Drilling a Square Hole. Can a drill be constructed which makes square holes?
Previous attempts have focused on Reuleaux triangles (a shape of constant width - useful for manhole covers) - but these produce square holes with rounded edges.
However, in 1939, in an anonymous article in Mechanical World magazine, plans were published for a device which uses circular motion to make perfectly square holes.
In their new book, How Round is your Circle, John Bryant and Chris Sangwin, build and demonstrate this device (scroll down for a video of the working device).
posted on Aug-31-09 at 1:13 PM

An Armadillo running and sniffing
The Mole-Cam
Cow Staring at Cow.
These and many more at the Museum of Animal Perspectives, a site run and curated by Sam Easterson.
posted on Aug-27-09 at 4:31 AM

"My Quest for Corvo was started by accident one summer afternoon in 1925..." so begins A.J.A Symons book The Quest for Corvo, an experimental biography of the bizarre genius Baron Corvo, much admired by D.H. Lawrence and by Graham Greene among others.
Mention Baron Corvo and bookdealers get excited. Only 5 copies (proofs) of his Don Renato existed. Symons sold his copy to Cecil Woolf, another biographer of Baron Corvo. This copy was later bought by an American Donald Weeks who, after reading Symons book, left his job and moved to England to become part of the growing cult of Baron Corvo. He was said to have amassed an enormous collection of Corviana. Weeks died in 2003: "He died ... of natural causes... Because, however, he left no will nor details of next of kin, he was officially classed as a missing person. He was "no one".' The fate of his rare-book collection has been a source of speculation.
Last week, Leeds University announced that "The University of Leeds has acquired a collection of books and manuscripts relating to Baron Corvo, one of the most controversial English novelists of the early 20th Century." Previews of the catalog. As to what makes Corvo so fascinating, readers can discover for themselves.
posted on Aug-6-09 at 12:52 PM

"Loot the Baedeker I did, all the details of a time and place I had never been to, right down to the names of the diplomatic corps." - Thomas Pynchon from Slow Learner.
Baedeker's were the de facto travel guide for international men of leisure: "Baedeker’s publications, which covered most of Europe, became so popular that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was quoted as saying that he stationed himself at a particular palace window each noon because “It’s written in Baedeker that I watch the changing of the guard from that window, and the people have come to expect it.” Baedeker maps online. Baedeker books online.
Are the old ones the best ones?
posted on Mar-11-09 at 2:03 PM

"He was sentenced to death after the military coup in 1980, a few months later he was pardoned but put under house arrest. While under arrest, he began to write a collection of poems; the aim of which was to create portraits of all the people he had ever met in his life" [Maninbo, or Ten Thousand Lives]. To date, 26 volumes from the ongoing collection have been published. Meet Ko Un. Ex-Buddhist Monk and one of South Korea's greatest poets.
posted on Feb-25-09 at 8:17 AM

The year is 1932. Hitler is rising in power. Harold Urey announces the discovery of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope. James Chadwick discovers the neutron. Heisenberg receives the Nobel Prize for his work in Quantum physics. It is a miracle year in Physics, matched only by Einstein's advances in 1905. A few of the most brilliant physicists in the world decide to convene in Copenhagen and ... write a play! Written on the 100th anniversary of the death of Goethe, The Blegdamsvej Faust is a remarkable document from a turning point in Physics.
posted on Feb-17-09 at 2:31 PM

The Tiling Database. Browse some random patterns. Or narrow down your search here.
Looking for an ornament in the Alhambra? Or a spiral tiling? Or perhaps a Topkapi scroll?
posted on Jan-13-09 at 11:13 AM

"Two people emerged from the ship, a man and his wife. .. Mrs. Wise immediately called for a doctor to look after the woman... The husband and wife were shown to Room 8, where the woman's condition continued to deteriorate... Eventually, the husband summoned the doctor, hotel staff and even the owner’s wife to Room 8 to ask a very unusual request: He asked that everyone present swear an oath never to reveal their identities." So, begins and essentially ends Alexandria Virginia's mystery of the Female Stranger.
posted on Dec-4-08 at 5:23 AM

In the 1940's the British Government set about creating eight deep level shelters underneath central London. Now, one of them is up for sale (Photos)
posted on Oct-17-08 at 3:51 AM

Prospect/Foreign Policy release their list of the world's top public intellectuals(full list). Number 1? The Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen.

