Care for some 2-player mode against Jason Voorhees? You can try it with this custom PlayStation 4 controller made by redditor scourge_of_carpathia. S/he jokes "I'm glad Crystal Lake [the setting of the first movie] finally got wifi."
You can see process photos here. It's a good introduction to the thriving craft of controller modding.
-via Geek Art Gallery
Let us go to the wise man on the mountain. Surely his insight will guide us properly on the inward journey to peace and a sociology degree.
Walk with Claire Jarvis of Infinite Nap and pick up some coding ability while you're at it.
(Photo: João Coelho)
Iberian tarantulas are a lot like your ex-girlfriend: they get close to you, then brutally betray you, leaving you emotionally wrecked for life. But Iberian tarantulas go even further. They frequently kill and eat males right after mating with them. Why?
Scientists aren't sure, but they have three hypotheses. Nala Rogers of Scientific American summarizes them:
- She’s choosy. She wants to mate, but not with the male in front of her, so she holds out for someone better. In the meantime, hey, free meal.
- She’s just hungry. “It doesn’t matter if you have a great father for your offspring if you’re going to die tomorrow. If you’re starving, eat him,” says Jonathan Pruitt, assistant professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Pittsburgh, who has studied cannibalism in funnel-web spiders.
- She has terrible impulse control. A successful spider is a voracious predator. The more she eats, the more resources she can devote to making big, healthy egg sacs. But aggressive tendencies that help with hunting might not be so helpful in other contexts. If a spider is just generally vicious, her aggression toward prey might spill over onto potential mates in what is known as the “aggressive spillover hypothesis.”
Researchers at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Spain performed experiments to study the behavior of female sexual cannibal spiders. Like your "friends" who set you up with that girl in the first place, they placed male spiders in cages with female spiders and observed their behavior. Here's what happened:
Most females mated with the first male who came calling. Some ate him instead. Females who ate their suitors were offered additional chances with new males.
Most of the cannibal females were choosy. They ate males who were in poor condition and mated with males who were high quality. “But we found that there were a few females that would consistently get a male and kill it and get another male and kill it—so they were really aggressive,” says Jordi Moya-Laraño, the study’s senior author. The most aggressive females killed big, healthy males as often as they killed scrawny ones. The same females also had the highest growth rates, indicating that they were the most aggressive toward prey. “In this study, a female personality trait—her voracity toward prey—was correlated with her aggressiveness toward males. This is evidence that aggression is consistent between foraging and mating contexts,” Rabaneda-Bueno says. “Our results provide evidence that different female personalities can lead to different outcomes in the interactions between males and females in a sexual cannibal.”
-via Dave Barry
Actor Ted Raimi (Joxer on Xena and O'Neill on SeaQuest DSV) tweeted out this photo of a marvelous donut. He encountered it while in Portland, Oregon for the Wizard World convention.
It's the Dubble Bubble Donut by Voodoo Donuts, a bakery in Portland that makes wildly exotic donuts. It has vanilla frosting, bubble gum dust and a piece of Dubble Bubble bubblegum.
Voodoo Donuts really should take the obvious next step and replace the frosting with bubblegum.
Roll for initiative and move into the Downward-Facing Dog. You might do that at D&D Yoga, an experiment by artist Scott Wayne Indiana, dance instructor Sarah Dahnke and artist Eric Hagan.
While engaging in yoga at an ashram in Upstate New York, it occurred to Indiana that it could be fun to participate in a "guided narrative" while doing yoga. Classic Dungeons & Dragons could provide that narrative.
The above video show the result of this idea. The players met at a facility in Brooklyn. They each received a 10-sided die and a character sheet. Hagan served as Dungeon Master. He guided them through a dungeon crawl as the players adopted appropriate poses, such as the Dice Rolling Pose and Sword One.
-via Kotaku
(Photo: Team Farmall)
How good are you at driving a tractor? Good enough to make it dance? These farmers can. They participate in the sport of tractor square dancing. Troupes, such as the above Team Farmall in Ontario, perform at fairs while callers give directions like these:
Promenade this girl please do,
she’s the one who came with you.
She’s with you, have no fear;
she won’t go home with that John Deere
International Harvester launched the sport in 1953 as part of an advertising campaign. It was a way for the company to demonstrate the fast hitching ability of one of its tractors. But the sport became popular only recently with the first modern troupe forming in 1999. You can try it, but as you can see from the video below, you'll need to be a very skilled driver.
(Photo: Farmer's Fridge)
Farmer’s Fridge is a salad manufacturing company. It offers a novel way to sell its products: vending machines!
Luke Saunders, the founder of the company, prefers the term “kiosk.” But the effect is the same: put in money, then make a product selection using a touchscreen menu and you get a fresh salad.
The first machine is in place at the Garvey Food Court in Chicago. It offers a variety of salads, most of which appear to be indecently healthy. They’re served in clear plastic jars which can be returned to the vending machine and recycled. The machines are restocked every day to ensure freshness.
-Thanks, Wifey!
