John Farrier's Blog Posts

Cthulhu Baby Blanket


Photo: Fickle Pegasus


Wrap you your baby, safe and secure, in the tentacles of Cthulhu with this crocheted baby blanket. It was created by Craftster user Fickle Pegasus for her husband's co-worker's son. Velcro tabs at the end of the tentacles help secure baby toys or, I suppose, the child itself.

Link via GearFuse

Jet-Powered Merry Go Round


(YouTube Link)


The Madagascar Institute is a Brooklyn-based art collective that "that specializes in large-scale sculptures and rides, live performances, and guerilla art events." The artists are especially fond of attaching jet engines to large sculptures and improbable vehicles. Most recently, they made a two-person carousel powered by small jet engines. The action in the above video starts at the 1:23 mark.

Madagascar Institute Website

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/workshop/4331862.html via Gizmodo

Seeing What the Brain Sees

Brandon Keim writes in Wired that scientists are getting closer to reconstructing images that duplicate what the brain actually sees through visual input. Though it's not actually brain-reading, it's a small step in that direction:

To construct their model, the researchers used an fMRI machine, which measures blood flow through the brain, to track neural activity in three people as they looked at pictures of everyday settings and objects.

As in the earlier study, they looked at parts of the brain linked to the shape of objects. Unlike before, they looked at regions whose activity correlates with general classifications, such as “buildings” or “small groups of people.”

Once the model was calibrated, the test subjects looked at another set of pictures. After interpreting the resulting neural patterns, the researchers’ program plucked corresponding pictures from a database of 6 million images.


Link via DVICE

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

This Mechanical Tumor is a Computer Peripheral


Photo: Mio I-zawa


Japanese artist Mio I-zawa created this mechanical tumor that grows and throbs as your computer operates. The harder your computer works, the larger it grows. From the blog Pink Tentacle:

Equipped with a series of motors and pneumatic actuators, the mechanical tumor pulsates gently when the CPU load is low. When the CPU load is high, the tumor’s air compressor is activated, causing the lump of flesh to inflate. The size of the tumor fluctuates according to the CPU utilization rate, giving the user a very tangible reading of the computer’s stress level.


Video at the link.

Artist's Website

Link via Gizmodo

Two Cthulhu-Themed Songs


(YouTube Link)


"Hey There Cthulhu" is a love song by the The Eben Brooks Brand, from their 2007 album Karaoke Bash Vol. 3. It is about a man expressing his tender love for the Dark One and his yearning for annihilation.


(YouTube Link)


"I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth" is a take on the classic Christmas song "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and is presented by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. It's from their album A Very Scary Solstice. On that same album you can find "Oh Cthulhu", which is a take on the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's "Messiah", sung by the Dagon Tabernacle Choir.

Via The Corner

Stop Motion Wafer Cookie Keyboard


(YouTube Link)


This one-minute stop motion video appears to be a Portuguese-language commercial for a fruit juice brand available in Brazil (Google Translator version). It's a trippy depiction of moving wafer cookies that form a piano.

Via The Presurfer, who celebrated his ninth blogiversary last week.

BookFail: A Gallery of Bizarre Books


Image: Book Fail


Inspired by the now famous FAIL Blog, BookFail is a gallery of book covers of strange, absurd, and improbable books. It's somewhat similar to the Judge a Book by its Cover blog, except that you can submit your own suggestions. Above is the The Zen of Farting by Reepah Gud Wan.

Link via Urlesque

Robot Converts from Wheeled to Tracked Vehicle


(YouTube Link)


The Galileo Robot has retractable wheels within its rear wheels that extend on command, expanding the hub of the wheel into a tank track. This allows the vehicle to have the advantages of a tracked vehicle when off-road, but the advantages of a wheeled vehicle when on a smooth surface. One application that the developer, Galileo Mobility Instruments, has already developed is a wheelchair that allows users to climb and descend stairs.

Company Website via Make Magazine

I Fell in Love at the Apple Store


(YouTube Link)


"Apple Store Love Song" is a song by Fatty Spins about meeting a girl/Apple product at a brand store. Although one might think that it was green-screened, it was actually shot at the Apple Store in New York City:

This is an original Fatty Spins song, and yes I actually went to the Apple Store on 5th Ave in NYC and filmed it on one of their demo laptops. If you're wondering why the other people in the store hardly turned around, then you've obviously never been to New York. And yes, there does appear to be a homeless giant standing behind me. LOL.


Adam Frucci of Gizmodo notes that another vlogger used the same demonstration products to shoot a music video without spending any money. Perhaps this is an emerging trend.

Musician's Website (NSFWish content) via Gizmodo

Hacked Floppy Disk Drive Plays Star Wars Music


(YouTube Link)


This floppy disk drive has been altered to play the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars. I have no idea how, but here's an explanation floating around the blogosphere:

I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it. I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's stepper motor, but it'd make my day if this was done in software using standard I/O requests. Either way, the 3.5 inch FDD finally serves an important function again.


