From the website:

Last Halloween I built a robot costume out of laundry detergent bottles, crutches, football shoulder pads, and several stoned days with a hot glue gun.

Definitely very weird. Link (Thanks Slade!)

Water turns red with blood as four hundred bottleneck dolphins lie dead or dying on the shore of Zanzibar on Saturday April 29, 2006. Although the exact cause is still a mystery, scientists are surmising that a loud burst of sonar was the cause:

Some scientists surmise that loud bursts of sonar, which can be heard for miles in the water, may disorient or scare marine mammals, causing them to surface too quickly and suffer the equivalent of what divers call the bends - when sudden decompression forms nitrogen bubbles in tissue.

A U.S. Navy task force patrols the coast of East Africa as part of counterterrorism operations. A Navy official was not immediately available for comment, but the service rarely speaks about the location of submarines at sea.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TANZANIA_DOLPHIN_DEATHS?SITE=CAVAL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

This one is titled "Knife Thrower". Don't miss Mark's photography portfolio, including the ones he took for the Ça Ira opera.

http://www.markholthusen.com/ (The flash-based navigation is a mystery to me, but the photos are worth it Thanks Michal Hovevaj!)

This website is building the world's largest virtual stadium - they have more than 35,000 fans. As a fan, you can reserve a free seat and dress up your avatar in various outfits and hairdos.

http://www.largestonlinestadium.com/index.php (Thanks dali!)

For the last 13 years, about 250 families in the depressed inner city of South Central Los Angeles have depended on an urban farm. Now, they are facing eviction as a new Wal-Mart is coming to town.

The issue is actually more complex: turns out that the farm is on private property, and the owner is not being compensated.

Link to South Central Farmers' website | NPR Report | Life & Times Blog (Thanks George H.!)

What is Peteena? From the website:

Technically, Peteena is a 9-inch, white, plastic doll that uncannily resembles a poodle. Peteena bears the shameful scars of her lowly, mass-manufactured origins in the legend "Hasbro 1966" imprinted on her butt (Hasbro, however, denies all knowledge of Peteena). Peteena wishes to stress to all you cyber-whatevers out there that she is not and never has been computer generated. Peteena has a very real (and very pampered) corporeal existence.

Link (Thanks Allison!)

From the website:

Brix is composed of a wall of virtual bricks and a camera that sees what is happening in front of the wall. When one approaches the wall, the surface reflects the image captured by the camera, in a thousand rectangular pixels. The image of the inter-actor slips onto the wall and after a few seconds, freezes as a photograph. Brix, prefigures a new form of palimpsestual electronic architecture.

I had to look up palimpsest - it means "an object, place, or area that reflects its history".

Link (Thanks Steve!)

Students at Canada's Simon Fraser University designed this cool purse called the Ladybag that can detect its contents and alert the owner when something is missing:

To design the purse, the students used off-the-shelf technology. Into the bottom of the bag they embedded a radio frequency identification reader, which is powered by a nine-volt battery.

They wired the reader to a screen-like panel in the front of the bag, which contains three patterns of light-emitting diodes.

Each pattern is an icon representing an essential item that the owner does not want to leave home without. In the prototype, these items are a set of keys, a wallet, and a cell phone.

Lastly, they attached an RFID sensor to each of those items.

As long as each item is missing from the Ladybag, its corresponding icon lights up. As the keys, phone, and wallet are each placed into the tote, the icon blinks off.

Link (Thanks David R!)

Definitely a weird (and interesting) choice of art medium: wrecked abandoned cars. http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Etheswamp/index.htm (Thanks Yawfren!)

Scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute and the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany, have created a brain-machine interface that translates brainwave signals into letters and words.

Although the current invention is still crude, it's easy to imagine that in the future, you won't have to type out your letter, just think it out!

...in the long term, such a brain-machine interface could replace the joystick in electronic gaming or serve as a communication tool for people unable to speak or sign.

"We are dreaming of something like a baseball cap with electrodes in the cap that can measure the brainwaves," said one of the scientists behind the project, Klaus-Robert Mueller of the Fraunhofer Institute.

"People could just put on the cap and have a wireless connection from these electrodes to a computer and they can play video games."

Link (Thanks David R!)

What would Frank Lloyd Wright's blog look like? What would he blog about? Well, his Gingerbread House, of course...

Link (A part of the Lost Blogs, where people blog as their historical figures of choice. Thanks Hubert Sorbet!)

MooBella invented a computer-controlled vending machine that makes ice cream on demand, from scratch (the ingredients are flash frozen in 10 seconds!).

From the website:

On the machine's front is a computer screen running on a Linux operating system. It displays menus of possible flavors and allows the user to create any combination, such as low-fat coffee ice cream with Oreo cookies. If the machine runs out of a flavor, it stops putting it on the menu and sends a message to MooBella asking for a refill.

USA Today Article | MooBella company website (Thanks Scott Taylor!)

We've featured one of Sean's creation before (4-foot tall Lego Homer), now check out one of his other creations: New York's Greenwich Village built with 50,000 Lego bricks.

Link | Brick Apple | Sean's official website (Thanks Yayo!)

We love Phillip Torrone of Make (Hi Phil!). Take a look at his funny clip reviewing Logitech's Quickcam Orbit MP webcam.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Definitely one of the more unusual uses of Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet software: Link (link maybe slow, via J-Walk Blog)