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When this koala plays air guitar, he can really get an audience excited. Next up: a kangaroo on drums.

via The Presurfer

Steve Heller, a professor of design at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City, found an extremely rare book from Nazi Germany. It's an official rule and regulations book for the Nazi Party and contains extensive descriptions of graphic design standards:

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

Link via Kottke

Hard Corps Weaponry is a studio that specializes in the custom painting of guns, including this nifty FNP9 in a John Deere theme. Other guns in the gallery include a Hello Kitty shotgun, a Miami Hurricanes Glock 23, and many exotic camouflage schemes.

http://www.hardcorpsweaponry.com/6.html via Say Uncle

Did you know that:

Tree octopuses have eyesight comparable to humans. Besides allowing them to see their prey and environment, it helps them in inter-octopus relations. Although they are not social animals like us, they display to one-another their emotions through their ability to change the color of their skin: red indicates anger, white fear, while they normally maintain a mottled brown tone to blend in with the background.

I read it on the Internet, so it must be true!

Really, it's important to be a skeptical consumer of information, especially given the fluidity of the Internet. Kids need to learn that not everything that they read on the Internet -- or through other media -- is true. And so this website was used as part of an experiment that examined the critical thinking skills of seventh graders:

Pearson's release explained that the Department of Education funded the study and that it was administered by Dr. Donald Leu, a former teacher and "national authority on integrating technology into instruction." Leu's study highlighted fallacious reports on the fate of the "tree octopus" -- an allegedly endangered species roaming the treetops of the Pacific Northwest -- as a key illustration of this baleful trend.

Researchers on Leu's team asked a group of students to hunt down information on the critter, which of course does not exist. But the same researchers pulled a bit of trickery on the students -- they directed them to a website dedicated to saving the mythical tree octopus from extinction. And presto: the kids taking part in the study fell for the hoax and even continued to believe in the tree octopus after the study's leaders explained that there was no such thing.

Site Link and News Story via ill-l listserv

The ad agency DraftFCB in New Zealand made this clever ad in imitation of the falling scene in the opening credits of Mad Men.

Link via Super Punch | Agency Website

Sage Werbock is a performing strongman who specializes in hauling enormous weights with his nipples. No, seriously, that's what his website indicates, although I didn't explore that section of it too far. You can do that if you want, but I'm going to focus on his blacksmithing work, and specifically, this AT-AT model that he welded together from scrap metal and old computer parts:

The main body is composed of power supply boxes from old computers, the head from floppy drive housings, legs and feet from various scrap metal. The entire piece has been welded together using the MIG welding process. Two coats of cold galvanizing primer are applied followed by a coat of varied grays and finished with two coats of protective gloss. The whole sculpture was randomly "attacked" with the welding arc to simulate battle scars.

Link via Technabob | Artist's Website

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal doesn't mince words in his cartoon rants, and this set on stupid job interview questions is no exception.

To this question, I once answered "My inability to answer questions like that", and I then challenged the value of the question. I was subsequently offered the job.

What's the stupidest job interview question you've ever been asked?

Link

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Boris, a friend of YouTube user mattinbrooklyn made a helmet that will shave a person's head in twenty seconds. Activating it spreads shaving cream over the head. Then four electric razors inside pass back and forth, giving the user, as you can see at the end of the video, a clean shave.

via Gizmodo

UPDATE 2/16/11: The video is a hoax! Or more specifically, a viral marketing stunt.

Graphic designer Wayne Dorrington depicted the entire plot to Episode IV of Star Wars using only nonverbal symbols. You can view the entire piece at the link. The trench run scene is almost as exciting as it was in the movie.

Link via blastr | Dorrington's Website

Update 6/8/11 by Alex - Chris Cassidy of JESS3 blog interviewed Wayne here: Link (Thanks Chris!)

Researchers conducted a study in which they asked college undergraduate students to leer at members of the opposite sex. They found that when women were ogled by strange men, their performance on math tests were worse compared to those who were not ogled by strange men. But when men were leered at by strange women, their performances were unaffected. Lead author Sarah J. Gervais explained:

Asked to describe the “objectifying gaze,” Ms. Gervais laughs. “In the laboratory, as you might imagine, it’s relatively difficult to get people to gaze at other people,” she says. “So what we did in this study is we trained confederates — those are people that are sort of in on this study — we trained them to visually scan women’s bodies and then to stare at their chests when they were interviewing them, and … we did this also to men.”

The men appeared to be unfazed when their female interviewers stared at the men’s chests before and after asking the first, third, and fifth interview questions, Ms. Gervais says.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo (unrelated, but returned when I searched for "creepy stare") via Flickr user Michael Cordedda used under Creative Commons license

Our friends at The Art of Manliness rounded up 22 creative uses for empty Altoids tins, such as the above portable grill made by Instructables user =SMART=. The steel rods come from a coat hanger.

Other mods at the link include a router plane, a dart gun, and a s'mores maker.

Link | Previously: Wonderful Altoids Hacks

In 1976, the late Farrah Fawcett posed for photographer Bruce McBoom, who captured the image to the left. This picture was turned into a mass produced poster, which became an icon of American culture during the 1970s. The red swimsuit that she wore for that photo shoot has been donated to the Smithsonian Institution:

Farrah’s longtime boyfriend, Ryan O’Neal, and her nephew, Greg Walls, donated iconic items from her estate to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History for inclusion in their pop culture collection.

“I don’t think that Farrah realized the impact that poster would have on the world,” Ryan said. “She was one of a kind. She had energy and an aura I have never seen before or since. She was magnificent.”

There's a video of the donation ceremony at the link.

http://news.bostonherald.com/track/inside_track/view/2011_0203farrahs_suit_is_museum_piece/srvc=home&position=also

J&M Workshop, a special effects studio, made flamethrower gloves. They look similar to the wrist-mounted flamethrower that we featured three years ago, but much more powerful.

Video Link via Technabob | Company Website

Cremation is becoming increasingly common in the United States, but it's usually done in an enclosed facility, apart from the public or even mourners. An exception to this norm is provided by an organization in the small town of Crestone, Colorado. The Crestone End of Life Project now offers open air funeral pyres. Since starting three years ago, they've had eighteen such funerals:

Ancient Vikings lit funeral pyres to honor their dead, and it is accepted practice among Buddhist and Hindu religions. But the practice is largely taboo in the U.S.

The pyre harkens to references in the Christian and Hebrew Bibles equating rising smoke with the ascent of the soul, said David Weddle, a religion professor at Colorado College. It can be seen as honoring a natural cycle, reducing the body to ash and the elements of which it is composed. It also can be a protest against traditional funerals, which some view as a denial of death, Weddle said.[...]

It takes up to four and a half hours for a body to burn completely. Since there's no way of separating human ashes from those of the wood the family receives about five gallons of ashes.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AP/Ivan Morelo

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This video is in Japanese, so I'm not sure what the characters are saying. But it appears to be a trailer for a film about a squid who is a professional wrestler and the woman who loves him. Here's the IMDB listing for this totally awesome movie.

via WTF Japan, Seriously!?