Link via Have You Seen This?

The World's Longest Bridge Will Be 25 Miles Long


Image: Artist's Rendering, MENA Infrustructure


The Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway will connect the Persian Gulf states of Qatar and Bahrain over a 40 km causeway. Construction is scheduled to begin next year at a cost of $2.3 billion. The structure will include both a roadway and a railway, and will reduce travel time between the nations to a mere 30 minutes. Once completed it will become the longest bridge in the world, surpassing the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the U.S., which is 38 km long. At the link, you can view a comparative graphic.

Link via Gizmodo

Blood Energy Drink


Photo: Urban Collector


Calm down, it's not actually blood. It's just an energy drink made to look like blood, and it's served in an IV bag:

The fruit punch flavor packs 4 hours of energy along with iron, protein, and electrolytes. Not only does Blood Energy Potion have a similar nutritional makeup to real blood, but it has the same color, look, and consistency of blood. Get real blood nutrients without that real blood taste! The re-sealable transfusion bag style pouch provides the convenient delivery of fluids for vampires and humans alike! Contains no real blood, just synthetic!


See? There's nothing at all abnormal about this product.

Link via Nerd Approved

Simulating A Stradivarius With Fungus

Sandeep Ravindran writes in Popular Science that a Swiss violin maker treated a new violin with a unique fungus. The result was that the new violin beat a Stradivarius in a listening test:

A jury of experts, as well as the conference attendees, judged the tone quality of the violins, and the ultimate winner was "Opus 58" -- one of the fungus-infected violins. 90 of the 180 attendees voted for it, with the Stradivarius coming in second with 39 votes. 113 members guessed that "Opus 58" was actually the Strad.

The wood in "Opus 58" was treated with a fungus for the longest time: 9 months. Fungal infections are generally thought to damage wood, but results published by Francis Schwarze last year suggested that some types of soft rot fungi reduced the density of the wood, making it lighter and improving its tonal quality, without impairing its firmness. Fungi may thus help artificially replicate the unusually low density of wood that is thought to have occurred in Stradivarius' time. The "Little Ice Age" that occurred at this time brought about long winters and cool summers in Central Europe, causing trees to grow slowly and uniformly and creating wood with great tonal qualities.


http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/fungus-infected-violin-beats-stradivarius-listening-test

Image: U.S. Department of the Interior

Animals That Can Count

Michael Tennesen writes in Scientific American that biologists suspect that robins, baby chicks, rhesus monkeys, and parrots may have the ability to count. Although they may not have fixed numerals, they have have concepts of relative quantities:

Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University has conducted similar experiments with rhesus monkeys, getting them to match the number of sounds they hear to the number of shapes they see, proving they can do math across different senses. She also tested the monkeys’ ability to do subtraction by covering a number of objects and then removing some of them. In all cases, the monkeys picked the correct remainder at a rate greater than chance. And although they might not grasp the deeper concept of zero as a number, the monkeys knew it was less than two or one, conclude Brannon and her colleagues in the May Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Although Brannon feels that animals do not have a linguistic sense of numbers—they aren’t counting “one, two, three” in their heads—they can do a rough sort of math by summing sets of objects without actually using numbers, and she believes that ability is innate. Brannon thinks that it might have evolved from the need for territorial animals “to access the different sizes of competing groups and for foraging animals to determine whether it is good to stay in one area given the amount of food retrieved versus the amount of time invested.”


Link

Image: U.S. Department of the Interior

A Robot That Draws Blood

The Bloodbot is a robot that drains you of your blood, thus replacing nursing assistants who previously did that task. It's a project by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, UK. It's been around for years now, but as people are waking up the a potential Robopocalypse, the Bloodbot only recently been getting attention in the blogosphere:

The Bloodbot has three powered (linear motion) axes and one unpowered (rotational) axis. All the motors are inexpensive stepper types.

The first axis moves a carriage up and down, so that it goes towards and away from the arm that is strapped in under it. This carriage is used to hold either a blunt probe (for finding a vein) or a syringe and needle. A piezo-resistive force sensor is mounted on the carriage to measure the force on the probe or needle.

The second axis moves the carriage across the width of the arm. This enables the probe to press in a series of places along the width of the arm.

The third axis, which is unpowered, enables a human operator to tilt the robot. This is so that, once a vein has been found, the needle can be inserted into the arm at the correct angle.

The fourth axis moves the whole robot along the length of the arm. This was designed to compensate for the slight difference between where the probe has identified a vein, and where the needle enters the skin, once the robot has been tilted.


Don't worry about safety -- it's accurate 78% of the time.

Link via DVICE

Image: Imperial College

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Profile for John Farrier

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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