Kirsty Russell and her family had planned to fly on vacation from Sydney, Australia to Munich, Germany. Alas, the pandemic put a halt to their plans. So her husband suggested that they simulate the 15-hour flight to Europe.
Russell's Twitter thread illustrated their long journey, recreated in detail. There was even an airport security check.
This is the sort of content I find fascinating. What's it like to live and work on board a ship? For a cruise ship, the answer is often "pretty good." For example, you'll occasionally need a haircut. This is the barbershop for crew members only on a Carnival-owned vessel.
Core 77 has a roundup of photos showing different crew-only areas of cruise ships, including mess halls, exercise facilities, and laundry rooms. Some of the crews have really nice amenities, including private pubs, weightlifting equipment, and pools that only they can access.
Photo: Cruise Hive
Our hero, Florida Man, knew that the police were coming for him with a probation violation arrest warrant. He cleverly deduced that the officers would avoid infection with the coronavirus and so placed a sign on the door of his home, warning them that he was infected. This was a ruse.
It failed. WEAR TV reports:
Deputies say they properly researched to ensure Price was lying about his condition. They showed up with proper PPE just in case.
Price was booked into the jail and showed no indication of having the coronavirus.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Putnam County Sheriff's Office
Jones Bar-B-Q is the heart of Kansas City-style barbecue. The Jones sisters, how have operated it for more than thirty years, have built their business around take-out. So they've made a fairly smooth transition into the contactless delivery that is prized during our pandemic era. Atlas Obscura reports that they recently installed a vending machine:
“We got a pop vending machine, and I looked at it and thought maybe we could put food in,” Jones says. “The vendor couldn’t believe it when I first asked about putting barbecue in a vending machine.”
The machine is stocked daily with complete meals:
The burnt ends at Jones Bar-B-Q are one of the seven items available from the vending machine. Alongside chicken wings, turkey, and rib tips, they’re stocked between 5 and 10 a.m. as they come off a smoker sitting next to a big pile of hickory wood. Jones labels each clamshell package with a hand-written description on masking tape. The sandwiches come with a small cup of sauce and sweet barbecue beans, potato salad, or coleslaw. Stacked high inside a soft white bun, the smoky, charred burnt ends are tender, moist, and taste like meat candy.
It makes me hungry just to read that description!
Swedish artist Max Björverud turned the ordinary toilet paper roller into a sophisticated instrument at an installation at the SNASK creative agency in Stockholm. Hack A Day explains how it works:
Inspired by the way bicycle computers determine your speed, [Max] took a set of toilet paper holders, extended each roll holding part with a 3D-printed attachment housing a magnet, and installed a Hall-effect sensor to determine the rolling activity. The rolls’ sensor data is then collected with an Arduino Mega and passed on to a Raspberry Pi Zero running Pure Data, creating the actual sounds. The sensor setup is briefly shown in another video.
Natalie Morrell brings to my attention photos of Catholic shrines crafted by French soldiers during World War I. These contain images of the saints for veneration during traumatic and terrifying times. Many remain, floating around antiques dealers. They're shaped from dispensed brass casings from rifles or field artillery shells. Many of these sculptures display remarkably professional skill and precision, as detailed in Nicholas J. Saunder's book Trench Art, A Brief History and Guide, 1914-1939.
-via Aelfred the Great
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a quiet place now. The engineers and scientists who normally work there are telecommuting a very, very long distance.
All the way to Mars.
The Curiosity Rover team has adapted to control the robot from home. NASA reports that it took a lot of ingenuity during early March:
The team began to anticipate the need to go fully remote a couple weeks before, leading them to rethink how they would operate. Headsets, monitors and other equipment were distributed (picked up curbside, with all employees following proper social-distancing measures).
Not everything they're used to working with at JPL could be sent home, however: Planners rely on 3D images from Mars and usually study them through special goggles that rapidly shift between left- and right-eye views to better reveal the contours of the landscape. That helps them figure out where to drive Curiosity and how far they can extend its robotic arm.
But those goggles require the advanced graphics cards in high-performance computers at JPL (they're actually gaming computers repurposed for driving on Mars). In order for rover operators to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, they've switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. Although not as immersive or comfortable as the goggles, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements.
-via Marilyn Terrell | Image: NASA
At $203 per pound, these dumbbells are the most luxuriously expensive fitness gear that you can ask for. They're ideal for people with more money than sense and upper body strength, as they weigh only 6.7 pounds each. They are engraved and wrapped in the Louis Vuitton monogram, so you know that they're the right look for any season at the gym. Please rack them when you're done with your sets.
These dumbbells are one of four sets of ridiculously overpriced fashionable fitness gear rounded up by Rain Noe, the wittily scathing critic of bad design at Core 77.
Like Captain Picard and Chief O'Brien say, building ships in bottles in fun. It's a centuries-old hobby.
In Japan, it continues to this day with gunpla--the hobby of building Gundam mecha models. For the past few years, Twitter user @rishima343 has been building Gundam models inside empty whiskey bottles. You can see a gallery of them at Kotaku.
Shane Wighton harnessed the power of geometry, physics, computer programming, machining, woodworking, and welding (he's a true renaissance man) to build a parabolic basketball backboard that drives the ball into the net.
Wighton based his design on millions of hypothetical shots, then used a CNC mill to cut the board out of pine. It failed spectacularly, necessitating new calculations and technical adjustments.
It's a truly amazing feat of imagination and multiple technical capabilities that will probably never been exhibited on an NBA court, which is unfortunate.
-via Gizmodo
Pictured above is Katy Ayers, a college student in Nebraska in a canoe that she grew herself.
Yes, grew. It's made of mushrooms. She made a wooden frame, then, with the assistance of local mushroom grower Ash Gordon, grew a mushroom body around it. NBC News describes the process:
They first built a wooden skeleton and a hammock-like structure to suspend the boat-shaped form in the air.
They next sandwiched the boat’s skeleton with mushroom spawn and let nature take over.
For two weeks, the fledgling canoe hung inside a special growing room in Gordon’s facility, where temperatures ranged between 80 and 90 degrees and the humidity hovered between 90 to 100 percent. The last step in the process was to let the 100-pound boat dry in the Nebraska sun.
The entire project cost $500. The canoe has been on the water three times, including once with two people inside. It's in good shape and is technically still alive, spawning more mushrooms.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Katy Ayers
The Japanese artist dooo_cds, who makes eerily realistic objects that appear to be made of living human flesh, has turned his talents to tabletop gaming.
He has made a 6-sided die that blinks as you roll your fate. It appears to be a living creature with moles for number marks. If you need to make a sanity check in your game, use this die, for it has no mouth and yet must scream.
-via Super Punch
Chris Grady, the Lunarbaboon, has succeeded as a webcomic artist. If you can develop even just one dedicated hater, you've made an impact on the world.
Grady recorded a time-lapse video of himself drawing this cartoon. The creation process is itself interesting--perhaps even more so for whichever sad person seems to hate him.
Joe Exotic was detained and unable to attend such an important photo shoot. Nor was a tiger available. So Wisconsin farmers Kyle Harris and Jeff Kast painted a cow with the stripes and colors of a ferocious tiger. Then the two men donned wigs and clothes appropriate for their roles. You can see more photos at Fox News.
The leg brace is a nice touch.
-via Dave Barry
French street artist Braga painted a sphinx cat with such perfect perspective that it blends almost seamlessly into the background. The natural gas tank that serves as his canvas disappears when photographed from the right angle.
-via Lustik
