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Wired has a gallery of user-submitted celebrities who have been “rolled” as AD&D characters. Here’s George W. Bush’s (by “Spherical Time”):
17th -level politician
Chaotic Neutral Human
Strength: 11
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 6
Constitution: 12
Dexterity: 10
Charisma: 16
Special Abilities: Always wins eligible elections, takes no damage for corporate connections, has the ability to prevaricate perfectly, and always goes first in initiative in attacks via other countries.
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Nexi, is an M.D.S. (Mobile/Dexterous/Social) Robot coming from the geniuses of MIT Media Labs Personal Robots Group in collaboration with Xitome Design, UMASS Amherst’s Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, and Meka Robotics. Built to the size and relative weight of a 3 year old child Nexi has a combination of mobility, dexterity, and human-centric communication and interactive abilities. It has the arm strength capability to lift up to 10 pounds and is able to move about on two wheels at a steady and even pace. And it’s head and neck is able to move and gesture at human speeds to allow it to nod, shake, tilt, and orient much like that of a human neck.
According to MIT:
The purpose of this platform is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning.
The face has the amazing ability to convey human emotions and facial expressions such as anger, confusion, sadness, curiosity, and happiness among 16 degrees of other facial expressions easily recognizable. It can do this by utilizing the eyebrows, gaze, eyelids, and an articulated mandible (the mouth) for expressive posturing eerily close to our own.
To end this post I’d like to point this sentence out to you from the Xitome Design website about the M.D.S. Robot:
The robot is roughly the height and weight of an adolescent child,with a strength-to-mass ratio that allows it to interact safely with humans.
Interact “safely” with humans?! I can’t wait for a creepy 3 year old sized robot to attack me in the future with an angry lifeless stare when the Robot Wars begin. 
Press Play to watch or head to YouTube – [Link]
Found via Gizmodo- [Link]
Further Information can be found here on these links provided. I highly suggest you check out the MIT Media Labs link since it has a ton of information about Nexi and other projects.
MIT Media Labs Personal Robots Group – [Link]
Meka Robotics – [Link]
UMASS Amherst’s Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics – [Link]
Xitome Design – [Link]
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Swedish Vodka maker Absolut is stirring up a little nationalistic pride in Mexico with their new ad depicting what Mexico would look like in an "Absolute World". But it is stirring a few feathers in El Norte, that’s for sure:
The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California.
Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fé de Nuevo México ceded to the United States to become modern-day California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. (Texas actually split from Mexico several years earlier to form a breakaway republic, and was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1846.)
The campaign taps into the national pride of Mexicans, according to Favio Ucedo, creative director of leading Latino advertising agency Grupo Gallegos in the U.S. Ucedo, who is from Argentina, said: “Mexicans talk about how the Americans stole their land, so this is their way of reclaiming it. It’s very relevant and the Mexicans will love the idea.”
But he said that were the campaign to run in the United States, it might fall flat. “Many people aren’t going to understand it here. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county — I don’t know if they know much about the history. “Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly and I don’t know how they’d take it.”
Link – via AdPulp (who said "Lou Dobbs is now totally switching to Grey Goose.")
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Behold the YouTube Doubler … because two YouTube clips playing at once is bound to be twice the fun of one clip playing by itself. Plus, almost everything is better when played next to a clip of a laughing baby.
Link – via Random Culture
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That’s the life-sized skeleton car Collindonthus by Indian artist Jitish Kallat, on display at Artkrush. See more of his skeleton art at The Saatchi Gallery – via who killed bambi?
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Katrin Sonnleitner created this extremely modular flooring: a Persian rug called PuzzlePerser, made out of thousands of individual puzzle pieces! Link [Flash, click on Project, then PuzzlePerser] – via MoCo Loco
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Earlier last month, French President Nicholas Sarkozy proposed that every fifth grader learn about the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazi in the Holocaust.
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”
Needless to say, his plan was controversial. His political opponents derided the idea, psychologists and educators claimed that it would traumatize the students. One Holocaust survivor noted:
“It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”
I came about this story from a thought-provoking post by Jessica Helfand of Design Observer. She wrote:
Meanwhile, schoolchildren are typically taught history by fact and by date. They memorize key battles and identify significant acts of legislation, a process intended to highlight those benchmarks of civilization with which we should all aspire to fluency. Curiously, the notion that making history human would devalue such learning seems odd, if not entirely oxymoronic: if we read and analyze fiction to come to a better understanding of our own humanity, why would we not derive similar lessons from our own history?
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Apartment Therapy LA Blog has a neat post about some homewares from Japan (that unfortunately, you can’t get in the United States). This one above, a dining room set called Cube Style, is very cleverly designed for small apartments (as you probably know, space is at a premium in Tokyo)
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Michael Griffith of the Savannah College of Art & Design had this great idea of converting a construction site for a high rise into advertisement for a local gym!
Found at Ads of the World, who has a couple more pics.
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Eclectic 2.0 is a beautifully shot movie made with still photographs by San Diego State University senior Ross Ching – check out the time-lapse panning. My favorite is the nightsky shots. The wonderful music is Horseshoes and Handgrenades by The Ghost Orchid
Don’t miss this: Link [requires Quicktime 7] | Then watch The Making Of Eclectic 2.0 – Thanks Edward!
There’s Eclectic (the first one by Ross Ching) on YouTube, but you need to see it in hi-res to appreciate the full beauty of the clip.
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A bear at a zoo in Hiroshima City, western Japan, is drawing applause from visitors with his performance of twirling a stick.
