John Farrier's Blog Posts

Photographer Jan Kriwol Plays with Your Mind



Polish photographer Jan Kriwol likes to suggest that outward reality is just a facade. At the link, you can view several examples of his work that exhibit this theme.

http://illusion.scene360.com/photography/12537/unreal-environments/ via io9 | Photographer's Website

The Rescue of the Chilean Miners Is Underway

The first of the 33 trapped miners in Chile came to the surface during the night. The rescue process is slowly underway. Retrieving these men from half a mile underground required immediate technological improvisation, and The New York Times has an interactive graphic explaining the solution devised by engineers.

It has involved untold millions of dollars, specialists from NASA and drilling experts from a dozen or so countries. Some here at the mine have compared the rescue effort to the Apollo 13 space mission, for the emotional tension it has caused and the expectation of a collective sigh of relief at the end.

But the Chileans were in uncharted territory. To their knowledge, no one had tried a rescue so far underground. Keeping the miners alive and in good spirits, much less getting them out, would be an enormous challenge.

Doctors from NASA and Chilean Navy officers with experience in submarines were consulted on the strains of prolonged confinement. The miners had lost considerable weight and were living off emergency rations.


Link via DVICE

How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Maker, Using Only Materials Commonly Found on a Modestly Sized Oceanographic Research Vessel

Southern Fried Scientist, a graduate student studying population genetics in hydrothermal vent communities, was onboard a research vessel longer than he normally likes to go without beer. So he decided to brew his own, and now offers detailed instructions on how you can do likewise:

The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter glass sample jars with air-tight lids, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water.

You’ll have to be more creative with your ingredients. Your need grains, malt, hops, and something for flavor. Simple grains such as those found in common cereals – Raisin Bran, Cracked Wheat, Kashi, whatever you can find – are decent sources of starches and usually contain enough enzymes to break the most complex proteins down. Fruit and nuts will add flavor, but are not important. The grains should be ground as fine as possible, rolled under a rolling pin or crushed in a mortar and pestle. The smaller the grains the greater the reactive surface area.


Link via Say Uncle | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Matt Seppings used under Creative Commons license

The Most Expensive Costumes at New York Comic Con



io9 has a round up of some of the most gloriously elaborate costumes at this year's New York Comic Con. Pictured above is Tom DePetrillo's mechanized Avatar AMP suit. He spent 450 hours and $1,600 building it. At the link, you can view the suit in action, as well as other amazing works of costuming.

Link

Rat Car



It's a little unclear, but Rat Car appears to be a modified car sculpture created by the art collective Agency of Urban Subconscious. This photo may have been taken in Bucharest. At the link, you can view three more pictures of similarly altered cars.

Link via Super Punch | Photo: Camil Dumitrescu

Conversacube Helps You through Those Awkward Silences


(Video Link)


Lauren McCarthy is the designer responsible for the Happiness Hat -- a hat that drives a painful spike into your head when you forget to smile. The Conversacube is one of her more recent projects. It's a little box that will prompt you on what to say during a first date when you're not sure what to talk about:

Each outward face of the box has a small screen and a microphone embedded just inside. As the conversation progresses, each person is personally prompted with directions or lines to keep the conversation running seamlessly with minimal awkward or uncomfortable moments. The microphones monitor audio levels of each participant and the cube responds accordingly, adjusting prompts to enliven, mediate conflict, or balance conversation as necessary.


Link via Make

Police SUV Drives onto Set of Transformers, Gets Hit by Bumblebee


(Video Link)


The next Transformers movie is currently being filmed in Washington, D.C. A police SUV found its way onto the closed set and was hit by the car representing Bumblebee:

The police SUV was not supposed to be there and the wreck itself was not scripted.

The police officer driving the SUV is a 25-year veteran senior explosive ordinance technician. He was taken to a local hospital and sustained minor injuries.

Law enforcement sources tell FOX 5 that he was driving to a call for a suspicious package incident nearby and was using a different radio channel than the police officers who were securing the perimeter for the movie.


Link via Geekologie | Previously: Transforming Transformer Costume

Painting Hanging in Family's Living Room Might Be a Lost Michelangelo

For years, a painting had been passed around the Kober family of Buffalo, New York. A family legend said that it was painted by Michelangelo. When Martin Kober retired in 2003, he decided to find out if this was true:

He found Antonio Forcellino, an Italian art restorer and historian and told him of the tennis ball, and something more horrifying.

"It wasn't the story that had scared me, but that it had been exposed to heating commonly found inside a middle-class home," Forcellino writes in his new book, "La Pieta Perduta," or "The Lost Pieta," published in Italy and due out in the United States next year.[...]

