putting the j in jjosh

There is something about the way the internet is so full of mind-blowing information — music, film, animation, large hadron colliders, etc. — that when you come across across something really great, a part of your brain lights up that doesn’t lght up all that often. I remember my friend Dr. Mercury telling me about experiments he was doing with fMRI machines that would image the brain activity during activities. He was involved with a study on humor. They would tell the participant a joke and then observe what part of their brain showed activity, hoping to get a better understanding of both the brain and humor.

The joke was this:

What did the elephant say to the naked man?

How do you drink with that thing?!

But to me the really funny part of the experiment was that they had to do a control group — a group where the participants were still scanned, but no humor was taking place — so they could compare the two. The control group joke went like this:

What did the elephant say to the naked man?

Hey there, naked man!

I love that so much. If I had heard the control part I would’ve cracked up anyway.

The point being, that this following science experiment, The Ruebens Tube, tickles some part of my brain that doesn’t usually light up. And it feels good. The guy fills a PVC pipe with gas, pokes small holes in it and puts a speaker at one end of it. He then lights the gas and plays tones through the speaker — fire EQ display. Amazing.

Great work, garage-bound American John Lennon. Culled from Wired’s Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos, linked from  Metafilter.