Claud, a male Asiatic black bear at Asa Zoo, began twirling a branch when he was playing with it 5 years ago. The zoo operator says that the bear stopped the twirling after he grew up but resumed it 2 months ago.
This day, he used his mouth to pick up a stick like a pole weighing about 5 kilograms – his recent favorite — and handled it intensely with his hands, legs and neck.
Visitors said they were surprised to watch such a large bear handle the stick so skillfully.
His breeder said he doesn’t know why the bear likes to twirl sticks but his performance is really powerful.
These silky skills could have levelled the playing field in Sonny Chiba’s Karate Bearfighter and given the title a second meaning too. Of course we always knew bears can kick ass, but it is nice to see it for real.
Link (with another video news report) – Thanks Q
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Stop and think about this for a moment: the combined ages of The Rolling Stones (current) member is: 254 years old.
Mick Jagger (born July 26, 1943) is 64 years old as of today, Keith Richards (December 18, 1943) is 64,
Charlie Watts (June 2, 1941) is 66, and Ronnie Wood (June 1, 1947): 60.
Hm… that’s it. Carry on.
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Will Ashford turns pages from old books he found at garage sales, street markets and used bookstores into works of art:
When I find a good candidate I explore every page. Like an archeologist I hunt for the words that speak to me with new meaning. Intuitively, one word at a time, they turn into a kind of haiku or philosophical poetry that I can call my own.
At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.
Not to be missed: Link – via Bibi’s Box
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In the 1960s, Heineken got the brilliant idea of making square beer bottles … so that after you’re done drinking the beer, you can use the bottles as bricks!
Made in England by Gentlemen blog has the pics of a wall built out of Heinies: Link
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The Praise Tabernacle church in Buffalo has got the best church sign I’ve seen! Found at JB’s Warehouse and Curio Emporium
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There can be no questions about it – here is the BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIMES. I present to you: Queen Kong (1976) with Robin Askwith (bling!) and Rula Lenska. Watch it and weep!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Sequoia Sempervirens
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The American football huddle was invented by Paul Hubbard, a deaf player at Gallaudet University, to avoid the other team see his signs.
Gallaudet University is the world’s premiere liberal arts university for the deaf and the hearing-impaired. Its all-deaf players football team was disbanded in 1994 for "lack of interest." The Gallaudet Bisons hadn’t won more than three games a season since 1930. (Source)
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Here’s a fantastic cake you can make for your next party: the echidna ice cream cake.
Bowling Trophy blog has the recipe:
To make it, fill a metal bowl with softened ice cream and freeze. Unmold, add a twinkie for a nose, coat the nose and face with that gross chocolate coating that hardens on contact with ice cream (because it’s full of coconut oil or wax), stick it full of chocolate fingers, sprinkle with grated chocolate and add a couple of smarties for eyes.
Link – via Look At This
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That’s the Chairman Mao chair, created by artist Gerard Scarfe, as seen in I’m Learning to Share blog.
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Mike Duncan’s company got this fantastic letter from a woman named Joyce who wanted to be unsubscribed from "his internet" because, she wrote, "My interent gets too full all the time"
Link – via I have seen the whole of the internet
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Doug of HolyJuan blog has a nice compilation of farm machinery warning labels with funny captions.
I Lol’d heartily at a few of them (Dancing with Heather Mills, Hah!) and I bet you would too. Head over yonder: Link
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Behold the teddy bear skull in felted wool, as created by Stephanie Metz. Her other artwork include Teddy Bear Fetal Development in felted wool, mutant chicken embryo with alligatorlike teeth (cool!) and a cute bunny rabbit.
Plus, she explains for the first time how wool felting works. Check out her artwork: Link – via Ectoplasmosis
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Photo: l0ckergn0me’s [Flickr]
How long does wedding bliss last? According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who surveyed over 10,000 women, the answer is: 4 years.
Prof Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, said studies showed that beyond this the benefits of marriage were often outweighed by having less time to see friends and a larger household workload.
While those who stayed single were more likely to feel lonely and have less sex, they had greater freedom, more time to socialise and fewer chores, he said.
Speaking at the British Psychological Society conference in Dublin yesterday, Prof Kahneman, of Princeton University, New Jersey, said: " People have very high expectations, and marriage does not necessarily live up to them."
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Boing Boing Gadgets has a very neat post about 9 common idioms that turned out to have technological origins. For example:
"Push the envelope"
Common definition: Extreme, testing the limits (e.g. "That backside 1440 on the halfpipe was really pushing the envelope, broseph!")
Original definition: In aviation, the term flight envelope has been used since WWII to define the limit of what is safe to fly (engine power, maneuverability, wind speed, altitude). By "pushing the envelope", test pilots were able to find out the limits of aircraft. The "envelope" was a mathematical term to describe the boundaries of a set of numbers-like performance data from test aircraft.
First use: The phrase was used in print as early as 1978 in an edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine: "The aircraft’s altitude envelope must be expanded to permit a ferry flight across the nation. NASA pilots were to push the envelope to 10,000 ft." However, it was Tom Wolfe’s "The Right Stuff" that put the term into popular consciousness.
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"What is guilt? Guilt is the reason they put articles in Playboy."
– Dennis Miller, comedian, political commentator, and actor
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Ladies! Want some beautiful dimples that nature has forgotten to give you? Fret not: check out this invention by one Isabella Gilbert:
The device consists of a face-fitting stpring carrying two tiny knobs which press into the cheeks.
From the Oct 1936 issue of Modern Mechanix
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