What’s the coolest thing about the Internet? Ask ten people and you’re likely to get ten different answers. But I bet almost everyone would put the ability to hypertext, or “link,” somewhere in their top five (I’d actually put it at number 2, just below the ability to Google, but hey, I’m the guy who writes the Tuesday Turnip, so maybe that’s just me.)

So what could replace the text link one day very soon? Well, how about a video link! The Economist reports that hypervideo, or clickable areas in a video that take you to related videos, is just around the corner.

From the article:

As the amount of video available online increases, so do the possibilities for linking clips together. Someone watching a documentary about the 20th century, for example, could click on the face of John F. Kennedy and be directed to newsreel footage of him. Further clicks might lead to the trailer for “Thirteen Days”, a film about the Cuban missile crisis, to an interview with protagonist-actor Bruce Greenwood, and to a film promoting tourism in Hollywood. Just as hyperlinking disrupts the traditional structures of written text, the same is true of video.

The question remains, though: how do you know JFK’s head is “clickable?” Well, apparently the new technology will allow editors to add highlights, the same way we do here at the _floss, with text. There might also be beeps, or audible cues, which, I guess will signal a whole new category of multitasking: hearing and processing two different sounds simultaneously.

Talk about keeping up with the 3-little-boneses…

Speaking of strange art happenings, I saw this on CNN, and was kind of amazed/disturbed. Apparently, 23 Adolf Hitler artworks (including 21 watercolors) were auctioned off yesterday for a total of approximately $220,000. The CNN photo gallery is pretty interesting because it showcases reaction from both sides (people who are rightly outraged by the event, and people who see the works simply as historical artifacts). It also talks about 2 so-called comedians’ attempts to disrupt the event, and it states that The Center for Military History in D.C. actually own 4 authentic Hitlers (but keeps them hidden in a locked vault). Crazy.

Of course, the most fascinating thing about the exhibit has to be the art itself. I’d always heard that Hitler had been an aspiring artist, and that he’d been turned down by a prestigious Vienna artschool twice, but I’d never actually seen his work. It’s kind of stunning to see that this horrific historical figure took so much pleasure in painting such serene and harmless landscapes. I’ve posted a few below, but you should definitely check out the CNN gallery to learn more.

While I can’t claim to understand the technology, CNN is reporting that French and Canadian art experts have uncovered the reason for the Mona Lisa’s half-smile… apparently, she’d just given birth! According to the article, scientists used special infrared and three-dimensional technology to look through the paint layers. A careful analysis by art historians revealed that, “the Mona Lisa’s dress was covered in a thin transparent gauze veil,” — something only worn by Italian women who’d just given birth. In any case, the evidence not only helps identify why Ms. Lisa was smirking about her situation, but also helps in dating the painting to around 1503. For more on the discovery, click here.

101 years ago today, Albert Einstein published the paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” in Annalen der Physik, forever imprinting into the minds of physics buffs (and mental_floss readers) the relationship between energy and mass when the speed of light is constant.

Also, um, happy birthday to Cosimo de Medici, Sam Adams, Thomas Nast, Meat Loaf, Shaun Cassidy, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lil Wayne, and me.

Included among the various oddities of a childhood spent in Pacific Palisades, California, are as follows: 1) Michael Keaton was my flag football coach; 2) I was big enough to start on the offensive line of said flag football team. At 75 pounds, 11 years old, I was hardly an imposing member of the line, nor was I so much a serviceable one — fear of physical contact being a poor attribute in a lineman — but the experience instilled in me a deep sympathy for the least appreciated position players in team sports. Here are these hulks of men, taking relentless punishment, recognizing that their hearts will give out years before they should — and although they make far more money than they did 15 years ago (left tackles are only out-salaried by quarterbacks now, actually), they’re barely respected for it. Do you know the names of all the starting o-linemen on your favorite team? Right. But over the past week, we have been reminded by excerpts of upcoming books and by the forced removal of Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms’ spleen that linemen are, in fact, germane to football success. So next time you’re watching Football Night in America, don’t forget who’s setting up those Manning-to-Harrison connections or creating those giant holes for Tomlinison to snake through.

Now that we’ve internalized that very, very important lesson, I would be doing a terrible disservice by screening YouTube footage of sweet offensive line play. (Why? Because it’s boring, and Jon Gruden and Bill Belichick probably don’t read a lot of mentalfloss.com.) So I’m going to show you what happens when blocking goes wrong. Or when a receiver gets led a little too far down the middle by a pass. Or when the demons of deepest hell come to inhabit a safety’s corpus. A pancake block may be impressive, but in terms of sheer entertainment value, does it match this?

POW! It doesn’t, huh? Don Beebe backflipping on his head, Earl Campbell bulldozing suckas… this stuff is YouTube gold. Here’s another hard-hitting highlight video, this time with non-Semitic rappers earning the musical honors:

KABLAM! I am frothing at the mouth. I am not kidding. I have detected froth. Now watch Lawrence Taylor end Joe Theisman’s career (wait for the reverse angle):

WHAMO! And to end this bloodfest, I bring you unabashed visual hagiographies of my two favorite defensive players: Taylor and Ronnie Lott. Key things to look for…in LT’s: Bill Parcell’s full head of dark hair, the unbelievable one-handed sack at the 3:45 mark…and in Ronnie Lott’s: everything; there’s never been a nastier safety in the history of the game.

