Although it lacks the refinement of a Geo Metro, a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado station wagon isn't a bad foundation for a limousine. This was one of several dozen built during the defunct custom car builder Miller-Meteor, a company perhaps best known for making the Ghostbusters' Ecto-1. It recently sold on eBay for $3,000. The seller pushed it as a tool for picking up women, and it's obviously well-designed for that purpose. Right, ladies?
Actually, it's not the real Darth Vader. It's just an actor dressed up as Darth Vader. Specifically, this is Jonathan Arons, who puts on a truly original performance for people at a senior center in New York City.
Jully Nascimento from Brazil got this QR code inked on her arm. When scanned, it reads "hold on". That's the name of a song by Good Charlotte that was meaningful to her in her youth.
There's just something majestically beautiful about cement-filled Budweiser cans linked by a chain. This work by Brooklyn-based designers Chen Chen and Kai Tsien Williams is called "American Ninja".
Interviewing is a skill and not everyone has it -- but some surprising people do. Like William Shatner. Have you seen his Raw Nerve? Whatever faults he has, Shatner knows how to do a probing interview.
Where was I? Oh, yeah: Bert from Sesame Street is one of those people. "If you could be any sock from history, what would you be?" Brilliant. That's how you get inside someone's head.
There's not much information about this video, but, allegedly, it shows an explosion at the bottom of a water-filled quarry. There's enough 12-year old boy left in me to say that this is awesome.
We've mentioned noodling before. It's a fishing technique that consists of grabbing a fish with your bare hands and tossing it up on the shore. But here in Texas we do it a bit differently. Noodling consists of shoving one's fist into the water. Then, when a big ol' catfish clamps its jaws around your hand, fling it out of the water.
Currently and sadly, noodling is illegal. But that may change. The Wall Street Journal spoke to expert noodler Brady Knowlton:
Nothing beats "the heebie-jeebies you get underwater, in the dark, with this little sea monster biting you," he says. He recalls that his arm looked like "the first stage of a chili recipe" after his first noodling experience about 15 years ago. Catfish are equipped with bands of small but very abrasive teeth.
The bill swam easily through the state house, but now rod-and-reel anglers are speaking up against the proposed law, currently in the state Senate.
They say noodling is unfair to the fish, since they're grabbed in their burrows without a chance to swim away.
Craft introduced me to a great Flickr pool called Geekigami, which is filled with well-made pieces of original origami. This piece by Flickr user -sbel- isn't geeky, but it is neat.
I had no idea that a set of lenses was such an incredibly complex piece of machinery! Michael Zang acquired on eBay a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm that had been sliced in half. It was made by students as a graduation project.
Half-caff latte, I choose you! Christiaan Morris made this latte surface art for the Fremont Coffee Company in Seattle. Other images at the link include Darth Vader, Batman, and Boba Fett.
Virgin Galactic's experimental SpaceShipTwo, dubbed the VSS Enterprise, recently performed its first flight using "feathering". That means that the rear of the craft bent far backwards to slow it down during re-entry. Popular Science's Clay Dillow explained its significance:
“Feathering,” as it is known, is probably the biggest innovation integrated into SpaceShipTwo’s design. In the feathered position, the entire tail section of the plane rotates upward about 65 degrees, creating a different aerodynamic shape that is highly stable yet creates tremendous drag to slow the aircraft down during re-entry. Though that drag is pretty significant, the light weight of the aircraft keeps the skin temperature from rising too high, circumventing the need for heat shields and other thermal protection.
Moreover, when feathered correctly the aircraft is so stable that the pilot can more or less take his hands off the sticks and let the aircraft work its way through the atmosphere naturally, based purely on its aerodynamic shape. That’s a huge safety feature, as the pilot doesn’t have to maintain a specific degree of entry or rely on a sophisticated fly-by-wire computer.
At the link, you can watch a video of the flight. Skip ahead to 2:30 to see the feathering.
Students at a Dutch university have constructed the largest functional Nintendo Entertainment System controller in the world. It measures twelve by five feet. As you can see from the Dutch-language video at the link, they set it up in a public venue and let people play Super Mario Bros. on a huge screen.
