Artist Paul Destieu created an art installation inspired by a common error in Microsoft Windows. "My Favorite Landscape" shows the Windows XP wallpaper called "Green Hill" duplicated multiple times.

Link via Geekosystem

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This promotional video for Google Docs shows how the utility's presentation options can be used to create a fairly sophisticated animated short. It took 3 animators 3 days to complete the 413 slides. You can view the file at the link.

Link via Urlesque

A company called Kind Fairy in the Ukrainian town of Dniprodzerzhynsk will provide you with a drinking buddy for an evening. It costs about $18. Manager Yulia Peyeva explained:

"Virtually all of our people are talented. They can play guitar, sing or recite poetry. Today you may want to talk about art and tomorrow to read Faust," said Peyeva, adding that the firm does not encourage binge drinking.

She said the service is enjoying strong demand, and that the firm employs a number of psychologists among its staff of boozing partners.

Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user katesheets used under Creative Commons license

deviantART member Matt McManis created a mosaic of Link from The Legend of Zelda using Skittles. Click on the link to see similar depictions of Mario and characters from Final Fantasy.

Link via Comics Alliance

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This video allegedly shows three men on sleds being towed by a Swedish Air Force fighter jet. As it prudently warns at the end, don't try this at home with your own jet.

via Everyday, No Days Off

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Teddy, a six-year old Cocker Spaniel, can cross his eyes on command. How do you train a dog to do that?

via Boing Boing

The Earth's magnetic field fluctuates in intensity. But until recently, most scientists thought that it wouldn't change more than 16% in a century. Slag recovered from a 3,000-year old Egyptian copper mine indicates that the magnetic field could double in just 20 years. Ron Shaar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem explained:

Their measurements, plus theoretical models, showed that the magnetic field’s strength peaked around 3,000 years ago in the middle Egypt’s Iron Age.

“We don’t have volcanic glass in Israel, but we do have slag,” Shaar said. When the ancient Egyptians (in what is now Israel) melted ore to produce copper, they created a lot of leftover molten rock that they threw immediately on a waste heap. The rock cooled quickly, preserving a signature of the magnetic field.[...]

Back in the lab, the team melted and re-froze some of the slag in the presence of a known magnetic field, to make sure they could trust the rock to faithfully trap the field strength. Then they measured the field strength in the raw slag.

They found that the magnetic field abruptly spiked twice during the 180 years they studied, once around 2,990 years ago and once around 2,900 years ago. Both times, the field jumped up in strength and then fell by at least 40 percent in the space of about 20 years.

“These geomagnetic spikes are very different from what we see now or have seen before,” Shaar said

Link via reddit | Photo: unrelated piece of copper slag by the University of California at Irvine

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19 girls in Karachi, Pakistan, crammed into a Smart Car in order to break a Guinness World Record. The previous record, 18, was set last January in Australia.

Link via Geekologie

The programmers at a web development company in Brooklyn, New York, altered the front door to their office so that it opens whenever someone checks into that location using Foursquare. Nick Hall, one of the owners of Apartm.net, explained how it works:

The key to the Foursquare door is a little Web relay device, which actually hosts its own little webpage (aw!) that the brothers use to run some Javascript. "The relay is supposed to be for industrial use," says Hall. "I think it's meant to be used to control pumps."[...]

A Mac Mini chills out near the door and makes requests to Foursquare's API every three seconds, looking for new check-ins at Apartm.net. When the computer finds one, it contacts the Web relay, which sents a simple binary bbzzzz! through a little copper cable that has been soldered to the intercom button in the hallway. The intercom is fooled into thinking the button has been pressed, and it unlocks the door via the building's existing buzzer system.

Link | Image: Foursquare

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Sega is making a gaming interface called "Toirettsu" which the (presumably male) user controls by selectively peeing on different sensors:

This is a teched out version of those little targets found urinals. Not surprising that Toirettsu is intended for restaurants' and retailers' toilets in the hopes that pissing mini-games will result with more customer pee in the urinal and less on the floor. It is also possible for restaurants and retailers to include advertisements on the Toirettsu screen.

Link

Great Scot International, a US importer of Scottish goods, plans to introduce Americans to haggis-flavored potato chips. Haggis, as you may recall, consists of sheep organs ground up and boiled inside a sheep's stomach. This delicacy is available in the UK in potato chip form:

Great Scot International announced this week it would have Mackie's Haggis and Cracked Black Pepper chips on display at its booth at the annual Fancy Food Show in New York next month.

"We know that flavors with a Scottish twist are popular because Haggis and Cracked Black Pepper is our best-selling flavor," Kirstin Mackie, managing director of Mackie's, said in a written statement.

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo by Flickr user tjmwatson used under Creative Commons license

Hongtao Zhou, a sculpture professor at the University of Wisconsin, made a bench out of a thousand leather belts. One end is shaped like a belt buckle and serves as a table and the other is shaped like a bull's head.


Link | Artist's Website | Photo: Design Boom

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Tomas Redigh and Daniel Larsson made this amazing short film entitled "Insert Coin." The end of the video includes a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made. Last year, we featured one of their similar works made with LEGO pieces.

via Geekologie | Filmmakers' Website

Paul Butler, and intern at Facebook, created this map of the world using ten millions online friendships:

I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Link via Gizmodo

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A couple in Canada loves Bailey, their pet bison, so much that they altered their car to allow him to ride in it. The 1,600-pound animal joins them at bars drinking beer.

via Urlesque