The rest of the top 10? The microfinancier Muhammad Yunus, the cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the writer Orhan Pamuk, the politician Aitzaz Ahsan, the evangelist Amr Khaled, the philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, the philosopher Tariq Ramadan, the cultural theorist Mahmood Mamdani and activist Shirin Ebadi. Sense a theme? Yes, all Muslims.
This is a striking turnabout from the 2005 poll topped by Chomsky, Eco and Dawkins.
What happened? Prospect Magazine explains. The Turkish newspaper Zaman weighs in. The UK's Independent is outraged. Fethulah Gulen defends himself.
posted on Jul-3-08 at 10:17 AM

"It so often happens that I receive mail - well-intended but totally useless - by amateur physicists who believe to have solved the world. They believe this, only because they understand totally nothing about the real way problems are solved in Modern Physics...It should be possible, these days, to collect all knowledge you need from the internet. Problem then is, there is so much junk on the internet... I know exactly what should be taught to the beginning student...I can tell you of my own experiences. It helped me all the way to earn a Nobel Prize. But I didn't have internet. I am going to try to be your teacher. It is a formidable task."
posted on Aug-29-07 at 4:22 PM

"At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died [in 2003], he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation." (NYer)
And since then, Roberto Bolaño's reputation has been growing (NYRB:"The Great Bolano"). A man who dismissed magical realism as "shit" is more the heir of Cortazar and Borges (his two idols) than Garcia Marquez or Vargas Lllosa yet he is also something entirely new. Bolano was also the founder of infrarealism, a movement whose manifesto proclaims "A new lyricism springing up in Latin America, nourishing itself in ways that continue to amaze us.... Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breath and heat. Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions."
Why has the English speaking world not heard of Bolaño? His great novel, The Savage Detectives, a sprawling work about youth and poetry and chaos (with no less than 52 narrators across several continents) has only this year been translated.
posted on Aug-27-07 at 10:27 AM

Brazilian Blogger Bashing! The respected Brazilian newspaper Estadao decided to promote its new online presence by jokingly producing a series of ads with obvious misfits and asking such questions as "Is this the guy giving you dating advice?" and a video (youtube) comparing bloggers to monkeys. Bloggers are outraged "Why would you read a newspaper that compares bloggers to monkeys?". In today's newspaper, Estadao offers no apology but instead dryly recounts the facts. Meanwhile, the resulting controversy, with thousands of blogs weighing in, has driven a lot of traffic to their new site.
posted on Aug-21-07 at 10:35 AM

The Quinta de Regaleira, completed in 1910, was the dream palace of the Portuguese millionaire Antonio Agusto de Carvalho Monteiro who was a devotee of mysticism and lost arts. The enormous gardens include a Templar initiation well,underground labyrinths, hidden doorways, fantastic grottos, lookout towers, and of course the palace itself (hunting room, outside detail, gargoyles) More photos here and here.
posted on Aug-18-07 at 9:05 PM

The Space Shuttle Atlantis and The International Space Station ...crossing the Sun.
posted on Sep-20-06 at 9:40 PM

Mapping the StarMaze A tale of mathematical obsession: "Before I can explain my decades-long quest to map the starmaze I must acquaint you with a small puzzle...I have a habit of seeing everything (cities, organizations, computers, networks, brains) as a maze, so I named this puzzle the starmaze....The first problem I ran into was that there were a lot of rooms...I invented wacky names for each room...But something funny happened...In that instant I finally grasped that the starmaze was arranged on the edges of a nine-dimensional hypercube..."
posted on Jun-4-06 at 9:10 PM

"In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic."
posted on Apr-17-06 at 11:06 PM

"CabSpotting traces San Francisco's taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible."
posted on Apr-6-06 at 4:39 PM

