If you drive just 5 MPH slower, you can shave 100 feet off your stopping distance. But are you willing to accept the consequences of doing so? This funny PSA from The Midnight Show explains to you in blunt imagery the price you'll have to pay for your thoughtful, careful driving.
Ed Rogers likes to keep the windows of his bedroom open. But he lives next to active railroad tracks, which makes his bedroom very noisy at times. So he assembled a machine that closes the windows automatically when a motion sensor detects a train on the tracks. The windows don't close quickly, but once they are shut, there is a noticeable decrease in noise.
Nancy Dorsner snapped a photo of this cosplayer at Dragon*Con. But...I thought that the FSM was...masculine? I'm confused. Or has the attribution of masculinity to the FSM just been a sexist tradition not grounded in proper theology?
Six years ago, we posted about the Rebel Alliance attack cruiser that Erik Varszegi made with 35,000 LEGO pieces. He's now topped that with a 8-foot long, 43,000-piece Venator-class Star Destroyer.
Craftster user shdwstrm won at Teh Internets by making this awesome Nyan Cat costume for a convention in Toronto. The pop-tart body is, however, not edible, which is a disappointment. Presumably she's working on a second version that is.
Yutaka Sone, an artist originally trained in architecture, carved a nine-foot long model of Manhattan into a block of marble. To gather information for the project, he used photos, Google Earth, and a few helicopter rides over the city. If you're in New York City, you can see it at his solo show starting on September 20 at the David Zwirner gallery.
Moleskine, the maker of iconic notebooks, is producing a model with a Star Wars theme. So it made this cute paper stop-motion animated battle between TIE fighters and X-wings.
During World War II, the Royal Air Force asked Abraham Wald, a statistician, to help decide where armor should be added to the UK's bombers. The RAF gave Wald information about which parts of its planes were typically hit. Wald's response was simple, brilliant, and surprising: armor the spots that hadn't been hit by German fire. Why?
This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.
Wald assumed that the bullets were fired randomly, that no one could accurately aim for a particular part of the bomber. Instead they aimed in the general direction of the plane and sometimes got lucky. So, for example, if Wald saw that more bombers in his sample had bullet holes in the middle of the wings, he did not conclude that Nazis liked to aim for the middle of wings. He assumed that there must have been about as many bombers with bullet holes in every other part of the plane but that those with holes elsewhere were not part of his sample because they had been shot down.
Justin Shaw loves the GeoChron, a clock that shows night and day changing across the world. But it's far too expensive for him to purchase, so he made his own. Read his instructions at the link if you'd like to build one, too.
Social scientists at the World Values Survey asked people around the world "Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?" Responses varied widely in different countries. Click on the link to view a larger version. Do the results match your own impressions?
Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, was presented with this mechanical marvel in 1785. It's a machine in the form of a lady playing a dulcimer. The lady isn't just decorative, but an essential part of the musical performance. Be sure to watch the whole video to see other amazing automatons from the same time period.
Nishant Jethi learned that the house sparrow population has dropped due to a decline in proper nesting space. His response to this problem was to build little birdhouses sized just for them. They's shaped like letters so people can spell out words with them.
Michael Colombo spotted a man on a New York City train wearing this tattoo. He said that it's a schematic for a guitar amplifier circuit. Colombo notes that such tattoos, no matter how they might look now, could be very useful to a post-apocalyptic society that needs to preserve knowledge. If you were to get a tattoo for this purpose, what information would you preserve?
Building and maintaining the tennis venue at Wimbledon is expensive, so starting in the 1920s, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club sold bonds to investors. But buyers don't get money; they get tickets. They can sell these tickets freely on an open market and thus earn a profit:
The club has issued these since the 1920s to finance development. But instead of paying cash coupons, like regular bonds, Wimbledon debentures pay interest in something much more valuable: tickets.
Holders get one ticket for each day of the Wimbledon tournaments during the five-year life of the bond. And here is the kicker: If you don't feel like going on any given day, you can sell it—legally.
"They're the only tickets that are freely tradable on the open market," says All England Finance Director Richard Atkinson. "You are free to sell them to anyone you like."
