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Mark your calendars for August 28th. Early in the morning, a colorful lunar eclipse will be visible from five continents. To explain the orange color of the eclipse, you are asked to imagine yourself on the moon.
With the Sun blocked, you might expect utter darkness, but no, the ground at your feet is aglow. Why? Look back up at Earth. The rim of the planet seems to be on fire. Around Earth’s circumference you see every sunrise and sunset in the world—all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth’s shadow, transforming the Moon into a landscape of copper moondust and golden hills.
The article from NASA includes a chart for eclipse times in different zones. Link -via Boing Boing
This Jack Nicholson caricature, and other really great artwork at the link (Flash Required). Please be sure to look at the Bruce Willis one!!
Really amazing! Link – via Frederik Samuel
If you liked Pacman, The movie [youtube]…
Here’s Minesweeper, the movie! Hit play or follow the Link to College Humor
Here’s what has got to be one of the craziest roads in the world: the Stelvio Pass [wiki], with its 48 hairpin turns to the top!
The Stelvio Pass is one of the highest Alpine Passes of Europe with its 2758 m. There are 48 hairpin turns on the northern side of the pass. The original road was built in 1820-1825 by the Austrian Empire to connect the former Austrian province of Lombardia with the rest of Austria, covering a climb of 1871 m. Since then, the route has changed very little. The 60 hairpin bends, 48 of them on the northern side numbered with stones, are a challenge to motorists.
Remember the classic arcade game Asteroids? It has been "reborn" as this Flash game by Alex Kaplan, who made it for the Gameplay Design Competition at Jay is Games:
Space Pilot is a keyboard controlled, mission-based action game in which you pilot a spaceship that looks, acts and sounds identical to the ship in the classic arcade game of Asteroids. The gameplay, however, is entirely new and original. The "replay" theme is found in the unlimited number of replays you have to complete each mission.
Play the game atArcade Town or Jay is Games – Thanks Joe!
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Image Credit: omphalina [Flickr]
After seeing the House of Hung picture, Neatorama reader Loneconspirator told us about this one: Hung Far Low in Portland Oregon – Thanks loneconspirator!
Jeff of HydroSlider sent this one in: a strange device that lets you glide on water with speeds up to 17 mph. With a bit of skills, a HydroSlider can be launched in as little as 9 inches of water.
Link (check out the video) – Thanks Jeff!
Jesus León blog has a neat post about the top 10 moments in sport history.
I quite like the clip about the 5′ 6" tall (diminutive by NBA standard) Spud Webb [wiki] at the 1986 slam dunk contest.
Link [a bunch of embedded YouTube clips] – Thanks kopra!
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Tired of finding stopped clocks in public places (in UK), Neatorama reader Alfie started a blog to identify these clocks and hopefully get them fixed.
Link – Thanks Alfie!
Found in Poland – Thanks norberto!
Square Deal, Teddy bears, Nobel Peace Prize, Mt. Rushmore… There could have been a list of thirty or more reasons why president Theodore Roosevelt was the coolest U.S. president ever. More cool things about T.R. follow in the comments. Link
Disclaimer: I wrote this article.
Mark Applebaum is a musician and composer who teaches at Stanford University. He’s built a variety of “sound-sculptures,” electronic musical instruments built from found objects, which look bizarre and sound even more bizarre:
The instruments consist of threaded rods, nails, wire strings stretched through a series of pulleys and turnbuckles, plastic combs, bronze braising rod blow-torched and twisted, doorstops, shoehorns, ratchets, steel wheels, springs, lead and PVC pipe, corrugated copper plumbing tube, Astroturf, parts from a Volvo gearbox, a metal Schwinn bicycle logo, and, indeed, mousetraps. It was great fun to collect this stuff and particularly satisfying to cause anxiety and suspicion among the hardware clerks who nervously eyed me as I conducted investigations of the acoustical properties of their wares. It was a feeling of accomplishment when, weeks into my research, the same salesmen would excitedly welcome me into the store, giddy with their own myopia-shedding epiphanies: “Mark, listen to how this thing sounds when you hit it with this!” My project became an informal and unexpected arts outreach program.
I play the sound-sculptures with my hands and with a number of different strikers and gadgets including Japanese chopsticks, knitting needles, combs, thimbles, plectrums, surgical tubing, a violin bow, and various wind-up toys, tops, etc. Located in the midst of the sculptures is a mixer and a small rack of electronic signal processors with their associated triggering pedals, mostly junky analog delays, early-era pitch transposers, unnatural reverbs, and the like. Signal-to-noise ratio has never been my greatest concern.
