March 5, 2012
We're gonna be like three little Fonzies here.
The Wirbelrohr! (aka, the Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube) You put a stream of air in, you get a hot stream and a cold stream out. Invented in 1930, there are no moving parts and no electricity supplied. [more inside]
This ain't your granny's harmonium
Henry Dagg squeezes out "Over the Rainbow" with the help of a nuisance of toy cats
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Part time virus hunter
It arrived at MIT in the middle of the night... 1988 computer virus - (via Dangerous Minds) [more inside]
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
Mick Jones, co-founder of seminal punk band The Clash, his hair as thin as the crowd, plays a few solo songs at the opening of the Rock and Roll Public Library, a converted office under a motorway in West London, in between swigs of lager. That is all. But what else do you need?
"It even has miniature owls in the Owlery and hinges on the doors."
A 50 foot wide miniature of Hogwarts used in all of the Harry Potter films will be going on display in London this month. The miniature was designed and built by production designer Stuart Craig.
I hope his face hurts too.
Patchwork
Online Modular Synth. Peter van der Noord has used Flash to create an extensive virtual modular synthesizer that runs in a browser.
Dewey Bozella
Dewey Bozella landed a hard right cross on his opponent's jaw at the final bell, and the 52-year-old boxer raised his arms in victory. After 26 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, Bozella triumphantly realized a dream deferred in his first and only professional fight. [more inside]
What'll It Take?
Well, it'll probably take 82 fans from 22 countries. Graham Coxon, with the help of director Ninian Doff, brings you a little Monday evening (at least in the US, the rest of you do the calculations as necessary) fun.
No other player has swung at more first pitches on a rainy Tuesday in the past 3.7 years.
This is a clip of Tim Kurkjian, a major league baseball analyst known for his citation of obscure statistics and unorthodox sources. These are clips of baseball players imitating Tim Kurkjian, plus ensuing hilarity. [via]
The Payphone Stadium Project
In 1990, the avenues of information we have today weren't around. So what was a baseball fan who wanted to know the score of a game elsewhere in the country to do? Compile a list of pay phone numbers at stadiums and get the score from passers by who picked up.
Thundercats, Hooo!
A Ph.D. in comic book form.
Nick Sousanis has been approved to write and submit what may be the first ever Ph.D. dissertation in comic book form. See here (PDF) for a taste of the style and content.
"Like Google for old maps"
Recently went live: A central repository of maps held by institutions across the globe. Over 60,000 maps. oldmapsonline.org
NYC High Schoolers Release 10-Point Educational Policy Plan
A group of high school students from The Bronx calling themselves The Resistance have released a 10-point plan to reform NYC public schooling. (via Colorlines) [more inside]
The idea, of course, is to let your attacker have the bag
"A man wearing bowler hat reading a newspaper is seen leaning leisurely against a car. Another person comes from behind and starts hitting the poor man on the head with an iron bar. He does not react at all, still reads his paper. The third man appears looking puzzled. The man takes his hat of and shows it to the other two. They take the hat and examine it." Beat The Bandit, 1961 is a video (01:46) presentation of amazing security/anti-theft inventions that you'll surely feel compelled to buy.
March Madness!
Take a tour of the solar system! Tonight, see the wonders of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn! There's only one catch: You'll need to actually step outside to do it. [more inside]
Leechers gone wild
The set of groups that rip, encode, and disseminate pirated materials on the internet, known as The Scene, recently revised their encoding standards of SD television to switch from the video codec Xvid AVI to x264 MP4. A few recipients of pirated material had a few carefully worded comments about this new decision. Most of the aggression stems from the fact that some consumer DVD players included XviD compatibility and cannot be upgraded to play x264 files.
Spider silk sounds
Spider silk spun into violin strings "Strands of spider silk have been used to make violin strings that have a unique and thrilling sound, thanks perhaps to the way the strands deform when twisted."
1930s-40s in Colour
The Library of Congress has posted a series of colour photos from the 1930s and 1940s online. [more inside]
Well, Who Am Us, Anyway?
