For example, the paddle steamer General Slocum disaster - http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27930055

I love how he paddles through benches in a flooded park, and how this is in the middle of a city. Also quite beautiful.

Questions:
Since when is a paper-thin plastic ping pong ball stronger than the wood paddle?? Shouldn't the ball be getting crushed against the paddle?

And how do you get a ping pong ball to move that fast?? Isn't it to light?

If you aren't paddling you aren't surfing, you're just riding on a board..
Unless you are being towed into some 40'+ monster. In which case you aren't really surfing either, you're displaying your massive balls to the world. I've been pounded into the sand by 10-12' waves and come up wondering how I survived. I can not even fathom something bigger than that.

The CV/AI (computer vision/artificial intelligence, I assume) challenge is certainly the more interesting part of this competition. The trouble I have with many man vs machine competitions is that it's often possible to design a robot that focuses on just one specific aspect of the game that it can do so well that it renders complex CV/AI work obsolete. Robots can often win in uninteresting ways that make the competition boring to watch. And humans can often exploit AI flaws or physical limitations of the robot to claim victory in equally non-spectator friendly ways.

In ping pong, if a robot can position its paddle in the right place to return a ball at all, it should be able to return it so fast that a human couldn't stop it. Strength and speed are the easy part. At the very least, the robot is pulling its punches (or more likely, it was not designed to punch as hard as it could have).

The competition just seems staged as a result. My guess is that both the human player and the robot are purposefully playing in such a way to create the most interesting looking match, rather than playing in the way most likely to win.

I went to lower and middle school in Texas, private and public. In public school I was paddled with the 'board of education' for refusing to say there was no such thing as a negative number in 5th grade. (private school had taught me that there certainly WAS such a thing by that point, but no one had taught my 5th grade teacher).
This is a great reason for other states to ignore Texas when purchasing text books, their board of miss-education has a clear history of ignoring or re-writing history, science, and (from my experience) even math!
When the board is populated mostly (or solely) with people that don't believe in public education, you end up with books and teaching methods designed to prove that point rather than teach. That's not a method others should emulate.

I'm no lawyer, but I think the citizens in this case didn't properly understand the law. Normally, they are right--the 4th amendment states that the police need a warrant to search a private residence. However, there are several exceptions to that rule including two that are applicable here--the plain view exception and the emergencies exception (see this link).

The plain view exception states that if the police have a clear view of what they believe to be illegal activity, they may enter a private premise without a warrant. And those airsoft guns, which from a distance do indeed look like real firearms, are in plain view from the street.

The emergency exception states that police may search a premises without a warrant if the evidence can be easily destroyed or moved before a warrant can be issued. In this case they had an anonymous tip that illegal activity was taking place at the location? If the citizens were actually selling guns, by the time the cops could secure a search warrant the sellers could have packed up all their stuff and left town.

I think in this case the fact that the guns were on sale in the driveway in plain view coupled with the anonymous tip gives police all the probable cause they need to search the premises without a warrant. I think if these people decided to be assholes and file a lawsuit claiming their civil rights had been violated or something, they'd be up shit creek without a paddle.

What I really wanted to do was get a whole bunch of the paddle balls and give them to the people standing in line waiting for a console. Then stand back and watch the carnage.
I have a feeling it would be epic.....

Screw you Xbox one and PS4 fan boys. I'm getting a paddle ball.

Putting the knives through the paddles could be possible. And cool.

The pineapple one is fake for two reasons:
a) it's not possible to practice it safely -- the margin of error is too small for humans
b) the odds of hitting the pineapple exactly horizontal in both x- and z-planes are too long
c) I frame-by-framed it, and the perfect cut in the pineapple appears before the knife hits it
I'm guessing that knife was made of rubber, or was CGI'ed in later.

The ping-pong ball one might be possible, but in this case, I'm sure it was faked. I think she had the ball in her mouth the whole time and the ball was CGI'ed in later like in Forrest Gump and the Bruce Lee one. If it were real, her mouth would have been open wider and longer before the ball got there, and she would have been using a sharp intake of breath to increase the chances of catching it.

Great show though. Upvote!

I don't. Maybe it disintegrated on impact, but there's still a hole in the paddle.

While I don't think this is what happened in this video, pressurized air alone could punch a hole in a ping pong paddle. Surely those dorks at Mythbusters have blown shit to bits this way.

Reminds me of a story my retired-Navy uncle told me of a guy he served with that worked in the boiler room on a ship. As he was working on a high-pressure steam pipe he saw something fall to the floor. It was his thumb. An invisible jet of pressurized steam escaping a needle-thin leak in the pipe cut it off.

Considering that this is the same thing as the paddle traveling at 900 mph towards a stationary ball, I'm surprised it wasn't the ball that exploded, but I suppose this has to do with the strength of domes/spheres.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Supersonic-Ping-Pong-Ball-Cannon-Shoots-through-paddles

900 MPH Ping Pong Ball vs. Paddle has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims on that post.

Supersonic Ping Pong Ball Cannon - Shoots through paddles has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.