Would you like to eat a cake that looks like a severed human head? Moreover, one that slowly decomposes as the frozen icing melts to reveal a skull inside? Well, then, good news! Barbara Jo of Do It Myself! knows how to make one. She provides step-by-step instructions at the link.

Link via Nerdcore

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Do you have three minutes? Watch 3 Minutes. It's Ross Ching's adaptation of the classic Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game." The film a good demonstration of the proverbial wisdom that lightsabers make everything better.

Link via Gizmodo

Previously by Ross Ching: Electric 2.0

Suddenly, the challenge of moving enormous stone slabs using Neolithic technology doesn't look so daunting, as artist Brock Davis illustrates in this piece entitled "Rice Krispyhenge". Presumably the stones were held in place with marshmallow.

Link via Geekosystem

Previously by Brock Davis:
Expressionist Versions of Classic Arcade Games
Boba Fett's Invoice for Jabba the Hut

Disappointingly, the Banryu "Guard Dragon" home security robot does not come with laser beam eyes, but it did debut in 2002, so maybe there have been upgrades since that time. This device from TSMUK, a Japanese robotics company, moves slowly -- only three meters a minute. And it's not life-size. But it's a start in the right direction.

You can watch a video of it at the link.

Link

Offbeat selections for Broadway musicals are trendy now, such as the Spider-Man musical currently in production. So perhaps it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the dark, transgressive book and film Fight Club may be turned into a musical:

Years ago David Fincher talked about being interested in doing a Fight Club musical as a celebration of the film’s tenth anniversary. I think many people brushed it off as being a lark or a joke or a passing thing, especially when 2009 came and went without the show turning up. But it turns out that somewhere in the back of Fincher’s head the concept has continued, and it’s still on his mind.

Tonight The Social Network screened for members of the Screen Actors Guild, and at the Q&A afterwards Fincher mentioned that he’s been recently talking to Trent Reznor about doing the musical. Back when the project was initially floated, Trent Reznor had expressed interest in doing the music; since then Fincher and Reznor have worked together on The Social Network and Reznor will be scoring the currently-in-production Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Do you think that Fight Club would work as a musical?

Link via Geekosystem | Image: Fox

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This is pretty amazing. The above video shows woodworking professional Adam Sandoval quickly making a long series of unmarked cuts into a block of wood. When he's done and clears away the excess, a deer sculpture remains!

via Make

New Roomba-like household robots are popping every day, now. The Windoro consists of two scrubbing modules, one on each side of the glass, held together with magnets:

The robot uses distance sensors, attitude adjustment, and obstacle detection while doing its little window waltz, employing detergent and a series of spinning pads to wash up as it goes.

This robot was developed by the Pohang Institute of Intelligent Robotics in South Korea. You can watch a video of the robot in action at the link.

Link via DVICE | Photo: DVICE

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The koi are hungry! This video shot in a hotel in Hawaii shows koi ravenously chasing after food like a swarm of piranhas.

via The Presurfer

Previously: Duck Feeds Koi

I can't tell which document Lincoln is carrying. But I intend to do what it says. deviantART user SharpWriter made this image based on a historic photograph. Really. Link via Everyday, No Days Off

Flickr user Nadia Prigoda-Lee snapped this picture at a Modest Mouse concert in Toronto. Two of her commenters say that it's the lyrics to the Björk song "Bachelorette" written in Braille.

Link via Flavorwire

Sean Bonner reasoned that human beings have evolved without soap, and therefore it's unnatural to strip away the dirt, oil, and grime of daily life with it. As an experiment, he stopped using soap and shampoo for a year. Although Bonner still showers on a regular basis, he uses just water. He's written about his experience so far, and why he's decided to give up on soap permanently:

As I just mentioned, my skin feels better than ever before. Not that it ever felt bad, really, but it feels awesome now. Still no stink at all, I swear even when I'm really active and sweating I don't notice any B.O., and I used to be über self-conscious about this and would think I was stinking if I walked up a flight of stairs too quickly. So this is a huge improvement for sure. And with the exception of changing climates drastically, even the dandruff is history. My previously wavy and mostly unmanageable hair now seems much more willing to bend to my will, a dream of mine since I first looked in a mirror, brush in hand, then tried and failed to make any sense of that monster. So I approve for sure.

And speaking of hair, that was actually a perfect test. Sometime mid-summer I stopped by a barber and before I'd realized it he'd squirted a glob of shampoo onto my head. It was too late to protest, so I just sat through the scrubbing. For the following 2 weeks my hair was a mess: full of dandruff and totally uncontrollable. Once things balanced back out to the previously established no-soap norms, all was good again.

Link | Bonner's Website | Photo by Flickr user aonecrafts used under Creative Commons license

John Pilley and Alliston Reid, researchers at Wofford College in South Carolina, wanted to know how large a dog's vocabulary could get with extensive training. After three years of work, they stopped teaching one border collie who developed a thousand-word vocabulary:

The authors demonstrated that their dog, Chaser, learned the names of 1,022 objects -- no upper limit is apparent -- they stopped training the dog after three years due to their time constraints, not because the dog could not learn more names. This study demonstrates Chaser's ability to learn the names of proper nouns, and her extensive vocabulary was tested repeatedly under carefully controlled conditions. The authors admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1022 toys better than they could. Chaser's ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object, revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1,022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, an extensive vocabulary, and a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.

Their second experiment demonstrated that Chaser really understands that these are names, and not commands to fetch the object. In order to test independence of meaning of nouns and commands, the authors randomly combined nouns with commands to see if Chaser would produce the correct behavior toward the correct object in each trial. Without special training, Chaser responded to each combination correctly, even on the first trial, demonstrating that Chaser understood that the commands and proper-noun names had independent meanings. The dog understands that names refer to particular objects, independent of the action requested involving that object.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user flash62_au used under Creative Commons license

16-year old Tove Sjöholm captured this amazing shot in Mute, Sweden. A spooked female moose jumped in such a way that it looked like it was jumping over a car. Here's Google Translate's rendering of a news article on the event:

It is not unusual for family Sjöholm, who lives in Mute outside Rolfstorp, is visited by the king of the forest in his garden. Tove has a certain respect for the powerful animals.

"Sometimes they stand and nibble on our apple tree. I've always been inside the house when I saw them. They are quite large and tend to be close to the house, so I had been outside, I had perhaps been a little afraid, "she says.

Link via Jalopink

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This clever two-minute advertisement for the computer company Intel shows a beautiful and deadly secret agent on the run from her enemies. They chase her through many windows for a wide variety of computer applications scrolling across a computer screen. The film, entitled "The Chase", was directed by Venables Bell and shot in Prague.

Link (auto sound) via reddit

Sometimes scholarly journals, particularly in the natural sciences, call for critiques from readers and responses to those critiques by article authors. Pictured above is one such response to a critique from a 1963 issue of The Journal of Geology. This is the comment to which the authors responded:

It is obvious that this error in presenting sedimentation rates has no effect whatever on the ages given in the paper. Therefore, the main body of the paper and the conclusions reached by Rosholt et al. require no modification.

Link via Marginal Revolution

Previously: Blank Peer Reviewed Journal Article