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Close calls from dashcams in Russia.

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First, some superlatives: In the country where the smallest man in the world resides, a Russian successfully landed the highest base jump in history from the tallest mountain on Earth, which was summited weeks later by the oldest man ever to do so.

On May 5th, Valery Rozov leapt from a peak on the mountain’s north face, 23,690 feet above sea level. The stunt was in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first summit of Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. A few weeks after this, the oldest man to climb Everest, Yuichiro Miura of Japan, summited for his third time.

Miura is probably the crazier of the two. He first climbed the mountain at the over-ripe age of 70, then again at 75, and unbelievably again on the 23rd of May, 2013, at 80 years old. It’s a couple more astounding achievements to pin to Everest, but also a reminder of how the enigma of the mountain has been unveiled over the decades since the first ascent.

Josh Orter takes back-of-the-napkin math to the next level with Stupid Calculations, which promises to turn practical facts into utterly useless ones. Stupid calculation number one is the size of a giant iPhone screen if you combined all the iPhone screens ever sold into one.

The eye-glazing calculations are laid out below for those who appreciate the dirty work but, skipping ahead, the Kubrick-inspired monophone would stretch 5,059 feet into the sky and have a base measuring 2,846 feet across (Central Park is 2,640 feet wide). Its surface area would take in 2.07 billion square inches. That's 14.39 million square feet or 330.54 acres. The new World Trade Center, by comparison, will have a surface area of 23 glass-clad acres, giving us enough screenage to watch Game of Thrones on all four sides of fourteen WTCs.

See also how long it would it take to drink the water in an olympic-sized pool through a straw.

If you went to prom in a giant, sweaty do-it-yourself duct tape prom dress, a mullet and a Realtree hat, you might relate to these photos of the 30 most embarrassing prom photos ever:

The post The 30 Most Embarrassing Prom Photos Ever appeared first on Runt Of The Web.

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Annnnd begin.

Irish war photographer Richard Mosse has traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo three times in the past three years—he's made it his mission, he says, to document a war so deep-seeded and tragic that it challenges "the limits of description." To describe the indescribable, Mosse has developed a unique methodology: he shoots using Kodak Aerochrome, a rare infrared film originally developed by the military to spot camouflage from above.

We've covered Mosse before, back in 2011, when his first still images were shown in London under the title Infra. But this week at the Venice Biennale, Mosse will unveil The Enclave, a film documentary shot over the past year in the interior of the country. Projected on dozens of massive screens within a darkened gallery, Mosse describes the film as an attempt to move viewers out of their ambivalence, using a one-two punch of extreme beauty and extreme violence:

Beauty is the main line to make people feel something, the sharpest tool in the box. If you're trying to make people feel something—if you're able to make it beautiful, they'll sit up and listen. Often, if you make something that's derived from human suffering or war, and if you represent that with beauty, it creates an ethical problem in the viewers' mind. And so then they're confused, and angry, and this is great—because you got them to actually think.

It's strange to frame war photography as a pursuit of beauty; In a way, Mosse is brandishing our own ambivalence as a visual weapon. If you can't make people pay attention to the reality of war, make war into something people do pay attention to: beauty. Check out the whole video above. [Richard Mosse]

everybody-loves-to-eat:

red velvet everything.

For the last month or so photographer Yume Cyan has been shooting some magical long exposure photographs of fireflies in a forested area around Nagoya City, Japan. By keeping the camera’s shutter open at a low aperture Cyan captures every bioluminescent flash of each insect resulting in dotted light trails that criss-cross the frame. You may remember a similar series of photographs also shot in Japan from back in 2011. You can see these a bit larger over on 500px.

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Last year at an event in Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed he'd come up with the idea for an entirely new form of transportation. He called it the Hyperloop, and here's how he described it:

...How would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train... it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There's a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.

Naturally this got people's curiosity up, and at this week's AllThingsD conference he was asked about it again. Not wanting to divert attention from Tesla, he briefly allowed that the Hyperloop would be a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table."

This sounds a lot like the futuristic ET3, or Evacuated Tube Transport Technology, we wrote up last year (pictured directly below and up top).

Customer: “Hi, I’m looking for Tolkien’s books.”

Me: “Alright, which ones?”

Customer: “The four he wrote.”

Me: “Well, ma’am, he wrote more than just four books.”

Customer: “The Lord of the Rings.”

Me: “Ma’am, not to be rude, but The Lord of the Rings is only three books.”

Customer: “The first one of that trilogy then! The Hobbit!”

Me: “I’m afraid we don’t have any copies of that at the moment.”

Customer: “Oh. Well, do you have anything else by Tolkien?”

Me: “Well, we do have The Silmarillion—”

Customer: “I don’t speak Spanish. I guess I’ll try at one of the other stores, thanks.”

In a move that is sure to please a number of people within the promotion, the UFC has raised the acceptable threshold for marijuana metabolites in a given fighter’s system.

The Nevada State Athletic Commission’s Steroid and Drug Testing Advisory Panel met this past weekend to discuss a number of issues, and one was the issue of marijuana testing, especially marijuana testing for international events. When putting on events in other countries, the UFC acts as its own regulatory body, but the promotion’s current threshold of 50 ng/mL is just a third of the newly-deemed acceptable level of 150 ng/mL set by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

UFC Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Marc Ratner said that the promotion will raise its threshold to meet that of the WADA.

“When we self-regulate around the world, we are going to go the WADA standard of 150,” Ratner told MMA Junkie. “So we’re starting that immediately.”

Ratner added that the Brazilian MMA Athletic Commission will also change its threshold to meet the WADA standard. The change will go into effect during the next event in Brazil, UFC on FUEL 10, which will be held in Fortaleza on June 8.

A change in marijuana testing could reduce the number of fighters who are suspended or fined for testing positive. Since 2012, at least seven fighters have tested positive for marijuana. Several of the commissioners supported increasing the threshold, including NJSAC regulator Nick Lembo.

“I leave medical decisions to medical personnel,” Lembo said. ”But my personal feeling is that I would much rather focus on obvious performance-enhancing drug use like steroids and blood doping.”

There is no word from UFC president Dana White about the change, but White has said in the past that he didn’t think marijuana should be a banned substance because he doesn’t think it is performance enhancing. White said his personal feelings don’t matter, however, and that there are rules the fighters need to follow.

Do you think the NSAC made the right decision raising the marijuana threshold?

UFC Increases Marijuana Limit For Fighters is a post from: The Inquisitr