Blackmouth Design, a custom fabrication firm in Seattle, made this home entertainment console and table for a dedicated Trekkie. It's built to imitate the navigation and helm console from the Enterprise on Star Trek. One of the engineers describes the build on reddit:

The table is approx. 56" x 36" and 21" tall. It features 16 vintage rocker switches that activate custom programmed light patterns (Screen accurate LED backlit replica resin "gumdrops" controlled by an Arduino Mega) and plays sound effect audio files from The Original Series as well as a few hidden Easter Eggs (like playing the theme song or the Amok Time fight music) when the correct combination of switches are thrown.

In addition to the 16 rocker switches there are 8 red momentary push buttons that control the customers home media system (Turn on/off lights, lower projector screen, etc.). The table top and trim are 3/16" Powder coated Aluminum over red, grey and black laminated plywood. LED backlit graphics (recreated from scratch) sit under 1/4" plexiglass panels. The table also has 2 drawers for game controllers and remotes as well as 2 hidden shelves to support beverages.

-via Hack A Day

Tomorrow we’ll have a six year old, and like so many girls her age she insisted on a cake depicting the future Queen Elizabeth I witnessing the execution of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII pic.twitter.com/4HC5khHjur

— Edmund Kingsley (@KingsleyEdmund) May 29, 2021

Anne Boleyn, a Queen of England under her husband, King Henry VII, lost her head when the king decided to move on to a new marital relationship. Some breakups are harder than others and Queen Anne definitely had a rough one.

The daughter of Edmund Kingsley, a stage actor and producer, appreciated the drama of that moment in history. It was the theme of her sixth birthday party. BuzzFeed reports:

“She said, ‘Well, my friend is getting unicorns, but I think what I'd really like is Henry VIII executing Anne Boleyn with Elizabeth I watching,” Kingsley told BuzzFeed News. [...]

Morrissey, a theater and movement director with a history background, was able to share with their daughter the details of the royal family who once occupied the Hampton Court Palace.

“I think that's where the seed was sown, seeing that castle and having a really fun day there. She just got really into the story of his big, fat, horrible king who had six wives," Kingsley said.

-via Nag on the Lake

Velox, which is Latin for "swift", can quickly go almost anywhere with its undulating locomotion. It can move over flat land, through snow, and through the water. The designers at Pliant Energy Systems explain that:

These fins are best described as four-dimensional objects with a hyperbolic geometry that allows the robot to swim like a ray, crawl like a millipede, jet like a squid, and slide like a snake.

Pliant suggests that Velox could be used rescuing humans who have become trapped on ice floes, delivering supplies in littoral combat situations, or hauling divers through water.

-via Kottke

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I've sat on this news story for a few days because I couldn't find it in what I would call a quality news source to support it. But NPR reaches that bar, so it's probably true that Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold an invisible, intangible sculpture.

High Snobriety has details about this artistic wonder:

Garau instructs that the sculpture will need to be displayed in an unobstructed area that is five feet by five feet. It should also be displayed in a private home. And it may be displayed in any light since it's not there.

Embedded above is an Instagram video of a previous work by Garau, which is likewise more conceptual than existential:

Last month, Garau displayed another immaterial sculpture titled, "Buddha in Contemplation," in the Piazza della Scala in Milan, near the entrance to the Gallerie d'Italia. Garau posted a video of the "statue" to his Instagram page, writing, "Now it exists and will remain in this space forever," says the video. "You do not see it but it exists. It is made of air and spirit."

-via Slate

Like European swallows and coconuts, harbor seals migrate. But how do they know where to go? Navigating by the stars (astronavigation) may be possible, but harbor seals have limited vision even while above the surface of the water, let alone below it.

This quandary inspired scientist Björn Mauck and his colleagues to create a hollow tube that would control seal access to seeing stars. They trained the seals to examine the starry night sky through this tube, then displayed star-like dots of light. Were the seals able to see them? According to their 2005 paper, some celestial bodies are bright enough to make astronavigation a hypothetical possibility:

Experiments with Venus and Sirius showed that our harbor seal could see these bright heavenly bodies. However, due to varying background brightness of the night sky and due to being sometimes partly occluded by high clouds, these “stars” in fact did not represent stimuli of constant intensity. Furthermore, it was sometimes difficult to decide whether or not another star had come into the seal’s view when the seal reacted. Therefore, a false-alarm rate was not determined for these experiments and detection rate for Venus and Sirius might be contaminated by an undefined rate of spontaneous reactions. Results of these experiments therefore demonstrated the seal’s capability to see some real stars, but had to be confirmed by tests with stimuli of reproducible and constant intensity. This was done in the experiments with artificial stars, which showed that our harbor seal detected the light emitted from celestial objects as faint as 4.4 stellar magnitudes.

