Last month, our very own Stacy (who just survived a freaky accident involving a downed power line - glad you're ok, Stacy!) wrote a very neat post over at mental_floss about the background stories of 10 classic toys.
Take, for instance, Slinky:
Slinky was invented by Naval engineer Richard James. He knocked a spring off of a shelf when he was working to develop springs that could keep ship instruments stable in choppy waters. The spring did what a Slinky does… it stepped down to a stack of books, then to the table, and then to the floor, where it righted itself into a cylinder. James knew it would be a great toy, and tests by neighborhood kids proved him right.
Long before the "series of tubes" become a web parlance (thanks to former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens), there was a real tubes technology: the pneumatic tube system.
WebUrbanist takes a look at this fantastic retro-technology that until recently was still used in my local Costco to move around money:
Long before the Internet was a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, a different series of tubes helped shuttle messages from one place to another, seemingly by magic. These pneumatic tube systems, many of which are still operating, are a marvel of not-so-modern technology and although they blow, they most definitely do not blow.
Super Punch blog has a neat post about Papershapers, a paper art exhibition as sponsored by Scion Space and curated by Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot.
The art exhibit features the artwork of Shin Tanaka, Polly Verity, Annie Vought, Ryohei Tanaka, Hunter Stabler, Richard Sweeney, Peter Callesen, Brian Dettmer, Ana Serrano, and Mu Pan.
The image to the left is called The Sharp-Beaked Hound of Zeus, a marvelous papercraft by artist Polly Verity.
Nearly two years after it was introduced to the world, Osaka University's CB2 robot (which stands for "Child-robot with Biomimetic Body") has been developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, just like a human baby would:
Below the soft silicon skin of one of Japan's most sophisticated robots, processors record and evaluate information. The 130-cm (four-foot, four-inch) humanoid is designed to learn just like a human infant.
"Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more," said Osaka University professor Minoru Asada, as his team's 33 kilogram (73 pound) invention kept its eyes glued to him.
The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother's countless facial expressions and "clusters" them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j1F1VEHktMpXSaXrLUgr4coIDfPg - via Pink Tentacle
This is very cool: Paper Forest blog has a YouTube clip of a spinning papercraft. The original design is by Ramin Razani, as noted by Jeffrey Rutzky in his book Kirigami (more photos here on his Flickr acct).
And so it has begun: Honda has developed a new brain-machine interface technology that allows humans to control the Asimo robot simply by thinking:
The BMI system, which Honda developed along with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation, consists of a sensor-laden helmet that measures the user’s brain activity and a computer that analyzes the thought patterns and relays them as wireless commands to the robot.
When the user simply thinks about moving his or her right hand, the pre-programmed Asimo responds several seconds later by raising its right arm. Likewise, Asimo lifts its left arm when the person thinks about moving their left hand, it begins to walk when the person thinks about moving their legs, and it holds its hand up in front of its mouth when the person thinks about moving their tongue.
Pink Tentacle blog has more: Link (with video clip)
To protect public propriety, Saudi Arabia has recently banned license plates whose Arabic characters spell out lewd words:
Saudi plates normally have three Arabic characters and three numbers, but the growing fashion is for auto owners also to display a version using the Latin alphabet and some buyers of personalised "vanity plates" deliberately choose Arabic letters which turn into words like "SEX", "ASS" and "NUT".
The authorities in charge of issuing vanity plates have released a list of nine prohibited three-letter combinations, and ordered all branches to stop renewing plates that include them, according to Watan.
In other news, a Saudi judge reiterated his decision that the marriage of an 8-year-old to a 47-year-old man is valid and refused to annul the marriage:
The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom recently. While rights groups have been petitioning the government to enact laws that would protect children from this type of marriage, the kingdom's top cleric has said that it's OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.
"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in remarks last January quoted in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."
Al-Sheikh reportedly made the remarks when he was asked during a lecture about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.
"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Sharia law has not brought injustice to women."
Actually, it's the image of a nebula surrounding a young pulsar known as PSR B1509-58, as taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy blog explains:
If you look at the wrist of the hand, you’ll see a brighter swirl of gas. In the center of that blob is a tiny object, a neutron star called B1509: an incredibly dense sphere of subatomic particles, leftover when a massive star goes supernova. While the outer layers of the star explode outwards, the core of the star collapses, cramming twice the mass of the Sun into a ball only a few kilometers across. This newly born neutron star — called that because the pressure is so great in the collapsed object that electrons and protons are rammed together to form neutrons — is basically the definition of the word incredible: it spins several times per second, has a surface gravity millions of times that of the Earth (if you were on the surface you’d be crushed flatter than a good science fiction program’s chances to be renewed on Fox), and has a magnetic field 30 trillion times that of the Earth’s.
It's always fascinating to get an inside glimpse into how art is made. Parka Blogs has a neat post about the creative workspaces and home offices of artists. This one above is the workspace of Disney Interactive animator Mel Milton. I spotted an empty table space to the right that will probably be occupied with toys soon!
Fred Baier said that his furniture are inspired by "industrial imagery," but we're pretty darn certain that the deks above, nondescriptly titled Dual Quad, is some sort of a hidden robot that will rise and quash humanity for not using coasters when setting down their drinks on the lacquered birch countertop.
If you'd like one, it'll set you back £11,000: Link via Gizmodo
I must've been living in a cave, because I missed this '08 post by Bonnie Burton of Star Wars blog on how to make your very own cuddly Bantha (y'know, the furry elephant-like animals ridden by the Tusken Raiders)
Don't let my kids see this: London architect Alex Michaelis has slide next to his staircase! Laura Housley of Cookie Magazine has the story:
Not that there aren't plenty of kids' diversions elsewhere, including the climbing wall outside and the slide that runs alongside the staircase. "We tend to have a lot of the kids' friends around—they're here perhaps more than at some of the other parents' homes," Michaelis says, adding that even grown-ups can't resist skipping the stairs. "We've been known after a big dinner party to use the slide."
We've posted about Spaceship Battleship Yamato in LEGO before on Neatorama, but as the old saying goes, the original is still the best: here's the namesake the battleship Yamato (also in LEGO) which sailed (and sank) during World War II.
The LEGO battleship Yamato was built by Jumpei Mitsui (who cleverly outsourced the building of some 200,000 elements to other LEGO fans). It only took him 6 (!) years: Link
Contrail is a fun little gadget developed by Studio Gelardi to let bicyclists "mark" their bike paths. As more an more bikers ride on the same path, the contrail lines get brighter. Ostensibly, they say that the gadget allows other bicyclists the path that is safe to ride on but I'm sure that a big part of the appeal is the sheer fun in making roads look like Skittles rainbow.
http://gelardi.com/portfolio/contrail/ - via Gadget Lab
Peter Beland of The Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating look at Ascending The Giants, a unique "adventure group" led by arborists Brian French and Will Koomjian. The duo climbs the tallest trees to learn more about the wildlife that lives on the highest branches:
Up in the branches of this goliath, I felt the tree sway back and forth with the wind, an unsettling sensation. From the ground, the nine-foot-wide tree almost seemed sturdy enough to support the earth below it and not the other way around. But from my precarious vantage point in the canopy, I spied a forest floor littered with fallen giants.
“Oh, it’s at least 500 years old; it’s been through plenty of storms," said ATG co-founder Brian French, in an offhand attempt to both reassure and terrify me as we chatted 200 feet up in the tree. "Of course, I could be wrong.” We shot the breeze some more, and as the musk of ancient fir and moss wafted into my nostrils, I was reminded that this is a living organism.
