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Going old school in the geekiest way possible, Windell Oskay at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has built a non-video version of Pong. The process of building it is posted as well. Link

It's not a weather anomaly, but an art project. Stevie Famulari used a weed sprayer to paint the snow on her Fargo lawn pink!

Famulari is an environmental artist and a landscape architecture professor at North Dakota State University.

She changes the color of her snow with each new layer that falls. She plans to paint the next snowfall a purplish blue and the one after that will be black.

She chose her colors to become darker as the season progresses. When the snow melts, she expects the older layers to be revealed.

Famulari says she will not paint the snow yellow. Oh yes, she also paints her lawn in the summer. http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/264474/ -via Unique Daily

(image credit: David Samson/The Forum)

NASA's Kepler space telescope mission is sending back data on exoplanets we've never seen before. Five new planets that the probe recently discovered are large planets that revolve close to their stars, making it easier for us to see them.

The smallest of the new planets is about the same size as Neptune, though much more massive. All of the planets are hotter than molten lava and could turn gold to goo, according to NASA temperature estimates.

Dubbed Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b, the five new planets range in temperature from 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,090 to 1,650 degrees Celsius), William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, said today during a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

One of the worlds, Kepler 7b, is among the lowest-density planets yet found, with about the same density as Styrofoam, he said.

The data from Kepler contains the possibility of many new exoplanets, but only these five have been confirmed so far. Link

(image credit: William Borucki/NASA)

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Nicholas Nunley needed a little cash, so he did what anyone would do -he hooked a Coke machine to his car and drove off! Deputies from the McMinn County Sheriff's department in Riceville, Tennessee chased Nunley as sparks flew from the dragging machine Wednesday morning. The Coke machine eventually disconnected from the car, but Nunley drove on. He pulled over after a nearly five mile chase. Nunley was charged with theft and resisting arrest. http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=11764287 -via Arbroath

Wouldn't it be nice to speak English in a manner that was legible, pleasant, and did not peg you as a resident of ...anywhere in particular? That is called the Transatlantic accent, which sounds halfway between British and American English.

It makes you sound like you have a good education but no one can tell quite where you are from. You hear it in old Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. It is the accent of Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, William F Buckley and (at least in some films) God.

There is no town in the world where people grow up speaking English that way. Instead you get the accent in one of three ways:

1. Learn the accent on purpose (actors used to do that).
2. Grow up or live on both sides of the Atlantic (but that can lead to even stranger accents, like those of Loyd Grossman and Madonna).
3. Pick it up at a top boarding school in America before the 1960s.

Abagond has some tips to help you cultivate a Transatlantic accent. Link -via Cynical-C

The Darwin Awards for 2009 have been announced. These annual awards recognize "those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it." All the awards are posthumous. The winners for 2009 are a pair of bank robbers in Belgium.

The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bankrobbers attempting to make a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM died when they overestimated the quantity of dynamite needed for the explosion. The blast demolished the building the bank was housed in. Nobody else was in the building at the time of the attack.

Among the runners-up is the first ever female Darwin award, given to a woman who drove her moped into flood waters, and then leapt back in after she was rescued to retrieve her bike! Link

Find hundreds of ads going up to a couple hundred years back with the Vintage Ad Browser. I spent a lot of time looking around, but kept coming back to this perfume ad from 1890. The picture has nothing to do with the product, but it doesn't matter, since everyone loves babies and dogs, right? Link -via the Presurfer

A star actor's final performance should be something memorable, but that doesn't happen often. In many cases, the actor probably didn't know it would be their final performance. For others, their career was already fading, or maybe old age limited their options. Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss asks: how many of these final performances can you match with the well-known actor who played the part? I scored only about as well as you'd expect with random guesses. Link

At first you think: it's "free" and "this machine accepts all credit cards", that's not right. And then you think "Oh..." This clever recycling idea was submitted to There, I Fixed It. Link -via reddit

42-year-old Roberto Carrillo didn't want to be in jail for New Years Eve. He tried to escape the cell in Valle Hermoso, Mexico by squeezing through a gap he saw where the roof met a wall of bars, but there wasn't enough room. He became stuck hanging upside-down and had to be rescued by laughing guards.

A source at the jail told The Sun: 'If he'd had a brain, it could have been embarrassing.'

Link -via Arbroath

Jeff Kisseloff interviewed grocer Harry Dubin about an article written about him in 1947, but then found something much more interesting about Dubin.

I picked up the album and opened it, and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. Inside were some 30 color photographs taken in and around the city in the 1940s. I had never seen such vibrant photos of the city in those years. In fact, I had never seen any color photos of the city in those years, yet here they were. It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something, all of them were Harry!

Needless to say, while our subsequent interview was wonderful, the album left me speechless in delight. These were the most evocative photographs of old New York I had ever seen. Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.

You might want to check back with The Kisseloff Collection as more pictures are added. http://thekisseloffcollection.com/wordpress/KC/?tag=harry-dubin -via Metafilter

When Alistair Hodgson was 21, he was a British paratrooper stationed in Northern Ireland. A booby trap exploded and tore him apart. His horrific injuries healed, except for the leg that was blown off and the other leg which had to be amputated. That was 17 years ago. Now Hodgson is the British National Freestyle Skydiving ­Champion. Besides training in his sport and coaching other skydivers, Hodgson works to inspire other disabled vets returning from Afghanistan.

“It’s so hard. But you have to ­rehabilitate yourself, find a focus…something to hold on to. If I can inspire just one other person to lift themselves out of that same dark place I was in – train for the Paralympics in 2012 or something, then it’s worth it.

“There was a time I thought my life was over and I still have very dark times when it’s difficult to deal with. Sometimes people poke fun at me or I catch sight of myself in a mirror and think, ‘You’re in a hell of a mess’.

"But when I’m in the air it’s like it never happened. I can ­compete at a world level – alongside people who have all their limbs – and have found a way to fly.”

Hodgson will compete against able-bodied skydivers for the world championship in August. Link -via Fark

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I had to find out who sells that pacifier. You can get one at Perpetual Kid. Video via Unique Daily.

All that most of us know about a sling is that David slew Goliath with one. Maybe our fathers made one for us when we were kids (mine did). But what else do you know about the sling as a weapon?

The sling was likely mankind's first, true projectile weapon. It generally consists of two cords and a pouch. These cords are held in one hand and a projectile is placed in the pouch. The length of the sling provides greater mechanical advantage than one's arms. Projectiles can be slung over 1500 feet (450m) at speeds exceeding 250 miles per hour (400 kph). The sling is unique in that the movement of the weapon is merely an extension of the user’s body. The power and accuracy of the weapon is not by technological means, but rather user skill. The connection between slinger and sling is an intimate one, a relationship rarely found in modern weaponry.

Slinging.org has the history of the sling, information on different kinds of slings, and advice on making and using a sling. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Phillip Niemeyer created an infographic of the big subjects of each year of the past decade for the New York Times. This is just a small part of the chart, which you can enlarge at the link. Keep in mind, this is on the opinion page. Link -via Digg