Admittedly at over $600 per mask, these amazing felted masks are far too expensive for most of us to actually buys for Halloween, but if you know how much effort goes into making felted creations like this, then you should know that it really is worth the price. Even if we can't afford these masks though, they're certainly cool to look at and great for costume inspiration.
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DeviantArtist joh-wee is quite the pumpkin carving artist. In celebration of her 100th pumpkin, she went ahead and carved this amazing version of the Hogwarts school crest that would fit right in with the magic school's massive Halloween celebration.
There are only 21 Lamborghini Reventóns in the world and each costs about $1.6 million. That was beyond the price range of Wang Jian of Jiangsu province, China. So he took an old Nissan van, a Volkswagen sedan and sheet metal and built a slightly low-end replica.
Link -via American Digest
In “The Return of Harmony,” the demon Discord threatens to destroy Equestria. Twilight Sparkle’s friends are picked off one by one, until she alone is left to find a means to defeat him. She immediately runs to her library and searches her collection for the answer. She finds inside one volume the mystical Elements of Harmony, which she uses to banish Discord.
It's a great metaphor for the value of libraries and librarians in an information age. The hero of the tale is Twilight Sparkle, the librarian of Ponyville and the protagonist of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. She is undoubtedly intelligent, considerate and brave. But is she, from a professional’s point of view, an effective librarian? What follows is an assessment of her in that capacity.
Organization
Twilight’s libraries are profoundly disorganized. This is apparent in the first few minutes of the first episode. Twilight’s responsibility is to manage a library in Canterlot, Equestria’s capital city. But books are piled in stacks with no adherence to any cataloging scheme.
Her organizational work in Ponyville is initially no better. Twilight’s stacks are in shambles—so much so that she can’t find information that she desperately needs. Spike, her library assistant, knows exactly who to blame: Twilight herself.
Eventually, Twilight’s inadequate organizational skills and knowledge of cataloging induce a major crisis when she is unable to locate a critical spell in an archive in Canterlot. What can she do? Twilight cries in anguish, “I don’t know!”
Tiny cannons, Mr. Tornado, and a fail-proof test for figuring out whether she likes you or like-likes you? Hold the page -scales just got interesting.
1. THE SCALE THAT MAKES OUR MOUTHS WATER
(Image credit: Flickr user Eden Politte)
In the early 19th century, Wilbur Scoville, an up-and-coming pharmacist from Connecticut, was hired to work on a muscle salve that used chili peppers to generate its punch. For some reason, the batches kept coming at different strengths. Scoville identified the problem immediately: No one had standardized the types and amounts of peppers being added to the mix. He set about creating a rating system for pepper spice levels, and when no instrument proved as sensitive as Scoville's own tongue, he made himself the guinea pig. He'd soak peppers in an alcohol solution to draw out the key spicy compound- capsaicin. Then he'd dilute the infused liquid with sugar water until the spiciness barely registered on his taste buds.
Sticklers will tell you that the Scoville Organoleptic Test doesn't actually measure the amount of capsaicin in a pepper, but rather the number of dilutions needed to put out a capsaicin-fueled fire. Jalapeño, for example, must be diluted 3,500 to 8,000 times, while a garden variety bell pepper needn't be diluted at all. Because no two tongues experience capsaicin the same way, the American Spice Trade Association began using a High Pressure Liquid Chromatograph to quantify hotness in Scoville Heat Units, a method that became the standard in 1998.
Scoville was hardly a one-trick pony. His 1895 work, The Art of Compounding, was still being used as a standard in the 1960s, and his papers on strange chemicals (such as the cantharides in Spanish Fly) made him a legend in the field. Still, in our minds, Scoville's greatest achievement is pepper-related: He's the first scientist in record to suggest drinking milk to put out a spicy mouth fire.
2. THE SCALE THAT SAVED MILLIONS OF BABIES
It may seem obvious now, but when Columbia Medical School anesthesiology professor Virginia Apgar claimed in 1952 that a newborn baby's survival was linked to its condition right after birth, the idea was revolutionary. One year later, after observing 2,096 deliveries at the Sloane Hospital for Women in New York, Apgar put a bib on the concept. Specifically, she proposed applying a "grading" system to newborns, given at one minute and again at five minutes after birth. The scale awarded points from 0 (poor) to 2 (good) across five criteria: pulse, respiration, muscle tone, color, and reflexes. Added together, the numbers generated an Apgar Score, which is still the standard within maternity wards. A score lower than 4 is considered critical, while 7 or greater means the baby is in good health. Most crucially, the process of assessing the five criteria forces nurses and doctors to pay closer attention to potential problems, leading to earlier interventions.
Today, Apgar is credited with saving hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lives. A 2001 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "the relation of five-minute Apgar scores to neonatal survival indicates that the Apgar score is just as meaningful today as it was almost fifty years ago."
3. THE SCALE THAT COUNTS THE WAYS WE LOVE
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