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Gizmodo broke the news, and despite the throng of doubters crying, “Photoshopped!”, ILM has confirmed that Artoo can definitely be seen floating through space as the Romulan ship attacks Vulcan (Star Trek 2009). From ScienceFictionStuff:
*Update, some people online are saying that this image is Photoshoped but I want to help prove that it is not. The best way to do this I have found is to play your copy of ‘Star trek’ with Media Player Classic and use the amazing frame advance feature to get the still… that’s how I done it.
Link with larger version. | Image: Spyglass Entertainment via image capture by Science Fiction Stuff.
Qiao Chang of SmugMug is a commercial photographer who creates origami figures as a hobby. One of her works takes the form of a mathematical puzzle called a Soma cube:
A solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. There are seven soma pieces composed of all the irregular face-joined cubes (polycubes) with <=4 cubes. The object is to assemble the pieces into a cube. There are 240 essentially distinct ways of doing so (Beeler 1972, Berlekamp et al. 1982), as first enumerated one rainy afternoon in 1961 by J. H. Conway and Mike Guy.
Link via GearFuse | Soma Cube Explanation
Murder Ink Sticky Notepad and Pen – $7.95 | More Fun Office Supplies
Here’s a new and gruesomely nifty sticky notepad and pen combo over at the Neatorama Shop: Murder Ink. For just $7.95, it’s a neat stocking stuffer for Christmas!
PS This Christmas season, be sure to shop early. I know that a lot of stores (ourselves included) have trouble keeping some hot stuff in stock.
A lot of manufacturers were stuck with a lot of unsold items last Christmas due to the economy, and they had underestimated the demand this time around. Add to this container shipping woes and incredibly strict importing standards (thanks Federal stimulus!), and we have a retailer’s nightmare. So, if you see something you’d like, don’t wait and get it now 
Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett remade the slow-moving bullet-dodging scene from The Matrix. Their official website goes into detail about how they executed the project:
By “frame accurate” we mean that we took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that’s nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.
This was time-consuming to say the least, taking us something like 440 hours to make the completed movie. At that ratio of 10 hours per second we figured we could do the whole film in about 9 years, so long we didn’t need to eat or sleep. As a full-time job then, we’re probably looking at 25 years or so. No thanks.
Early in the piece we decided we wanted to do everything “in camera”. No wire-removal, no special effects, no crazy Photoshop tricks. We pretty much regret this now, but I guess it gives us bragging rights of some sort. We did do some colour correction and image stabilising, and at one point we edited a very small number of frames in one scene so that some minor background shake was taken out, but that’s it.
Official Website via io9
Yesterday, Neatorama featured a Muppet version of Queen’s iconic song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Lindsey Weber of Urlesque has compiled fifteen unusual and creative cover version of that song, including this ukulele version by Ukulele Bartt. Others include a typographical version, an orchestral version, and one in which the musician uses only his hands.
Jonathan Wolfe makes delicate puzzle boxes out of acorns. Each one opens only when a particular area is tapped or a wire is pulled. One in the video takes the form of a Matryoshka doll with a smaller acorn puzzle box inside.
Thinking about seeing The Road, the new movie based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy? Take note of some of the locations they filmed in, as they utilized existing devastated areas to serve as the cataclysmic setting.
Windy Ridge, which is on the east flank of Mt. St. Helens in Southern Washington, still looks like a wasteland nearly 30 years after the volcano erupted in a lateral blast. The filmmakers took advantage of the naturally creepy vistas that sweep around the formerly lush environment.
“They wanted locations that represented devastation,” Ludvigsen said. “The areas they liked were where trees were uprooted and root wads were showing, trees where the tops were snapped off from the eruption.”
It also helped that portions of Forest Road 99 had been washed out during recent flooding.
The crew spent a good portion of the day in that location, filming stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. In this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Mortensen plays a father leading his young son through a landscape torn apart by some unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on Earth.
Link | Photo: Joel W. Roger/CORBIS
Hebert’s Specialty Meats can supply your Thanksgiving entree complete with alligator dressing. Order it with your turkey, duck, chicken, quail, or rabbit. From the description, it sounds delicious!
Sauté onion, bell pepper, and that wonderful Cajun seasoning, smother alligator meat in tomato sauce. Combine finished product with white rice.
Link -via Woman’s Day
(image credit: Flickr user Paraflyer)
How did whales manage to grow so big? And is there a limit to how big they can get? Scientists looked at the mechanics of how whales feed, especially those species that consume tiny krill. They call what they discovered “lunge-feeding”, which is detailed in an article at Discover Magazine.
In order to make lunge-feeding work, you have to have a really big mouth to capture enough water in one gulp. But in order to have a big mouth, you need a big body. And in order to keep that big body running, you need to get a lot of food. And in the very act of getting that food–diving deep, lunging open-mouthed, and then pushing a school-bus-sized volume of water forwards–requires a lot of energy on its own.
This type of feeding might explain the size of whales.
If the scientists are right, they may have discovered one of the big ironies in evolution. Lunge-feeding may have allowed whales to become the biggest animals ever to roam the planet. But this was not an open-ended invitation.r. Once whales got large enough, lunge feeding itself became so costly it prevented them from getting any bigger.
