Feast your eyes on this lovely hand-carved wooden case mod called Erecura from Espie-Whitburn design.
This hand carved computer case is based on the Celtic Goddess Erecura - Goddess of the Earth. Each panel has been detailed using a modern interpretation of Celtic knotwork. This is more than a functioning computer, it is a work of Art that is truely unique.
It's for sale for $1900. I wonder if they have a smaller one that would keep the cat hair out of my Mac Mini. http://www.espie-whitburn-design.com/ComputerCase.html
Tommy Williamson built the characters ("So-called Arthur king and his silly English knnnnnigits") from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail out of LEGO bricks! They were constructed for a special diorama called Pythonscape that will be featured at BrickCon 2011 this weekend. Get a closer view of each knight in his Flickr set. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
The art of taxidermy has seen a resurgence in the past decade, after falling out of favor some fifty years ago. Lisa Hix of Collector's Weekly studied the phenomenon, and talked to quite a few new-wave taxidermists, including Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.
Marbury, now based in Baltimore, says he believes Internet culture revived interest in taxidermy, and not just because of eBay.
“The Internet’s become a cabinet of curiosities,” Marbury says. “You can search to your heart’s content and find really bizarre stuff, filling your computer with JPEGs and GIFs. In many ways, it parallels the traditional cabinet of curiosities, where you have these explorers going out and grabbing anything they could for their Wunderkammers (wonder rooms) in their houses or for museums. In a sense, we’re all walking around with that on our phones now. If you want to collect it, you can find it. I think it desensitizes us a little bit.”
His theory goes something like this: In the early 2000s, people started spending so much of their time in their heads, staring at computer screens, that they felt compelled to collect real, tactile objects that brought them back into the physical world—such as animals that were once alive, with soft fur or feathers, leathery hides or scaly skin, smooth horns and teeth, and even traces of decay that make a connection to the soul of nature and a long-gone past.
Learn what's different about taxidermy this time around, and find plenty of links to online taxidermy collections and resources, at Collector's Weekly. Link
If you read the New York Times story we linked last week, The Secret to Success, you were probably impressed with the graphics that accompanied the story. They were created by Doyle Partners, and now you can watch how they created those illusions. Laughing Squid has another video showing how they put GRIT in the gymnasium -that one is more realistic. Link
A toilet in the General Services Administration (GSA) Building in Washington, DC, exploded and an unnamed woman was taken to a local hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries. A memo was sent to explain the danger to other employees.
"DO NOT flush toilets or use any domestic water. Due to a mechanical failure, there is high air pressure in the domestic water system that resulted in damage to toilets. The engineering staff is working to correct the issue," the memo said. "There has been damage to flushed toilets that has resulted in injuries. We will announce when the issue is resolved."
Colin Heaton and Anne Lewis of Southport, North Carolina, adopted a Pit Bull/Rottweiler mix that had been rescued from a "bad situation." They named him Thor. The dog has since protected chickens from foxes, coyotes, and even a snake which bit him. Earlier this month, Thor got the chance to rescue a human.
Barbara Simmons, 78, fell on the side of the road while checking her mail on a hot day earlier this month.
She said she yelled for help but no one came to her rescue for at least a half hour. Thor, a dog with a heroic name, noticed Simmons and went to check it out.
"He was just so gentle and like, 'are you okay, are you okay?'" explained Simmons. "It was like somebody asking, 'are you okay, are you okay?'"
Thor's owners said he was acting strangely that day, ignoring their commands.
"He ran to this point and he stopped and looked back at my husband and barked at him a couple of times like, ‘I'm not going to listen to you,' and he took off right around the corner," said owner Anne Lewis.
Thor led his owners to Simmons nearly a block away. They called for help and the EMT told Lewis that Thor probably saved her life.
http://www.wistv.com/story/15558547/dog-rescues-elderly-woman-who-fell -via Fortean Times
Wilson Greatbatch is an awesome name for a man who invented things all his life. Greatbatch is best known as the inventor of the implantable pacemaker, which came about by accident!
