The Reality of an Olympic Medal

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Non-Athlete Holds 120+ Guinness Records

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Mr. Furman, a 56-year-old Queens, N.Y. native, currently holds 120+ Guinness Records. Despite considering himself a “non-athlete,” he started setting records at the age of 24 in 1979 by doing 27,000 jumping jacks. After that, he says, he was hooked on the rush of achievement. Since that Herculean exercise session, he’s managed to nab another 358 records. Some of them have since been beaten, but not enough to dethrone him from his Record Reign.




Not only has Furman set an unmatched number of records, he’s made sure to do them in some pretty fabulous places: Antarctica, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat. Out of all of the records and locations, he says his favorite is the time he pogo-sticked up Mount Fuji in Japan.


So why does he do it? Furman told Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that it’s all for the pure joy of challenging himself, succeeding and holding World Records – something he dreamed of when he was a self-described nerdy kid.

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Largest Individual Flower on the Earth

The largest flower in the world, the rafflesia arnoldi, weighs upto 11 kg (24 pounds) and grows only on the Sumatra and Borneo islands of Indonesia. Its petals grow to 1.6 ft (1 metre) long and 1 inch (2,5 cm) 
Image via Wikipediathick.


There are 16 species of rafflesia, found in Sumatra, Malaysia, Philippines and Borneo. The species is named after the naturalist Sir Stamford Raffles, who founded the British colony of Singapore in 1819. Raffles discovered the parasitic plant with his friend Dr. Joseph Arnold during their travels in May 1818. The rafflesia arnoldi is named after the two.


However fascinating and beautiful the rafflesia arnoldi may be, it is also called “corpse flower” and really reeks, the latter to attract flies for pollination.


Of about 200,000 kinds of flowers in the world, the smallest is the duckweed, which can only be seen with a microscope.

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7 Buildings Shaped What They Sell

1. The Longaberger Company, Newark, OH

Longaberger is known for its handcrafted maple baskets, so its headquarters are obviously shaped like a giant basket. Not just any old basket, though. It’s a Longaberger Medium Market Basket that’s been blown up to 160 times its normal size. The basket includes a seven-story atrium, heated handles that prevent ice formation, and two 725-pound gold leaf Longaberger tags. Want to take a look the next time you’re in Ohio? Longaberger has visiting hours!

2. Twistee Treat Ice Cream

Between 1983 and the mid-1990s, Twistee Treat opened 90 or so ice cream shops around the country, and each one is shaped like a delicious cone of soft-serve vanilla. Want your own towering cone? A completely stocked one in Zephyrhills, Florida, is on the market for a mere $475,000. Or, if you’re on a budget but good with tools, the same listing also offers “A Separate Dismantled Ice Cream Cone Building” at the bargain price of $40,000.

3. Kansas City Public Library’s Parking Garage

Parking garages are usually eyesores, but this one’s beautiful. The garage for Kansas City’s Library is cleverly concealed behind what look like the bindings of 22 giant books. What’s really terrific is that local residents got to help pick what books would get the nod for 25-foot renderings on the side of the garage. Some of the tiles that made the cut: Catch-22, Invisible Man, The Lord of the Rings, Silent Spring, and Charlotte’s Web.

4. House of Free Creativity, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

Kansas City doesn’t have a monopoly on book-shaped buildings, though. Turkmenistan cut the ribbon on this open book in 2006 as part of an effort to create a comfortable environment for journalists. Of course, “free creativity” may be a bit of a stretch. The journalists in question all work for Turkmenistan’s state-run press, and the country had no foreign or private media and very little open Internet access when the building opened during the reign of the late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov.

5. The Hood Milk Bottle

This one’s a Boston institution. In 1933, Arthur Gagnon wanted to open an ice cream stand in nearby Taunton, and he designed his new business to look like a giant milk bottle. After several changes in ownership (and a sail from Quincy to Boston proper), the structure is now known as the Hood Milk Bottle and resides at the Children’s Museum. It’s 40 feet tall and could hold 58,000 gallons of milk.

6. United Equipment Company, Turlock, CA

United sells and rents heavy equipment like compactors and excavators, so it’s only natural that the company’s headquarters building is shaped like a two-story yellow bulldozer. The bulldozer building, which opened in 1976, is “using” its redwood treads and giant blade to move a pile of boulders. 

7. The Phoenix Financial Center, Phoenix, AZ

Financial services made early use of massive punch-card-driven computers, and the Phoenix Financial Center looks as if it’s offering an odd tribute to this antiquated technology. The entire building has narrow slits for windows and looks like an oversized punch card. According to Phoenix’s municipal government, though, the resemblance was purely accidental; the narrow windows are there to minimize the effects of the hot desert sun on the building’s air conditioning bills. Nevertheless, local residents still refer to it as “the Punchcard Building.” 



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Small Fish Eats Big Fish?

The black swallower might not be the best known undersea creature, but it might be one of the most abhorrent. That’s because scientists have only ever seen them after they are dead—often after they have attempted to eat a fish so large that its meal eventually killed it through indigestion.