How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All. 56m24s of mainlined audio psychedelic comedy from The Firesign Theatre in 1969. In one piece, consisting of Two Sides, including The Further Adventures Of Nick Danger. [more inside]
Open Education Week
March 5-10, 2012 is the first Open Education Week. The effort has been lead by the Creative Commons Education Project and the Open Courseware Consortium. The effort hopes to highlight and promote the use of open educational resources (OER). Events listed here.
NFL Bounties
Joe Posnanski asks why football fans aren't fazed by the news that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty pool to reward players who knocked opponents out of their games.
If pitchers were offered bounties to throw at Albert Pujols' head and knock him out for a series, that would be a scandal beyond anything in memory. If we found out that Dwyane Wade was actually offered extra money to hurt Kobe Bryant in the NBA All-Star Game, he and the people offering the bounty might be suspended for life. Hockey is a violent sport, but if a team of players and coached really had pooled together money to pay anyone who could get Sidney Crosby taken off on a stretcher, wouldn't that be one of the great disgraces in the sport's history? So what does it say about the NFL -- and what does it say about us as football fans -- that this would happen in pro football and there would be a vague, "Eh, everybody does it, everybody's trying to hurt everybody in football anyway" reaction from so many?
If pitchers were offered bounties to throw at Albert Pujols' head and knock him out for a series, that would be a scandal beyond anything in memory. If we found out that Dwyane Wade was actually offered extra money to hurt Kobe Bryant in the NBA All-Star Game, he and the people offering the bounty might be suspended for life. Hockey is a violent sport, but if a team of players and coached really had pooled together money to pay anyone who could get Sidney Crosby taken off on a stretcher, wouldn't that be one of the great disgraces in the sport's history? So what does it say about the NFL -- and what does it say about us as football fans -- that this would happen in pro football and there would be a vague, "Eh, everybody does it, everybody's trying to hurt everybody in football anyway" reaction from so many?
Secret of Dominion
Secret of Dominion, a science fiction adventure in 13 episodes.
Squee!
Top 10 cutest photos of sleeping cats. UK charity Cats Protection has released its top ten pictures of sleeping cats, to coincide with National Sleep Awareness Week. [more inside]
"Rubik's hot dog not hot either."
The mid 1980's marked the zenith of popularity for Erno Rubik's amazing cube (previously on the blue). But how magic was it? To find out, Ruby-Spears Productions gave the toy a face, legs and some clever, albeit grammatically incorrect dialogue, and in 1983 Rubik the Amazing Cube was born! [more inside]
Apple's design philosophy
The idea that the form of a product should correspond to its essence does not simply mean that products should be designed with their intended use in mind. That a knife needs to be sharp so as to cut things is a non-controversial point accepted by most designers. The notion of essence as invoked by Jobs and Ive is more interesting and significant—more intellectually ambitious—because it is linked to the ideal of purity. No matter how trivial the object, there is nothing trivial about the pursuit of perfection. On closer analysis, the testimonies of both Jobs and Ive suggest that they did see essences existing independently of the designer—a position that is hard for a modern secular mind to accept, because it is, if not religious, then, as I say, startlingly Platonic.— Form and Fortune is an essay about Steve Jobs and Apple's design philosophy by Evgeny Morozov.
a radical experiment in empathy
Sam Richards: A Radical Experiment In Empathy (button underneath the video makes "interactive transcript" available, at link) [more inside]
Leopard slug sex is indeed hot
Compared to some species, human sex is boring, as Roxy Drew shows in this comic. NSFW, unless you work with kinky giraffes.
The Magic Dollar Sign
The page for a single tweet is 2.0 MB and 80% javascript. Michal Migurski profiles the sizes and compositions of typical pages from popular web sites, MetaFilter among them.
Sometimes it isn’t about being saved, it’s about finding a friend
Counting Stars is a powerful and touching comic from artist Katie O’Neill, which looks at loneliness, wishes, and what we might really need more than a white knight to come along and rescue us. [more inside]
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