The story goes that, by mistake, he installed a resistor with the wrong resistance, but he recognized that the pulse it created was identical to a normal beating heart.
Mr. Greatbatch realized that this new circuit could potentially be used to control a human heartbeat.
In his spare time, he experimented with his idea of an implantable pacemaker Ñ working upstairs in an old, cedar-sided barn on his property and using his savings to build 50 handmade pacemakers of various designs.
"I had to solve the problem of how to reduce an electronic apparatus in the size of a kitchen cabinet to the size of a baby's hand," he recalled in 1990.
He later founded the company Greatbatch, Inc. which produced lithium batteries for pacemakers and other devices. Greatbatch held over 350 patents when he died on Tuesday at his home in Amherst, New York. He was 92. http://www.buffalonews.com/wire-feeds/24-hour-national-news/article573368.ece -via Gizmodo
New Scientist produced a new One-Minute Physics animation to explain the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment in a hurry. As if you could explain "collapsed realities" in one minute. Still, it's a cute cartoon. Link
Led Zeppelin released their first album in 1969, about the time I started buying record albums. They released their last one in 1982, about the time I stopped buying record albums. Of course, I then had to get the entire collection on CD. Anyway, today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss challenges you to name all nine of Led Zeppelin's studio albums in three minutes or less. It took me about a minute to complete, because I'm not much of a typist. Link
Wildlife photographer Jean-Francois Largot took a fascinating sequence of photographs of a lion cub rescue in Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve. The cub apparently slid part of the way down a cliff face.
Clinging on for dear life to the side of a vertical cliff, the tiny lion cub cries out pitifully for help.
His mother arrives at the edge of the precipice with three other lionesses and a male. The females start to clamber down together but turn back daunted by the sheer drop.
Eventually one single factor determines which of them will risk her life to save the youngster – motherly love.
See the whole thing at the Mail Online. Link -via Buzzfeed
Jack Horner is seeking funding for a project in which he would reverse-engineer a dinosaur using chickens. Horner has already rejected the Jurassic Park method of cloning dinosaur DNA (he was a consultant on the film). Instead, he plans to switch on ancient traits that still exist in the DNA of modern birds.
Already, researchers have found tantalizing clues that at least some ancient dinosaur characteristics can be reactivated. Horner is the first to admit that he doesn’t know enough to do the work himself, so he’s actively seeking a developmental biology postdoctoral fellow to join his lab group in Montana. Horner has the big ideas, and he has some seed funding.
Now all he needed to make it happen, he told his TED audience, was a few breakthroughs in developmental biology and genetics and all the chicken eggs he could get his hands on. “What we’re trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make,” he said, “a chickenosaurus.”
Wired magazine looks at the genetic research that led Horner to believe that such a project is feasible. What could possibly go wrong? Link
(Image credit: photographer Dan Forbes/model maker Jason Clay Lewis)
Vollis Simpson built a collection of what he calls "whirlygigs" on his property in Wilson, North Carolina, that came to be known as Acid Park. According to an urban legend, Simpson's daughter died in a car wreck while on LSD and the whirlygigs are her drug-induced visions as interpreted by her father. None of this is true, but the eight moving sculptures are there. Read the real story and see more pictures at Atlas Obscura. Link
You think you've got it bad? What if a bat took off with your monocle and it's not even insured? This is the first example I saw of the comics of Ben Dewey at Things Could Be Worse. The tragic things that happen in each panel are so absurd, they have to make you feel better about whatever else is going on. Link -via Mostly Forbidden Zone
Ken Desrosiers grew the biggest pumpkin in Connecticut history. He also kept a camera on it so we could enjoy this time-lapse video of its journey to 1,487 pounds! Notice the solar panels leaves moving to grab all the sunshine they can. Videogum has a list of neat taglines for this video. Link -via The Daily What