Forcellino said Herman Grimm, a noted Michelangelo biographer, saw the "Pieta" in 1868 and attributed it to the master. Additional evidence includes a letter in the Vatican library discussing a Pieta painting for Colonna, he said.

"I'm absolutely convinced that is a Michelangelo painting," Forcellino said.


Link via Geekosystem | Image: New York Post

Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future


(Video Link)


The lead role in the movie Back to the Future was originally played by actor Eric Stoltz. After five weeks of filming, director Robert Zemeckis decided that it wasn't working, and replaced him with Michael J. Fox. The above video shows Stoltz in scenes that will be familiar to fans of the movie.

via blastr

Get Yourself Frozen in Carbonite



Three years ago, Alex mentioned that an artist created a replica of himself frozen in carbonite, like Han Solo was in The Empire Strikes Back. If you looked upon that image with envy, you can now get a similar sculpture featuring your own face and body shape. It's not a full-size replica, but one that measures about four and a quarter inches high.

http://www.paulpapedesigns.com/Store_GG.html via GearFuse | Photo: Paul Pape Designs

Furniture Made from Naval Mines



Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin makes furniture from old naval mines found off the coast of his homeland:

Northern coast of Estonia and especially the islands, wich during the years of occupation were an almost inaccessible border zone for the common including heaps of corroded mine shells, wich are basically spheres with holes, spireks and shackles.[...]

Karmin uses mines as modules. The entire furinture series is composed of only two existing basic forms of mines - the hemisphere and the cylinder. With great delight, he has concocted utility articles of diverse forms, resulting in armchairs, writing desk, bed, toilet, cupoard, bathtub, swing, fireplace...By the hand of the artist the militaristic metallic scrap has become the design furinture of remarkably modern appearance.


http://www.marinemine.com/#mainpage via Nerdcore | Photo: Marine Mine

Latvia's Hospital-Themed Restaurant

There's a restaurant in Riga, Latvia, that looks like a hospital. The staff will even wrap you in a straight jacket, if that's what you'd like. It's called Hospitalis, and it combines the pleasures of eating out and medical examinations:

Ah, listening to a live band while eating a meal in a gynecologist’s exam room—now there’s a multi-orifice experience few other restaurants can match![...]

Hospitalis also has a small “crazy menu” with entrees like liver-filled quail that are prepared in such a way as to resemble something that might have been surgically extracted from a person. You have to sign an indemnity waiver before ordering anything from the “crazy menu” (no, that’s not a joke) so here’s to hoping that the liver they fill the quail with isn’t being removed from you.

Though you can order a “normal” meal at Hospitalis be prepared to eat it with syringes, scalpels and other surgical utensils. In that same vein (pun), drinks are served in the likes of test tube vials and I.V. bags. If you are the designated driver but can’t resist getting a drink then ordering a Corona beer in a urine sample jar should ensure that you’ll be sober for the trip home.


Link via The Agitator | Photo: Spot Cool Stuff

Baby Born from 20-Year Old Frozen Embryo

The longest time between conception and birth of a human embryo has been thirteen years. That record has now been blown away by the recent live birth of a boy who was conceived twenty years ago:

The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF.

That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 – meaning that the boy just born to the woman in the study has a sibling out there somewhere who was conceived at the same time but is 20 years younger.


http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/baby-born-20-year-old-frozen-embryo | Image: RWJMS IVF Program

Russia's Inflatable Army

Russia has devised a way to enlarge its army while saving money. It's begun making large numbers of inflatable -- and fake -- tanks, radar stations, and trucks:

What they lack in firepower, they make up for in flexibility: they are light and can be deployed quickly to deceive the enemy.

They are also very realistic. They are made of a special material that tricks enemy radar and thermal imaging into thinking they are real weapons.

The inflatables are stitched together at a former hot-air balloon factory.


Link via Slashdot | Photo: BBC News

Female Character Taxonomy



The blog Overthinking It created an enormous infographic classifying female characters in movies, anime, literature, comics, and television. The author writes:

Some of the listed tropes might be considered crazy-sexist, and others represent more positive stereotypes. The tropes are subjective, and they exist on a continuum of sexism. Consider Family Guy’s Lois Griffin (who falls under the category of “Perfect Wife”). Lois isn’t a particularly complex female character, and the idea of a fun-loving sexpot wife who stands by her man no matter what he does is kinda-sorta sexist, in that this character is a fantasy fetish figure tailor-made for adolescent male audiences. But as far as sitcom housewives go, I’d much prefer to watch a Lois-type character than a classic sitcom shrew like Debra from Everybody Loves Raymond. At least Lois represents a more positive (and sex-positive) stereotype.


Link via Buzzfeed

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