James May of the British television show Top Gear is planning to build a full-sized house out of LEGOs:

On Friday, more than three million Lego bricks were delivered to the vineyard in preparation for the task.

Denbies marketing and business development manager, Jeanette Simpson, said: “The millions of bricks came all the way from the Czech Republic. The house will be life-size with a staircase, toilet and shower.”

Link via Geekologie

It was big enough to provide 1,500 servings:

Measuring 12 inches tall and 24 inches wide the cupcake weighed 150.7 pounds and used 15 pounds of fudge filling and 60 pounds of yellow icing.

Makers cakes.com created the cake as part of celebrations for the SpongeBob SquarePants' 10th anniversary at the Minneapolis Mall of America.

An adjudicator from Guinness World Records was on hand to inspect (and sample) the cake before declaring it the world's largest cupcake.

Link via Instapundit

From the food blog Insanewiches:

The Rubix Cube has confounded us for years. Maybe the sandwich version of this puzzling brain teaser will do the same. The Rubix Cubewich contains cubes of pastrami, kielbasa, pork fat, salami, and two types of cheddar.

Link via Geekologie

Jen Hui Liao created a machine that will take a picture of the user, and then guides his/her hands to draw the image on paper. Liao says:

I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in.

Link via Gear Fuse

Videos of the machine in action

Maybe this fellow doesn't have a car on which to put his bumper stickers, or he just wants to communicate with people walking behind him.

If you had bumper stickers on the back of your shoes, what would they say?

Link via Gear Fuse

Having trouble keeping your income tax forms straight? Grab a few of these foot-long paper clips to keep them sorted. $12.99 each.

Link via Gear Fuse

Previously on Neatorama: Trading a Paper Clip for a House

Craftster member enemyairship created this 7 by 7 foot rug of Mario in raccoon form:

He's made of 386 granny squares, each one representing 1 pixel (3.5" each) that makes up Raccoon Mario. I learned to crochet in February by watching youtube videos and recently watched another video for granny squares and got started on this project right away. I had originally thought that it would take me over 1 month to complete if I made about 10 granny squares per day.

Link via Gear Fuse

This is why I will never get a tattoo:

TAMPA - It wasn't particularly hard for the victims of a Riverview home invasion to identify the burglar. He was the only one with an outline of the state of Florida tattooed on his face, authorities say.

In addition to the Florida tattoo, Sean Roberts also has the words "Crazy Cracker" written or tattooed on his head, Hillsborough County sheriff's spokesman J.D. Callaway said.

And to think that if he had chosen a rectangular state like Wyoming or Colorado, he could have escaped.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jul/20/unusual-face-tattoo-leads-robbers-arrest-cops-say/news-breaking/ via Double Plus Undead

(Video Link)

Il Gatto is a short film by Peter Atencio.  It's about the love that a woman has for her kitty cat/sensei and her quest for vengence against the man who accidentally drove over it.  It seems modeled on Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse films.  Run time: 5 minutes.

(Video Link)

This BBC News video shows inventor Jem Stansfield climbing the outside of the BBC building with hand-held mounts that adhere to the wall thanks to the suction created by the vacuum cleaner engine on his back.

Via Geekologie

Engineering students at Virginia Tech have built a car that can be driven by the visually impaired. The vehicle is equipped with laser range finders and a semi-autonomous computer that helps direct drivers around a course that they can't see:

The steering wheel is hooked up to a distance monitor that gathers information from laser range finders, and it uses voice software to tells the driver how far to turn the wheel. For example, the monitor will tell the driver “turn left three clicks.” As the driver does that, the monitor makes three clicking noises.

A vibrating vest provides cues to follow when accelerating and decelerating. The vest vibrates in different places — the back, the belly and the shoulders — to convey different commands. When the entire vest vibrates, it means, “Slam on the brakes!”

Link

Sure, they look like they're just fingerless gloves, but they're more fashionable than boxers and have a handy opening flap on the front: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?handerpants-pid564.html

Archaeologists have found five Roman ships in excellent condition off the coast of Italy:

A team of archaeologists using sonar technology to scan the seabed have discovered a "graveyard" of five pristine ancient Roman shipwrecks off the small Italian island of Ventotene.

The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years, the researchers said on Thursday.

Link

(YouTube Link)

The American Library Association (ALA) just finished its annual conference in Chicago.  This is a video of the winners of the book cart drill team competition.  These librarians from the Omaha Public Library chose a 'Ride of the Valkyries' theme.

Alas, I missed ALA this year.  But as a faithfully married man, I shouldn't be availing myself of its bacchanal pleasures anyway.

Via Geekologie

Previously on Neatorama: March of the Librarians

Creating nanomachines can be unprofitable because of the time necessary to create and then assemble the components. But researchers at Columbia University have found a way to make machines assemble themselves:

To make the gears, a thin copper sheet is laid over a heat-expanded polymer. When the polymer cools, it shrinks faster than the metal, which causes the metal to bend. When the metal bends, it creates regularly spaced teeth in the polymer, effectively making a microscopic gear. Stiffer metal that's harder to bend creates a gear with fewer, larger teeth, while a more supple metal creates gears with smaller, more numerous teeth.

The team has already made a number of different types of gears, all at the six-to-25 millimeter range, and are now ready to shrink the process down further, to create gears smaller than a micrometer.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-07/scientists-design-versatile-self-assembling-nanogears