The original sound-sculpture was called the Mousetrap (as in, “to build a better . . .”), and subsequent instruments have continued the mouse-pun theme. This clip of Applebaum on the Mouseketier is from a concert at Stanford in 2005. Watch at least until the violin bow comes out.
Pluck Play or go to YouTube
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A list of 19 great movie projects that were proposed, or even started, but never made it to theaters, with explanations for most and links for more information on each. Link -via Grow-A-Brain
Self-Sustainable Chair, a dress made out of polyethylene, connected to shoes that pump air into an inflatable bubble attached to its rear part on each step. The dress slowly transforms into a chair with each step and holds the person to sit on it naturally. With his or her body weight the chair is slowly deflated and forms back to the original flat dress. Self-Sustainable chair is a conceptual garment that motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit. The purpose of this project is to transform the humdrum experiences produced by routine walking commutes into an amusing interactive performance.
It’s an art project by Joo Youn. Push play or go to Google Video. Link to project. -via Arbroath
Earvolution ranks ten bands that only existed in the media, but don’t you wish they were real? You may be surprised at how Spinal Tap ranked. Link -via the Presurfer
Need to change your wallpaper? Social Wallpapering is a public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop backgrounds; it is an attempt to create the greatest high-resolution wallpaper resource on the planet. Users can rate wallpapers, track their favourites, comment, and upload their own creations.
The design of Social Wallpapering was inspired by the potential of community-based interactive websites, especially digg.com.
Link – via Ursi’s Blog
It’s time for a Caption Monkey game! You can win a Free Monkey Drawing by Ape Lad of Hobotopia, simply by submitting the funniest caption.
The rules are simple: write a funny but civil caption in the comment section (one per caption per comment, you can submit as many as you can think of). You can also vote for whichever comment tickles your funny bone.
Funniest caption will receive a free monkey drawing – you name the monkey and Ape Lad will draw you one (see for example: the Neatorama Monkey, the whole Monkey! set at Flickr, and this cool YouTube clip of the drawing process). If you don’t win, but still want a monkey (or any other critter), you can buy one directly from Ape Lad (it’s worth it!).
Congratulations to Shawn #108 who won last week’s Caption Monkey game
Go to it!
Update 8/9/07 – congratulations to Sid Morrison #28 who wrote the winning caption: The Ass of Damocles. If you don’t know what it’s in reference to, check out: The Sword of Damocles.
This complete outfit comes with a duct tape Tommy gun [wiki]!
It’s not called “duct tape” because of it is ductile[wiki]. It is, however, versatile enough that you can make:
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This is homemade model of a Gibson Explorer is completely made from LEGO blocks. It seems a bit bulky but it’s looks very cool!
The Hover Skateboard in Back to the Future Part II [imdb] could be a viable gadget in a future by this discovery. But perhaps a better and more feasible application are faster, cheaper and more powerful maglevs all over the planet:
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force [wiki], so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
Remember the $99 million diamond and platinum skull by Damien Hirst last June?
Turns out Christoph Steinmeyer had created something like it in 2004: a "Disco Inferno" skull!
Image Credit: Droste Effect: manyone1, Original: svacher
Flickr user Pisco Bandito wrote a tutorial on how to create your very own Droste effect [wiki] photo using Mathmap for Windows and GIMP.
Or you can just gawk at the cool photos others had created at the Escher’s Droste Print Gallery [Flickr] – via Microsiervos (whom we always love!)
Previously on Neatorama: Droste Effect in Escher
Neatorama reader Den Holmes who made the nifty Noah’s Ark diorama, just sent this one in: a super awesome 17th-century 64-gun British ship model.
The model is 100% SCRATCH BUILT, MADE OUT OF CHESTNUT WOOD, CUSTOM MADE, 1-OF-A-KIND… The scale of this ship is 1/96 so it would be 168′ long x 42′ wide, and draws 21′ of water. The model is 27" long x 12" wide, and 25" high mid-ship. And has 5 different deck levels, plank-on-frame construction. Total work hours on the model, 1,175, and about 10,000 pieces. About 61′ of rigging.
Holy Camoly! 10,000 pieces! And if you work 8 hours a day on it, you’d have to spend 147 days to complete the work.
Gimme Friction Baby by Wouter Visser is a fun, addicting game of angles.
The omission of instructions was deliberate – Wouter believes that including instructions on such an abstract concept could potentially be more confusing than just letting the players figure it out for themselves.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it! Taken @ Singapore last month.
Neatorama reader Dean Mackey wrote to us about his website, The Online Paper Airline Museum (with links to over 800 paper airline designs – some his own and others he found on the Net).
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