Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

[smofbabe]

Gorgeous high-speed photographs at the Web Urbanist. (Descriptions of each set are below the photos.) My favorite:

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The photos are impressive; the utter inanity of many of the comments, rather less so...

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I wonder how they get an upright beer bottle to shatter when they hit it with a hammer. Wouldn't it just fall over and maybe break then? It's clearly not been fastened to the table, and nobody's holding on to it.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Depends on how you hit it. A slow tap will just knock over the bottle, but if the impact is fast enough to create a shockwave in the glass that outpaces the movement of the whole thing, it will break the bottle without immediately moving the base.

Here's a quick experiment based on the same principle. Grab the end of a mounted roll of toilet paper and slowly pull on it. The paper will unroll. Now jerk that same paper as quickly as you can, and watch as the paper tears before the rest of the roll can be sucked along.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Some lucky lady can go to cocktail parties and tell the story about the time she was hired to hold a cherry tomato while someone shot a bullet through it.