Etsy seller yumeleona23 made this dandy cross stitch featuring Gambit from the X-Men. Since Gambit uses playing cards as weapons, it seemed best to surround him with a frame of them.

Link via Geek Crafts

Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff created interactive world maps which denote the locations from which scientific papers were authored. Green dots represent higher quality research and red dots signify lower quality research. There are three maps, one each for physics, chemistry, and psychology:

The idea is simple enough - scientific papers cite other scientific papers and it is usually held that the more a paper is cited the more important it is. So taking the data from the Web-of-Science database the researchers simply counted how many papers originated from each city and plotted a circle with a radius proportional to the number of papers on Google Maps.

They then looked at the number of papers that you would expect to be in the top 10% most cited papers from each city, i.e. 10% of the papers compared to the number that were actually in the top 10%. The difference indicates how successful the city is in producing important papers and not just their volume. They plotted the circles in red for lower performing cities and green for higher performing cities.

Pictured above is a selection from the physics map.

Link via Slashdot

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After they're done getting a space shuttle into the upper atmosphere, the solid rocket boosters drop off and fall into the ocean. They're recovered by the NASA vessels Liberty Star and Freedom Star and refurbished for additional use. This video shows how it's done. It's rather long, so let me point out some highlights:

0:28 -- Dolphins!
1:41 -- Liberty Star arrives at the location of a rocket.
2:30 -- Divers attach towing rig to the rocket.
3:20 -- Liberty Star begins towing the rocket.
5:00 -- Freedom Star gets underway.
5:45 -- Freedom Star crew watches shuttle liftoff.
6:25 -- Freedom Star arrives at the location of the other rocket.
7:40 -- Rocket flops over in the water.
8:05 -- Freedom Star enters the harbor.

via Geekosystem

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Elk cows like to graze on the lawns of Estes Park, Colorado. Bulls follow them into town for some lovin'. The scenes in this video from Human Planet are surreal, particularly the golf courses crowded with both humans and elk. Also, very stupid tourists.

via Weer'd World

Anthony Robles of Arizona State University was born with only one leg, but that didn't stop him from becoming the national champion in his weight class last night:

Born with one leg, Robles took the 125-pound title Saturday night with a 7-1 win over defending champion Matt McDonough of Iowa. Robles' three-day performance here earned him the Outstanding Wrestler award.[...]

He took control in the first period, jumping out to a 7-0 lead with a two-point takedown and two turns that exposed McDonough's shoulders to the mat for five more points. Robles uses his gripping power on those turns.

"My tilting is due because I have such a strong grip, and that's because of my crutches," he said.

Link via Deadspin | Photo: AP

Div is a surly, drunken DivX player from the webcomic Penny Arcade. You can view an archive of strips featuring him here. [H]olyGeekboy built a marvelous casemod out of a PVC pipe and Wild Turkey (and apparently some computer parts, too, but it's the whiskey that makes the machine run).

Link | Photo: Flickr user Brian Haberer

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This Japanese-language video appears to show a woman who can stamp individual sheets in a book very, very quickly. In fact, she can stamp a hundred sheets in 17 seconds.

via WTF Japan, Seriously!?

The Pinewood Derby is a traditional crafting event among Cub Scouts in the United States. Boys are given a block of wood and some plastic wheels. Their job is to carve and paint the block into a car that, when released at the top of a long ramp, will beat the other similarly made cars to the finish line. When I was a Cub Scout, my Dad showed me how to add weights to the body. Doing so was completely within the rules. Adding CO₂ canisters to the car, however, probably isn't. It's actually a fairly sophisticated modification because the tubes have to open at the right time. A video at the link shows how it's done.

Link via Hack A Day via MArooned | Photo: The Hell Ya Better

A man in Luleå, Sweden, was found to have a guitar that had been converted into a double-barreled shotgun:

Aside from the six more conventional weapons found in the apartment and a quantity of ammunition, police discovered that a wall-mounted guitar was not quite as it first appeared.

The neck of the guitar has been hollowed out and equipped with two shotgun barrels, while the body of the string instrument contained the beginnings of trigger mechanism.

http://www.thelocal.se/32678/20110318/ via reddit | Photos: The Local

The Zoopreme Court is a collection of animal caricatures of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Dan Schofield and Alice DuBois, the site's creators, select animals with puns based on the names of each justice. Pictured above is Ruth Bearder Ginsbearg (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Schofield and DuBois plan to compose caricatures of all 112 justices as well as landmark decisions.

