St. Patrick's Day is on Tuesday and Beth Jackson Klosterboer of Hungry Happenings is ready! She made this shamrock-shaped bread bowl with canned French bread dough. She shaped the sides over a dough layer bottom, then cut away the excess dough. After baking it, Beth filled the interior with white chicken chili.
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Archery tag is a sport similar to paintball. They key difference is that players shoot each other with foam-tipped arrows fired from bows instead of paint beads from a compressed air gun. A flyboard is a cross between a jet ski and a jet pack. Users fly over the water, held aloft by jets of water.
Together, they form the elements of a great combination sport: flyboard archery. John Jackson, an expert in archery tag, and Austin, a watersports professional, joined forces to demonstrate how it works. It looks like an awesome game to play!
-via Core 77
(Photo: unknown)
Ride like the wind. You are a master horseman traversing the plains on a majestic steed. People will look at you with respect and honor if you style your hair like this.
-via Rocket News 24
(Photos: Phoenix Herpetological Society)
In 2013, Mr. Stubbs was an 11-year old, 7-foot long alligator living at the Phoenix Herpetological Society in Arizona. He had lost his tail when he was a baby, so it was very difficult for him to swim. His swimming stroke resembled a slow dog paddle, rather than the quick, graceful movements of a healthy alligator.
Mr. Stubbs's handlers wanted to give him the freedom and ease of movement that a normal alligator has. So they built a prosthetic tail and attached it to his body.
That's not a decorative mound of rubber. It's a functional tail thoughtfully engineered to move in a manner similar to a living alligator tail. A 2013 article in USA Today (warning: auto-start video) describes it:
Using cameras and a computer, Justin Georgi, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz., studied Mr. Stubbs for weeks. Georgi studies alligator and reptile locomotion. At times he would attach reflective dots to the gator, whose jaws were secured with electrical tape before each session. The dots would form a 3-D computer model, allowing Georgi to see exactly how Mr. Stubbs got around.
Georgi used the research to devise the tail's specifications. It had to be buoyant, and weigh just seven to nine pounds. It also had to be flexible, so when Mr. Stubbs wiggled his rear stump, the tail would swing to propel him forward.
-via The Soul Is Bone
The Diving Bell Spider (Argyroneta aquatica) is the only spider species that lives its entire life underwater.
It accomplishes this amazing feet by maintaining subsurface air bubbles. The spider's body is covered with tiny hairs. Air bubbles adhere to that textured surface. The spider then weaves protective cases for these air bubbles with its silk. It attaches these air tanks to underwater plants and rocks and then climbs inside.
In addition to maintaining the air inside the bubble, the spider silk cover functions like a gill, pulling breathable air out of the water. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains:
Research has shown that the inflated web serves as a sort of gill, extracting dissolved oxygen from the water when oxygen concentrations inside the web become sufficiently low to draw oxygen in from the water. Slowly, however, the inflated web collapses, and the spider must travel to the water’s surface for bubble renewal, which it does about once each day.
-via TYWKIWDBI
(Math Puns Are the First Sine of Madness t-shirt on sale at the NeatoShop)
It was my understanding that there would be no math. Apparently, so did a groom in Rasoolabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. He and his bride were partners in an arranged marriage.
The bride suspected that the groom's family had lied to her family about his education. So at the wedding, she presented him with a simple math test that consisted of only one question. The Canadian Press describes it:
How much is 15 plus six?
His reply: 17.
She left immediately. Now they're trying to get the wedding gifts returned:
The groom's family tried persuading the bride to return, but she refused. She said the groom had misled them about his education.
"The groom's family kept us in the dark about his poor education," said Mohar Singh, the bride's father. "Even a first grader can answer this."
Local police mediated between the families and both sides returned all the gifts and jewelry that had been exchanged before the wedding, Kumar said.
-via Joe Carter
This video shows a pipe covered with ice. The heat in the pipe is melting the interior of the ice sheath. As the water flows down, it creates otherworldly images of shapes and movement.
-via Twisted Sifter
Michael Beitz warps reality with his surreal sculptures, such as a liquefying picnic table and a wall that literally has an ear. One of his recent works is Not Now, an enormous conference table that loops in the center. That may be occasionally inconvenient in an office environment. But there are some meetings in which it could be handy.
(Photo: Fanny Schertzer)
So you want to be a supervillain. Good for you! It's important to have ambition. But you'll need more, such as a great name, a character hook, a costume, and some henchmen. Once you have those taken care of, you'll need to choose a lair.
A mere storage rental facility won't do, nor your studio apartment. You need a place that impresses people as the domicile of a serious, dedicated supervillain. When on Earth has 15 sites you should consider. Pictured above is one of them: Ball's Pyramid. It's the tallest volcanic stack in the world, which makes climbing it difficult. The island is located a few hundred miles off the coast of Australia, so there's no nearby shopping. Still, when you need quiet time to think away from the hustle and bustle of your day job in retail, Ball's Pyramid will be ideal.
-via The Presurfer
Faig Ahmed, an artist from Azerbaijan, creates surreal carpets that appear to bend and distort reality. Some pop out in 3D dimensions. Others seem to be physical manifestations of digital image glitches. In an interview with Art Radar Journal, Ahmed explains how he designs and weaves them:
I work with a group. Usually there are twenty to 25 people involved in the process. This group experience gives my work vitality and I’m the spark that ignites it.
When I decide to begin a piece, I first talk to the carpet makers and then edit and correct their work alongside my own sketch. Next, my artwork is transferred onto engineering paper. After these preparations, the weaving process begins. As a rule, the process itself is not that easy, and I have to visit the workshop often and make corrections all along the way.
Each work needs a different type of research. For a carpet from the “Fluid Forms” show, for example, I was pouring paint onto the walls to see how different colours blend into each other and flow. For the Geometric series of carpets, I was cutting different shapes from paper to place over the surfaces to see what kinds of shades they create.
Two weeks ago, Lisa highlighted the optical illusion body art of Natalie Fletcher. Her mindbending illusions are cool, but she's done even more amazing stuff with body painting. I'm especially impressed with a series called Lost in the Landscape. Fletcher painted human bodies so that they almost perfectly blend into the background of natural wonders. Her models recede into nature as their skin turns into the images behind them.
Content warning: artistic nudity.
-via Fubiz
Etsy seller Dave Stencil makes fine wood cutting boards with inlay images of television, film, and music stars making cooking-themed puns. His online shop is appropriately called Cutting Boredom. His themes include The Beatles, Harry Potter, 300, and The Big Lebowski.
You can almost see the thought processes inside the squirrel's mind. The bird feeder has a built-in dome to protect it from squirrels climbing the shaft. The solution is to find a position high enough but also close enough to make a death-from-above leap onto the bird feeder.
I saw Episodes I, II, and III when they came out. But I barely have any memory of them. I don't think that I could even describe the general plot. This is as a result of intense therapy over several years. It would gone a lot faster if I had access to Spock's mind meld abilities. Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy did in the episode "Spectre of the Gun." It saved their sanity and their lives, as demonstrated in this mashup video by Drew Krotz.
-via Geek Tyrant
Art director Madani Bendjellal took posters for famous movies and removed their titles and pictures of their main characters. You can view more at Fubiz. How many can you identify? Which ones were instantly recognizable and which ones took you some time to think about?
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