Whether he's got toothbrush bristles, bath towels or duct tape, Takahiro Iwasaki can build a landscape out of it. This detailed, delicately carved roll of duct tape is my favorite. You can view more examples of his work at the link.
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Spring is almost here. Are you looking for a quick way to heat up your home decor. Behold the Sun Wall Clock from the NeatoShop. This stunning wall clock is about 4.6 billion years in the making and features an actual graphic of the sun with solar flares. Make it the center piece of your room design. It is a great way to bring life to a cold boring room.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Clocks & Timers.
Cursed cats! They are so fond of disrupting human work, especially medieval manuscript composition. In 1420, a scribe in what is now the Netherlands discovered that a cat had urinated on a page that he had written. He added illustrations of the event and the subsequent damage to the book, as well as provided helpful advice:
Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum ostum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem uni cattie venire possunt.
When translated into English, that reads:
Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.
Link -via Alexis Madrigal | Photo: Historical Archives of Cologne
Bryan, the "Knitting Guy", is a mad yarn bomber who turns stop signs in Clairemont, California into flowers. He's planted, er, crafted at least a hundred of them and has an interactive map at this site so that you can visit them. Last year, Enrique Limon of San Diego City Beat accompanied Bryan on one of his covert missions:
Guiding his buddy as he sewed up the stockinette-stitched sleeve along the stop-sign rod, he recounted the tale of his first stop-sign flower: “I put it up in the middle of the night—it must have been 11:30 or midnight. I wanted to make sure no one saw me doing it, and then chuckled all the way home and waited to see people’s reactions.”
He figured that if it lasted three days, the $10 he spent on yarn would have been worth it. Fourteen months later, it’s still there.
A few more quickly followed.
“I find it lightens people’s mood,” he said, adding that, recently, when he went back to do some maintenance work on that first flower, someone had already rewired its leaves.
Official Site and News Story -via Makin'ology
Our long nightmare is over -one of the worst tattoos that ever went viral has now been fixed. The unnamed owner of the poorly-done tattoo of his late wife's face did his research and approached master artist Scott Versago of Empire Ink in Akron, Ohio, to help him. Versago told the story:
"I got to tackle the official "#1 worst portrait tattoo in the world" today. I'm sure you've all seen it a million times online, as had I. I couldn't believe my eyes when this guy walked in and showed me this project. I think my jaw literally hit the floor. He went on to tell me the story behind the portrait; He had just married his beautiful wife and not even a month afterwards she was killed in a horrible house fire accident leaving him to raise their child alone. Shortly after he went to a local tattoo studio to memorialize his wife and was left with this abomination. He later returned to that studio for one more session, thinking that perhaps "he had done something wrong in the healing of the tattoo" and they butchered it even more the second time. Finally, he drove all the way to my studio, Empire Ink, just to meet me and to see what his options were. Touched by his story, I gifted the entire project to him for free. Now he has closure and I have an amazing story to add to my portfolio!"
This solar flare was recorded on July 19, 2012. The color has been added because otherwise we could look at it -you know what they say about looking at the sun. Dr. Phil Plait tells us what's going on here.
What you’re seeing is the profound impact of magnetism on the material in the Sun. I’ve described this effect before (with lots of juicy details here), but in a nutshell: The gas inside the Sun is so hot it’s ionized, stripped of electrons. When that happens it’s more beholden to magnetism than gravity, and when the magnetic field lines pierce the Sun’s surface they form loops along which the ionized gas (called plasma) flows along them.
The total time represented by the video is 21 hours. The flare, though small against surface of the sun, is many times bigger than the earth. Read more about it at Bad Astronomy. Link
Though he made them with just nuts and bolts, Balázs's chess pieces are immediately recognizable. He writes, "You can imagine the shopkeeper's face when I told him I need only one of each screw...." Do you recognize what he's written for the dividing lines? They're physics formulae. Nerd Pride!
