http://slyoyster.com

Hahahahahah.  No sorry, wrong video.  This is just. Um. Well, imagine if you were tricked into going on candid camera and then instead of tom foolery Panic Face King pretended to execute people in front of you and you had no idea it wasn’t real.  It’s like The Price is Right.  Except nothing like it.  Who’s the panic face kind now?

Move over Gundham.  It took $1.5 million to complete the so-called Kobe Tetsujin Project [JP], with the money coming from the city of Kobe, a handful of corporations and individual Gigantor fans, but now the city can lay claim to the tallest mecha-statue in Japan. 

The statue weighs an impressive 50 tons and stands at 18 meters (59.058 ft.).  For those scratching their heads, the statue is based on the giant robot from the 1960’s anime.

The Big Picture presents another excellent series of photographs to remember the first atomic bomb used during warfare. Many of the photos highlight the mass destruction of life and property that took place on August 6, 1945.

The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy”. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy – an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950.

Despite that, a second bomb was detonated in Nagasaki two days later.  Why the US Military didn’t detonate it in a remote section of Japan first to display the nuclear bomb’s destructive power, I’ll never understand.

Hmmm.  So this exists.  I’m just going to shake my head Japan and marvel at the stuff you come up with.  But the truth is, would you want to be friends with anyone who actually thinks eating boob pudding is what?  Funny?  Ironically cool? Anything other than creepy? [via]

Leave it to the Japanese to give you something you’ve never seen before.  Like ever.  This is from the anime show Kemonozume where adult kisses end by being chewed in half. Enjoy the rest of your day. 

Playing devil’s advocate here, if we’re going to be fair, at the very least, this didn’t end with any sort of tentacle mouth killing.  Which has been known to happen.  [via]

Today’s total solar eclipse as viewed from Iwo Jima, Japan.  The eclipse is not viewable in America, only Southeast Asia and it lasted 6.5 minutes.  The next partial eclipse to occur will be January 2010 and then a total eclipse on July 2010.

[via]

To help promote the 30th anniversary of Gundam, a 1:1 replica of an original Gundam robot is being built in Japan.

Word is that the robot will be officially open to the public in July, but from the pictures over at Dannychoo (which you should definitely check out), it looks just about complete.

“If you go ahead to the area where the robot is being built, you’ll come face to face with a complete life-sized Gundam,” claims Herman over at Dooby Brain.

UPDATE: One of the things missing from many of these photos was a sense of geography.  You couldn’t really tell anything about the statue since many of the photos were so tight and just made the 59-ft. statue look like a measly action figure.

Well, all of that has changed thanks in no small part to Koji Sasahara of the Associated Press (via Photo Journal).
Sasahara really captures the statue in it’s glory, protecting Tokyo from any mecha harm.  This is the photo of the statue I’ve been hoping to see.

Japan’s KAGUYA probe shot the surface of the moon in HD a mere 13-miles out.  The probe’s orbit has been decaying since it began circling the Moon and will crash on the surface at 18:30 GMT on June 10. [via Kottke]

I tried watching this commercial gif for oh about 20 minutes or so.  It took me that long to realize this might be the strangest wtf thing I see all day.  It’s all looking up from here.  I get the pizza and the hot sauce, but what’s up with the babies in a blanket?

Why do I get the feeling that Japan is constantly trying to wtf one up themselves every day.

We are officially one step closer to Judgment DayI understood that Sky Net was supposed to be an American company but apparently it was a Japanese-based network of scientists that laid the foundation for John Connor’s destruction.

The creators of the Child-robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, say it’s slowly developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship. [...]

“Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more,” said Osaka University professor Minoru Asada, as his team’s 33 kilogram (73 pound) invention kept its eyes glued to him.

The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and “clusters” them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.

Asada’s project brings together robotics engineers, brain specialists, psychologists and other experts, and is supported by the state-funded Japan Science and Technology Agency.

With 197 film-like pressure sensors under its light grey rubbery skin, CB2 can also recognise human touch, such as stroking of its head.

Is anyone as weirded out by this as I am? If you’re making a humanoid robot baby why does it have three fingers? I’m guessing this is a safety measure so we don’t confuse them with living 10 year olds. I wonder if there is cyborg priest out there salivating.

Thousands of humanoids could be working alongside humans in a decade or so, if that is what society wants, said Fumio Miyazaki, engineering science professor at the Toyonaka Campus of Osaka University.

“Robots have hearts,” said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota. “They don’t look human unless we put souls in them. When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.”

Yes that’s right he said “Souls!” Damn, I’d be more prepared for this if I could have stayed awake through all of Spielberg’s A.I.

Asada said Japan’s indigenous animistic belief system may also have readied people to accept human-like robots with minds of their own.

“Everything has a mind — the mind of the lamp, the mind of the chair, the soul of the desk,” he said, pointing at objects in his office.

“Therefore the machines should have their mind too. If we proceed in this study, machines may have something like a human mind or ‘robo-mind’,” he said.

These scientists are obviously off their rockers. We all know a machine can not have a soul… unless it is struck by lightning, pals around with Steve Guttenberg and is named Johnny 5.

One the thing for certain… we now know a side effect of generations of people living in the midst of atomic radiation is the inability to recognize creepiness.  [h/t]

Think you’ve had a tough life?  Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945 when the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns and stayed overnight before going home to, yup, Nagasaki – where the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Aug. 8, 1945.

Now 93 years old, Yamaguchi has been certified as the only person to survive both atomic bombs.

“As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognized as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Nagasaki city official Toshiro Miyamoto said. “It’s such an unfortunate case, but it is possible that there are more people like him.”

Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation — including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs — but Mr. Yamaguchi’s compensation will not increase, Mr. Miyamoto said.

[via Metafilter]