John Farrier's Blog Posts

Descendants


(Video Link)


Descendants is an animated short film by Heiko van der Scherm about two flowers, and the curiosity and treachery between them. In a manner that reminds me of the rabbits of Watership Down, the flowers are anthropomorphized, but still motivated primarily by the plant life cycle.

Starring Whoopi Goldberg. Run time: 14 minutes, 32 seconds.

via Nerdcore

Hookah Case Mod



Instructables user kirkfrog made YaHookah! -- the computer that you can smoke. It's an old CPU box turned into a functional hookah. The tank is acrylic, and the bubbles are provided by an aquarium air pump. DIY instructions at the link.

Link via Gizmodo

Can You Identify LEGO Minifigs By How They Feel In Your Mouth?


(YouTube Link)


If not, then you're just not as talented as this teenager. Sophia Heesch claimed to be able to identify eighty Star Wars minifigs is this manner, and this German language video demonstrates a test of that claim. Would any German speaking Neatoramanaut care to translate?

via Geekologie

Coffee-Fueled Car

The Carpuccino, built by the team at the BBC science show Bang Goes the Theory, runs on coffee grounds. These are burned and the resulting carbon monoxide powers the car:

The team calculates the Carpuccino will do three miles per kilo of ground coffee - the equivalent of about 56 espressos per mile.

The journey will use about 70 kilos of ground coffee which, at supermarket prices of between £13 and £26 a kilo depending on brand and quality, will cost between £910 and £1,820, or between 25 and 50 times the £36 cost of petrol for the journey.


Link via Fast Company | Photo: The Daily Mail

A Tablecloth That Reveals Images When You Spill Liquids On It



Underfull is a prototype tablecloth design by Kristine Bjaadal. It has a hidden butterfly pattern that is revealed only when it is stained. Bjaadal writes:

This creates stories and can contribute in giving the tablecloth sentimental value – important in a society where we seem to have an increasingly superficial relation to the objects we surround ourselves with.


Link via OhGizmo! | Video | Photo: Kristine Bjaadal

Stop-Motion Animation with Doritos


(YouTube Link)


This video, entitled "Annihilation", shows stop-motion animation using Doritos chips. Its provenance is a mystery to me, but I suspect that it's viral advertising.

via Urlesque

Every Alfred Hitchcock Cameo (Minus Seven)


(YouTube Link)


Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in all of his movies. YouTube user royvanderzwaan, a collector of Hitchcock films, assembled (almost) all of these cameos into one video.

via Nerdcore

Furry Chandelier



This glass chandelier -- which looks to me like a big ball of fur -- was made by glass artist Robert Kaindl. At the link, you can see some simply amazing glasswork.

Link via Gizmodo

Scientific Cookies



The blog Not So Humble Pie has a roundup of science-themed cookies. Among them is a picture of the cellular mitosis cookies (above) made by the blogger behind Reflections of a Science Teacher. Others were inspired by centrifugal governors, genome sequences, and a Sierpinski carpet.

Link and Link via Make

Nerdy 'Yo Mama' Jokes

reddit user Grimmlock started a clever comment thread. It's filled with nerdy variations of the classic 'yo mama' joke theme. A few samples:
Your momma's so fat that the probability that she is in an arbitrary point in a room is 1.

The woman who carried you in her womb for your gestation period and later expelled you from her vagina has such an excess of adipose tissue that one could reap cardiovascular benefits simply from taking a brisk walk around her person.

Yo momma is so fat, the recursive function int yourMom{ (return yourMom();} causes a stack overflow

Yo momma's so fat that when I used multiple integration to find the volume under her curves, it turned out she was a hypervolume and could not be graphed.


Link | Photo by flickr user Tobyotter used under Creative Commons license

Mr. Burns from The Simpsons Untooned



deviantART user Martin Beyer imagined what Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would look like if he was depicted more literally. It looks like a sculpture, but Beyer actually used Zbrush to create a digital 3D image.

Link via GearFuse

LEGO Synthesizer


(YouTube Link)


Japanese designer Yoshi Akai creates electronic musical instruments from unusual objects, such as telegraph machines and stylophones. One of his recent works is a three-channel, eight-step synthesizer that can be played by placing different colored LEGO blocks in various positions.

via CrunchGear | Official Website

Thieves Pull High-Level Heist...Just to Steal New Laptop Computers

As though taking a lesson from the movie Mission Impossible, thieves broke into a Best Buy in New Jersey, rappelling in from a hole that they cut in the roof to hover over a spot obscured from security cameras. What did these highly-skilled thieves take? Just 20 Apple notebook computers. That's it.

"High level of sophistication," said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. "They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out."

Employees discovered the missing laptops, as well as a gaping hole in the ceiling, when they arrived to work around 6:30 this morning.

The thieves left boot prints on the gas pipe, which runs up the side of the building in Monmouth Junction, Ryan said.

On top of the building, they used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof, he said.


Link via CrunchGear | Image: Paramount

Cell Phones that Can Read Lips

Researchers in Germany are trying to develop a cell phone that can read lips by measuring the electrical activity used in the muscles of the mouth while speaking, which is then converted into a computer-simulated voice:
The user can speak into the phone soundlessly, but is still understood by the conversation partner on the other end of the line. As a result, it is possible to communicate in silent environments, at the cinema or theater, without disturbing others. Another field of use is the transmission of confidential information.

For the transmission of passwords and PINs, for example, users can change seamlessly to soundless language and, hence, transmit confidential information in a tap-proof manner.


Link via Popular Science | Photo: US National Gallery of Art

Playing Pinball with Your Mind


(YouTube Link)


The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface uses signals picked up by an electroencephalogram (EEG) to give commands to machines:

While the player imagines left and right hand movements, algorithms decode his brain activity signals in realtime into control signals for the pinball machine. The demonstration shows the cutting edge performance of a brain-computer interface system with regard of timing precision of the control signal. Other (slower) applications are developed for communication needs of e.g. paralized patients.


Link via Make

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Profile for John Farrier

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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