This beautiful chandelier provides perfect lighting for a romantic evening of playing Duck Hunt. JJ Games describes how they built it:
We custom built the chandelier using our excess inventory of light guns, about 20 feet of electrical wire, 12 candalabra sockets and light bulbs, and a few other miscellaneous parts to hold it all together. It cost about $200 and took about 15 hours to build. It makes for great mood lighting in a man cave when that special someone comes over.
(Photo: Spells the Ninja Monkey)
Equestria Daily, which is the brony equivalent of the New York Times, is rolling out a new feature: cosplay compilations. At the link, you can find photos and information about great works of MLP cosplay. Pictured above is Mickey modeling a convincing Twilight Sparkle costume.
I've been getting a lot of notices about today being Google's birthday. At first I ignored them, because Google's birthday is on September 27th, which I recall because it is also my birthday. But I keep seeing birthday notices everywhere, so I "Googled" it. (In other news, "Google" is the only word I've ever put into the Google search field that did not have a Wikipedia entry on the first page of results.) About.com has this to say:
Google's birthday has shifted around over the years, but it currently is celebrated on September 27th. The exact year of Google's "birth" depends on how you measure it.
The Web domain www.google.com was registered in 1997, but Google officially opened for business in September of 1988.
And Wikipedia says:
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[41] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.
The Google blog doesn't say anything, because there's no entry for today -yet. Some big British newspapers: The Independent, The Guardian, and the Daily Mail, all have congratulatory stories on Google's 15th birthday. But the most telling clue is the search page itself, which has no Google Doodle for today, meaning they probably plan to celebrate on another day. Maybe on my birthday!
(Image: last year's Google Birthday Doodle)
James Hance, an artist whose work we've featured extensively here at Neatorama, made this music box inspired by "The Rings of Akhaten," an episode of Doctor Who. In that episode, the people of Akhaten sing to keep a god asleep.
At its height, the commercial reach of the Roman Empire extended deep into central Asia. There was even direct contact between Rome and China.
John E. Hill of the University of Washington offers further evidence of the connection between these two ancient empires. He translated a Chinese text called Weilue into English. It includes a description of the Roman Empire:
The ruler of this country is not permanent. When disasters result from unusual phenomena, they unceremoniously replace him, installing a virtuous man as king, and release the old king, who does not dare show resentment.
The common people are tall and virtuous like the Chinese, but wear hu (‘Western’) clothes. They say they originally came from China, but left it.
They have always wanted to communicate with China but, Anxi (Parthia), jealous of their profits, would not allow them to pass (through to China).
You can read more from this translation at the link.
Link -via Smart News
(Unrelated photo by Jan Smith.)
The British Museum has a a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice that becomes a different color depending on which direction the light comes from. No one knew why until scientists got a good look at the way the glass was made.
The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.
Researchers suspected the chalice would appear in different colors depending on what drink it held, but they weren't about to test that theory with the ancient artifact. So they recreated the material it was made of! Even more intriguing are the potential modern applications of the technology. Read more about it at Smithsonian magazine. Link
(Image credit: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)
As Los Angeles grew in the 1920s, in large part because of the film industry, city planners built hundreds of outdoor staircases into the hills to connect new homes with public transportation at the bottom. They aren't used much anymore, as residents are more dependent on cars.
The film studios were the first to develop the area, building compact bungalows to house their actors and technicians. Both Chaplin and Disney lived here.
Movie carpenters would build sets during the week and homes at the weekend. Charles said this accounted for the local architectural hotchpotch that is often ridiculed. A Moorish castle next to a Spanish villa, next to a Tudor mansion - the carpenters were inspired by whatever they had been building on the studio backlots that week.
Our second staircase was thankfully unobstructed. Here, in 1932, Laurel and Hardy tried and failed to move a piano to the top in The Music Box. The film won an Academy Award. I'd seen it over and again as a child and remembered it fondly.
There were now buildings either side but it was still quite recognisable. For such a historic landmark it was still remarkably unkempt, its history simply marked by a defaced granite plaque inset into one of the lower steps.
Take a tour of those staircases both then and now with Charles Fleming of the L.A. Times and Zeb Soanes of the BBC. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
(Image source: The Music Box)
Well, let's just Nutella the heck out of this cake! Throw it all in and top it off with another jar of the good stuff. Erica went all out with this cake, which has Nutella buttercream frosting and Ferrero Rocher sweets on top.
Link -via Tasteologie
(Photo: Macey J. Foronda/Buzzfeed)
It might almost make a kid want to go to the hospital! The New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital redesigned its CT scanning room, adding pirates:
“There aren’t scary pirates — there’s a pussycat pirate and one that looks like Curious George,” says Dr. Carrie Ruzal-Shapiro, chief of Pediatric Radiology. “The parents have been really positive too. It makes it less scarier for the kids.”
