Sean McNally, a 15th-level artist and 7th-level animator, created a resume that looks like a character sheet from Dungeons & Dragons. He claims to have a Base Art Bonus of +11, of which I am skeptical. But maybe a little exaggeration is expected on a resume. Click on the link for a larger image.
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached and collapse of European Communism rapidly accelerated. From the archives of the BBC:
At midnight East Germany's Communist rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.
They surged through cheering and shouting and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side.
Ecstatic crowds immediately began to clamber on top of the Wall and hack large chunks out of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) barrier.
Ford is developing a seat belt that inflates when the car detects a crash. In The Wall Street Journal, Matthew Dolan writes:
Its inflatable rear seat belts spread crash forces over five times more area of the body than conventional seat belts, said Sue Cischke, Ford group vice president of sustainability, environmental and safety engineering
Each belt's tubular air bag inflates with cold compressed gas, which flows through a specially designed buckle from a cylinder housed below the seat. The inflatable belt's accordion-folded bag breaks through the belt fabric as it fills with gas, expanding sideways across the occupant's body. It looks something like a water wing children wear in the pool before they know how to swim.
Martynas Birskys of the Vilnius-based design studio DaDaDa sells slippers made out of bread. For your comfort, you can select from various sizes and grains. It's hard to argue with his sales pitch "eatable…dries itself… made from bread...first in fashion…needs no pressing…feels good in dry climate …won’t sag."
Ben Miller of Urlesque has compiled several pop, rock, and metal songs performed by harpists, such as CKania13's rendition of Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven." The other videos are selections from Journey, Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Lenny Kravitz.
Two Dutch architects want to alter the storm drainage system of the city of Rotterdam to redirect water into playgrounds. The water will be used to fill fanciful ponds and moats for children to play in/around:
In Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen's proposal, rainwater runoff isn't funneled into a complex system of underground pipes, a system that is rather expensive to build and maintain, but is managed instead through a network of surface reservoirs, the Waterpleinen, or Watersquares. These storage spaces will be dry for most of the year, but during storm events, they will collect water from the surrounding neighborhood. If one reaches capacity, excess water will overflow into another basin. After the rain, the collected water will slowly recede into nearby bodies of water or seep into the soil.
So instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old.
Luis Diaz Santis and Magaly Guerrero Ramierz sent out invitations to their wedding depicting themselves as 8-bit characters in a two-player combat video game. Chris Jacob of Gizmodo suggests that this is a subtle social commentary on modern marriage. Either way, it's cool, and you can view a picture of the groom proposing in binary at the link.
This chart shows the moral alignments of nine pop culture characters using the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. Rorschach as Chaotic Good? I think that Chaotic Neutral is more likely. And Neutral Good for John Locke at best.
Top row, left to right: John Locke of Lost, Dwight from Sin City, Rorschach of Watchmen. Middle row: Indiana Jones, Niko Bellic of Grand Theft Auto 4, Tyler Durden of Fight Club. Bottom row: Darth Vader, Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, and the Joker.
I'm not sure who's responsible for this chart -- it's been floating around the net. I'll edit with a photocredit when someone claims responsibility.
The Polish design team razy2 made a chair that's built like a stack of sticky notes. The Q-Book is composed of sheets of paper, carefully cut, that are attached on one side. If you need something to write on, just tear off a sheet.
Dutch designer Erik De Nijs created Suited Case -- a collection of four functional suitcases that can be linked together in the form of a couch. His goal was to give travelers a taste of home while away:
This concept came from a research on nostalgia during travelling. When a familiar object from home is taken with you on a trip you feel much more at ease. And which object is more familiar then your own comfortable couch.
The fabrics which are used to cover the suit cases emphasize the homely feeling. I searched for a combination of fabrics which amplify each other and which create a prominent image. By using prints on the large luggage and the pad on the hand luggage I tried to put down a lively picture.
The work will be on display at the upcoming Dutch Design Week in Eindoven. You can view more pictures at the link.
