The architects at Nemo Workshop designed this new espresso bar in New York City called D'espresso. The interior looks like the room has been tilted on its side:
The "books" are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling. In addition to painting unusual surfaces with intriguing patterns -- whoa, you're standing on books! -- it gives an Alice in Wonderland-esque sense that the room has been suddenly upended.
Chris Allen, a professional yo-yoist, made an enormous yo-yo out of two dog pools. It's 35 inches across, 18 inches wide, and weighs 5.4 pounds. Allen tested it while standing on the roof of parking garage of the National Yo-Yo Museum in Chico, California. At the link, you can watch a video of Allen building and using the yo-yo.
Jeremy Messersmith composed and performed a love song entitled "Tatooine". It begins like this:
Twin suns of Tatooine Taught me everything I know Twin suns of Tatooine Taught me everything I know
There's room up there for second chances Singles are fine but doubles are fantastic I'd like to think that there's a star for me and you Spinning round, falling for one another
Papercraft animator Eric Power made this music video for it. It tells pretty much the entire original trilogy in two minutes and a half minutes.
Robert Lamb spent a day and a half building an elaborate Rube Goldberg device in order to propose to his girlfriend. The video includes his initial, failed test runs. The actual proposal comes at 7:05.
Took me 9.5 years to ask my fiancee to Marry me, now she knows why!
Providence, Rhode Island-based artist Dave Cole specializes in large-scale knitting. Recently, he created an enormous knitted piece covering an old bridge in Melbourne, Australia:
All around there it’s very dust-colored, so I chose the brightest, most fluorescent colors - orange and pink - and with 40 people we knitted one kilometer of two-foot-wide surveyors’ tape along the bridge. I used the Fibonacci sequence as a basis for the design so it looked like it was curving in and out and up and down.
Neiman Marcus is selling a candy-covered gingerbread house that stands over six feet tall:
This unique edible playhouse is handcrafted of 381 lbs. of gourmet gingerbread and 517 lbs. of royal icing by the expert confectioners at Dylan's Candy Bar®. The munchable manor, which stands 6.6 feet high by 5.25 feet wide by 4.1 feet deep, incorporates the best confections from the world's largest candy store in New York City.
YouTube user OneMinuteGalactica remixed scenes from Star Wars with audio from a 1950s-era teen hygiene film about dating. Luke wants to ask Leia out on a date. How should he do it? What should they do together? This film advises young Jedi on how to have a good first date experience.
Linguists working in a remote area of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh discovered a language spoken by 800 people that is totally unlike any language that's ever been cataloged. It's called Koro.
"Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project's research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.[...]
Languages like Koro "construe reality in very different ways," Dr. Anderson said. "They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language."[...]
Moreover, it was masked by the unusual language diversity of the area, where so many languages are spoken that they seem to intermingle effortlessly in streams of thought. Indeed, the local Koro speakers themselves didn't consider theirs a separate language, even though it is as distinct from those spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian, the researchers said.
This language has no written form, so researchers are working quickly to learn its grammar and vocabulary in order to preserve it against extinction.
This wedding video shows the bride and groom meeting in the woods, exchanging kisses with sparkly special effects. It's sweet, romantic, and kitschy all at the same time.
Researchers have found that it may be advantageous for tennis players to grunt as they swing because the grunt may confuse opposing players about in which direction the ball is moving:
For those clips that included a grunt, respondents had a slower response and were less accurate about the location of the forthcoming shot. The authors, while concluding that future on-court study needs to be conducted, posit one possible explanation, that “the interfering auditory stimulus masks the sound of the ball being struck by the racket or it distracts an opponent’s attention away from the sound of the ball.”
Link | Photo by Flickr user Adam Baker used under Creative Commons license
Comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner took a whimsical look at Facebook portraits. In a large infographic at Fast Company, he presented his analysis of what your portrait photo says about your personality, motivations, and criminal history.
Austin Houldsworth is an "interactive artist". He wanted to see if it was possible to speed up the fossilization process from a few million years to a few months, and built a machine that he thought might do the job. Pictured above is Houldsworth with the body of a partridge that he subjected to four months of petrification. His ultimate goal is to try it on a person:
Yes, fossilising a human being is still the ultimate aim. Regarding this experiment, the results are promising enough to continue perfecting the machine... but I never saw the machine as the final result - it has helped me to understand the many different aspects which are required for the process to occur. And subsequently I've designed a number of improvements for the machine. I believe I'll be working on this particular project for a very long time.
D.L. & Co., a manufacturer of luxury crafts, makes a candle that cries tears as it burns. It's called "Deirdre", after the Irish pre-Christian folktale "Deirdre of the Sorrows." There are four more photos at the link.
http://www.dlcompany.com/catalog/bust-dierdre-candle-dl-limited via Make
Courtesy of YouTube user teemune comes this video of a milling machine programmed to play the theme song to MacGyver. Here's how it's described in the video notes:
Visa made a program that converts notes from a .txt file into G-code, which makes the milling machine play the music.
DARPA and Lockheed Martin are developing a sniper rifle that, if successful, will partially aim itself:
It will measure atmospheric conditions, account for the weapon’s maximum effective range and include GPS coordinates. It’s also supposed to communicate with the rifle scope, informing the gun itself of the aim point offset and expected crosswind.
Link via Say Uncle | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Lance Fisher used under Creative Commons license
