Justin Mitchell has cataloged his dice collection and put photos of them online. Some of them are quite unusual, either made of uncommon materials or offering unconventional ranges. Pictured above is a 36-sided die.

Link via Boing Boing

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Artist Chris Burden built "Metropolis II", a representation of road traffic in Los Angeles. It shows 1,200 toy cars moving along 18 lanes:

Two years ago he created a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper that stood in Rockefeller Center, and in 2004 he made “Metropolis I,” composed of 80 Hot Wheels toy cars zooming around two single-lane highways along with monorail trains chugging on tracks of their own. The piece was snapped up by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

“I was happy with ‘Metropolis I,’ but it kind of disappeared once it went to western Japan,” Mr. Burden said in a telephone interview from his studio in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County. So in 2006 he and a team of eight studio assistants, including an engineer, began “Metropolis II,” a far more ambitious version. It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation.

In "Metropolis II," by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”

Link via DVICE

This is a cloud that has broken off the Carina Nebula. It's about 8,000 light years away and has a nasty attitude. Or did, at least 8,000 years ago. Did we do something offensive at the time?

Link via Geekologie | Photo: NASA

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Animator Dan Meth, whose work we've previously featured, made this cartoon about people who resist buying the latest technological wonders, like iPads and spears. "What -- this? Oh, it's my bone. It makes hunting for food way easier. You should get one."

Dan Meth's Website

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The turns in the racetrack at Daytona International Speedway bank at a 31º slope. Conventional road paving techniques won't work at that angle. Here's how it's done:

Unlike repaving a street in your neighborhood, Daytona's a banked surface designed to allow cars to reach speeds as high as 210 mph. This means crews have to carefully mill and grade each turn for the appropriate angle.

Once the appropriate angle is set, a large dump truck carrying asphalt transfers the crushed rock to a small buggy, which then transports the asphalt to the hydraulic crane. So far this process isn't much different from how it's normally done, but the next step involves a lot of engineering.

The asphalt is transferred from the crane to an ABG Titan 525 Paver, which lays it along the surface of the track. In order to achieve the angle the paver's suspended from the track at a 31-degree angle by a Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer at the top of the track. This is followed by a Hamm DV-8 Double Steel Drum Roller, also suspended by a bulldozer. The Drum Roller uses its immense 40,000 pounds of weight to crush the material into a smooth surface. This is repeated numerous times until the surface is dense enough to support racing.

Link

We've previously featured the clever gadgets of Kipkay, including his DIY Laser Pointer, his DIY Star Trek Phaser, and his Potato Gatling Gun. One of his latest projects was a slingshot with a laser sighting system. He used a 6 mm laser diode powered by two AA batteries. At the link, you can watch a video showing how Kipkay built it.

Video Link (self-starting) via DVICE | Screenshot: DVICE

Raynor Ganan discovered, to his dismay, that Google Image Search tends to identify "John Locke" as a LOST character, rather than as an English philosopher. It was this discussion that prompted his investigation:

i was trying to explain jeremy bentham’s panopticon to my 5 year-old nephew this weekend and he was like, “geesh uncle ray, i already know all about that because of lost.” and then i was like, “look here half-pint, just cuz the producers of that television programme copy-pasted philosophers’ names for their characters’ names to spice up the mystery (despite the fact that the relationship is tenuous at best) this does not mean that you know the first thing about jeremy bentham or his panopticon.” and then my 5 year-old nephew turned on the waterworks and his mom made her way over to us and gave me disparaging looks.

http://ragb.ag/post/1648712319/i-was-trying-to-explain-jeremy-benthams via Geekosystem

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Matt Mets made this musical instrument for the Make Tokyo Meeting this past weekend. It can be played by touching the spoons as though they were keys on an organ. You can find the schematics and the source code at the link.

Link via Make

eBay user ni0vek offers this taxidermic squirrel changing into his superhero outfit. He sells other interesting items in his store, such as three moles playing poker.

