Water Droplets

Water Droplets © Frank H. Jump

Fading Ad's Frank Jump breaks in the new USB Microscope.

via Fading Ad

MSNBC Unveils Luke

From Radar:

Little Luke Russert's popped his convention cherry! Here he is on Chris Matthews' Hardball Sunday, chatting about "the e-mail, The Facebook, The YouTube," and in general burrowing straight into the heart of his expertise: The Youth Vote! And you know, he doesn't do so bad. Only, someone get this kid a comb!

Business Card Showcase

fubiz has a gallery of 70 amazing business cards.

Saturday Night Randomry

Some background:

In the late 1940s John Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally extremely soundproof. Anechoic chambers are widely used for measuring the acoustic properties of instruments and microphones, and for performing psychoacoustic experiments.

Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

I don't know if this explanation is accurate, but this experience is often described as the inspiration behind the famous Cage composition 4' 33".

Gadgetry

From Boing Boing:

UFOCapture is a Windows application that helps you videotape meteors and other fast-moving stuff in space. You hook up a sensitive video camera to your computer, point it out your window, and while you slumber, the software saves all the good bits.

$8.5 Mil + $1.26 Mil For Renovations Well Spent

From Gizmodo:

Eric Clough isn't your typical architectural designer. Sure, he'll design you a fine den or kitchen, but he's clearly got a creative streak that goes much deeper than that. That's why, when given the opportunity, he secretly built an incredible scavenger hunt into a $8.5-million, 4,200-square-foot Park Avenue apartment that included ciphers, riddles, poems and a lot of hidden doors and compartments.

...In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

...How amazing is that? It took the family months to discover the scavenger hunt and weeks after that to figure it all out. It's like the live in a children's book of some kind.

Congrats

Toxic Sea Snails

From io9:

There is a kind of soft, toxic snail that lives in the sea called a Nudibranch. The many kinds of Nudibranch all have intense coloration and weird shapes — so weird, in fact, that National Geographic just devoted an entire gallery to the strange creatures.

History Made In Saudi Arabia

From Yahoo:

It's probably as revolutionary and groundbreaking as Mozart gets these days. A German-based quartet staged Saudi Arabia's first-ever performance of European classical music in a public venue before a mixed gender audience.

The concert, held at a government-run cultural centre, broke many taboos in a country where public music is banned and the sexes are segregated even in lines at fast food outlets.

The Friday night performance could be yet another indication that this strict Muslim kingdom is looking to open up to the rest of the world.

On Death And Dying

From guardian:

This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living. Life Before Death is at the Wellcome Collection from April 9-May 18

Pictured:



Elly Genthe was a tough, resilient woman who had always managed on her own. She often said that if she couldn’t take care of herself, she’d rather be dead. When I met her for the first time, she was facing death and seemed undaunted: she was full of praise for the hospice staff and the quality of her care. But, when I visited again a few days later, she seemed to sense her strength was ebbing away.

Sometimes during those last weeks she would sleep all day: at other times, she saw little men crawling out of the flower pots who she believed had come to kill her. “Get me out of here”, she whispered as soon as anyone held her hand. “My heart will stop beating if I stay here. This is an emergency! I don’t want to die!”

via Sully

When Galaxies Collide

From Wired:

To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the launch of Hubble, the Space Telescope Science Institute released 59 images of galaxies colliding. Rather than the staid and immutable image that galaxies have had in textbooks these images paint a remarkable picture of whirling, colliding, flirtatious galaxies that are crashing into each other or cozying up to produce new mega galaxies.

Although only one in a million of the galaxies closest to us are interacting, galaxies much further away (the light we are getting from them is billions of years old) are caught "in the act" more often. This is because there were more galactic collisions in the early universe, so looking farther away (which is also farther into the past) will increase your chances of seeing galaxies collide.

Fun With A Water Balloon

From Wired:

Film cameras slice fluid seconds of time into individual pieces, allowing scientists and laypeople new insights into events happening in high speed. Case in point: In the late 1870s, people didn't know whether a horse trotting ever had all four of its feet simultaneously in the air. An enterprising photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, captured a series of snapshots -- a filmstrip -- of a horse trotting and definitively settled the question in the affirmative. You can see the horse in-motion and check out the geeky tech from this magazine piece on high speed photography.


Fast forward 130 years and we can now split a second into 2,000 of its constituent parts and examine them. One incredible example is the video of the yellow balloon exploding above. At that speed, the water appears much more viscous than it is, holding its shape for a few thousandths of a second before gravity pulls it to the ground.

Dying In Style

From Complex Blog:

Bring on the pollutants and harmful toxins—these Diddo Velema, Gucci and Louis Vuitton collaborative gas-masks are going to make fashionistas want to inhale stuff that’ll kill them. The high-fashioned monogrammed, and diamond encrusted headwear was debuted by Velema at the 2008 Luxury Show in Bucharest, Romania and seem to be reserved for the filthy-rich hypochondriacs. Chemical warfare? No biggie, we’re dyin’ in style.

via Sully

Stonehenge Secrets Revealed

From boingboing:

Retired construction worker Wally Wallington of Flint, Michigan is moving one-ton concrete blocks over a ton each by himself without using pulleys or any mechanical equipment. He's reconstructing Stonehenge singlehandedly.

Sci-Fi Inspiration

From io9:

Some of the most awesome science fiction machines ever conceived for film, like the turbo-tank AT-ATs from Empire Strikes Back, were inspired by things the concept designers saw every day. You may already know that George Lucas was allegedly inspired to create the AT-ATs by these cargo lifters at the Port of Oakland -- but did you know the T-1000 "liquid metal" Terminator was inspired by chocolate fudge? Find out which strangely ordinary items inspired eight of the coolest science fiction machines, and be humbled.

via io9

West Virginia Railroad Culture

From boingboing:

My uncle Kevin Scanlon has snapping photos of Appalachian life for as long as I could form sentences -- actually, no, longer. When I was young, his photos taught me to appreciate the modest, mostly overlooked beauty surrounding the old railroads that snake through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and neighboring states. His photographs document what is now a dying culture.

Brilliant photos.

via boingboing

A History of Evil

Brilliant.

From boingboing:

[An] animated Documentary-Mockumentary about Evil in western civilization from Ancient Greece to present day. (...) This was a student project, hence the "unfinishedness" and abrupt ending. I ran out of time. I might update it later. It was animated frame by frame in flash and composited and textured in AfterEffects.



via boingboing