The Roku company produces digital media receivers that let people route streaming audio and video to their television sets. Last year, the Ephrata Public Library in Pennsylvania began loaning Roku boxes to patrons. The program has been so successful that the library is expanding it. Matt Enis of The Digital Shift talked to Penny Talbert, the library director, about the program:
EPL purchased two Rokus last Spring at the suggestion of the library’s technology manager. As Talbert noted, the units didn’t require a huge initial investment to try. The basic Roku LT units cost $50. For each unit, the library purchases dedicated subscriptions to Netflix and/or Hulu Plus, which currently cost $7.99 per month each, as well as other content from TED, Allrecipes.com, the BBC, and other sources. Subscriptions are set up so that patrons can’t use EPL’s account to make additional purchases while they have the units.
For comparison’s sake, Talbert noted that the total cost of the Roku and a dedicated subscription is less than libraries pay for content in many other formats. Many individual ebooks, audiobooks, or single seasons of a television series on DVD cost more than one Roku unit, she said.
“If that television series is available on Hulu, do the math. It’s not only cost savings, but space savings, and what you can offer your patrons. …This is a great way to send, basically, 100,000 movies home with a patron.”
Link -via Josh Hadro | Photo: brownpau
Chemical analysis indicates that this brick--embelished with a cat's pawprints--is of Roman origin. How did it end up in the western United States? It is likely that the Hudson's Bay Company, a British corporation that explored and settled the Pacific Northwest, shipped it to Fort Vancouver all the way from Britain. Alexis Madrigal writes in The Atlantic:
While there were roughly 25 Native American tribes in the region, there were not any brickmakers among them, which meant there weren't any bricks. So, the Hudson's Bay Company, which ran the Fort, had to order them from a world away.
"You can certainly bring over brickmakers to look at the local lays and the Columbia River silts are great for making common brick. But at the time, when they are out there establishing their post, if they want some brick for their chimney, there just isn't any," Gurcke said, when I reached him at his job with the Park Service in Skagway, Alaska. "So they ship them from, in this case, England. We do have some records of them shipping bricks very early from England."
Link | Photo: Fort Vancouver Historic Site
What does flying an F18 fighter jet feel like? This may be the closest you'll ever get to flying the $67 million machine. Page Maverick and Goose, then hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Trending Now
Sandy beach, palm trees and clear, blue water. But if you think that these vacationeers are lounging on a warm tropical island, you'd be wrong. They're inside a giant hangar in snowy Germany:
The 'resort' is actually located on the site of a former Soviet military air base in Krausnick, Germany. Tropical Islands is inside a hangar built originally to house airships designed to haul long-distance cargo. And despite it looking like temperatures are through the roof - outside the giant hangar it is actually snowing.
The computer, tablet, or smart phone you're reading this post on comes from a factory in Asia on a cargo ship. In fact, most things you buy come on such ships - and because of rising demand in Europe and the US, cargo ships get bigger and bigger. How big? Read on:
What is blue, a quarter of a mile long, and taller than London's Olympic stadium?
The answer - this year's new class of container ship, the Triple E. When it goes into service this June, it will be the largest vessel ploughing the sea.
Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).
If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.
Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.
William Kremer of the BBC has the post: Link
Astronaut Chris Hadfield, the International Space Station's ambassador to the internet, shows us how to make a sandwich without the aid of gravity. The Canadian Space Agency has more about eating in space at their website. Link -via Viral Viral Videos
Randall Munroe, the cartoonist behind xkcd and a profoundly brainy guy, answers bizarre physics questions submitted to his What If? blog. His most recent question pondered the effect of the sudden absence of the water displacement of all of the world's oceangoing vessels:
Archimedes’ principle tells us that the water displaced by a ship weighs as much as the ship itself. If we can figure out the total weight of all the world’s ships, we can figure out how much water they’re displacing, then divide that volume by the surface area of the ocean to figure out how much the water level would drop.
And his answer to the question? The sea level would drop 6 microns. But because the world's sea level is rising anyway, it would return to the previous level within 16 hours.
Link -via VA Viper | Photo: RightIndex
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