The Roofless realm. Prestes Maia, is a colossal abandoned clothes factory that towers over central Sao Paulo: "At first glance Prestes Maia, which sem-teto members occupied in 2002, resembles a chaotic, multi-storey shantytown; cardboard spews out of its cracked windows, graffiti litter its walls and children rattle through its wide corridors on bicycles. But the community is meticulously organised." It was first occupied as part of the Movimiento dos Sem Teto, an organized movement of homeless families and workers and now houses over 468 families. But, now, an injunction has been issued for the repossession of the building. Everyone must leave by February 15th but there is no plan and the authorities fear violence will erupt. There's a Flickr community.
posted on Feb-14-06 at 3:38 PM

UTATA "is a collective of photographers, writers, and like-minded people who share a compelling interest in the arts. We began (and continue to exist) as a salon-style gathering of photographers who came together on flickr." Interesting projects such as the gorgeous Trains project and the current Utata pays homage, including works reminiscent of Arbus, Man Ray and Wegman.
posted on Feb-2-06 at 11:25 AM

Ring of Letters
The Einstein-Freud Correspondence (Einstein furthers the cause of peace)
The Freud-Jung Correspondence (Freud is Jung's father-figure)
The Jung-Pauli Correspondence (A QM founder buys into Jung's synchronicity)
The Pauli-Heisenberg Correspondence (The Uncertainty Principle was a letter to Pauli)
The Heisenberg-Bohr Correspondence (Was Heisenberg a Nazi?)
The Bohr-Einstein Correspondence (What is the fundamental nature of reality?)
posted on Jan-6-06 at 4:32 PM

The Secret of Nimrud Hey! What's down in this basement here? Looks like Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky! And, hey, a golden Assyrian mask from 800 BC! A photo-essay on the re-discovery of treasures in Iraq.
posted on Dec-15-05 at 9:50 PM

The Charts of Clarence Larkin A mechanical engineer by training, Clarence Larkin later found his true calling as a pastor and an author of influential books on religion. He is best remembered, however, for his detailed charts on topics such as: The Underworld, The Failure of Man, The Threefold Nature of Man, and an incredibly detailed The Book of Revelations from his book on Revelations.
posted on Dec-2-05 at 1:24 PM

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world, using uploaded GPS traces. So far: London and several other cities have been mapped. (via dataisnature)
posted on Nov-30-05 at 8:49 PM

Multiplicative Magic Squares
posted on Nov-22-05 at 9:33 AM

The Star Diary An imaginary book. One of many imaginary things. Or, is this the Star Diary?
posted on Aug-17-05 at 2:16 PM

The Rainmaker
After three long years of drought, a desperate San Diego City council, sought out a man who had been creating rain from Central America to the Yukon, a rainmaker who could bring clouds, fill dams and douse fires. For $10,000, Charles Hatfield agreed to make rain. Soon after, on January 5, 1916, it started raining and raining...and raining. So much water fell from the sky that two dams overflowed. One dam broke, unleashing floods and devastation. Instead of gratitude, the city council threatened to sue Hatfield who in the end was saved by a court ruling that deemed rain to be "an act of God."
Hatfield claimed to have invented a chemical formula to summon clouds and was credited with over 500 successes. He took his rain-making secrets to the grave. Hollywood, of course, produced a movie.
posted on Aug-1-05 at 8:56 PM

"This planet answers an ancient question," said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."
The star, Gliese 876, visible in the night sky, lies only 15 light-years away.
posted on Jun-14-05 at 1:44 PM

Chines government loves Flickr interface! So, Chinese government copies Flickr interface? So similar that Flickr users have no problem joining and creating accounts. Quickly, they have the most popular photo: The kitchen sink. As one Chinese user writes "evrything is free in china , you know ,4 example the software that microsoft made"
posted on Jun-5-05 at 1:25 PM

But who are we to know such things? What if what first appeared as a solid yellow flower was in fact a series of radiating stripes? Another prominent one here. This is the world of ultraviolet as photographed by Bjørn Rørslett, the world as it is seen by insects and... bats and other mammals?
posted on Feb-16-05 at 9:57 PM

Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (With Answers) I hereby put this version of Sam Loyd's 1914 work into the public domain. (Ed Pegg Jr, 2005) Who is Sam Loyd? Remember the Donkey Puzzle? The 15 Puzzle? These and 4,998 more...
posted on Jan-10-05 at 10:33 PM

Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein (image heavy page). It has been noted, in a current exhibition, that "Lichtenstein drew visual material from a wide range of sources, from comic books to art history. His revisions of this material often drastically altered its original meaning" Did they? David Barsalou has spent the last 25 years going through over 30,000 comics to find those originals. (via papelcontinuo)
posted on Oct-16-04 at 12:12 AM

The Gold-Digging Ant-Lions of India is but one tale about insects and culture. Although, The Cultural Entomology Digest seems to have been out of circulation for a decade, you can still read about Japanese Crests based on Butterflies, Chinese Cricket Culture and hints of a Greek Cricket culture, Beetles as Religious Symbols or the Insects of MC Escher.
posted on Aug-28-04 at 3:49 PM

Copper is a beautifully drawn web-comic about a dog and his boy. The author Kazu Kibuishi is also about to release Flight, a highly anticipated anthology which includes the works of Derek Kirk Kim, Jen Wang, Clio Chang, Rad Sechrist, Vera Brosgol and Enrico Casarosa, all a group of artists who met over the Internet (Most links are to comics) Scott McCloud sends in a review from the year 2054.
posted on Jun-4-04 at 6:39 PM

Popular De Lujo: A portrait of a city (Bogota, Colombia) through its folk art and street graphics. "Some sections of this site are not translated in order to keep the original and true sense of local idiomatic expressions which have no precise equivalent in other languages. However, you will realize that the graphic language is so rich in shapes and colours, that it speaks for itself."
posted on May-31-04 at 1:55 AM

On Fornication And Genetics in The Breedster Age The site which launched a social networking app based around insect fornication and copulograms, gave rise to mass projects, insect personals, and even racist clans now presents some early findings including interesting animations of a populated world.
posted on May-25-04 at 3:40 PM

The Matthew effect "It was Merton who identified and named the tendency always to assign exclusive scientific credit to the most eminent among all the plausible candidates. At least I hope it was he, though I'm sure Merton, who invented many wonderful jokes himself, would have been delighted if the credit for it turned out to be misattributed to him." Or is this called the flypaper effect? The question remains: Who popularized the phrase 'Shut up and Calculate!'
posted on May-15-04 at 12:08 AM

The Art Millenium "The Encyclopedia was founded in May 1999. It contains more than 15,000 pictures and overviews of about 1000 artists. Total size is 2.5 Gigabytes" I was there in their Collections looking at Graphics (Dore, Beardsley, Cranach, Durer, Giger), specifically all of Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte. I have not begun to scratch the surface.
posted on Apr-20-04 at 3:24 PM

Urban Haute Couture "is about street art and street art only. Since a couple of years ago there's a boom in street art. To be clear we're not talking about graffiti. We're talking about street art that is spraypaint/marker template based, stickers, posters and combinations of those. This new breed of street art, except for using the urban landscape as a medium, has actually nothing to do with graffiti." Cities include Berlin, Amsterdam and the Romanian Stencil Archive.
posted on Apr-4-04 at 10:27 AM

Flickr! First launched during the week of no-metafilter, Flickr is a new kind of social software application (in the tradition of Friendster or Orkut) - but, after making friends and forming groups, it actually gives you something to do! Created by a team led by Mefi's own sylloge, Flickr is also a collaboration focused Flash-based application that allows you to share picture files with friends, comment on them and post them directly to your weblog. An exposed set of services is also leading to a host of interesting ideas.
posted on Mar-12-04 at 9:47 AM

ShipBreaking The photographer Edward Burtynsky captures some dramatic images of ShipBreaking. The Perils of this industry were first highlighted in a Pulitzer prize winning series of articles by the the Baltimore Sun. Today, these ship graveyards still pose serious environmental issues as highlighted by this shipbreaking weblog maintained by Greenpeace.
posted on Nov-28-03 at 4:09 PM

CocoWeb (trans) is a project which has assembled 516 manifestations of the Bogeyman in Latin America. The list includes the well-known Coco or Cucuy, a dark figure who makes an appearance in the art world as the subject of one of Goya's Caprichos. Any Hispanic child can tell you about La Llorona, a grieving woman who walks in the night (familiar enough to be used in a controversial got milk? ad). In South America they can tell you about the Sack-Man, on of the original bogeymen, who walks in the darkness, looking for children to throw into his sack.
posted on Oct-31-03 at 11:55 AM