While scientists have never actually seen the fish eating, they speculate that it grabs its prey by the tail and slowly starts swallowing it whole, as its dinner rolls into a circle in its belly. Unfortunately, the black swallower is not too selective about the size of its prey, which often results in dinner starting to decompose before it can be digested. The resulting gas build up leaves the black swallower to float to the surface.

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Hairy Crazy Ants Attack America !

They are tiny, destructive and they bite - so whatever you do don't ant-agonise them.
A plague of pesky little alien invaders are causing mayhem as they spread across America.
Unleashing antisocial behaviour wherever they go, hairy crazy ants - sometimes known as raspberry crazy ants - have now made it to the southern state of Louisiana.

Antisocial: The hairy crazy ant is just 2mm long but is wreaking havoc across America


The 2mm-long reddish-brown pests are believed to have originally made it to U.S. shores on boats from the Caribbean before crawling from Texas and Mississippi.
They get their name because they are covered with little spikes and run around in little circles - as if they're mad.
And experts at the Louisiana State University's Agricultural Center are so worried they have warned residents that the ants are on the attack.
It follows the discovery of a colony at a home in Sulphur, near Lake Charles.
LSU entomologist Dennis Ring says they can get inside electrical boxes and short them out and even find their way into computers, televisions or other electronics and damage them.
He added that residents shouldn't have trouble knowing if they have a problem.

Troublesome: An ant on a circuit board


Mr Ring explained: 'Your pet will not stay in the yard, you will not go in your yard because in a matter of minutes you will have hundreds of ants on you.'
Zack Lemann, spokesman for the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans, said the ants gather in the thousands, bite people and overwhelm other ant populations in the area, either killing them or forcing them to leave.
He added: 'They make their nests in inconvenient places, their colonies can be extremely large, they do bite humans and often they do not respond well to control methods used on other ant species.'



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History Of Video Arcade Game

The first video game was invented by Willy Higginbotham. Willy was no teenage computer wizkid, however. In the early 1940s he worked on advanced radar displays for B28 bombers and went on to work for the Manhattan Project where he designed the timing mechanism for the first atomic bomb. In 1958, bored by the displays of the Brookhaven National Labs annual open-day exhibition, Willy designed a tennis game simulation, the world’s first video game. It was called Tennis For Two. Willy did not take out a patent but even if he had the royalties would have been paid to the US government.

Game development on main frame computers continued through the years, with Spacewar! being one of thefirst and certainly one of the most known games. Launched in 1962, it was programmed on a DEC PDP-1 by Steven Russell.

The first game console was called the Brown Box, created by Ralph Baer in 1966 to control a video home console ping-pong game. Baer sold the console to Magnavox Odyssey and went on to design the first game light gun for the Shooting Gallery game.

The first coin-operated video arcade game, Galaxy Game, was launched in September 1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. However, it was beaten to the commercial market by Computer Space, launched two months later by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. In November 1972 Bushnell launched PONG for his Atari company. It would become the first significantly successfull coin-operated video arcade game. Atari would continue with releases, including the famous Asteroids shooting game (pictured), legandary amongst ardent arcade gamers.

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This Rocket Car Running on Nothing but Air

Toyota Industries intends to apply for a Guiness World record for the fastest car driven by a compressed-air engine, after its Ku:Rin, as the vehicle is called, reached 129.2km/h (80.3 mph)on a test run earlier this month. This is a three-wheel, one-seater vehicle that broke the speed record for compressed air-powered vehicles at the Japan Automobile Research Institute test facility.





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5 Million Dollars for 1 Terabyte?

"5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte" (2011) is a sculpture consisting of a 1 TB Black External Hard Drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded files. A full list of the files with clickable download links can be found here.



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World's First Virtual Store

A major South Korean retailer has opened what it appears to be the world's first virtual store geared to smartphone users, with shoppers scanning barcodes of products displayed in a Seoul subway station. Homeplus, the nation’s second largest discount chain, is offering 500 items including food, electronics, office supplies and toiletries at its "store" at Seolleung station in the south of the city of 10 million.


Seven pillars and six platform screen doors have been plastered with images of life-size store shelves filled with goods -- such as milk, apples, a bag of rice or school backpacks -- which each carry a small barcode. Shoppers download a related application on their smartphone and make purchases by taking photos of the barcodes.

"You place an order when you go to work in the morning and can see the items delivered at home when you come home at night," said a spokeswoman for Homeplus.
In fact, consumers don’t have to be anywhere near the virtual store. For example, if you want to order replacements of a bottle of water that you have in your hand, you don’t have to stop by the subway station. You simply scan the bottle’s barcode with the Homeplus app. The products are delivered later to home or office.
Currently, only Android smartphone users will be able to use the service that launched last week. Not that Homeplus hasn’t made an app iPhone, it’s just Steve Jobs and Co. hasn’t approved it yet.

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Before & After Hurricane Irene Pictures

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