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Last year, we featured artist Chris O'Shea's giant human-crushing hand projected onto a public screen. One of his more recent projects was to hack the Xbox Kinect gaming platform so that it can play an air guitar:

First it thresholds the scene to find a person, then uses a histogram to get the most likely depth of a person in the scene. Then any pixels closer than the person to the camera are possible hands. It also uses contour extremity finding on the person blob to look for hands in situations where your hand is at the same depth as your body. It only works if you are facing the camera front on. Then it uses one hand as the neck of the guitar, drawing a virtual line from the neck through the person centroid to create the guitar line. The other hand is tracked to see if it passes through this line, strumming the guitar. The neck hand position controls the chord.

http://www.chrisoshea.org/lab/air-guitar-prototype via CrunchGear

In 2002, blogger Julie Powell decided to spend a year cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She blogged about her experience daily. The blog led to a book. Then, in 2009, this story was turned into a movie called Julie & Julia.

Lawrence Dai is taking this process a step further. He's going to watch this movie every day for a year:

For the moment, I will not tackle the existential query, "Why, Lawrence? Why Julie & Julia? Why now?" Instead, I shall stick to explicating the rules of engagement.

Starting today, Tuesday, November the 30th, 2010, I will watch the comedy-drama Julie & Julia every day for a exactly one year--from the opening title sequence until the very last credits roll.

The film clocks in at a humbling 2 hours, 2 minutes and 33 seconds, which means if I am successful in my endeavor, I will have watched 745.5125 hours of Julie & Julia, or rather, a little over 31 days of nothing but this movie.

Link via Urlesque | Image: Columbia Pictures

Studio V is an industrial design firm in Tel Aviv. It recently produced the Manifold Clock, which folds and unfolds a fan as the hands circulate. At the link, you can watch a time-lapse video of it in action.

Link via Make | Photo: Core77

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Artist Noah Scalin decided to make a representation of a human skull every day for a year. He used a wide variety of media, from spaghetti to sea shells. This video shows all of them.

Link via Dude Craft | Artist's Website

Double rainbow! This image is from Google Maps' satellite view. It shows a plane flying over Hyde Park in Chicago.

Link via Geekosystem | Screenshot: Atlantic

Bonnie Burton made a Christmas wreath out of Star Wars action figures. She used acrylic glitter paint to make them a festive green and attached them to a foil garland wreath.

http://www.starwars.com/kids/activity/crafts/f20061221/index.html via Wonderland | Photo: StarWars.com

The miracle of Hanukkah, according to Jewish tradition, is that there was only enough holy oil in the Temple in Jerusalem to burn for one day, but it lasted for eight. The above chart by Towson University professor Seth Gitter explains the event from an economics perspective.

Link via Marginal Revolution

Yes, Susan Boyle fights multiple Paddington Bears while attempting to make off with their suitcase. Why, does this image by deviantART user korintic somehow surprise you?

Link via Popped Culture

Scrambling an egg inside its shell is nothing new, but Windell at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories wanted to go the extra step of making a complete omelette without fully opening an egg. Here's how he planned to do it:

1. Puncture the egg with a small hole (1-5 mm)
2. Scramble the egg inside the shell, through that hole
3. Plug the hole (maybe with egg) so that the egg won't leak
4. Boil the egg for a few minutes to cook the outside part alone
5. Use a syringe to extract the (still-liquid) center
6. Fill the center with some appropriate filling
7. Plug the hole again, so that the egg won't leak
8. Return the egg to boil, to cook the raw part that is contacting our filling
9. Retrieve the egg and serve it

That turned out to be much easier said than done, and Windell had to ultimately resort to cooking the eggs in vacuum-sealed bags. At the end of the post, he proposed a number of advanced recipes, such as inverse Scotch eggs -- that's sausage injected into an egg.

