The Hexa Pot is a collapsible cooking pot made from biodegradable paper.The idea is that you don't need to lug around an metal pot when you go camping. Just take one of these. If you need to boil water to make it potable, such as during a natural disaster, whip this out of your bug-out bag and start heating up the water. You can bring the pot to a full boil, even though it's made out of paper.
Ah, Alien vs. Predator! Perhaps the greatest of all date movies. deviantART member Joker-laugh has captured the essence of that film with this custom chess set.
The late Don Hong-Oa was born in China and lived in Vietnam and the United States. He practiced a particular form of photography that realistically mimicked traditional Chinese ink drawings. It's like the inverse of photorealisic painting.
I'm not a fan of The Lord of the Rings, but I have wondered how such a monumentally influential author was overlooked for a Nobel Prize in literature. C.S. Lewis nominated J.R.R. Tolkien in 1961. The governing committee considered him, but ultimately awarded the prize to the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric. Why? Recently declassified documents explain the committee's reasoning:
Swedish reporter Andreas Ekström delved into 1961's previously classified documents on their release this week, to find the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, EM Forster and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andri?. [...]
The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his "advanced age" – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet's years were "a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state". Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author "a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health".
Durrell, meanwhile, "gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications", while Italian novelist Alberto Moravia "suffers from … a general monotony".
Greene, who never won the Nobel, was 1961's runner-up, with Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, coming in third.
Oddity Central reports that Taiwan's garbage trucks commonly play music in order to alert people of their arrival in a neighborhood. Among the more popular tunes is Beethoven's "Für Elise." They often switch to thematic songs during Christmas and the Chinese New Year. Which songs do you think would be ideal for garbage trucks?
You may remember Instructables user mezcraft from her amazing Harry Potter-themed gingerbread house. Believe it or not, she's actually topped that achievement. Mezcraft's cuckoo clock isn't just gingerbread on the outside. The gears are gingerbread, too! Mind you, it doesn't actually function as a clock. But gingerbread engineering has advanced so rapidly in the past few years that surely such a clock will be available in the near future.
For a year and a half, the 401st Air Expeditionary Group of the United States Army Air Force wreaked havoc on Nazi Germany. You may know that these brave men often decorated the noses of their bombers with cartoonish or saucy images. But they also personalized their jackets with similar works of art, often marking down individual bombing runs. You can find a gallery of pictures of these jackets at the link. Content warning: some NSFW images.
It takes two hours on a sunny day, but this solar heater built by engineering students at Humboldt State University in California works. It's made from waste materials, specifically can lids. These are held together by vines from Himalaya blackberry plants, which are an invasive species in their area. You can find in-process photos and descriptions at the link.
The word below the swoosh is "run". Annie Chiu designed this and other unconventional street advertisements to encourage you to purchase Nike running gear.
Chris Weisbart's hologram is actually light projected from the rear onto a thin sheet of water vapor. Although Weisbart does effects like this professionally, this unit is built from old scrap parts, including a children's humidifier and drinking straws.
We've all been in a situation when a bathroom experience would only be enhanced if there were realistic representations of supervillains trying to break through the wall and kill us. Probably daily. So rileyreplicas, a forum user at The PF, made one for a friend's husband. The site is currently down, so I can make no guarantee about what you'll find at the link. But you can also visit Geekologie to see more pictures. That's a good idea, because this one photo doesn't do justice to the extensive modifications to the entire bathroom.
The Spanish art collective Estres would like to remind you that your cuddly neighborhood chiropterans need a place to live, too. So they turned a birdhouse upside down!
This classy, if a tad expensive ($4,500!) sink doesn't come with fish, but it does offer a habitat for them. There's a light in the back as well as access ports on the top. The producer recommends that you get a professional plumber to install it.
Traveling all the way from Wayne Manor to the Gotham City Police Department headquarters takes the wind out of a crimefighter. Sit down and rest a bit before taking on the next case. Instructables user Orvis has just what an aging Dark Knight needs.
A law student at Yeshiva University in New York City who goes by the pseudonym "David" weighed his options carefully. If he timed his use of university and gym facilities just right, could he go through a semester without actually living anywhere? That is, could he be effectively homeless without misery? David decided to try it. The Observer, a student newspaper at Yeshiva, interviewed him about the experience:
The way that it's working out is I have a gym membership, NY Health and Racquet club, and there's one right around the corner from Cardozo and that's my home base. The organization is probably the hard part about this. So I have four lockers and NY Health and Racquet club has showers and I shave there. It has shampoo and soap and all that stuff. [...]
So I have one locker for running clothes and laundry, one for dress shirts, one for dress pants and one for miscellaneous things. And also each locker has a spot for shoes at the top so that's really good.
I had to really reduce the amount of stuff that I had. I had to get rid of everything that's nonessential. I only have, like, five dress shirts, five dress pants, some running clothes that are necessary and then obviously sweatshirts and stuff. Other than clothes I don't really have a lot of stuff, just stuff for shaving and brushing my teeth and books. I have a school locker too, so that helps.
I also have access to my school. Its open until midnight and then opens again at 8 a.m. so I nap there a lot. There's this one room in the library that has couches and I nap there during the day when I have breaks in between classes. At night I try and stay in there as late as possible so I can get the maximum amount of warmth. So I'll leave there at midnight and go find a spot and then NY Health and Racquet club opens at six. So I really only have six hours outside, so its not unbearable.
http://www.yuobserver.com/features/homeless-by-choice-1.2736857?pagereq=1#.TwY9etRSScR -via Althouse | Photo of Yeshiva University by Flickr user gezellig-girl.com