On average, New York-Presbyterian has about 200 inpatients per day, treating about 150 kids each day in the pediatric emergency room. And every day kids ranging from newborn to age 21 come in for CT scan for ailments from neonatal abnormalities to abdominal pain to head trauma. “Our more adult patients ages 17 to 21 ask for the pirate scanner, too,” Ruzal-Shapiro says.
You can see several more photos at the link.
One day, Mica Angela Hendricks, a professional illustrator, bought a new sketchbook. Her 4-year old daughter liked it and added her own contributions. Soon the two were working together, each, Ms. Hendricks insists, adding essential elements:
Sometimes I would give her suggestions, like “maybe she could have a dragon body!” but usually she would ignore theses suggestions if it didn’t fit in with what she already had in mind. But since I am a grownup and a little bit (okay a lot) of a perfectionist, I sometimes would have a specific idea in mind as I doodled my heads. Maybe she could make this into a bug! I’d think happily to myself as I sketched, imagining the possibilities of what it could look like. So later, when she’d doodle some crazy shape that seemed to go in some surrealistic direction, or put a large circle around the creature and filled the WHOLE THING in with marker, part of my brain would think, What is she DOING?!? She’s just scribbling it all up! But I should know that in most instances, kids’ imaginations way outweigh a grownup’s, and it always ALWAYS looked better that what I had imagined. ALWAYS.
I would love to watch any Disney movie in which Tardar Sauce derailed the plot with her charming personality. Eric Proctor showed her in five Disney movies. At the link, you can view our favorite cat in The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
Tumblr user Yitzus came across this amazing find:
LOOK WHAT I FOUND! A TABLETOP LIBRARIAN GAME! WHO NEEDS DUNGEONS AND/OR DRAGONS WHEN YOU COULD BE FILLING OUT BUDGET SHEETS, DEALING WITH DRUNKEN PATRONS, AND FILING FOR GOVERNMENT AID!
What is this thing? Well, I logged into the library database WorldCat and did a search. This is a game published by the consulting firm Harwell Associates in 1977. It's designed to simulate the experience of a library director.
It's fun! I'm already a third-level cataloger/mage. The encumbrance rules are a pain, but we are talking about 70s-era data storage.
Link -via Breda Fallacy
The Humane Society of the United States held an art competition for chimpanzees. The winner was announced yesterday. Brent, a 37-year-old retired laboratory chimp who lives at Chimp Haven in Louisiana, won the top prize: $10,000 for his sanctuary!
A Chimp Haven spokeswoman said Brent was unavailable for comment Thursday. “I think he’s asleep,” Ashley Gordon said.
Brent has his own unique painting technique. He only paints with his tongue. Chimp Haven's president Cathy Willis Spraetz, says the chimps paint canvases that are held outside their enclosures.
Some other chimps use brushes or point to the colors they want on the canvas, but Brent comes up to smush pre-applied blobs of child-safe tempera paints with his tongue, she said.
“If we handed the canvas to them where it was on the inside, they might not want to hand it back,” she said. “They might throw it around and step on it.”
Cheetah, from Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida, won the second place prize of $5,000 -and an additional $5,000 as the winner of Jane Goodall's personal choice award. Link -via Fortean Times
See all the submitted artworks at the Humane Society. Link
(Image credit: Brent/Human Society of the United States)
It may be hard to believe, but some movie buffs are touting the superiority of the VHS tape, to the point of trying to preserve and even resurrect it. The thing is, many movies that were released on VHS have never made the leap to DVDs, and therefore are either hard to find or totally unavailable to many viewers. Collectors Weekly talked to Dan Kinem, director of the documentary Adjust Your Tracking. He talked about how videotape revolutionized the movie industry -and since a large chunk of profit would come from home video, movies started to be designed to fit the format, particularly horror films.
“Especially for movies that were direct to video or shot on video, viewing them on DVD doesn’t make a lot of sense, because they were originally intended to be viewed on VHS,” continues Kinem. “These are movies that feel too cleaned-up on DVD and Blu-ray, as if they were never meant to look that good. You can see the mistakes they made and the bad makeup and everything. Watching them on VHS is closer to the old drive-in or grindhouse theater, the way the director intended it to look.” For Kinem, Peretic, and many other VHS fans, there’s an authenticity to viewing certain movies on VHS that’s integral to the film experience, no different from the way record fans think certain albums should only be played on vinyl.
Read more about the resurgence of the VHS format in the full interview. Link
2-year old Alejandro had Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Medical insurance wouldn't cover a powered wheelchair until he was 5 years old. That was unacceptable to Shea, his father, who bought a wheelchair on eBay and modified it so that Alejandro could control it with his feet:
After unsuccessfully trying to repair a broken digital kitchen scale [Shea] was inspired to reuse the sensors as pedal inputs. [Alejandro] has limited foot strength and the sensitive strain gauges are perfect for picking it up. Above you can see the sandal-based interface he built. The two feet working together affect steering as well as forward and reverse. The pedal system is connected to the wheelchair using a Digital to Analog converter chip to stand-in for the original analog joystick.
At the link, you can watch a video of Alejandro maneuvering the wheelchair.