Link via The Agitator

It's May, 2011 in sunny Santa Clarita, California. A gentle breeze is rolling in from the sea, adding a nice cool to the air on your face. It'd be a wonderful day to go down to the beach, or a hike in the mountains. You'd might consider doing either, but you're surrounded by a horde of the undead while inside the NeatoShop warehouse.

The fall of civilization came surprisingly quickly, as most people simply refused to divert their attention from petty concerns while the infection spread. You, too, were distracted by silly things, like the newest Rebecca Black video and Charlie Sheen's astonishing career comeback.

Now it's too late to make serious preparations. You'll just have to improvise from materials in your current location -- the warehouse serving the NeatoShop retailing empire.

What will you do? You came without so much as a rock in your pocket and now must survive using only the contents of the warehouse.

This is a contest. Look through the contents of the 'Shop and devise materials that you'll need to survive -- improvised weapons, water filters, medical equipment, cook stoves -- anything that you'll need to see through the end of this dark chapter in human history.

Leave the description your improvised survival tool in the comments. The most inventive/funniest/silliest will win your choice of any item under $25 from the NeatoShop, and several runners-up will win a t-shirt of their choice!

When you enter the description of your survival implement(s), be sure to also provide the name of the item that you want if you win. Please make sure that you provide a selection or your entry will not be considered.

(Original image credit: Flickr user theogeo)

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Apparently there's an iPhone app that will make a kitchen island rise from the middle of your floor. Or something like that. Tim Thaler built this remarkable accessory:

A hydraulic scissor lift is at bolted to the cement, and then a small frame is built on top of the scissor lift table. On top of that is a subfloor, flooring, and then the island. The cabinet doors are on the other side, and have safety push button switches that kill the electricity from the Smart Home Insteon switches, and prevent it from moving when the doors are not fully closed.

via Make

One of the three ducks in this picture was added by Etsy seller dpad. Can you tell which one? He made it with quarter inch tiles from old book covers.

Link via DVICE

Kelly Gneiting, a champion sumo wrestler from Arizona, hopes to complete an upcoming marathon in under nine hours. If successful, he'll be the heaviest marathon competitor ever according to Guinness World Records:

"I have high self-esteem and believe I can do anything," he told the Daily Telegraph. "I'm big, but I feel like I have a talent for this." Mr Gneiting, who is originally from Idaho, is 6ft tall and has a 5ft waist. He is a three-time American sumo champion and has represented the US at the world championships.

He said that his size made running uncomfortable. "It's hard on my feet, my thighs and under my armpits," he said. He plans to wear slick black Lycra leggings to prevent friction.

The Telegraph (UK) notes that Gneiting weighs 29 stone, which converts to about 184 kilograms. Oh, those Europeans and their odd measurement systems!

Link | Photo: Getty

Dan Mirvish of The Huffington Post noticed a positive correlation between an increase in the stock price of Warren Buffett's company and actress Anne Hathaway doing something newsworthy. Here's a sampling of his findings:

Oct. 3, 2008 - Rachel Getting Married opens: BRK.A up .44%
Jan. 5, 2009 - Bride Wars opens: BRK.A up 2.61%
Feb. 8, 2010 - Valentine's Day opens: BRK.A up 1.01%
March 5, 2010 - Alice in Wonderland opens: BRK.A up .74%
Nov. 24, 2010 - Love and Other Drugs opens: BRK.A up 1.62%
Nov. 29, 2010 - Anne announced as co-host of the Oscars: BRK.A up .25%

Now all of that is interesting, but correlation does not equate causality. However, as John Bates, a computer scientist who has worked in the financial sector notes, the correlation could become causality soon enough:

Now, generally the correlations are between some statistical indicator and a stock or industry. "Let's say a new instrument comes to an exchange, you might suddenly notice that that an instrument moves in conjunction with the insurance sector," Bates posited. But it's thought that some hedge funds are testing strategies out to mine news and social media datasets for other types of correlations.

Does it happen a lot? Bates doesn't think so, but it's not out of the question. And, in any case, we're going to see a lot of strange trading strategies as hedge fund managers' computing resources grow ever more powerful and they are actually able to "correlate everything against everything." Oh, it's raining in Kazakhstan? Buy pork bellies in Brazil! And sell wheat in Kansas! Dump Apple stock! Why? Because the computer says that the 193 out of the last 240 times it rained in Kazakhstan, pork bellies in Brazil went up, and wheat prices and Apple shares went down.

Mirvish Link and Bates Link via Kottke | Photo by Flickr user Anthony Citrano used under Creative Commons license

For fun: in the comments, define "The Santoso Effect".