Widgett of Need Coffee interviewed a manager with Wells Fargo and confirmed that there are two ATMs at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. David Parker said that they were installed around the year 2000 and are largely maintained by the staff because Wells Fargo can only visit once every two years:

We do send a vendor down about once every two years to do some preventative hardware maintenance on both of the ATMs, to make sure they're operational, change out the belts and that kind of stuff, provide new cartridges…anything else hardware-wise that we would need to make sure that it runs. But as you can imagine getting somebody down there is quite a feat.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Need Coffee

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"Drinks go down easy when we party. It's only when we sober up that we realize that we were actually plastered." Inebriation is a parody trailer for Inception by Atomic Productions. Are you really drunk? How do you know for sure?

via Geekosystem | Official Website

Jack Henriques, a British engineer, built what might be the largest portable barbeque pit in the world. It's 16 feet long, 11 feet tall, and can cook three whole pigs or two cows and seven whole sheep at the same time:

Each of the seven coal trays is fixed to a custom-built scissor jack, which can be raised or lowered using a turning handle.

This ensures that the cooking temperature can be easily changed for each tray, without the difficulty of moving and disturbing the meat.

The cooker also features abattoir-style meat hooks on which whole animal carcases can be hung for cooking.

God-grilla – which can grill 500 burgers at once – was commissioned by the Stone Barn, a wedding venue in the Cotswolds village of Aldsworth, Glos.

Link via Geekologie | Photo: Caters

Previously: The 10 Coolest BBQ Grills (And Then Some!)

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Jordan Breindel of Urlesque has a roundup of thirteen funny but pointless machines, such as the above Waiting Machine. This kinetic sculpture by Chris Eckhert impatiently taps its index finger, waiting for you to do something more productive with your time.

Link | Chris Eckhert

Ratcliffe Fowler Design made this enormous sculpture for Nike in a mall in Johannesburg, South Africa. "Ball Man", which is over 20 meters high, is modeled after player Carlos Tevez. It consists of 5,500 soccer balls suspended in the air, held together by cords.

Link via Make | Photo: Coolhunter

Hawaii-based artist Jacqueline Rush Lee creates sculptures from books that she finds at library discard sales. She bakes them in kilns, dyes, and sometimes creates plaster casts. Lee writes:

For almost a decade I have found myself drawn to the intimate, tactile, and symbolic qualities of used books. I am interested in how these recycled books come with their own histories of use and meaning and how they serve as potent vehicles of expression. With the idea of working with them as my canvas or building block, I transform the books into sculptures that explore and redefine the book as familiar object, medium, and archetypal form. By scrambling the formal arrangement of the book and transposing its material and conceptual qualities, I aim to create evocative art forms that suggest an alternative narrative.

http://www.jacquelinerushlee.com/images/BookSculpture.html# via DudeCraft

More than three years ago, we wrote about a boat that is shaped like a dolphin. The Seabreacher is now available in shark form, too. So you can roam around shores and terrify beachgoers:

It looks like a great white shark, complete with dorsal fin, gaping jaws and rows of dagger-sharp teeth. At 16.5ft in length, it is even the same size as one.

Unlike the real thing, it also has a 260hp engine, which powers it to 50mph above water, and 20mph below it.

The Seabreacher can also leap out of the water, partially submerge, and roll like a shark does.

Article and Gallery via DVICE | Photo: Toxel

Over in the NeatoShop, we sell an umbrella that has a handle similar to those found on Japanese samurai swords. One college student in Atlanta owns one (although he didn't get it from us), and when police heard that a student in a dorm had a sword, they surrounded the building and evacuated it. The owner's girlfriend reports:

The officer then asked me to describe him, so I proceeded to describe his hair color, height, eye color, and build. The officer interrupted, "Did this person have a weapon?" Through my nervousness I perceived what the situation was about.

I replied, "He had an umbrella that looked like a weapon. It looks like a samurai sword."

The officers looked at each other. One of them said, "An umbrella?" to which I replied affirmatively. I then helpfully volunteered, "I can call him to come right back over."

Link via Gizmodo

Tian offers the blog Hanzi Smatter as a public service to people who have Chinese characters tattooed on their bodies, but aren't sure what they mean. Email him a picture, and he'll translate it for you. The picture on the left was sent along with this note:

Hello,

I just stumbled across your blog and thought that you could assist me in verifying the meaning of my tattoo. I did them myself late one night a couple years back while apprenticing at a tattoo parlor.

Thanks

J. S.

Tian says that the characters mean "bitter idiot".

Link via The Agitator

Previously: Never use Google Translate to Generate the Text of Your Tattoo

Artist Matt Jones made "Bertrand" -- a model of a whale created from garbage bags:

We breathed life into Bertrand, but sadly, he didn't take flight. He tragically insisted upon beaching himself, and we ended up putting him out of his misery.

The idea was for him to be a solar hot air balloon, the air inside heating up and lifting him. I'm confident the main problem is too much mass of plastic in the pectoral fins, and tapered tail relative to how much volume of air those areas hold.

Link via Super Punch

Yasuhiro Suzuki built a boat that looks like a zipper pull. When piloted through the water, the resulting wake resembles an opening fly. The boat was on display at this year's Setouchi International Art Festival. You can view a video at the link.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: InventorSpot

Mathematician Jon McLoone calculated the most difficult word to guess in the game of Hangman. It's "jazz". Here's how he arrived at that result:

Jon McLoone built a computer game -- with a series of algorithms -- to figure out that exact question. It rests on a key assumption: the guesser will pick common letters (e.g. vowels) measurably and proportionally more often than exceptionally rare ones (Q, X, Z, J). McLoone then simulated fifty Hangman runs for every single word in the dictionary. That's 90,000 words, totaling nearly 5 million games on Hangman.

Some words were easily guessed, typically requiring fewer than five incorrect letters offered. For example, the word "difficult" proved easy -- in its 50 trials, the simulator guessed, on average, only 3.3 incorrect letters. Allowing for eight incorrect ones before our stick figure meets an untimely death, the word "difficult" only caused one stick-death. Allowing for ten? Mr. Stick had a 100% survival rate.

Having gathered all this data on 90,000 words, McLoone selected the 1,000 most promising, and then ran the game 3,000 times using just those thousand. All said and done, McLoone "played" nearly 8 million games of Hangman in order to determine that the hardest Hangman word to guess -- regardless of whether the guesser has 8, 9, 10, or even up to 13 guesses, is "jazz."

Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user quinn.anya used under Creative Commons license

I ask because it's for sale on eBay. The toilet was removed from the late author's New Hampshire home by the new owners in the 1980s. It hasn't been cleaned yet, so it's super-authentic. You can bid for it or buy it immediately for $1,000,000.

eBay Listing and Article via Geekosystem | Image: eBay

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YouTube user KleinerLudewig jumped out of an airplane at 4,300 meters while sitting in a small rubber boat and solved a Rubik's Cube in 31.5 seconds. He finished at 2,500 meters and then deployed his parachute.

via Nerdcore | Previously: Man Solves Rubik's Cube Puzzle in 11.1 Seconds

Artist Jude Buffum created pixelated video game screenshots for Ghostbusters, Gremlins, and The Goonies. They'll be on display at the upcoming 3G Show, starting September 3rd at Studio 1988 in Los Angeles.

http://www.theautumnsociety.com/2010/08/3g-show.html via Super Punch | Museum Website

Previously by Jude Buffum:
Rainbow Brite: Finish Her!
Housewives Tarot