Apparently, it’s illegal to carry a plank alongside a pavement in London. It’s illegal according to Metropolitan Police Act 1839 para. 54. If you get caught, technically have to pay a fine of up to £500! So if you are Londoner, don’t even think about it!

Other silly laws include:

1. Carrying a plank along a pavement.

2. Singing profane songs in the street.

3. Sliding on ice or snow.

4. Being drunk in a pub.

5. Defacing money.

6. Flying a kite in a public place.

7. Firing a cannon within 300 yards of a house.

8. Playing knock-down-ginger (also known as ding-dong ditch)

9. Shake a doormat in the street after 8 a.m.

10. Handling salmon in suspicious circumstances.

Watch two guys making fun of it and breaking each of these laws in London:

There will be 51,376 centenarians in Japan as of Saturday, a 7.5% increase from the previous year. Japanese women, who are frequently at the top of the list as the demographic with the world’s greatest longevity, comprise about 87% of the tally.

via blogs.wsj.com

Apparently a lot of men have issues in the men’s room when somebody is looking at them, especially stunningly beautiful women. Watch this prank with realistically looking ladies peeking out of LG UltraWide monitors set above the urinals.

The world’s original online alarm clock conducted a research about fear of darkness. This video explains how many people and at what age suffer from this fear, the reasons behind it and how to treat this fear.

You can find the static infographic version here.

I looked at a bunch of £1 coins today and to my surprise discovered that the Queen’s appearance changed with the year the coin was issued.

Click on the image to enlarge.

There is no secret to this trick other than placing coins one on top of another over of a magnet.

Coins will sit on top of each other as if they are defying gravity.

If you have a magnet, do try this at home. You can even prank someone by placing a sheet of paper over the magnet, as in the first image.

How many times have you thought of leaving the bathroom without having to make your hands dirty again? Well, this tool solves it. Every public bathroom should have it.

The Earth looks embarrassingly small in the solar system. To quantify its scale in the relation to the Sun, approximately 1.3 million Earths can fit within the Sun.

Yet, the Sun is an average star in our Galaxy. And not the brightest one, as you can see on Hertzsprung Russel diagram.

Dolores lives in Leipzig’s zoo. Other than looking scary without any fur, she is a friendly girl. She and other female bears in the zoo lost their fur coats in 2009 and it was not clear why this happened. Vets were left baffled by their condition.

Contrary to what many may think, only 45% of China’s land is properly populated. Roughly speaking, 55% of China’s land is empty.

Of the total population of 1.33 billion people, as many as 1.26 billion live in the South and Southeast, while the North and Northwest are hardly populated at all. This translates into 45% of China’s territory being home to 95% of people, with the remaining 55% of the territory containing only 5% of the population. To illustrate my point, light coloured areas on the map below comprise 55 percent of the country’s land area, but contain only about 5 percent of its population:

The provinces with low population density are the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet autonomous regions, Gansu and Qinghai. There, the density of population is somewhere between 0 to 50 people per square kilometer, closer to the lower end.

Expect to see hardly any people, empty surroundings and clean air (!) when driving in these parts of China:

To further illustrate my point about hugely uneven distribution of China’s population, have a look at the road map of China. You can see how there are so few roads in the North and Northwest compared to the North and Northwest of China.

On the upside, partly because of uneven distribution of population and infrastructure, North and Northeast of China remain relatively untouched, clean and stunningly beautiful.

images via nub1an.livejournal.com