Rochus Jacob designed and built the Murakami Chair. As the user rocks back and forth during the day, the chair charges a battery that powers the lamp. Jacob writes:
I was looking for opportunities to generate energy through activities we naturally do. The final result is a rocking chair that enables the user to experience production and consumption of electricity in a gentle and rewarding way. An abstract process becomes tangible and eventually cultivates natural awareness. Complexity is covered by simplicity. Advanced nano-dynamo technology which is built in to the skids of the chair and more efficient light sources such as the newly developed OLED generation makes it possible to build a rocking chair with a reading lamp running on electricity generated from the rocking motion. During daylight the energy gets stored in a battery pack. The construction of the flat and bendable organic light emitting diodes allows new form factors such as using the traditional shape of a lamp but instead of having a light bulb the lampshade himself turns out to be the light source. To have a drastic reduction of consumption the big challenge will be to make consuming less feel like getting more.
The market research firm Mindset Media studied the cultural and economic behaviors of beer drinkers and discerned certain trends among buyers of particular beers. Among the brands studied are Budweiser, Bud Light, Corona, Heineken, and Blue Moon. Beth Snyder Bulik wrote about the study in Ad Age. Here's what she wrote about Budweiser drinkers:
True to form, Bud drinkers are sensible, grounded and practical. They are the polar opposite of daydreamers and don't easily get carried away. These beer drinkers also don't like authority—can anyone say union?—and are emotionally steady people who live in the here and now. However, what may be a bit surprising is that people who prefer Bud can also be very spontaneous and tend not to do much advance planning.
Budweiser drinkers are 42% more likely to drive a truck than the average person, 68% more likely to choose a credit card with flexible payment terms and 42% more likely to use breath-freshening strips every day.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: U.S. General Services Administration
Artist Virgil England is best known for his custom fantasy-inspired knives and swords. But in 1990, he stepped outside of this domain to create a life-sized (if that's an appropriate term for an imaginary creature) dragon skeleton in Chugach National Forest in Alaska:
The part of the Dragon that is exposed is about 18 feet long. The wing is 15 feet high. The skeleton is carved whale bone and forged mild steel with reindeer rawhide stretched and stitched over the bones. I did it to display a 59 1/2 inch two handed sword called "The Veil of Tears". After the ten hour photo session It went to a three day showing in San Francisco then to the buyers.
A wattle is the bit of flesh below a rooster's beak. What purpose does it serve? Carolynn Smith at Macquarie University in Australia conducted a study that suggests that it's pure chicken bling. Sarah Zielinski writes in Scientific American about the results:
Cutting off the wattles of roosters and seeing how the behavior of hens changed wasn’t an option. Instead, Smith created four animated roosters. The animated roosters (see second part of the video below) all acted the same, performing the tidbitting routine over and over, and they all looked the same, except for their wattles. One had a normal wattle, one was missing his, a third had a wattle that didn’t move, and the fourth had an extra floppy wattle.
A test chicken would be placed inside a test pen with two “audience hens,” a couple of buddies intended to make the test hen more comfortable in the less familiar surroundings (fowl are social creatures). One of the videos was then played for the test chicken and her response was recorded: How quickly did she respond to the animated rooster? How quickly did she start searching for food (the normal response to a male tidbitting)? And how long did she search for food?
The test hens responded more quickly to the tidbitting males that had the normal or stationary wattles, less quickly to the one with the extra floppy wattle (the wattle moved so much that it swung up the side of the rooster’s head and appeared much smaller than it was) and slowest to the male lacking wattles. After the hen’s attention was gained, though, she reacted about the same to each of the four animated chickens. Smith suggests that the wattle helps a rooster gain a hen’s attention when he is tidbitting, rather like a human guy wearing flashy clothes while doing his best dance moves to try and pick up chicks.
Video at the link.
Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Some of these videos have been on Neatorama already, but some haven't. Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has compiled twelve of the worst and funniest parking accidents that can be found on YouTube. In the above video, a driver tries to pass over the undercarriage access space at an oil change business -- but misses.