Pepa Quin of Brickpics built this excellent LEGO model of Futurama's Planet Express building (complete with the flying billboard). The diorama is complete with the spaceship, Futurama minifig characters, and even a
Excellent work, Pepa! Link - via The Brothers Brick
Photoshop Disaster is a new blog dedicated to finding (and making fun of) bad photoshoppery in print media, ads, and product packagings. They've got a lot of examples, some quite famous (like the belly button-less Brazilian Playboy model [SFW]), but a lot I've never seen before (like the mutant Lady Guineviere's third hand in Castle in the Air novel)
This one above is a Spanish newspaper's attempt in covering up a rival newspaper's ad by replacing it with ... clones!
Photo: FORS Team, 8.2-m VLT Antu, ESO
The black "blob" in the sky is a dark molecular cloud made of dust and gas that is so dense that it absorbs practically all visible lights:
The eerily dark surroundings help make the interiors of molecular clouds some of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe. One of the most notable of these dark absorption nebulae is a cloud toward the constellation Ophiuchus known as Barnard 68, pictured above. That no stars are visible in the center indicates that Barnard 68 is relatively nearby, with measurements placing it about 500 light-years away and half a light-year across. It is not known exactly how molecular clouds like Barnard 68 form, but it is known that these clouds are themselves likely places for new stars to form.
Farmer David Kennard has himself some very talented sheepdogs. His team of Collies carefully round up a flock of sheep, and with the help of their master, welcome the coming of Spring by spelling out the word with sheep!
Every second, the sun produces more energy than human civilizations have ever produced in history.
Indeed, every second, the sun produces about 400 trillion trillion watts of energy. That's the equivalent of a trillion 1 megaton atom bombs! (Source)
The Economist has an interesting article on the next big thing in automotive industry: the quest in search of the perfect battery.
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which helped to make the mobile-phone revolution possible in the past decade, are now expected to power the increasing electrification of the car. “They are clearly the next step,” says Mary Ann Wright, the boss of Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions, a joint venture that recently opened a factory in France to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrid vehicles.
According to Menahem Anderman, a consultant based in California who specialises in the automotive-battery market, more money is being spent on research into lithium-ion batteries than all other battery chemistries combined. A big market awaits the firms that manage to adapt lithium-ion batteries for cars. Between now and 2015, Dr Anderman estimates, the worldwide market for hybrid-vehicle batteries will more than triple, to $2.3 billion. Lithium-ion batteries, the first of which should appear in hybrid cars in 2009, could make up as much as half of that, he predicts.
Members of the Chorley and South Ribble Knit and Natter Group in Lancashire, England, decided to knit something useful for new mothers learning to breastfeed: knitted breasts!
[Breastfeeding Network] helper Sara Cookson said that whilst the knitted boobs seem quite funny at first glance, they're actually one of their most important tools, and they would be lost without them.
She explained: "The knitted breasts allow us to demonstrate feeding in a hands-off way that people are comfortable with.
"Many mothers stop breastfeeding their babies in the first few weeks after birth. If we can help them get through this period, they can go on to successfully breastfeed."
The groups, which meet at Wade Hall in Leyland and Highfield Children's Centre in Chorley, use the breasts with life-size baby dolls to show techniques including the hand expressing of milk and the best way to latch a baby on to the breast for feeding.
Link - via Fortean Times
Our beloved Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit, is having an identity crisis: does it include all knowledge no matter how trivial, or does it adopt a more stringent editorial guideline to enhance its reputation as a credible reference?
These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?
What? The role of clowns in modern society was deleted? Travesty!
New technology brings new (bad) habits, and the iPhone is no different. Michelle Quinn of the Los Angeles Times writes about how the iPhone is changing "a lighthearted conversation into the Pursuit of Truth":
When she whipped out her iPhone, Erica Sadum could feel her husband's eyes roll. But she had a point to prove. And in less than a minute, she was able to report to the skeptics around the dinner table that Menno Simons, whose followers are known as Mennonites, was in fact born in 1496.
Apple Inc.'s iPhone, which went on sale nine months ago, isn't the only so-called smart phone that provides itinerant access to the Web. But its wide screen and top-quality browser make it easy to use and read, which means it can in seconds change a lighthearted conversation into the Pursuit of Truth.
"It's turned me from a really annoying know-it-all into an incredibly annoying know-it-all, with the Internet to back me up," said Sadum, a technology writer in Denver. "It's not a social advantage."
Here's an unexpected outcome of the weakening dollar: more and more drug traffickers are going to Europe!
Even as the dea has made it more bothersome to bring coke into the United States, the sliding dollar has made importing it less profitable. Both the UN and dea note that a kilo of coke brings in two times as much in Europe as it does in America.
As with any commodity, producers look to maximize earnings by selling in markets with the strongest currencies. But unlike oil, for instance, the value of which is measured in dollars, the cocaine market is more fluid. "The euro has become the preferred currency for drug traffickers," declared then-dea administrator Karen Tandy at an anti-drug conference last May. "We're seeing a glut of euro notes throughout South America," she said, adding that "9 of 10 travelers who carried the $1.7 billion euros that came into the United States during 2005 did not come from Europe...They came from Latin America."
"A man is not old until regrets take place of dreams."
- John Barrymore, actor
I've been a big fan of See Mike Draw since I stumbled across his blog last year ... Since then, he's posted a lot of new comic panels (all funny ... in a twisted way, of course!).
After staring at it for a few minutes, I finally "get" this cartoon (yes, I'm slow!). And before the avalanche of protest begins, Vulcans have green blood, but we'll let that pass for now.
See more here: Link
Italian police is looking for this man, who robbed supermarkets by hypnotizing the checkout staff into giving him money:
Now, let's see if I can hypnotize you into leaving comments ... Look into my, um, blog?He waited until he got to a female bank clerk and, according to the video footage, appears to hypnotise her into handing over more than £600.
He then calmly walked out.
The cashier who was shown the video footage reportedly has no memory of the incident. She only realised what had happened when she saw the
money missing.
The illicit underworld of drug smuggling has now gone underwater: drug runners from Colombia are using homemade (jungle-made?) semi-submersibles (built in the Colombian jungle to avoid detection) to bring cocaine to the United States.
[US Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen] believes the semi-subs are a response to the Coast Guard's tactic of using snipers in helicopters to shoot out engines on smugglers' speedboats. The submersibles' engines are beneath water level.
"We're seeing an evolution in the construction," he said. "Early on we saw fiberglass and now we're seeing steel."
Early semi-subs were capable of carrying 4 or 5 metric tons of cargo; newer ones can carry 12 metric tons, Allen said. Their speed has increased to 12 knots, which is "a pretty good speed on the ocean." [...]
Allen said the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense and others are working on how to board the vessels. "In many cases, they don't stop. And it's difficult to slow them down," he said.
Photo: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.
That's the aferglow of GRB 080319B, by far the brightest gamma-ray burst from a stellar explosion ever seen, as captured by NASA's Swift satellite. The burst was so bright that it could even be seen to the naked eye half-way across the universe:
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe since the Big Bang and occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. The stars' cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars and release an intense burst of high-energy gamma-rays and jets of energetic particles.
The jets rip through space at nearly the speed of light, heating the surrounding interstellar gas like turbocharged cosmic blowtorches, often generating a bright afterglow.
"These optical flashes from gamma-ray bursts are the most extreme such phenomena that we know of," said Swift science team member Derek Fox, also of Penn State. "If this burst had happened in our galaxy, it would have been shining brighter than the Sun for almost a minute — sunglasses would definitely be advised."