I can’t imagine how cold it would have to be to freeze such a large, fast flowing river and falls. These pictures were taken in 1911 before there was a dam in place, so the water would have been much higher and much faster.
From the Upcoming 
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A nanny goat led a herd on a break for freedom during rush hour, and German police had to stop them in order to allow traffic to move. What to do? Identify the perpetrator, and handcuff her to a fence!
Hapless police didn’t have a clue how to herd the goats back to their farm and so cuffed them until owner Uwe Stiller, 50, arrived in Bielefeld, Germany, to collect them.
No word on whether the ringleader goat will have to face charges. Link -via Arbroath
Americans know about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but you probably aren’t familiar with all the Native Americans from the history of the early United States profiled in this slide show. Red Cloud is ranked at #8.
Without a doubt, one of the best Native American war leaders the United States Army ever faced, Red Cloud organized 2,000 Arapaho, Sioux and Cheyenne in a successful bitch-slapping of U.S. forces out of the Lakota territory that is now Wyoming and southern Montana. Known as Red Cloud’s War, the two-year skirmish ended with the U.S. agreeing to completely withdraw from their area.
Link -via Gorilla Mask
Bart’s Blackboard is an archive of every sentence that Bart Simpson has been forced to write on the blackboard in the opening sequence to The Simpsons. So far, there are six seasons loaded in this ongoing project.
Link via J-Walk Blog
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the always intriguing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what today’s mysterious object is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. The first correct guess and the funniest (but wrong) guess will win a Funny T-Shirt from the Neatorama Shop. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guesses as you’d like. Please let others play and post no URL or web links. Doing so will forfeit your entry.
For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update 11/27/09 – the answer is: A dust container for a compressed air duster, “used in spraying field and truck crops,” patent number 1,877,778. No one got it right (in time anyhow, there were correct answers posted after the What is it? Blog has posted the answer). Congratulations to two funny guesses who got the prizes instead:
Melphistopheles who said “Jar-Jar” and davisbg who said “Beginner’s Ship-in-a-bottle Kit”
Creating a robot capable of grasping a variety of door nobs but is light enough to fit onto a wheelchair is quite an engineering challenge. But Erin Rapacki of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell was up to the task, and built one from only $2,000:
A door-opening robot must be able to grasp a variety of designs of door knobs and handles. It also needs to calculate “how much force is needed to open the door, the twisting angles to unlatch the door, and how much force is needed to unlatch it”, says Erin Rapacki, now at Anybots in Mountain View, California [...]
To keep her device simple, Rapacki used a single motor and avoided the expense of cameras and elaborate sensors. Instead, a motor-driven set of gears extends the gripper towards the handle with its three fingers spread apart (see diagram).
Rapacki first tried flexible neoprene fingers, thinking that they could bend to grasp the knob, but these proved too thick and soft. Stiff plastic fingers with plates to constrain their sideways motion proved much more effective.
She also added a slip clutch to the drive system, to allow the device to hold and turn the knob at the same time as pushing or pulling.
Link via Popular Science
James Ng wanted to surprise his girlfriend by proposing on a hot-air balloon ride when he got a surprise of his own: he dropped the ring 500 feet into the woods!
James Ng was set to propose to his fiancée on a hot-air balloon ride when the symbol of their love fell 500 feet into the woods.
Ng, 26, pastor of New Mercies Community Church, had hidden the 1-carat diamond ring in a box in his camera case. As they floated along on Oct. 29, the case slipped from his hands.
"I just watched it tumble, and it hit a tree and spun around, and the stuff fluttered out of it," Ng recalls. "And I just put my head down on the side of the balloon, and I was just — I just couldn’t believe I’d just done that.
"My first thought was don’t tell her … and buy another ring — which it took me forever to afford the one I had," Ng says. But Sonya Bostic, 27, caught on. "When he reacted the way he did, that’s when I knew," she says. "Wait a second! My ring’s in there!"
But the story has a happy ending. Dick Russ and Rob Jennings of USA Today have the story: Link
Photo: Kossy@FINEDAYS [Flickr]
Today, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year in the United States. And if you’ve ever flown commercial airlines, then you’ve probably got a horror story or two.
So, let me ask you this question: what is the worst airline you’ve ever flown and why?
I’ve flown pretty much all major carriers (both domestic and international) and there’s only one airline I’ll never ever fly again but that’s another story. I want to hear yours.
If you’re the dainty type of cyclist who just can’t go anywhere without a touch of lace, you may consider this awesome reflective lace by Elena Corchero.
Link Via Craftzine Image Via Elena Corchero
These cool sculptures are made during an annual event called Canstruction. Teams of engineers, architects and students get together to make their inspired creations using canned food. After the public exposition of the artworks, the food is donated to local food banks and shelters.
Link Image Via Canstruction
Similar in principle to the colored spirals, the shades of blue, and the famous checkershadow illusion, this video demonstrates that our brains judge colors by comparing an object or area to other objects or areas rather than assessing the color directly.
Found at Reddit, where there is a discussion thread re the illusion.