Link via Nerdcore

The salak fruit, native to Indonesia, has an outer skin resembling that of a snake. The pulp inside divides into three edible lobes. Agriculture Guide has pictures of this fruit and fourteen other odd-looking fruits and vegetables.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo by Flickr user Jayson Emery used under Creative Commons license

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World of Filkcraft created this song about the WoW lifestyle to the tune of "Part of Your World" from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. It's called "Part of Your Guild."

via Nerd Bastards | World of Filkcraft

Researchers in the US and UK wanted to evaluate whether or not the regional boundaries established by governments reflected how people interacted on an individual level. They used 12 billion telephone calls placed over a one month period as their data set:

This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person's links. We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature. We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.

The paper goes into some detail about how their findings illuminate changes in Britain's regional cultures.

Link via io9 | Image: Ratti et al.

Zoologists implanted frogs with radio transmitters. The result was that most of the transmitters were found in the frogs' bladders or fully excreted. Further experimentation indicated that certain species of frogs and toads have bladders that can detect, surround, and excrete foreign objects. At Wired, Dave Mosher writes:

They enlisted five green tree frogs and five cane toads, implanting small inert beads in each the same way they implanted the radio transmitters. Each tree frog expelled its bead within 23 days. One cane toad also gave its bead the boot, and the beads in the other four toads had migrated to their bladders.

To unravel the secrets of the process, the zoologists implanted beads in 31 more cane toads, toxic amphibians native to South America but introduced to northeastern Australia in 1935 to control beetle infestations. (Since then, Shine says, the toads have become invasive and poisoned populations of large predators such as pythons. As a result, ecologists now closely track their numbers and behavior.)

Toads dissected on sequential days revealed that the bladder grew a thin offshoot of cells to surround the bead, which later developed into mature, bladder-like tissue and merged with the organ’s main cavity. From there, they “floated freely in the urine” and were peed out if near the bladder’s opening.

Link | Photo by Flickr user Sam Fraser-Smith used under Creative Commons license

Law and the Multiverse is a blog by attorneys James Daily and Ryan Davidson. It examines, from a realistic perspective, the legal ramifications of life depicted in superhero comics books. They go into great detail, citing specific cases and statutes.

For example, some superheroes such as Black Alice can absorb the powers of others. Would doing so expose her to liability?

One immediate consequence of viewing superpowers as property is that power-drainers like Rogue, Scrambler, or Leech may be liable for the tort of conversion and the crime of theft (or common law robbery, if you prefer) in addition to the tort and crime of battery for which they were likely already liable. This would only apply to unjustified uses of the ability, of course. Use of such powers against a willing subject or out of self-defense, defense of others, or necessity would still be justified.

But the consequences don’t stop there. If Superman uses the power of a blue sun to bestow superpowers on another person, is that a taxable asset transfer? Who would want to try to collect?

If two superheroes marry, share a power, then later divorce, could one be forced to give up the power during the division of assets? Does it matter who had the power originally? Even though the shared power may be a non-rival good, one of the two superheroes may still have a claim to exclusivity. Perhaps the power is a trademark ability of one character, or maybe they signed a superhero pre-nuptial agreement that determined the disposition of any shared abilities.

Link via Comics Alliance | Image: DC Comics

Researchers at Vanderbilt University are trying to develop robots that could perform the evaluative functions of triage nurses and doctors at hospital emergency rooms:

They envision robots, dubbed TriageBots, which would check patients in, gather their medical records, administer diagnostic tests and work with doctors to provide preliminary diagnoses and allocate medical attention according to need.

While people wait in the emergency room, they would sit in special "smart" chairs stocked with interactive diagnostic equipment that could relay more comprehensive data to medical personnel.

Based on the level of urgency, the triage bots could either immediately notify medical staff or give the patient an estimated wait time. Mobile robots would circulate around the waiting room to check on the status of patients awaiting care and reallocate priorities if necessary.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-12/triagebot-wants-you-rate-your-pain-one-10 | Photo by Flickr user snabby used under Creative Commons license