YouTube user jairust mounted bottle rockets on his motorcycle. He writes:

Before you comment on safety remember that they are made of cardboard and balsa wood. You can buy them at walmart, they don't have explosives in them, any sharp tips, no metal, and nothing that can hurt anyone.

I made rocket pods for the sides of my '06 CBR that shoot estes rockets with the push of a button. Some of the rockets in the video did not fly very well but I have got the problem under control so watch for another video!!

In the links, you can view a video of him firing rockets from his motorcycle at night.

via Gizmodo | YouTube Video | Screen capture by Gizmodo

This Blog Rules has pictures of four promotional posters for the censored and modified Star Wars movies released in the Soviet Union. They look surreal, like something out of Brazil rather than the plot of Star Wars. Would any Russian-speaking Neatoramanaut care to translate?

Link via Nerd Bastards

Artist Guy Shield proposed to his girlfriend Liz through a series of folded, sequential illustrations. He invested a lot of time in process, and you can read his sweet, romantic, and heavily-illustrated story at the link.

The plan was to create a series of images that I could work on at home, without giving away too much about the end (folded) result. The images would act both individually and as a series of captured moments of the irrelevant and mundane, utilising street-signs, strange signage and various forms of odd-ball graffiti to spell out the proposal. And naturally, when she'd ask me what I was working on, I could easily say "oh, I'm practising my hand created type because it needs A LOT of practice" and I'd be out of trouble. The hardest trick was working out how I could form the word 'MARRY' because just putting it into an individual image would blow my unique cover.

Link via DudeCraft

Laboratory-grade measuring instruments can be pricey, but some enterprising scientists are finding that the Nintendo Wii controller can serve as an alternative:

The Wiimote can track just about anything: All that’s needed is an LED light. Hydrologist Willem Luxemburg of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands demonstrated a hacked water-level sensor made from a Wiimote and a plastic boat at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union here Monday.

“Just switch it on and make sure it doesn’t get wet,” Luxemburg said.

Luxemburg’s team aimed the Wiimote at a problem that can be very tricky for hydrologists: measuring evaporation on a body of water. The easiest way to measure evaporation is to place pans of water near the lake, or whatever water is being studied, and put pressure sensors in them. The sensors record the drop in pressure as more and more water disappears. But this equipment can run $500 or more, and still the measurements aren’t accurate because the water in the pan gets warmer on land than it would in the lake. Alternatively, measuring the level of water in a pan that is floating in a lake is also tricky because the pan will inevitably be moving.

The Wiimote could overcome the evaporation-measurement problems. It has a tri-axial accelerometer and a high-resolution, high-speed infrared camera, which can sense movement with better than 1 millimeter accuracy.

Link via Make | Photo: Betsy Mason/Wired

(YouTube Link)

This computer-generated animation by Roy Prol imagines the Earth as a ringed planet, such as Saturn or Uranus. First, it addresses the orientation of the rings, and then shows what they would look like from various places around the world, day and night. In Scientific American, John Matson writes that Earth may have once had a ring system:

But such a ring, if it were to suddenly appear, might not be all good news. Decades ago, John O'Keefe of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ventured that Earth may have had a ring system similar to Saturn's for a brief period. In a 1980 paper in Nature, O'Keefe pointed to climatic data indicating colder winters at the end of the Eocene epoch some 34 million years ago along with showers of tektites, glassy rocks of mysterious origin, at around the same time. O'Keefe's theory held that tektites that missed the Earth in this bombardment were captured into a ring system that may have persisted for millions of years, casting a winter shadow across Earth's surface and contributing to a late Eocene die-off of many marine organisms such as plankton and mollusks.

Link via Geekologie

The French design firm 5.5 designed a few infographics for the Spanish chocolatier ChocolatFactory. Each is made out of actual chocolate. Pictured above is a set of domes that represent different cocoa contents, with the largest dome representing the least cocoa (60%) and the smallest representing the most (99%). The other graphics are chocolate bars that tell consumers how many calories they're eating and a pie chart demonstrating a distribution system.

Link | 5.5 | ChocolatFactory | Photo: 5.5

Artist Michael Johansson makes full-sized objects that look like plastic click-out models. The dingy pictured above, entitled "Toys 'R' Us", is a 1:1 scale model made from functional boating equipment and a welded metal frame. Gallery at the link.

http://worldfamousdesignjunkies.com/under-the-influence/just-add-johansson/ via DudeCraft | Artist Website | Dingy Project | Photo: Michael Johansson

When Emma Smith of Leytonstone, UK, went into labor, her husband Leroy realized that they wouldn't be able to get to the hospital in time. He then used his BlackBerry to find instructions online on how to deliver a child:

So the 29-year-old grabbed hold of his BlackBerry, accessed the internet and sought help from search engine Google for step-by-step instructions.

And after following the detailed guide on the internet's wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith.

Five minutes after the delivery the midwife arrived to cut the umbilical cord of their fourth child.

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

This mysterious Batmobile-styled limousine was recently spotted in New York City. The carblog Autogespot suspects that it's built from a Corvette C4, but that's all the information that I can find.

Link via Topless Robot | YouTube Link | Photo: CarScoop

I guess that in scientific publishing, there's no such thing as bad publicity. The textbook Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin, featured in Tiger Woods' recent SUV crash, has shot up the bestseller list. Its Amazon ranking has moved from 396,224 to 2,268:

Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was "delighted that anyboy's reading my books. I just wish it was one that's still in print."

Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.

"It's not a book you sit down and read from cover to cover," said Gribbin, "you can dip in and out of it. Tiger Woods is absolutely my target audience. He's busy, hasn't got a lot of time, but wants to catch up on what's happening in physics."

We need to arrange for a celebrity to become embroiled in a major scandal while reading Neatorama.

Link via Radley Balko | Photo: Handout/Getty Images

I'm not sure how it works, but this 8-ft by 8-ft clock by artist Miss Moun displays the time by selectively lighting up words in a poem. Three words are always lit, and each word represents either the hour, minute, or second. The piece is entitled "6 Is for Blossom", and you can view more pictures at the link.

http://www.missmoun.com/index.php?/project/6-is-for-blossom/ via Gizmodo | Photo: Miss Moun

The Japanese woodworking firm Sada-Kenbi has built a wooden, functional, street-legal sports car. It can reach speeds of up to 80 kph and costs $44,000 USD. The car has stylish gull wing doors and a stereo. More pictures and a video at the link.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/23/view/8388/wooden-sports-car.html via The Presurfer | Company Site (in Japanese) | Photo: SPGRA

Biologist Mark Norman found octopuses (octopi?) off the coast of Indonesia that use split open coconut shells as hiding places. This is the first known tool use by an invertebrate animal:

An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment.

This, on its own, astonished the team. Then they noticed that the octopuses, after using the coconut shells, would arrange them neatly below the centers of their bodies and "walk" around with the shells—awkwardly.

It's uncertain whether these were African or European coconuts. Video at the link.

Link | Photo: Roger Steene

Rather than a formal taxonomy, this diagram by Ibrahim Evsan divides geek culture into activities, obsessions, social communities, terms, idols, and types. Its primary flaw is that it does not take cross-breeding into account. Larger version at the link.

Link via Fast Company

(YouTube Link)

Trying to ignore the alarm isn't going to work with the Princess in a Pea Alarm Clock (PPAC). Jeff Saltzman rigged an air compressor to lift up one side of a mattress when it's time to wake up. If the sleeper doesn't get up, s/he'll get thrown to the floor.

Link via Make

UPDATE 12/14/09: I've swapped out the video. Thanks, GlitchEnzo!