The Mercator projection is useful if you want to place a global map on a cylinder. But it gets very limited the further one looks away from the Equator, as the relative sizes of areas get distorted.
That's why Twitter user @neilrkaye created this animated .gif. It shows the nations closer to the poles shrinking to their true sizes relative to the equatorial nations.
-via Nag on the Lake
Redditor 7861279527412aN writes that his grandfather carved this bowl in 1994. It's made from a single piece of wood and has only one side. It is thus an elaborately woven Möbius strip. The work is very impressive. But, as another redditor points out, it's very limited as cereal bowl.
The brilliant French street artist OakOak noticed that the ridges on a manhole cover looked like the maze borders from Pac-Man and so went to work with his paintbrushes.
I don't think that I've looked at OakOak's Instagram feed in three years. It's filled with clever treasures. He's got a great talent for adding small changes to pre-existing forms to warp reality.
-via Geekologie
Pinelopi Papadimitraki calls her invention "Detext." The cloud-shaped cushion makes it physically difficult to look down at your phone to fall into a fountain. She writes at Core77:
Detext is a wearable device that attempts to situate one's focus to their immediate surroundings and their own body by disrupting the problematic habit of using handheld devices while on the move.
So it makes you look up at the world around you. And it's stylish, too.
Twitter user @cszabla recently visited Singapore and saw this transportation marvel. The city state is apparently so bicycle-friendly that, at certain times, you can ride straight through a shopping mall.
-via Super Punch
Trap chess is a variant upon the ancient game. Randomly selected squares open down, eliminating any pieces unfortunate enough to be on top.
Hackaday explains that neighbors Bob and Yann invented this practical model. At the end of a turn, each player taps on the button which will trigger a trapdoor:
The build relies on a PIC16F818, an 8-bit microcontroller from Microchip. This helps interface between the timer and servos and generally runs the whole show. The board is built into a table, and we’re impressed by the fit and finish of the final product. From a distance, it’s difficult to notice anything is awry, and it would make a great prank when playing with an unsuspecting mark. Just make sure there’s no money on the table first.
Amidst the ruins of shattered dreams and relationships scattered through a post-industrial wasteland known as Springfield, one family occasionally tolerates itself. Director Lenivko Kvadratjić presents the introductory sequence of The Simpsons as a sorrowful Russian art film. You will regret everything.
-via Nag on the Lake
Car rental is popular in Japan and the prices are cheap. They're so cheap that many people are renting the cars just to have space available to do other things privately, such as eating lunch, charging their phones, napping, or to practicing rap. The Asahi Shimbun reports:
"I rented a car to eat a boxed meal that I bought at a convenience store because I couldn't find anywhere else to have lunch,"said a 31-year-old male company employee who lives in Saitama Prefecture, close to Tokyo.
“Usually the only place I can take a nap while visiting my clients is a cybercafe in front of the station, but renting a car to sleep in is just a few hundred yen (several dollars), almost the same as staying in the cybercafe.” [...]
People also rented vehicles to watch TV in, get dressed up for Halloween, practice singing, rapping and English conversation, and even do facial stretches said to reduce the size of their face, NTT found.
“Cars can be used for private space,” said the NTT Docomo official in charge of the study. “People used our vehicles in more ways than we expected.”
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Steve Nagata
Jimmy Swift is an American artist. He's based in Los Angeles, but he's traveled to over 90 countries and left works of art in place along the way. In Goa, India, he painted this rock to look like a rearing great white shark surfacing to strike. You can see more photos here and here.
-via Lustik
Manuel Di Rita is a street artist who goes by the name Peeta. For a recent street art festival in Mannheim, Germany, Peeta pained the flat outside walls of a house to make it look like the structure of reality is warping. His anamorphic shapes appear to twist and turn through the house, which must make life inside challenging. You can see more photos of it at Street Art News.
On the left is Perseus and Andromeda, a 1602 painting by Giuseppe Cesari now kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. On the right is a nearly photo-perfect copy rendered by Sarah Scullin, a professor of the classics at Knox College in Illinois. She made it with her young son's toys.
To my embarrassment, I can't figure out who the pink action figure is.
After shaming me in the comments, have a look at Scullin's other recreations of classical paintings, including works by Goya, Corot, Waterhouse, Draper, and Botticelli.
-via Nag on the Lake
Instagram member @snowrachell loves both superheroes and Disney Princesses. And, since Marvel is now a Disney property, it only makes sense that Tony Stark should be classified as a Disney Princess. In this photo taken at Denver Pop Culture Con 2019, she updates Iron Man's armor for a new generation.
-via Cosplay in America | Photo: @ehindscooks
Comedian and songwriter Heywood Banks once overheard the middle of a conversation. All he heard was the words "they had to taser her again." This led him to wildly speculate about the rest of the story and desperately wish that he had heard it.
It was a moment that truly belonged on /r/writingprompts. And so in this song, Banks asks himself under what circumstances it would be necessary to taser someone twice. He performed the song on The Bob & Tom Show out of WFBQ radio in Indianapolis.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
Civil War Tails is a museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that commemorates the famous American Civil War campaign fought there in 1863. Twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth Brown created and operate this extraordinary educational opportunity. At the museum, visitors can find detailed, historically accurate scale models of the battles that composed the Gettysburg Campaign using over 8,000 individually sculpted models of cats.
Yes, cats. This one, for example, shows the defense of the hill Little Round Top by the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry against an attack by the 15th and 47th Alabama Infantry regiments.
The Brown sisters are gradually building up their collection of dioramas, taking their time to make sure that every detail is correct, so that one cat equals one soldier on correct topography. You can learn more about their museum on their website.
-via Nag on the Lake
Minnesotastan of the famous blog TYWKIWDBI found this image at /r/specializedtools, which is my new favorite subreddit. I could waste whole hours there.
But, instead, I'm going to tell you about these simple but amazing devices. They're called eye caps. Morticians use them to make sure that the eyes of dead bodies stay closed, which would make open casket funerals awkward. In her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach explains:
The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but once closed, will not easily open back up.
You can buy them for your professional or recreational use (I'm not judging) here for about 17 cents a pair.