-via Super Punch | Image: Marine Mammal Science

A bola is a traditional tool originating in South America. It usually consists of three stone balls attached by cords. Throwing them correctly wraps the cords around the legs of a target, immobilizing it. Cowboys in Argentina and Uruguay have used them capture stray cattle.

The BolaWrap is a modern-day bola used by police to restrain people without seriously injuring them. The handheld device fires a bola 10 to 25 feet away and locks around the target. Fire it at the legs and the suspect soon finds he can't walk anywhere.

-via Marginal Revolution

Businesses occasionally seek out and listen to feedback from their customers. Sometimes customer comments are sarcastic, which confuses artificial intelligences tasked with gauging verbal sentiments. That's why computer scientists Ramya Akula and Ivan Garibay, with funding from DARPA, created a program that can reliably detect sarcasm. From the abstract of their article in the journal Entropy:

Inherent ambiguity in sarcastic expressions make sarcasm detection very difficult. In this work, we focus on detecting sarcasm in textual conversations from various social networking platforms and online media. To this end, we develop an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text. We show the effectiveness of our approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets from social networking platforms and online media. Models trained using our proposed approach are easily interpretable and enable identifying sarcastic cues in the input text which contribute to the final classification score. We visualize the learned attention weights on a few sample input texts to showcase the effectiveness and interpretability of our model.

I'm sure it works well.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay

It is the duty of every citizen in a free republic to stay informed of current events that affect public policymaking. Consuming quality sources of news on a daily basis should be a daily habit. You could include, among those sources, the New York Times. This respected publication would like for you to know which American cities are the best and the worst for gardening in the nude. And so it presents the above list (paywalled), using data compiled by the lawncare company LawnStarter, to keep you in the know:

The study used a number of metrics, including: the percentage of nudists and the friendliness of laws governing public nudity and toplessness in each city; local Google searches for “nudist” and “World Naked Gardening Day”; safety concerns, addressed by measuring the number of registered sex offenders amid the population; weather-related factors such as temperature, rain and wind speed; and a previous Lawnstarter study ranking the best cities for urban gardening. The resulting top and bottom 10 cities are uncovered in this week’s chart.

I'm shocked to see San Antonio at the bottom. My in-laws are in that city. When I next visit them, I will engage in research to verify if this conclusion for myself.

-via Dave Barry | Image: New York Times

A horse drawn canal boat has a lot of inertia and no brakes. If a horse towing a boat arrives at a bridge, the supervising humans must bring it to a halt, disconnect the towing rig, move the horse to the other side of the bridge, and then reconnect the tow line.

The industrious people of Industrial Era Britain thought of a better solution: the roving or turnover bridge. Whereas some bridges were simply high enough to allow the passage of the tow horse on either side, the roving bridge brought the horse up on ramps facing either direction, turning it completely around as it passed.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Smabs Sputzer

Pyramid Lake in western Nevada offers excellent trout fishing. But if you want to access deeper water and more fish, then you need to move away from the shore. Some enterprising sportsmen began setting up ladders into the water. Standing on top of these ladders was more comfortable than standing in the cold water for hours at a time.

Then some outfitters began modifying ladders to hold fishing gear. And then some mounted chairs on top of the ladders. In the New York Times (paywalled), Chris Santella writes:

Our ladders seemed pedestrian next to the local models — custom contraptions made by a Reno craftsman which included a platform and a padded seat.

“When people first started fishing the lake, they used milk crates,” recalled Joe Contaldi, principal guide with Pyramid Lake Anglers. “This helped them cast far enough to reach the drop-offs where the fish cruise looking for food. And it also helped them get above the cold water.” The crates gave way to conventional ladders and then to chair ladders.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Pyramid Lake Guides

Jordan Rudess, a master keyboardist, owns a Pocket Piano. This is an electric keyboard that breaks down into segments. It will continue to play even when segments are removed. With the help of his friend Maddi, Rudess played a ragtime song while losing piano segments. In the end, he's playing on only three keys!

-via The Awesomer

On April 17, 1961, a small army of 1,500 Cuban exiles backed by the US government landed at the Bay of Pigs in the hope of overthrowing the Castro regime. To prepare for this great event that would doubtlessly be the start of a successful military campaign, the CIA struck commemorative coins.

Alas, for the Cuban exile troops and the people of Cuba, Castro's forces knew about the invasion and quickly defeated it. This silver coin was, as a result, never circulated.

-via Super Punch | Photos: CIA

Slava Korolev in Palisades Park, New Jersey operates the unique studio named Light Dents. He takes discarded musical instruments and turns them into lovely and eye-catching lamps, candelabras, and wine bottle holders.

Twitter user Melinda in Naples, Florida has access to many bodies of horseshoe crabs. Their hard shells are perfect for painting.

Emanuele Magini, a furniture designer and scenographer in Italy, calls this chair the Lazy Basketball. It suggests a helpful distraction for the workplace or a possible prank to play on unsuspecting users just looking for a place to sit.

-via Toxel