From Abbasids to Zur Linde: A Borges Dictionary (pdf) ; Fantastic Zoology: a graphical interpretation of Borges' "Book of Imaginary Beings" (Edward Gorey would have been interesting); The Intruder: A Borges story in eight games. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality
posted on May-7-03 at 10:15 PM

Strange is this little animal, because of its exceptional and strange morphology and because it closely resembles a bear en miniature. -- So says one of the first men to behold "water bears" or tardigrades as they are better known. Resembling a large gummy bear, or a bear walking on its claws, but measuring in at no larger than a few 100 microns, the tardigrade occupies its own phylum in the animal kingdom. Cuteness aside, they are also known for their extraordinary abilities to survive extreme conditions: Tardigrades can survive the process of freezing or thawing, as well as changes in salinity, extreme vacuum pressure conditions, and a lack of oxygen.
posted on Feb-24-03 at 12:40 PM

Fantomas Lives!
Fantômas is the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the arch-criminal anti-hero of a series of 32 pre-WWI French thrillers written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. He carries out the most appalling crimes: substituting sulfuric acid in the perfume dispensers at a Parisian department store, releasing plague-infested rats on an ocean liner, or forcing a victim to witness his own execution by placing him face-up in a guillotine.
In 1912, Apollinaire founded the Societe des Amis de Fantomas which included prominent artists and writers. Magritte considered Fantomas to be a major influence in many of his paintings. Fantomas was not only a comic book but also spawned films, tv and radio shows and plays. (There is, of course, a modern band as well)(I read the Mexican comic book as a child)
posted on Sep-14-02 at 12:13 PM

.i la lojban mo
Lojban is in many ways like any other language. There's an English-Lojban dictionary. There's a Lojban grammar. You can even get your news at Nuzban, a Lojban-only news site.

Lojban, however, is a completely constructed language. Why Lojban? Well, Lojban came from Loglan, an invented language from the 1950's (Loglan was created as an experiment to study the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: succinctly, the idea that language and culture are hopelessly intertwined) Today, there are hundreds of invented languages and a thriving language construction community. Alongside well-known constructs such as Tolkien's elven languages and Klingon, there's also d'ni - the language of Myst, a language of flowers, opus-2 - a language that shuns word order and Teonat - a language of the imaginary inhabitants of Teon.
With the help of online language construction kits, you too can create your own language.
posted on Sep-12-02 at 8:44 PM

Folk Art Environments What do you get when you combine Folk Art and an entire house or area to play with? You get obsession on display and a fascinating, created world. You may have heard of the Watts towers or the Bottle Village, but have you seen Le Palais Ideal de le Facteur Cheval (in France) or Nek Chand (in India) or the Whirligig Ranch or the Forevertron or the Ave Maria Grotto? If you share Jane's Addiction you may want to consult her directory next time you travel.
posted on Sep-8-02 at 11:43 AM

A Tale of Two Cities: Chicago and New York This exhibition of more than 150 black-and-white photographs represents a cross-section of the thousands of significant buildings that are protected by local landmark designation in Chicago and New York City. The story of how this came to pass is both as similar and as different as the cities themselves.
posted on Sep-7-02 at 9:41 AM

Sebastiao Salgado, author of Workers and Migrations (a beautiful book to share with others) and Earl Dotter, author of The Quiet Sickness: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America. Photographers of Labor.
posted on Sep-2-02 at 11:11 AM

The Zymoglyphic Museum including the works of Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch made about a dozen tableaux, constructed of human fetal skeletons with backgrounds of other body parts, on allegorical themes of death and the transiency of life.... One fetal skeleton holding a string of pearls in its hand proclaims, "Why should I long for the things of this world?" Another, playing a violin with a bow made of a dried artery, sings, "Ah fate, ah bitter fate."
Ruysch's work was eventually purchased by his student and admirer, Peter the Great.
posted on Aug-30-02 at 9:52 PM