John Farrier's Blog Posts

New Year's Resolution Generator



Too lazy to come up with New Year's resolutions, let alone keep them? This web tool by graphic designer Monica Verlarde will take away all of that hard work and provide you with a resolution -- often a very simple one.

Do you have a New Year's resolution? What is it? Share in the comments.

Link via Technabob

A Robot That Moves Like A Snake


(YouTube Link)


The OmniTread robot was built by engineering students at the University of Michigan. Its body consists of seven segments connected by pneumatic bellows. Treads on all four sides of the segments give it traction against surfaces, and the connecting bellows can inflate or deflate to provide stiffness or flexibility as needed. The robot can squeeze through a four-inch hole or ascend a vertical tube.

http://www.engin.umich.edu/research/mrl/00MoRob_6.html via CrunchGear

The Oldest Naval Vessel in Active Service



The US Navy has the frigate Constitution, launched in 1797. The British Royal Navy has the Victory, which dates even further back -- to 1765. But both of these vessels are museum ships, rather than truly active vessels.

The oldest naval vessel in active service is the VMF Kommuna, a Russian Navy salvage ship built in 1915. James Dunnigan writes for Strategy Page:

This 2,500 ton catamaran was built in the Netherlands and entered service in 1915. Kommuna began service in the Czar's navy, spent most of its career in the Soviet (communist) Navy, and now serves in the fleet of a democratic Russia. Originally designed to recover submarines that had sunk in shallow coastal waters, Kommuna remains in service to handle smaller submersibles, does it well and has been maintained over the decades to the point where it cheaper to keep the old girl operational, than to try and design and build a replacement.


http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/Why-A-Czarist-Warship-Remains-In-Service-12-30-2009.asp via Hell in a Handbasket | More Pictures | Image: Warfare.ru

Snow Globe on Four Wheels


(YouTube Link)


Rachelle Brown of Houston, Texas, decorates the interior of her car with Christmas lights and fake snow. It looks so much like a snow globe that one might be inclined to pick up her car and shake vigorously. The video is from the NBC affiliate in Houston.

via Urlesque

The Simpsons, if Set in Estonia


(YouTube Link)


The Estonian station TV3 recreated the introduction to The Simpsons as though the show took place in an Estonian village.

via The Presurfer | Company Website

Stained Glass Simpsons



Stained glass artist Joseph Cavalieri created panels based on The Simpsons. The series is called "Missing Episode" and mixes that TV show with the work of 17th Century French poet Jean de La Fontaine. Pictured above is "The Death in the Playground".

Link via Popped Culture

The Carved Leather of Mark Evans



Mark Evans carves images onto leather with knives. He's deliciously unpretentious about his craft:

Art doesn't get more primal than etching animal skins with a big knife. I don't do 'pseudo intellectual' I make art.

And that's it: no postmodern angst, no childhood issues. Just a guy with a knife and a sheet of leather. At the link, you'll find a gallery of his amazingly-detailed work.

Link via DudeCraft

Russia Proposes Blowing Up Earthbound Asteroid

The head of Russia's space agency proposed sending up a spacecraft to deflect Apophis, an asteroid that may have 1 in 37 chance of hitting Earth in 2029:

"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said.

Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or hitting it with nuclear weapons.


NASA thinks that the chance of impact is only 1 in 250,000.

Link via Geekologie | Photo: Asteroid Gaspra, via NASA

Could a Conjoined Twin Get Away With Murder?

Law student Nick Kam has written a paper exploring a hypothetical legal scenario: from a set of conjoined twins, one commits a murder. Since justly punishing one requires unjustly punishing the other, would the guilty party escape punishment? In "Half Guilty", Kam writes:

To consider more extreme approaches to punishing the guilty twin, the Court could order the twins separated so that the guilty twin may be punished. Even if this Solomonic option were possible in this case, as physiologically it appears impossible, this action raises grave Constitutional concerns. The Supreme Court has held that the body to be inviolate, providing slim exceptions to this rule as in the testing blood alcohol content, chemical castration, and the death penalty. This punishment smacks of the Sharia law practice of chopping off a convicted thief’s hand. Furthermore, it is hard to argue that separation would only punish one of the twins as each would be left immobile, one half of a complete body. Separation surgeries have some success as in the case of Jodie and Mary Attard (although this surgery was undertaken knowing full well that it would and did kill the weaker twin). Modern scholars estimate the rate of successful separation surgery at around 5% (see also the Bijani twins). With such dismal rates, sentencing conjoined twins to separation surgery would be the equivalent of a death sentence.


