The picture blog Scaffoldage uses the tagline "Skeletal Archiporn." It's another project from Shaun Usher of Letterheady and Letters of Note. Some of the scaffolds shown are almost works of art; others can frighten or even make you feel woozy. There is no text, but each image is linked to its source. The scaffold shown here was used during construction of the Water Cube built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. http://www.scaffoldage.com/ -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user dominique bergeron)

Joey Zeledón's Coat Check Chair is beautiful in its simplicity. It's made from coat hangers and the steel bar from a closet rack shaped into a chair frame.

Link via Not Cot

Wait -- a toothed gear that has only one side? Is that even possible? Aaron Hoover, a robotics student at Berkeley, says that it is:

[...] I convinced myself that this mechanism is indeed possible and that with right tools, a functional prototype could be built. (The entire mechanism essentially boils down to an oddly configured set of planetary gears. One can think of the black portion in the image as the ring with a fixed zero input velocity. A single blue gear is a planet, and the white strip is the sun. Output can be taken either from the sun or the planets (with no regard for practicality!). In practice, however, it’s easiest to actuate the Möbius strip (the white portion). So, using a combination of the Scene Language for Dynamic Environments (SLIDE), developed here at Berkeley, Tcl, Python, and Solidworks, I was able to create models of the constituent components. The base was fabricated on a Stratasys fused deposition (FDM) machine and took approximately 86 hrs. to finish. The “spur” gears were molded in silicone rubber using a two-part mold printed on a 3D Systems wax deposition machine (ThermoJet). And the central Möbius strip was also molded using molds printed on the 3DS machine. The Möbius strip was molded as a single linear strip then twisted and the ends were rejoined in a “guiding” mold and additional rubber was poured into that mold to bond the two ends together and form a single continuous ring. The end result is a functional prototype, but rotating the middle ring without having the blue gears pop out is a little tricky.

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ahoover/Moebius.html via Make

Husky Jackal Theater of Nashville proposes to put on a stage production of Terminator 2, using a script composed entirely of lines borrowed from the collected works of William Shakespeare:

We adhered to strict guidelines regarding the usage of Shakespeare’s works. Each line and phrase is taken directly from folios printed by or before 1685, and many extended sections of dialogue are composed of individual lines from separate works. Only proper nouns and pronouns were subject to change, as dictated by the plot. In these instances, all proper nouns are supplanted only by other proper nouns, and all pronouns by other pronouns. In some cases, corresponding verb tenses are modified. These practices enabled us to accurately retell the story of Terminator 2: Judgment Day while remaining true to the words of Shakespeare in form (if less so in intent).

Link via Mary Sue | Image: Matter Anti-Matter

Previously: What if The Big Lebowski Had Been Written by William Shakespeare

Hot Dog Leash - $9.95

Is your dog a trendsetting hipster pup?  He needs the Hot Dog Leash from the NeatoShop! It's the hot dog item of the year! All the pooches at the park will be salivating over this leash.

Spring has sprung! You have a new leash on life! That means it's time to take your cooped up pooch to the dog park.  Happy frolicking!

Be sure to check out all the amazing Home & Garden items available at the NeatoShop!

Marcus Levine creates stunning portraits and nudes out of nails driven into boards. Each work takes about 3,500 nails, as well as a lot of time. Levine is a driven man and rarely takes a day off from creating art.

Link via Dude Craft | Artist's Website | Photo: My Modern Met

Previously: Andrew Myers' Screw Portraits

The Caribbean island of Montserrat once had its government and most of the island's services centered in the small town of Plymouth. The community was evacuated in 1995 due to volcanic activity. In 1997, an eruption buried Plymouth under several feet of ash, rock, and lava. It has been an exclusion zone ever since, and no residents have returned. See a collection of 40 pictures of what's left. Link (Image credit: Flickr user Nick Brooks)

An aquarium enthusiast who goes by the name Steveoutlaw on forums was poisoned while trying to rid his aquarium of an invasive colony of anemones. To kill it, he boiled the rocks from his fish tank, and accidently inhaled some fumes. He ended up in the hospital, a victim of palytoxin, the second deadliest poison found in the natural world.

