Artist Justin Harder created a pixelated motorbike, helmet, and chest protector out of wood. It's modeled after one that appeared in the Nintendo game ExciteBike. At the link, you can view process photos showing how he made it.
The bike lane in North Williams Avenue in Portland, Oregon now sports power-ups from the video game Mario Kart. Presumably driving over them will make the bicyclist variously very fast, spin out of control, or become invincible.
Mark Peters explains that the word "dude" has evolved over time. In the 1800s, it referred to a dandy -- a person obsessed with proper dress and deportment. The following century, the meaning began to change:
In the 20th century, “dude” evolved to take on a more neutral meaning. The term was adopted in the black community, then as now a prime spreader of new words and meanings. This 1967 OED example reflected the shift in meaning: “My set of Negro street types contained a revolving and sometimes disappearing (when the ‘heat’, or police pressure, was on) population... These were the local ‘dudes’, their term meaning not the fancy city slickers but simply ‘the boys’, ‘fellas’, the ‘cool people’.” In the sixties, the term attracted more coolness as it was embraced by surf culture, and by the seventies, a dude was just a guy.
This car was reportedly spotted last week in Dapitan Street in the Sampaloc district of Manila, the Philippines. So far, I have no other information about it. At the link, you can view an additional photograph.
Artist Jeff Canham makes birdhouses from the wrong side of town, including bail bondsmen, head shops, and psychics. Other sections of his portfolio include classic sign paintings and logo designs.
http://jeffcanham.com/projects/birdhouse-photos/ via Super Punch
I haven't seen it yet, but apparently last night's episode of Futurama required a mathematical formula to explain a plot element. Producer David X. Cohen is noted for leaving real mathematical statements on screen during the show and had a staff mathematician compose an original theorem for that episode:
In an APS News exclusive, Cohen reveals for the first time that in the 10th episode of the upcoming season, tentatively entitled “The Prisoner of Benda,” a theorem based on group theory was specifically written (and proven!) by staffer/PhD mathematician Ken Keeler to explain a plot twist. Cohen can’t help but chuckle at the irony: his television-writing rule is that entertainment trumps science, but in this special case, a mathematical theorem was penned for the sake of entertainment.
In 1821, French astronomer Alexis Bouvard reasoned that the eccentricities in the orbit of Uranus might be caused by the gravitational pull of a nearby planet. 45 years later, that planet, Neptune, was directly observed for the first time. Because it takes 164 years for Neptune to complete one orbit of the Sun, its orbit has until now not been fully observed:
Although Neptune is oblivious of this special time in its orbit, next year will be a special year for astronomy. It will be the first time for nearly 150 years that a planet has completed its first full orbit after its discovery.
Uranus, a planet discovered by Herschel in 1781 -- approximately 10 AU closer to the sun than Neptune -- completed its first orbit after discovery in the year 1865 (it completes one orbit of the sun every 84 years). And Pluto, the newly designated dwarf planet discovered by U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 -- approximately 10 AU further away from the sun than Neptune -- won't complete its first orbit for another 168 years. We'll have to wait until 2178 to see Pluto complete its first 248 year orbit around the sun.
Etsy seller zeebree specializes in molding crayons into unique shapes. Here's a picture of a set that she made in the shape of LEGO minifigs. Each is about an inch tall.
The examples of ancient Greco-Roman statuary that survive to this day may be bare stone and earthenware, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann argues that they were originally brightly painted:
Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.
Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, "The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way."
There's a cunning new marketing strategy in which some fashion firms are engaging. They find a celebrity that they think that people dislike and send their competitor's products to that person. This is, allegedly, how Snooki from Jersey Shore ended up with an expensive Coach handbag. It was sent to her by Coach's rivals:
Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here's the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other's bags! Competitors' bags!
Call it what you will — "preemptive product placement"? "unbranding"? — either way, it's brilliant, and it makes total sense. As much as one might adore Miss Snickerdoodle, her ability to inspire dress-alikes among her fans is questionable. The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.
Dimensions is a neat feature from the BBC that overlays historical or ecological events over modern maps centered on the postal code of your choice. The above map that I created shows the Great Wall of China shielding Lubbock, Texas. Other options include the route of the original Marathon, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the ongoing floods in Pakistan.
Cool Material has a roundup of historical events depicted with Facebook status updates. These include the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Galileo arguing for a heliocentric cosmology, and the sinking of the Titanic.
Widgett of Need Coffee interviewed a manager with Wells Fargo and confirmed that there are two ATMs at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. David Parker said that they were installed around the year 2000 and are largely maintained by the staff because Wells Fargo can only visit once every two years:
We do send a vendor down about once every two years to do some preventative hardware maintenance on both of the ATMs, to make sure they're operational, change out the belts and that kind of stuff, provide new cartridges…anything else hardware-wise that we would need to make sure that it runs. But as you can imagine getting somebody down there is quite a feat.
"Drinks go down easy when we party. It's only when we sober up that we realize that we were actually plastered." Inebriation is a parody trailer for Inception by Atomic Productions. Are you really drunk? How do you know for sure?
Jack Henriques, a British engineer, built what might be the largest portable barbeque pit in the world. It's 16 feet long, 11 feet tall, and can cook three whole pigs or two cows and seven whole sheep at the same time:
Each of the seven coal trays is fixed to a custom-built scissor jack, which can be raised or lowered using a turning handle.
This ensures that the cooking temperature can be easily changed for each tray, without the difficulty of moving and disturbing the meat.
The cooker also features abattoir-style meat hooks on which whole animal carcases can be hung for cooking.
God-grilla – which can grill 500 burgers at once – was commissioned by the Stone Barn, a wedding venue in the Cotswolds village of Aldsworth, Glos.