PS: Special shout-out to YouTube Hunter reader Simon who sent in this Japanese game show clip to the comments section two weeks ago…

That very footage was projected on the big screen at last night’s Flaming Lips show, conferring everlasting coolness upon him and his family. Congratulations on being cool, Simon. Let us know how that works out for you.

PPS: In case you’re wondering, the only thing I remember about Michael Keaton is that he always smelled good. A very fragrant man.

I never thought I’d say this, but I saw something amusing in an airline magazine recently and wanted to share — a list of American cities named after various animals, ranging from the obvious (Buffalo, New York) to the obscure (Fly, Ohio). If you know some that weren’t in the article, feel free to add them in the comments…

• Alaska: Fox, Chicken
• Arkansas: Deer
• California: Antelope
• Colorado: Dinosaur
• Florida: Flamingo
• Georgia: Parrot
• Kansas: Partridge
• Louisiana: Trout, Pelican
• Michigan: White Pigeon, Wolverine
• Minnesota: Badger
• Mississippi: Alligator
• Missouri: Crane
• Montana: Anaconda, Monarch, Otter
• Nebraska: Eagle
• Nevada: Carp
• New Jersey: White Horse
• New Mexico: Coyote
• New York: Buffalo
• Ohio: Fly
• Oklahoma: Mustang
• Pennsylvania: Sturgeon
• South Dakota: Porcupine
• Texas: Falcon, Turkey, Marlin
• Utah: Beaver
• Washington: Elk, Tiger, Cougar, White Swan, White Salmon
• West Virginia: Duck, Man
• Wyoming: Wolf, Moose

The article also notes that there are no towns or cities called Bear (not including Bear River, Bear Mountain and so on), and that “the most popular place name for towns, as well as rivers, creeks, and mountains, is Beaver.” There’s definitely a joke in there somewhere, and we’re definitely not gonna make it.

Reader Deborah provides today’s tale of stupidity:

Once when I was on a flight to Nairobi, Kenya from Paris, France, I got up to stretch my legs and ended up in conversation with someone I knew from university. We glanced up to see our flight’s location on the television screen map, and my classmate, well in his 30s, said, “look, we’re passing over Ecuador.” I asked if he meant “the equator,” and he became a little standoffish and quickly returned to his seat. Perhaps I should preface this story by saying that we both attended an “international” university with multiple friends from the country of Ecuador.

Yikes. The equator, of course, does run through Ecuador, but that’s no excuse (particularly as a flight from Paris to Nairobi wouldn’t cross South America!). The equator also passes through:

• São Tomé and Príncipe
• Gabon
• the Republic of the Congo, not to be confused with…
• the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Uganda
• Kenya
• Somalia
• the Maldives (although itmisses every island, passing between Gaafu Dhaalu Atoll and Gnaviyani Atoll)
• Indonesia
• Kiribati (again, it misses every island, passing between Aranuka and Nonouti Atolls in the Gilbert Islands)
• Colombia
• Brazil

Despite its name, Equatorial Guinea is not crossed by the equator.

I saw this link to a Foreign Policy photo essay, and thought that the photos were both too startling and amazing to ignore. Brendan Corr’s gorgeous images are all of a Bangladesh beach/port called Chittagong where half of the world’s supertankers are disassembled. The reported facts are pretty insane: that over 200,000 Bangladeshis are employed by the work, that most of the workers don’t have gloves or shoes and have to work extra-cautiously to avoid the razor-sharp metals and pollutants, and that the scrap metal stripped from these ships supplies 80 percent of Bangladesh’s steel. Anyway, I’ve posted a few below, but you can see more of the lush photos at Foreign Policy. Link thanks to ettf.

if your only source of news is the Daily Show or the occasional CNN bottom-of-screen headline crawl, you’re probably aware that

• terrorists want to kill you, your grandpa and quite possibly your little dog, too,
• preferably with portable nuclear weapons, smuggled into the US via
• our extremely vulnerable and barely-monitored shipping ports.

But not to worry: the DHS is on it. In July they announced a plan to equip our major ports with radiation scanners — but it won’t be ready until 2011, and it’ll cost around $1.2 billion. According to Wired, the answer to our dirty nuke problems might be a little more home-grown:

“In San Francisco Bay, a group of do-it-yourself volunteer researchers is not waiting for the mushroom cloud. They say they are close to perfecting a portable device that could do much the same thing right now, for total out-of-pocket costs of about $12,000. The group, led by physicist and Sandia Lab weapons subcontractor Stanley Glaros, says it has already built a boat-mounted scanner with off-the-shelf parts that might reliably spot radiation spikes in container ships at sea from a kilometer away.

Encouraged, and armed with this background radiation survey to reduce false alarms, the team is now testing a homemade detector based on a 4-inch by 4-inch by 16-inch sodium iodide crystal … the same technology used in many monitors currently deployed at ports around the country.
‘The crystal is like Frodo’s sword,’ explained a Glaros collaborator. ‘It starts to glow when the bad stuff’s around, kind of a blue fluorescence.’”

See? Fight evil with crystals that glow blue. No need to get all billion-dollar-y.

The Raw Feed is reporting today that German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Dresden have figured out a way to turn your phone into a projector, meaning you’ll soon be able to give PowerPoints off of your cell?! How insane is that? Using a single mirror, and tiny diode lasers, the thing is barely the size of a sugarcube. I’m not sure what scares me more, the thought of having to rely on my cell phone to give an important PowerPoint, or the thought of having to watch my mom and pop’s vacation slides off of theirs. Link via TheRawFeed.