riemann hypothesis is concerned with the non-trivial zeros, and states that:

The real part of any non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is ½.

Thus the non-trivial zeros should lie on the so-called critical line, ½ + it, where t is a real number and i is the imaginary unit. The Riemann zeta-function along the critical line is sometimes studied in terms of the Z-function, whose real zeros correspond to the zeros of the zeta-function on the critical line.

Wikipedia

I am still on about Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, The French First Lady, the wife of the President of France here.

On 26th of March 2008, the French First Couple went on an official visit to Britain. When Carla walked over to the Queen, she performed what could very well be the world’s most over-analysed curtsey:

Image source: dailymail.co.uk

Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail (UK) wrote that:

Not since Anne Boleyn has a woman curtseyed so deeply, so demurely or so calculatedly before a British monarch. When Carla Bruni-Sarkozy swept in to London to meet the Queen yesterday on her very new husband’s presidential jet, she was part Grace Kelly, part Jackie Kennedy, part Princess Diana.

Anne Boleyn was apparently a woman who lived 500 years ago.

A video of the curtsey (starting 0:50)

France’s first lady, Carla Bruni, 40 was a model before she married Nicolas Sarkozy in February 2008, less than 4 months after his divorce from his wife of 11 years, Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz.

On the eve of their official visit to Britain at end of March 2008, interest in a nude photo of her has been fanned. The photo taken by Michel Comte in 1993 and was due to be auctioned in the month after.

Pic of Ms Sarkozy at a banquet during the visit to Britain [source: dailymail.co.uk]

Then the BBC reported on 11th April 2008 that the photo has been auctioned for USD91,000, more than 20 times the expected price. The office of the French President declined to comment.

This is the first time in history that a nude photo of a serving first lady has been sold for profit.

To add more spice to the whole saga, Comte, 53 the photographer added that:
- he took hundreds of photos of Bruni over 10 years
- he has photos of her that are even more explicit
- “But she need not worry as I would never put them on sale.”

Link to the photo after the break