Former British Army officer Ed Stafford is well on his way to becoming the first person to hike the entire length of the Amazon river, from its source to its mouth. He's been hiking for 612 days and hopes to complete the journey in August. In The Daily Mail, Mark Barrowcliffe writes:

The challenges he faces are monumental. So monumental, in fact, that Arctic explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has written to Ed to warn him that the stage in front of him - the deep Brazilian jungle - will be 'difficult'. You can take it that this is something of an understatement, given that it comes from a man who once sawed off his own fingers after they became frostbitten.[...]

His average day would kill most people. Up at dawn, he walks for around eight hours, until 3pm. At this stage of the journey he will be lucky to have covered 7km in that time. This is jungle, real jungle - and you pay for every step with willsapping swings of the machete.

It's like clearing the thickest hedge you could imagine for a whole working day. Only this hedge is filled with razor grass - which is pretty much as the name implies, grass that will cut exposed flesh to ribbons - huge thorns and spines on trees sharp enough to go straight through a carelessly placed hand, deadly snakes, poisonous spiders and foot-long centipedes so venomous that they can blister your skin with a touch. Oh, and the odd man-eating big cat. Specifically, jaguars.

Link via Radley Balko | Photo: The Daily Mail

The photo-realistic plastic soldier figurine is actually a contestant from a cosplay competition at a comic con in Lucca, Italy. That's all that I have right now, but I'll update this post as more information filters into the geekosphere.

Link via Geekologie | Lucca Comics & Games 2009

(YouTube Link)

When you watch this video, you might think that this is a man standing behind a sheet of plastic, re-drawing the hands on a clock face every minute. Actually, this clock by designer Maarten Baas is a LED screen showing the artist doing precisely that on a continuous loop. The video is from the recent Design Miami fair, which ended on December 5th.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/5837/maarten-baas-real-time-clock-movies-at-milan-design-week-09.html via Gizmodo | Artist's Website | Design Miami

Photo: Mocoloco

Here at Neatorama, we've previously featured Leandro Erlich's amazing illusions. One of his more recent works is a couch made out of chocolate. Even at very close range, it looks just like a brown leather couch, right down to the stitching, buttons, and leather folds. More images at the link.

Link via The Presurfer

Photo: Glowing Wood Sculptures

Artist Billy Hall uses a lathe to sculpt whole wood blocks thin enough to be used as lampshades. The shades are usually between 1/32 and 3/32 of an inch thick and coated with epoxy. Pictured above is "Luna", a globular design made from Southern Yellow Pine.

http://www.glowingwoodsculptures.com/gallery.htm via DudeCraft

(YouTube Link)

That's the vision behind Gebhard Sengmüller's art installation entitled "A Parallel Image." Starting with the work of French engineer Maurice Leblanc in 1880, moving images were transmittable electrically by breaking them down into single frames, and then frames into individual pixels. This is how broadcast and cable television developed. Sengmüller writes:

“A Parallel Image” starts from the assumption that the development just described never happened. Would the absence of the idea of breaking down an image into lines have led to the lack of a procedure for live transmission any time soon? Or would the desire of our technological civilization to have an immediate transmission medium have been so great that a completely different, more complicated way would have been accepted?

With this claim I attempt to develop a television format that is useless in its efficiency, but nevertheless technically entirely feasible. My format chooses a parallel transmission of every single pixel, which makes a technically elaborate synchronization in time between sender and receiver superfluous².

Technical details follow at the link. And in the video, there's a Betty Boop cartoon about 1:30 in.

Link via Gizmodo | Gallery of the Installation

She was not very subtle about it. At the Lewis Drug Store in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a woman was arrested for hauling 418 items out to her car:

Police say an employee of the Lewis store at 10th and Cliff in Sioux Falls noticed her acting suspiciously.

She was apparently filling up a bag with items and then went outside without paying.

The employee confronted her and called police.

Police say she had stolen 418 items from the store, simply by filling up bags with merchandise, and taking them to her car.

http://www.ksfy.com/news/local/78355767.html via Stuff | Photo: KSFY TV

A Taiwanese man with a character known as "Little Gray" completed all 986 objectives in World of Warcraft and finished the game:

To reach the milestone the Taiwanese power-player killed 390,895 creatures, accumulated 7,255,538,878 points of damage, completed 5,906 quests (that's 14.62 quests per day, apparently), raided 405 dungeons and hugged 11 players.

Here's the sad part: once you achieve something like this, what is there left to accomplish in life?

Link via Wandering Goblin | Image: Blizzard Entertainment

A Japanese firm is producing a limited run of beer made from barley which spent time on the International Space Station. From The Japan Times:

The brewer will receive orders for the Sapporo Space Barley beer via the Internet until Dec. 24, making 250 six-packs, holding 330-ml bottles, available at a price of ¥10,000 each, Sapporo said Thursday, adding the product will be delivered to customers in late January. Proceeds will be used for the promotion of science education.

The original barley seeds were stored for five months in the Russian module of the International Space Station.

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Sapporo Breweries

The room pictured above, by designer Jeffrey Miller, was inspired by the work of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Erin Williamson of Design Crisis has assembled a gallery of similar interiors.

http://design-crisis.com/?p=474 via Fast Company | Photo: Design Crisis

Jeremy Bell of Toronto, Canada, bought a LEGO kit that assembles into a realistic facsimile of a handgun. Naturally, it struck him as a good idea to bring it to work:

It was the end of the day so Mr. Bell and a few colleagues decided to wind down by playing a few rounds of the video game Modern Warfare 2 at the office before heading home. A little while later, sudden, intense yelling filled the office hallways.

"We originally thought there was some sort of domestic dispute out there ... that was until I clearly heard my name," said Mr. Bell.

"The guy sounded seriously angry and was instructing me to slowly come into the hall with my hands on my head."

It was Toronto's Emergency Task Force, more commonly known as the SWAT team, responding to calls of a man in an office with a gun.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2301787 -- Thanks, Jeremy Barker! | Photo: Global TV

UPDATE 12/5/09: Jeremy Bell has blogged about the incident (via Hell in a Handbasket).

Flickr user roguebantha_1138 spent two hours assembling this snowman that looks like a LEGO minifig.

Link via Geekologie

(YouTube Link)

YouTube user Mechanical Sculptor created this mechanically exploding and retracting picture frame. His channel is filled with videos of similar works.

via Make | YouTube Channel

About 10,000 Americans every year are diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and most must submit to the surgical removal of their voice boxes. Machine replacements have, so far, sounded raspy and robot-like. But now medical researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa have developed an device that fits into the mouth and tracks the normal movements of the tongue to produce simulated human speech:

The system uses a palatometer: a device that looks much like an orthodontic plate and is normally used for speech therapy. The device, made by CompleteSpeech of Orem, UT, tracks contact between the tongue and palate using 118 embedded touch sensors.[...]

To use the device, a person puts the palatometer in her mouth and mouths words normally. The system tries to translate those mouth movements into words before reproducing them on a small sound synthesizer, perhaps tucked into a shirt pocket.

Link via Popular Science | Image: Jaren Wilke/Megan Russell, The University of the Witwatersrand

deviantART user William Chua of Singapore created this remix of Super Mario Bros. and classical Japanese illustration. He claims inspiration by both Super Mario Bros. and the game Monster Hunter.

Link via Geekologie | deviantART Gallery