(Photo: Pieter Jannick-Dijkstra)
Kanye West and Jay Z are American hip hop and rap performers. They've worked together extensively for over a decade and are close friends and collaborators. Now the University of Missouri is offering a course on their work. Dr. Andrew Hobreck teaches English 2169, which is entitled simply "Jay Z and Kanye West." Here's the official course description:
This course looks at the career and work of Jay-Z and Kanye West from three perspectives: (1) Where do they fit within, and how do they change, the history of hip-hop music? (2) How is what they do similar to and different from what poets do?, and (3) How does their rise to both celebrity and corporate power alter what we understand as the American dream? In addition to listening to music and watching videos, we will also read Jay-Z's Decoded; histories of and critical works on rap music by Jeff Chang, Adam Bradley, and others; and one or two good studies of how poetry works.
In an interview with Consequence of Sound, Dr. Hobreck argued that these two men should be taken seriously as emerging poets:
I really do think that these guys are warming up to the level of major poets, and not many people think of it in those terms. Because it’s not just on a page, but it’s video art, too. So, we looked at how those complicated the questions, and how do books about poetry help us to understand rap with Jay and Kanye at the forefront. We looked at the larger history of rap as an art form. Specifically, how, especially with Blueprint 3 and Yeezus, there’s an identifiable push to get beyond what’s happening in the art form. They’re very much like painters and novelists in the 20th century, moving beyond the confines of the art form’s boundaries.”
I have not listened to either gentleman, so I have no opinion on the subject. Do you agree with Dr. Hobreck?
-via American Digest
(Photo: Bildtankstelle)
(Photo: Ji-Elle)
(Photo: Ji-Elle)
Chinguetti is a small town in Mauritania. It's been getting smaller because of the gradual expansion of the Sahara. But it was once a thriving settlement and, due to its beautiful mosque, a pilgrimage site since the Thirteenth Century.
It was once a rich intellectual center, so Chinguetti has a substantial library of about 1,300 Koranic manuscripts. That library is a treasure trove of rare books that have survived for centuries in the dry air.
-via Erik Krawkkel
(Photo: Hermanus Backpackers)
James Grant went spearfishing with friends near Colac Bay off New Zealand's South Island. He was in about 6 feet of murky water when he felt something bite into his leg and pull on him.
At first, the thought that it was one of his friends playing a prank. But when he realized that he was fighting a shark, he drew his knife and stabbed at it. Then he scrambled up on the shore. Using a first aid kit, he stitched up the bite wounds, some of which were 2 inches across.
Then Grant went off to a nearby pub to enjoy a few pints with friends. Courteously, he put on a bandage when he saw that he was dripping blood on the floor.
Having taken care of business, he went to a hospital to get more stitches and was back at work on Monday. After all, it was just a shark attack--nothing to get worked up about
-via Dave Barry
(Photo: Franziska Kauffman/EPA)
Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) was an automotive engineer and founder of the car company Porsche. In 1898, he personally built his first car: a 1898 Egger-Lohner electric C2 Phaeton. It had a 3-5 horsepower engine that could propel the car up to 21 MPH. He marked it "P1" because it was his first but certainly not last car.
He took it out onto the streets of Vienna in June of 1898, then participated in a great race in September. Porsche won, passing the finishing line 18 minutes before any other participant did. Then, in 1902, he placed the car in a warehouse. It sat there for a century.
On Monday, the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany unveiled the partially restored car. You can watch a video about it here (warning: auto-sound).
-via Jalopnik
(Photo: Shanghai Daily/Qu Zhi)
If you love Benedict Cumberbatch--at least when he's playing the role of Sherlock Holmes--then get to 50 Ruijin Road, Shanghai, China to indulge in a full fan experience. A cafe there is devoted to Sherlock Holmes and, specifically, the version on the TV show Sherlock. You can see more photos here.
It's decorated like an old English cafe with wood and leather furnishings, copies of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and scientific equipment that our favorite detective might use. It's a popular hangout because the show has a huge audience in China. In fact, when British Prime Minister David Cameron visited recently, he was barraged with requests to speed up production of the new season.
-via That's Nerdalicious!
(Photo: Umami Burger)
A Monte Cristo sandwich usually consists of ham, cheese and white bread which is dipped in egg batter, fried, then dusted with powdered sugar. Umami Burger, a ritzy hamburger chain in southern California, now offers a burger based on the Monte Cristo sandwich.
It's the brainchild of Michael Voltaggio, a chef famous for his work on the reality TV show Top Chef and his Los Angeles restaurants Ink and Ink Sack. For his Monte Cristo burger, Voltaggio uses Gruyere cheese fondue and proscuitto. The bun is then soaked in custard, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Voltaggio then wraps the bun around a beef patty and serves the burger with a side of maple syrup.
-via Foodiggity
Adam Lister, an artist in Beacon, New York, creates pixelated images of famous paintings, such as the Mona Lisa, and pop culture icons, such as Breaking Bad. He uses watercolors to render the style that originated with digital displays. He also uses 3D printers to create textured sandstone sculptures of these images.
The pixelated style is one that was deeply influential in his upbringing. In an email to the Washington Post, Lister explained:
Having grown up playing Atari and Nintendo video games, this broken-down, angular method of processing and displaying information became an interesting guideline for me to translate and selectively restructure some of the most famous paintings in the world.
-via Geek Art
The evil mailman is intent on attacking the house. It up to cat--and only cat-- to defend it. Watch our gallant hero slash at the enemy, who ultimately flees in terror.
-via 22 Words
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