Fancy Boy lip glitter, fish poison, left-handed washing glove, turtle mix, non-alcoholic whiskey, daddy butter, and an eye removal kit. These are just a few of the items Greg Benson and Ryan Smith of Mediocre Films asked employees of Target and Walmart to help them find on a recent shopping errand. Also, Greg wrote Ryan's list without Ryan reading it before Ryan entered the store, and vice versa. (Via Laughing Squid)
Friday, December 16, 2011
Nonsense Shopping List Prank
Nonsense Shopping List Prank:
Gear cube
Gear cube:
This cube made of gears is a great example of some of the really brilliant stuff coming out of the 3D printing scene; it's a phenomenon on Thingiverse, where the method for turning any solid shape into a geared wonderment has been generalized into a formula that can be applied to your 3D model-file.
Cube Gear
(via Making Light)
58 donors responsible for 80% of SuperPAC funding
58 donors responsible for 80% of SuperPAC funding:
With the Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court turned money into a form of political speech, paving the way for enormous influxes of cash from the American ultra-elite one-percent-of-one-percent, and, to a lesser extent, organized labor (money given to the GOP by big business dwarfs labor's contribution to the Dems by a factor of about 2.5). The extent to which this has distorted American politics is only now becoming apparent, as statistics about SuperPACs and their "donations" are gathered and published. In this Salon report, Justin Elliott publishes some eye-opening figures about the new political reality in money-as-speech America.
Especially concerning: 80 percent of the money sloshing around in America's SuperPACs' warchests came from just 58 donors.
The Super PACs are not paragons of transparency, but what has been disclosed gives a sense of where the money is coming from and the interests of those giving it. Based on the donors and the origins of these groups, we can already discern what messages the Super PACs will generate in the home stretch of the campaign.
Close-order drill from hacked Elmobots
Close-order drill from hacked Elmobots:
In this video, an artist skins and skeletonizes a cadre of Elmo robots, installs Arduinos in them, and hacks them to do synchronized maneuvers. Yes, I am well aware that I wrote this into a novel. Dang, I wish they showed more of the bots moving!
Adrianne Wortzel first saw Tickle-Me-Elmo-TMX during her residency in the Artificial Intelligence Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and noticed something interesting about the robotic toy. It wasn't long before she amassed an army of them. And what army is complete without synchronized maneuvers...
Choreographing a Well-Armed Militia Bearing Arms: Adrianne Wortzel
The world's first audio recording is creepy, not made by Edison
The world's first audio recording is creepy, not made by Edison:
At the French site Anecdote du Jour you can listen to the world's first audio recordings, made in 1859 and 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The recordings, one of a tuning fork being struck and two of de Martinville singing, are scratchy and thoroughly eerie. All the more so because de Martinville himself never heard them. In fact, nobody heard them until 2008.
The reason we credit Edison with the invention of recorded audio and not de Martinville is that de Martinville failed to invent a way to play back his recordings.
De Martinville's phonautograph turned sound waves into 2-dimensional squiggles on soot-blackened paper or glass. It was meant to be a lab instrument, to help study acoustics, not a method of recording and playing back sound. Apparently, several decades passed before anybody even realized the sounds could, theoretically, be played back.
Via Greg Gbur
Image: One of de Martinville's phonautograms. A recording of a tuning fork made in 1859.
US-funded Open Technology Initiative takes to Occupy
US-funded Open Technology Initiative takes to Occupy:
The New America Foundation's Open Network Technology Initiative, a US State Department-funded project to build an "Internet in a suitcase" that can be dropped into repressive zones where protesters need network access and the state is trying to take it away. The project -- a very complex piece of technology -- has gotten to the point where it needs a live test, and lucky for the Open Technology engineers, Occupy DC is just down the street, and that's a great testbed.
The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.
That’s harder to pull off in practice, even under ideal conditions — as anyone who’s tried to link even two Wi-Fi access points in their own home could attest. Now throw in the variables that the access points should work in urban and exposed environments, as well as protest zones like Tahir Square. You’ll want to protect dissidents with encryption and deniability. And you don’t want your beta-testers to be arrested or even killed because of a software bug. All together it’s the kind of challenge engineers like to call “non-trivial”.
“Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath said. “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”
U.S.-Funded Internet Liberation Project Finds Perfect Test Site: Occupy D.C.
(Image: Brendan Hoffman/Wired.com)
Vader Christmas Choir Flash Mob
Vader Christmas Choir Flash Mob:
Video Link. More about the making of at the Official Star Wars Blog.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Marco Tempest’s Open Source Techno Magic
Marco Tempest’s Open Source Techno Magic:
“Using sleight-of-hand techniques and charming storytelling, techno-illusionist Marco Tempest brings a jaunty stick figure to life onstage at TEDGlobal.”
DIY Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
DIY Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation:
LEGAL AND MEDICAL DISCLAIMERS… That said, check this out:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Previously:
via @eglinski
Radium infuser for drinking water
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Radium infuser for drinking water
I've blogged old radium-based health product ads before, but this one is a bit of a cake-stealer: the Revigator, sold in the 1920s, was a uranium-infused crock that you filled with drinking water so that it could be made radioactive prior to imbibing.
The glazed ceramic jar had a porous lining that incorporated uranium ore. Water inside the jar would absorb the radon released by decay of the radium in the ore. Depending on the type of water, the resulting radon concentrations would range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand picocuries per liter.
Considerable confusion persists about the correct pronunciation of "Revigator." The solution can be found in the question-and-answer section of a 1928 sales brochure of the Revigator Water Jar Company. The answer: "re-vig-a-tor. Accent on the vig."
Produced by the Radium Ore Revigator Company (aka the Revigator Water Jar Company) of San Francisco California. Although the address on the jar itself is 260 California Street, their headquarters were at Sutter and Taylor in the Revigator Building which is still there. Their Hayward offices were located at 519 Castro Street, and 641 Castro Street. Some of their regional offices included the following addresses:
Hand-stitched Kanye West tweets
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Hand-stitched Kanye West tweets
Supervelma sells lovingly-stitched tweets from the mind of Kanye West at Etsy. Discounts are available for anyone who would like a set of three or more tweets.
Bookwheel: the multiple-tabbed browser of the XVIth Century
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Bookwheel: the multiple-tabbed browser of the XVIth Century
There I Fixed It has an historical overview of the "bookwheel," a sixteenth-century book-desk combined with a water-wheel, which lets you easily rotate several books into your field of vision.
But imagine yourself back then attempting a research project. You want to learn about a topic from multiple sources and cross-reference each one. A desk with a scattered pile of books in no logical order with all sorts of bookmarks and notes trying to make sense of it all. Agostino Ramelli, an Italian engineer born in 1531 proposed a complex but intriguing solution to this problem; the bookwheel.
Based on the design of a waterwheel, the bookwheel would hold over a dozen separate titles, all sitting open at the same angle. Using either hand or foot controls, the reader could easily sort through the books he collected at ease without the fear of losing track of his place.
Historical Thursday: Agostino Ramelli's Bookwheel
(Thanks, Phead!)
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Mind tricks to try and use
Mind tricks to try and use:
On Reddit, a wonderful thread where redditors detail their favorite "mind tricks." Here's a smattering:
When I walk through large crowds of people, to avoid walking into anyone, I simply stare at my destination. I look no one in the eyes. People actually will watch your eyes and they avoid the direction you are going. If I look into people's eyes as we are walking into each other, we are sure to collide. You have to let people know where you intend to go with your eyes. It always works for me, try it! (Poo_Smudge)
I'm a paramedic. When a patient is possibly faking unconsciousness we have 2 tricks to determine if they're really unconscious or not. First, you can lightly brush their eyelashes with your finger. Their eyes will flutter if they're faking it. Alternatively, if they're on their back you can lift their arm over their face and let it go. A conscious person will drop their arm away from their face. (Monkeybrigade)
If you're trying to find something, try looking right to left as opposed to left to right. Your eyes tend to skim over things if you search in the direction you are used to reading in, so skim the opposite way. It takes me a bit more effort to do this, but I notice more details. (icameintoadarkroom)
If you ask a question, and receive only a partial answer, respond with polite silence. Simply wait. A more complete answer will usually follow. (Kromulent)
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