John Farrier's Blog Posts

Old Records as a Roofing Material



Nashville musican Matt Glassmeyer built a roof on his porch out of 350 damaged LP records. It's held up pretty well after two years of use.

Link via Dude Craft | Glassmeyer's Website | Photo: Tree Hugger

UPDATE 11/30/2010: Matt Glassmeyer writes to correct a misunderstanding about the roof. Thanks, Matt!

Winemaker Plans to Build Undersea Wine Cellar

Ivan Simonic, a Slovenian winemaker, plans to build a wine cellar beneath the ocean. He states that conditions beneath the ocean produce excellent wines:

A Slovenian winemaker revealed a unique technique for maturing wine when he retrieved 600 bottles that he laid six months ago in clay-made amphoras on the Adriatic seabed.

The sparkling wine, named Poseidon after the Greek god of the sea, was placed at a depth of 30 metres where the temperature is between 12 and 13 degrees Celsius, perfect for storing and maturing wine, Ivan Simonic said.

The constant movement of the sea means the usual techniques used to mature sparkling wine are not necessary, he added.


Link via Born Rich | Photo: AFP

Skateboard with a V8 Engine


(Video Link)


V8 Supercars, an Australian car racing organization, built a somewhat oversized skateboard powered by a 630-horsepower V8 engine. They made it to honor skateboarding master Tony Hawk, who will be in Sydney from Dec. 3-5 to attend a race. The skateboard will be on public display with Hawk during that time.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Photos of the Year from Reuters

The editors at Reuters have compiled the most stunning pictures taken by their photographers during the past year. You can view large versions of all fifty-five on one page at the link. To the left, you'll see one snapped by Denis Sinyakov on August 7th in the Ryazan region of Russia. Sinyakov writes:

I was really lucky to find this religious procession. It happened by accident when I drove to the village of Kriusha, which was partially burnt by wildfires. I spent a night in my car parked on a roadside in Kriusha. I began to drive away to look for a new location. There was smog. The huge area of the Ryazan region was covered with smog due to hundreds of forest fires in the surrounding areas. I'd already spent two days taking pictures of destroyed villages and firefighters so I was surprised to see an Orthodox priest followed by masked elderly women. I believed that it would be an additional angle to the story I was covering. There were about 30 or 40 women, residents of Kriusha. They prayed and walked in a procession around the village asking God to save their houses, lives and asking for rain. They held the same religious procession twice a week for several weeks.


Content warning: some of the photos show graphic violence and human suffering.

Link via The Agitator | Photo: Denis Sinyakov

PVC Pipe Instrument


(Video Link)


Inspired by Blue Man Group, YouTube user snubbyj made a musical instrument out of varying lengths of PVC pipe. In some of this videos, he actually dresses up like a Blue Man Group performer. In this video, he performs the instrument at a talent show at Loyola Marymount University. Here's his playlist:

-Office Theme Song (0:18)
-Linus and Lucy (0:38)
-Turkish March (1:13)
-Mario Brothers Theme (1:27)
-In the Hall of the Mountain King (1:54)
-Bad Romance (2:07)
-Viva La Vida (2:50)
-Like a Virgin (3:03)
-Crazy Train (3:23)
-Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (4:01)
-James Bond Theme (4:15)
-Pirates of the Caribbean Theme (4:35)
-The Final Countdown (featuring my friend, Quin) (4:56)

via Geekologie

The 25 Best LGBTQ Comic Book Characters

LiveJournal user Neo_Prodigy compiled information and pictures of 25 LGBTQ (well, actually LGB) characters that appear in comics books. Among them is Det. Renee Montoya, a Gotham City cop in the DC Universe:

Although Batwoman got the most press about being a lesbian super heroine who would headline her own series, many people missed a real gem in Renee Montoya who is currently the faceless crime fighter the Question. 52 was groundbreaking in that each week there was a new story for well 52 weeks and the writers managed to tell a cohesive and powerful story. Too bad they couldn't repeat this with Countdown. But one of the true gems was that many C-list characters were allowed to take center stage. One of them was Renee Montoya who we saw evolve from a tragic protagonist to an unlikely and formidable heroine. Why she doesn't have her own title and isn't on a team has my eyes rolling faster than pinwheels.


Link via Geekosystem | Image: DC Comics

Dramatic Movies Depicted as Star Wars Movies



Graphic Designer Matthew Ranzetta created posters for movies The Princess Bride, Empire Records, Rebel Without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and Empire of the Sun. They reflect scenes and typography from the Star Wars movies.

Link via io9

Woman Claims to Own the Sun

Angeles Duran, a woman from Spain, has laid claim to the Sun. She argues that there's no international law to prevent her action:

Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system.

There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about individuals, she added.

"There was no snag, I backed my claim legally, I am not stupid, I know the law. I did it but anyone else could have done it, it simply occurred to me first."


Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo: NASA

Police Mistake Horror Movie Set for Real Crime Scene, Begin Investigating

Two years ago, the horror movie New Terminal Hotel was filmed at the George Washington Hotel in Washington, Pennsylvania. A recent fire there drew firefighters, who discovered what looked like a gory crime scene in one room. They summoned the police, who in turn called in crime scene investigators. Only later did the police realize that they were looking at leftovers from a horror movie set:

Washington Police Chief J.R. Blyth thought Sunday's discovery was the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years in law enforcement. He committed several investigators to the "crime scene" -- until they realized it had been set up that way for a horror movie.[...]

"I had no idea what was going on -- blood on the floor, the mattress, the pillows, piece of a scalp with hair still attached in the center of the bed," said Blythe.

The room is on the fourth floor of the 10-story hotel on South Main Street. Vulgar words were written on the walls, along with the fake blood.


Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: Bull Lee Films

Which Shipping Company is Kindest to Your Packages?



The editors of Popular Mechanics placed sensors inside a package and shipped it through three major package delivery firms in order to determine which company handled it the most gently. These sensors measured the vibration, temperature, and orientation to which the box was subjected. Here were their findings:

After crunching the data and averaging the number of spikes recorded by each carrier on each trip, we found that the USPS has the gentlest touch, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g's. FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively (see graph, next page).

Given those results, we were a little surprised to find that the USPS flipped over its Express Mail packages an awful lot, averaging 12.5 position changes per trip. Meanwhile, FedEx averaged seven position changes, and UPS had an average of four.

All three carriers did a good job at maintaining a stable temperature, but FedEx nabbed the top rating, with an average change of only 26.01 degrees, compared with 26.8 degrees for UPS and almost 32 degrees for the USPS. But the maximum temperatures our package experienced were within 2 degrees, and at no time did a temperature register above 80 degrees or below 47 degrees.


Link via Super Punch | Image: Popular Mechanics

The Top 10 Daily Consequences of Having Evolved

Sure, we've got opposable thumbs and larger brains, but was the path of human evolution all that it's cracked up to be? At Smithsonian magazine, Rob Dunn points out ten problems that we face today as a result of the evolution of our species. Here's one:

4. Unsupported intestines
Once we stood upright, our intestines hung down instead of being cradled by our stomach muscles. In this new position, our innards were not as well supported as they had been in our quadrupedal ancestors. The guts sat atop a hodgepodge of internal parts, including, in men, the cavities in the body wall through which the scrotum and its nerves descend during the first year of life. Every so often, our intestines find their way through these holes—in the way that noodles sneak out of a sieve—forming an inguinal hernia.


Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user Ryan Somma used under Creative Commons license

Non-Sign



The Seattle-based design firm Lead Pencil Studio created this installation at the US-Canadian border. It's supposed to give the impression of a billboard:

the sculpture is made from small stainless steel rods that are assembled together to create the negative space of a billboard. while most billboards draw attention away from the landscape ‘non-sign II’ frames the landscape, focusing attention back on it.


Link via Dude Craft | Studio Website | Photo: Design Boom

Ford Mustang Station Wagon



Ford never offered the Mustang as a station wagon, but that didn't stop car modders from creating their own:

The story goes that in 1966 Italian coach builder Intermeccanica built a Mustang station wagon for advertiser Barney Clark and designer Bob Cumberford which showed up in many car magazines of the day. Supposedly Ford had a Mustang wagon in design stages around the same time but scrapped the program shortly after the Intermeccania cars appeared. The Intermeccania cars are often mistaken for a factory concept.


Pictured above is a non-Intermaccania conversion, currently on sale on eBay. You can view several more pictures at the link.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290502683221&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT#v4-44 via Jalopnik

Anime Opening Credits Are All the Same


(Video Link)


Derek Lieu is the cartoonist responsible for the webcomic Kick in the Head. He noticed that most anime opening sequences have the same features:

It's always amused me the repeated imagery that exist in anime opening credit sequences. This video doesn't cover them all, but it has a lot of the big ones. Interesting thing I learned, if a character is running it's overwhelmingly to the left of the screen.


So he put together this video, showing the openings of 93 different anime series. There's a complete list of them at the video link.

via Geekosystem | Lieu's Website

Klein Bottle Opener



A Klein bottle is "a closed surface with only one side; formed by passing one end of a tube through the side of the tube and joining it with the other end." Pictured above is a bottle opener shaped like a Klein bottle. It was made by Bathsheba Grossman, who explained:

The problem of beer That it is within a 'bottle', i.e. a boundaryless compact 2-manifold homeomorphic to the sphere. Since beer bottles are not (usually) pathological or "wild" spheres, but smooth manifolds, they separate 3-space into two non-communicating regions: inside, containing beer, and outside, containing you. This state must not remain.

A proposed solution Clearly the elegant course is to introduce a non-orientable manifold, which has one side and does not divide 3-space. When juxtaposed with the beer-bounding manifold described above, it acts to disrupt the continuity thereof, canceling the outdated paradigm of distinction between interior and exterior. This enables the desired interaction between beer and self.


Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Bathsheba Sculpture

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