Link via io9 | Photo: US Department of Health and Human Services

Map of the World in Which Countries Are Weighted by the Number of Languages They Have Produced



Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:

Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups' languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.


Link via Marginal Revolution

Project Underway: The First 3D Map of the Brain's Connections



The picture above is a 3D image of some of the neural connections in an owl-monkey's brain. The Human Connectome Project of the US National Institutes for Health is currently engaged in a similar, but more ambitious project: to map every connection in the human brain. It's like a circuit map for neurologists:

The complexity of the brain and a lack of adequate imaging technology have hampered past research on human brain connectivity. The brain is estimated to contain more than 100 billion neurons that form trillions of connections with each other. Neurons can connect across distant regions of the brain by extending long, slender projections called axons — but the trajectories that axons take within the human brain are almost entirely uncharted.[...]

The field of neuroscience emerged in the late 19th century, when scientists observed individual brain cells for the first time. Since then, researchers have made breathtaking progress in understanding the anatomy, cell biology, physiology and chemistry of the brain in both health and disease. Yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered, including how brain function translates into mental function and why brain function declines with age. Advances in neuroimaging, genomics, computational neuroscience and engineering have put us on the brink of another great era in neuroscience, when we can expect to make unprecedented discoveries regarding normal brain activity, disorders of the brain and our very sense of self.


Press Release and Article Link via GearFuse | Image: Van Wadeen

Flexible Furniture


(YouTube Link)


FlexibleLove is the creation of Chishen Chiu, a Taiwanese furniture designer. Its honeycomb structure made from recycled materials allows users to expand, shrink, and reshape it as needed. It's like a Slinky that you can sit on.

Official Website via Make

Map of the Most Remote Places on Earth



This map by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy is an attempt to demonstrate what areas of the world are comparatively accessible by land and water travel. The cartographers concluded that much of the world commonly thought of as inaccessible is not:

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.


Map Link and Article Link via Volokh Conspiracy

A Sub Shop Made Inside Shipping Containers, Moved By Crane


(Video Link)


Construction workers rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York City often have to spend half of their lunch breaks riding elevators up and down to buy lunch. But soon, a sub shop will come to them. The Subway restaurant company built an outlet out of shipping containers. A crane will lift it high into the sky to provide meals to workers where they are:

Meals will be offered high in the sky for efficiency; to get food from street level, hundreds of ironworkers now use an elevator and must also climb.

"This amenity will save time by allowing construction workers to stay in the tower throughout their shift rather than having to go all the way up and down," said Candace McAdams, spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the World Trade Center site.

A full Subway menu will be served, including the trademark $5 foot-long hero.

Richard Schragger, who owns the Freedom Tower franchise, said he'll also offer extras no other Subway has: hot dogs, hamburgers and New York's famed pretzels.

Like other franchises of the Milford, Conn.-based company, this one will bake its own bread daily — higher and higher above ground zero. As the tower grows, the lift will "jump" to the next new floor along with the restaurant, at a rate of one story about every week or two, engineers estimate.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hv0Y-A0oQW2-B88x6cwNS_KSB9HgD9CP9M7O0 via Gizmodo

The Sound Sculptures of Zimoun


(Video Link)


Swiss artist Zimoun builds sound installations that create a unique audiovisual experience. This video is a compilation of many of his projects, including listening to woodworms at work using a microphone, an automat with selections representing different cities, and pvc hoses flopping about under the force of compressed air. You can see an archive of project-specific videos at the above video link.

Official Website via Make

Email This Post to a Friend

Page 1,214 of 1,334     first | prev | next | last

Profile for John Farrier

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


Statistics

Blog Posts

  • Posts Written 19,996
  • Comments Received 52,531
  • Post Views 31,892,703
  • Unique Visitors 26,170,454
  • Likes Received 30,107

Comments

  • Threads Started 3,802
  • Replies Posted 2,327
  • Likes Received 1,895

This website uses cookies.

This website uses cookies to improve user experience. By using this website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

I agree
 
Learn More