Palytoxin is shrouded in legend. Hawaiian islanders tell of a cursed village in Maui, whose members defied a shark god that had been eating their fellow villagers. They dismembered and burned the god, before scattering his ashes in a tide pool near the town of Hana. Shortly after, a mysterious type of seaweed started growing in the pool. It became known as “limu-make-o-Hana” (deadly seaweed of Hana). If smeared on a spear’s point, it could instantly kill its victims.

The shark god may have been an elaborate fiction, but in 1961, Philip Helfrich and John Shupe actually found the legendary pool. Within it, they discovered a new species of zoanthid called Palythoa toxica. The limu-make-o-Hana was real, but it wasn’t seaweed – it was a type of colonial anemone. In 1971, Richard Moore and Paul Scheuer isolated the chemical responsible for the zoanthid’s lethal powers  – palytoxin. Now, Jonathan Deeds from the US Food and Drug Administration has found that the poison is readily available in aquarium stores.

The problem is that the anemones that contain palytoxin are almost impossible to distinguish from species that don't. Read more about it at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link -via reddit

(YouTube link)

Have you ever wondered what astronauts do in their free time? Cady Coleman {wiki} is a scientist, flautist, and an astronaut, currently aboard the International Space Station. In this video, she gives us the short version of what it's like to play music in space. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Thanks to a webcam set up in Decorah, Iowa, you can watch Bald Eagle babies hatch live. Two of the three eggs have hatched, so while you wait for the last one to make its debut, you can entertain yourself by watching the fuzzy gray baby birds. You never know what you're going to get, though - the other day, the eagles brought a dead rabbit back to the nest and ate it.

At about six feet across and deep, the nest weighs about 1.5 tons. It's in a cottonwood tree about 80 feet off the ground and was first built there by the eagles in 2007 after the first one fell in a storm.

Link via KCCI

Flavorwire has compiled a really cool slideshow of classic authors (such as Ernest Hemingway, above) and their typewriters. There's something so nostalgic about seeing them peering at their Underwoods, their Royals, their Olivettis. Do you think in 50 years, we'll look at pictures of authors toiling over their MacBooks the same way?

Link


Photo from Life magazine.

(video link)

Saggy pants? Not in Principal Bobby White's school. The Memphis educator has enacted "The Urkel Initiative," a program that secures those droopy drawers up around the offending student's waist with zip ties through the belt loops.

He says it has cut down the number of kids being sent home or receiving citations for inappropriate dress from more than 80 per week to about five.

Link via Best Week Ever via AV Club

Earlier today on my Swedish blog, I published a post about a simple way to avoid crying when chopping onions.

It turned out that a lot of people didn't know about this trick, so I thought I'd share it here at Neatorama as well. Hopefully some of you readers will find it useful.

Ok, here it goes: Put a little bit of water in your mouth.

That's it! Just some plain water in your mouth while cutting the onion and you can wave goodbye to those tears.

From what I've heard, it's due to the fact that you're only breathing through the nose by doing so. So basically, just keeping the mouth closed should work just as fine, but it's probably not as easy as it sounds.

Link (in Swedish)

It seems everyone is familiar with the dangers of drug-resistant staph infections and well aware of just how scary they are. As it turns out, they are so terrifying that a woman recently robbed a convienance store using the staph infection on her arm as a weapon.

When a worker confronted her, prosecutors said Slusher showed her Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus-infected arm to the attendant, told him to stay away and then left the store.

She was later arrested and hopefully held in a cell away from the other prisoners.

Link Image via mtsofan [Flickr]

Photo: Shutterstock

What do conservatives dream about when they sleep? Crushing their liberal opponents in the 2012 Presidential Election? Repealing Obamacare and banishing the evil unions?

Well, aren't you glad that somebody did the research? Jerry Kroth and colleagues at the Santa Clara University investigated the dreams of 48 female graduate students and found that the conservative types are having these kinds of dreams:

• Dreams of Falling
• Dream Discontentedness
• Dreams of Being Chased
• Dreams of Being Famous

I wonder what liberals dream about? Via Discoblog.