Here's your chance of owning a piece of movie history: the house that Macaulay Culkin bravely defended in the movie Home Alone is up for sale. The price is a bit steep, but it's been proven to withstand intrusions by idiotic burglars.

The 4,250-square-foot, 14-room home sits on a half-acre lot and features four bedrooms, 3.2 baths, a large screened-in porch with a chandelier and, of course, the staircase sledded down by Culkin in John Hughes’ 1990 film.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/chibrkbus-home-alone-house-in-winnetka-on-sale-for-24m-20110504,0,678293.story

Midlife crisis used to be for old guys, but young people today have got their own version: "quarterlife crisis." It is hitting twenty- and thirtysomethings shortly after the enter the real world.

Author Damien Barr said that a "growing number of 25-year-olds are experiencing pressures previously felt by those in their mid-forties":

"Plenty of people are going to say the quarterlife crisis doesn't exist," he said. "The truth is that our 20s are not, as they were for our parents, 10 years of tie-dye fun and quality 'me' time. Being twentysomething now is scary – fighting millions of other graduates for your first job, struggling to raise a mortgage deposit and finding time to juggle all your relationships.

"We have the misfortune to be catapulted into a perilous property market. We're earning more and spending more than ever. We're getting into debt to finance our degrees, careers and accommodation."

He added: "The Depression Alliance estimates that a third of twentysomethings feel depressed.

"If, as we're constantly told, the world is our oyster, it's definitely a dodgy one. Unlike the midlife crisis, the quarterlife crisis is not widely recognised. There are no 'experts' to help us. We have no support apart from each other."

Link

Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg, which has the world's largest model railroad, has yet captured another superlative to its name: it has recently opened Airport Knuffingen, the world's largest model airport.

Over an area of 150m², there will be almost 40 different aircrafts taking off and landing, up to 360 times, daily. Since 2011, more than 150.000 working hours, and round-about 3.5 million Euros have been invested in this spectacular project.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

If one bicycle seat is kind of uncomfortable (at least for us fatties), how about 22 of them? Here's Jeremy Petrus' Mishmash bench, made from Selle Royal's bicycle seats: Link - via Core77

Be thankful that you don't live 50 million years ago, or you'd have to use a baseball bat instead of a shoe to kill this ant:

A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Link

Photos have surfaced that allegedly show the US military tossing kittens out of an airplane. When Gen. G. Rover Barkly was asked about the photos he said, "We wanted to find out if a cat really does always land on its feet. The upside is that if they don't make it the first time, we have eight more tries per animal. That is a bargain for the American taxpayer." I made that all up naturally, that photo is one of the more humorous ones from a Slate story titled "Cats of War." link

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Get ready for T-Shirt weather with Funny T-Shirts from the NeatoShop. From geeky to one-liners, we've got tons of neat T-shirts cheap! Free shipping to USA and Canada on orders $75 and up: Link

Besides pestering you with thankless tasks, what exactly do CEOs do all day? Thanks to a new Harvard Business School study, now we know:

Researchers asked the chief executives of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week. You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss’s assistant a neutral observer? If the boss spends his lunch hour boozing, or in a motel with his assistant, will she record this truthfully? Nonetheless, here are the results.

The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours. And the longer they work, the better the company does.

Less diligent chief executives are more likely to have one-to-one meetings with people from outside the company. The authors speculate that such people are trying to raise their own profile, perhaps to secure a better job. Bosses who work longer hours, by contrast, spend more of them meeting their own employees.

Link

I'm a sucker for beautiful nighttime cityscape time-lapse like this one shot by photographer Dominic Bodreault from late 2010 through early 2011 in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Manhattan, and Chicago. Simply gorgeous (the music by Hans Zimmer is also spot on).

Take a look at weep: Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] - via PetaPixel

Would you love a cat that looks like Hitler? Apparently cats looking like Hitler is such an epidemic that there is an entire website dedicated to cataloguing these Kitlers. If you have one you can post your Feline Führer and show him to the world before he tries to take it over. Link

It’s amazing what a little camouflage can do.  Apparently during World War II to avoid potential bombing the government went to great lengths to disguise an aircraft  plant.  Check out more of these amazing photos at the link.

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Link

When we think “Evil Lairs” most of us fondly remember Dr. Evil’s hollowed out mountain with his face on it from the Austin Powers movies (at least I do).  In reality there are plenty of actual evil lairs to marvel at. My favorite is H.H. Holmes' Murder Castle.

This was no ordinary hotel: most of the rooms were windowless, with stairways to nowhere and hallways that ended in dead ends. Holmes also built gas jets into hotel-room walls, a wooden disposal chute and person-size kiln in the basement. This was the perfect place to murder someone.

Link

When I was a kid we had to make do with a Light Bright to entertain us. Now it looks like we are one step closer to children having a robotic, artificially intelligent play friend. Which will be perfect for the child with no friends.

Visual pattern recognition is an important part of human intelligence. It’s a complex process, requiring parallel processing of different types of information such as the shape, color, and contrast of a person’s face. If the robots of the future are going to be able to imitate–or improve upon–our behavior they’re going to need to be pretty adept at pattern recognition. The Nao program for pattern recognition only sees in 2D, but for the purposes of the card game it’s enough.

Link

How to you kill two birds with one stone? We haven’t been back to the moon since the Apollo missions and we have a looming energy crisis. Former NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt has a big plan to solve both those issues.

 Former astronaut, Apollo moonwalker, geologist and former Senator Harrison Schmitt has a modest plan to solve the world’s energy problems. All we need is $15 billion over 15 years and some fusion reactors that have yet to be invented.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/former-apollo-astronaut-says-moon-mining-could-solve-global-energy-crisis

The National September 11 Memorial will open this fall in New York City. The names of 3,500 victims of the terrorist attacks that day will be inscribed on the wall surrounding the fountains. Instead of arranging the names alphabetically, they will be grouped by affinity: police officers together, firefighters together, passengers on each plane together, and for those who were in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, friends and co-workers will be grouped together.

"It’s about making meaning not just for the people who know the individuals, but for the people who are going there," says Jake Barton, Local Projects' founder. "In that way, people can learn the human relationships and stories underneath the names themselves." If, for example, you see the 650 employees from Cantor Fitzgerald together, you realize that an entire company was nearly wiped out. Had they been arranged alphabetically, that bit of meaning would have been lost.

"The Memorial Finder, covers the gap," says Barton. "It tells you the specific panel and number, where you can find an individual, but begins to reveal the connections between the names themselves. As you move around the site itself, a smartphone app will reveal adjacencies as well as the stories behind the names." While the project makes intuitive sense, wrangling 3,500 victims’ names was anything but simple.

An algorithm created by programmer Jer Thorp allows, for instance, the names of firefighter John T. Vigiano II and his brother, police officer Joseph Vincent Vigiano to be placed next to each other, while both are grouped with the other victims in their respective units. Read more about this project at Fastco Design. Link -Thanks, Joe Jalbert!