It looks just like a tiny zen rock garden! This is the work of Japanese artist and designer Manami Sasaki, who has lately been sculpting slices of toast into elaborate works of art. In this case, the sand substitute is sour cream carefully raked with a fork.

There has been a mill on the site of the Sturminster Newton Mill in Dorset, UK since 1016. The current structure dates back to the 18th Century. It continued to operate until 1970, when it was turned into a museum.

Since then, the old equipment operated sporadically for the amusement of tourists. During the current pandemic, that has turned into a very good thing indeed. The mill has now re-opened to mill flour for local stores. The BBC talked to its operator, Pete Loosmore:

Mr Loosmore said the mill usually gets through a tonne of grain during the tourist season but this increased when local shops started reporting shortages of flour.

"This year we have got through the whole of that tonne in two to three weeks and we're still chasing more and more grain," he said.

"It's been nice to bring the place truly back to life and back into something like it used to be when it was working six days a week."

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Marilyn Peddle

Gourd crafts can be fun, but the shapes are often impractical for daily usage. With The Gourd Project, Jun Aizaki of the CRÈME design house is trying to change that. To reduce waste from packaging, he's making completely biodegradable cups, jars, and vases from gourds.

From a farm in Pennsylvania, Aizaki is able to grow complete vessels in six weeks. He grows the gourds inside molds with optimal shapes.

Molding gourds is not new. What is new about Aizaki's project is his objective of making this process available for mass production. He writes:

We plan to initially invest money towards R+D, so we can grow the gourds in both indoor farming facilities and outdoor farms, allowing us to scale up the quantity and lower the price per gourd. The goal is to keep the high quality and quantity, so that The Gourd can be a viable challenger to the plastic waste industry.

-via Colossal

Redditor /u/kethtoper is a stained glass artist with a geeky soul. Lately, he's be recreating icons of the Star Wars universe as beautiful glass and wood lamps, such as this AT-ST.

February 14, 2019 was a beautiful day onboard the USS Momsen, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. As she sailed in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Ensign Kathryn Hunter photographed the 5-inch/54 caliber Mark 45 gun framed by a rainbow.

-via Kurt Schlichter | Photo: US Navy

Jigsaw puzzles have faced a huge resurgence in popularity lately. If you want one to spike your anxiety levels (because we all need that right now), then try The Accident by Yelldesign. It looks like glass, but is actually a sheet of acrylic carefully cut to look like a shattered window pane.

-via Colossal

Inside the Puratos bakery in St. Vith, Belgium, is a carefully curated library of sourdough starters. Its librarian, Karl De Smedt, watches over now 84 distinct sourdough starters. He and his staff carefully tend to the living collection by refreshing the doughs every two months according to their original recipes. Some of those doughs are over a hundred years old.

You can take a virtual tour of the library here.

-via Atlas Obscura

Kirsty Russell and her family had planned to fly on vacation from Sydney, Australia to Munich, Germany. Alas, the pandemic put a halt to their plans. So her husband suggested that they simulate the 15-hour flight to Europe.

Russell's Twitter thread illustrated their long journey, recreated in detail. There was even an airport security check.

This is the sort of content I find fascinating. What's it like to live and work on board a ship? For a cruise ship, the answer is often "pretty good." For example, you'll occasionally need a haircut. This is the barbershop for crew members only on a Carnival-owned vessel.

Core 77 has a roundup of photos showing different crew-only areas of cruise ships, including mess halls, exercise facilities, and laundry rooms. Some of the crews have really nice amenities, including private pubs, weightlifting equipment, and pools that only they can access.

Photo: Cruise Hive

Our hero, Florida Man, knew that the police were coming for him with a probation violation arrest warrant. He cleverly deduced that the officers would avoid infection with the coronavirus and so placed a sign on the door of his home, warning them that he was infected. This was a ruse.

It failed. WEAR TV reports:

Deputies say they properly researched to ensure Price was lying about his condition. They showed up with proper PPE just in case.

Price was booked into the jail and showed no indication of having the coronavirus.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Putnam County Sheriff's Office

Jones Bar-B-Q is the heart of Kansas City-style barbecue. The Jones sisters, how have operated it for more than thirty years, have built their business around take-out. So they've made a fairly smooth transition into the contactless delivery that is prized during our pandemic era. Atlas Obscura reports that they recently installed a vending machine:

“We got a pop vending machine, and I looked at it and thought maybe we could put food in,” Jones says. “The vendor couldn’t believe it when I first asked about putting barbecue in a vending machine.”

The machine is stocked daily with complete meals:

The burnt ends at Jones Bar-B-Q are one of the seven items available from the vending machine. Alongside chicken wings, turkey, and rib tips, they’re stocked between 5 and 10 a.m. as they come off a smoker sitting next to a big pile of hickory wood. Jones labels each clamshell package with a hand-written description on masking tape. The sandwiches come with a small cup of sauce and sweet barbecue beans, potato salad, or coleslaw. Stacked high inside a soft white bun, the smoky, charred burnt ends are tender, moist, and taste like meat candy.

It makes me hungry just to read that description!

Swedish artist Max Björverud turned the ordinary toilet paper roller into a sophisticated instrument at an installation at the SNASK creative agency in Stockholm. Hack A Day explains how it works:

Inspired by the way bicycle computers determine your speed, [Max] took a set of toilet paper holders, extended each roll holding part with a 3D-printed attachment housing a magnet, and installed a Hall-effect sensor to determine the rolling activity. The rolls’ sensor data is then collected with an Arduino Mega and passed on to a Raspberry Pi Zero running Pure Data, creating the actual sounds. The sensor setup is briefly shown in another video.

Natalie Morrell brings to my attention photos of Catholic shrines crafted by French soldiers during World War I. These contain images of the saints for veneration during traumatic and terrifying times. Many remain, floating around antiques dealers. They're shaped from dispensed brass casings from rifles or field artillery shells. Many of these sculptures display remarkably professional skill and precision, as detailed in Nicholas J. Saunder's book Trench Art, A Brief History and Guide, 1914-1939.

-via Aelfred the Great

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a quiet place now. The engineers and scientists who normally work there are telecommuting a very, very long distance.

All the way to Mars.

The Curiosity Rover team has adapted to control the robot from home. NASA reports that it took a lot of ingenuity during early March:

The team began to anticipate the need to go fully remote a couple weeks before, leading them to rethink how they would operate. Headsets, monitors and other equipment were distributed (picked up curbside, with all employees following proper social-distancing measures).

Not everything they're used to working with at JPL could be sent home, however: Planners rely on 3D images from Mars and usually study them through special goggles that rapidly shift between left- and right-eye views to better reveal the contours of the landscape. That helps them figure out where to drive Curiosity and how far they can extend its robotic arm.

But those goggles require the advanced graphics cards in high-performance computers at JPL (they're actually gaming computers repurposed for driving on Mars). In order for rover operators to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, they've switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. Although not as immersive or comfortable as the goggles, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements.

-via Marilyn Terrell | Image: NASA

At $203 per pound, these dumbbells are the most luxuriously expensive fitness gear that you can ask for. They're ideal for people with more money than sense and upper body strength, as they weigh only 6.7 pounds each. They are engraved and wrapped in the Louis Vuitton monogram, so you know that they're the right look for any season at the gym. Please rack them when you're done with your sets.

These dumbbells are one of four sets of ridiculously overpriced fashionable fitness gear rounded up by Rain Noe, the wittily scathing critic of bad design at Core 77.