Link via Great White Snark

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Professor Richard Quinn of the University of Central Florida recently discovered that 200 students in a class of 600 cheated on a test. They got a copy of the publisher's testbank and studied from it. Now some students are objecting to Quinn's accusation, arguing that what they did doesn't constitute cheating. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick writes:

The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank. That struck me as odd -- and I wasn't really sure that what the students did should count as cheating. Taking "sample tests" is a very good way to learn material, and going through a testbank is a good way to practice "sample" questions. It seemed like the bigger issue wasn't what the students did... but what the professor did.

In looking around, it looks like a lot of the students agree. They're saying that the real issue is that Prof. Quinn simply copied questions from the publisher, rather than actually recreating his own test, and noting that this seems like a massive double standard. The professor is allowed to just copy questions from others for his tests? In fact, some of the students have put together a video pointing out that, at the beginning of the year, Prof. Quinn claimed that he had written the test questions himself.

Do you agree with this argument?

Link via Urlesque

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Instructables user spookylean turned an Altoids mint box into a portable martini kit. This way, he's prepared for a martini emergency. He writes:

All you will need to be prepared in any emergency is an Altoids or equivalent tin, some tiny bottles (the smallest one is from a miniature Tabasco sauce bottle), a tiny ziploc bag, a folding paper cup (about the easiest origami there is), and the stopper cannibalized from a dollar store water pistol. Oh, and of course gin (I favour Plymouth) and vermouth (Noilly Prat).

Link via Weer'd World

So far, they don't have opposable thumbs or laser eyes, but some squid can jump out of the water. Specifically, the Caribbean reef squid can leap 50 times its own body length:

Marine biologist Silvia Maciá was boating on the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 2001 when she noticed something soar out of the sea. At first she thought it was a member of the flying fish family—a group of marine fish that escape predators by breaking the water's surface at great speed and gliding through the air on unusually large pectoral fins. But after tracing the creature's graceful arc for a few seconds, Maciá realized this was no fish. It was a squid—and it was flying.

With her husband and fellow biologist Michael Robinson, Maciá identified the airborne cephalopod as a Caribbean reef squid (Sepioteuthis sepioidea)—a lithe, torpedo-shaped critter with long, undulating fins. They think the squid was startled by the noise of the boat's outboard engine and estimated that the 20-centimeter-long mollusk reached a height of two meters above the water and flew a total distance of 10 meters—50 times its body length. What's more, the squid extended its fins and flared its tentacles in a radial pattern while airborne, as though guiding its flight.

"It was doing this weird thing with its arms where it had them spread out almost in a circle," recalls Maciá, who teaches at Barry University in Florida. "It had its fins kind of flared out as much as it could—it really looked liked it was flying. It hadn't accidentally flopped out of the water; it was maintaining its posture in a certain way. It was doing something active."

Link via Geekologie | Photo: Bob and Deb Hulse

Tara Wheeler knits Doctor Who paraphernalia, especially the scarves worn by the Fourth Doctor. She's also created TARDIS socks. Since they're bigger on the inside than the outside, they have a slimming effect. At the link, you can find the pattern so you can make your own.

Link via Comics Alliance | Photo: Tara Wheeler

Microsoft Windows turned 25 last Saturday. Computer World has a visual guide to its interface from version 1.0 to 7. Pictured above is a screenshot from 2.0, which debuted in the fall of 1987:

New features in Version 2.0 included the ability to overlap application windows and improved memory use. Also new: Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), which allowed Windows applications to automatically share and update data. For example, DDE allowed information in an Excel spreadsheet to be automatically updated when data in another Excel spreadsheet was changed.

Link via J-Walk Blog | Screenshot: Microsoft

The Scottish Tartans Authority, an organization which provides guidance for Scottish traditions, says that it's time for kilt-wearers to begin wearing underpants:

The Scottish Tartans Authority has decreed that refusing to put on underwear beneath a kilt is "childish and unhygienic".

It also warned that "going commando" flies in the face of decency.

Tartans Authority director Brian Wilton said kilt wearers should have the "common sense" to realise they should wear underwear beneath their country's national dress.

Link | Photo by Flickr user ianrob63 used under Creative Commons license