Designer Garrett Miller has an ongoing project in which he takes children's drawings (and their descriptions) and makes them into professional illustrations. The imagination is still there; he just adds the technical abilities to bring the drawings to a more readable level. The picture shown is by 6-year-old Cody. See some other favorites just ahead.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Designer Garrett Miller has an ongoing project in which he takes children's drawings (and their descriptions) and makes them into professional illustrations. The imagination is still there; he just adds the technical abilities to bring the drawings to a more readable level. The picture shown is by 6-year-old Cody. See some other favorites just ahead.
The instructions for this game are right there in the title: use the space bar. That's all. The game is easy to play, but what they don't tell you up front is how hard it is to stop! Link -via Metafilter
How can you subvert a camera equipped with a facial-recognition system? With crochet! Howie Woo crocheted a mask with a series of detachable facial features that make you look more like a cartoon character than a real, recognizable person.
Hey, these could be useful for creating real-life rage faces, too! There's a video at his site that shows how the system might work, in which a camera discovers that Woo is addicted to potato chips and has one outstanding parking ticket. Link
Free power for the rest of your life! What manner of sorcery can this be? This video will set someone up for two possible kinds of rude shock: dangerous and disappointing. How do you think this was done? -via The Daily What
The Fine Brothers have created an 8-bit "choose your own adventure"-type interactive YouTube game based on the TV series Mad Men! Watch your favorite characters drink, smoke, fool around, and stab each other in the back in all their retro game style glory. There are three different endings to the game, depending on what order you choose your tasks. -Thanks, Benny & Rafi!
Firefighters Ted Aubart and Ben Terhaar of Sedan, Minnesota helped put out a truck fire at a St. Patrick's Day parade last week. They drew attention because the volunteer firemen were wearing elegant formal dresses at the time.
Link -via The Daily What
Every year, the men in the Sedan Fire Department trade their firefighting frocks for designer dresses as part of a beauty pageant of sorts that raises money for new equipment; however, as they were getting ready to ride in the St. Patrick's Day parade, a pickup truck caught fire. That blaze spread to another car, and both Aubart and Terhaar hitched up their skirts and sprang into action.
Aubart can be seen in the pink dress, helping a blue-bedecked Terhaar pour water on the smoldering vehicles.
It only took a couple of minutes to put out the fire -- even though Aubart did havev to adjust his fallen dress straps while on the run.
Link -via The Daily What
A firefighter wearing a helmet-mounted camera attacks a fire in a two-story home. This shows how difficult it is to see what you're doing in all that smoke! They got the job done anyway. -via Blame It On The Voices
Like I tell my kids, you could always choose the alternative: walk to school. Comic by Jeff Wysaski at Pleated-Jeans. Link
To celebrate the USA's bicentennial in 1976, ARCO asked people to predict what the world would be like in the year 2076. The responses were published in a book which included children's drawings of their vision of the future. See more of them at Smithsonian's Paleofuture blog. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Photographer Bob Carey put his dignity on the line for a good cause. He has been taking photos of himself wearing a pink tutu (and little else) in varied and beautiful locations since 2003. Carey is now selling signed photographs and taking pre-orders for a book of pictures to be published this fall. Proceeds go to organizations fighting breast cancer. See plenty more pictures of Carey and his tutu at his newly-launched project site. Link -via Buzzfeed (where you can see a video of a tutu photo shoot)
Imagine that you get a tattoo using ferromagnetic ink that can respond to magnetic signals, such as, oh, your phone ringing. It sounds like a science fiction plot, but a group of inventors have filed a patent application on behalf of Nokia for just such an idea. At first read, it appears that the patent is for a patch you'd attach to your skin, but in notes 0026 and 0027 in the patent application, they mention tattoos. It is common for patents to be worded to cover all foreseeable future uses for a technology in its infancy, but this might just happen. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s not that I have an issue with tattoos — I sport a few myself — but I don’t want anything that is permanently in my skin to be linked to technology that could be obsolete any second. Also, it seems like having an actual part of your body vibrate with your phone would be an incredibly creepy and weird feeling.
(Image credit: Flickr user irina slutsky)
It’s not that I have an issue with tattoos — I sport a few myself — but I don’t want anything that is permanently in my skin to be linked to technology that could be obsolete any second. Also, it seems like having an actual part of your body vibrate with your phone would be an incredibly creepy and weird feeling.
If I were a more paranoid person, I might come up with a sci-fi scenario where people started getting these tattoos and then Nokia sold the technology to the government, who then used it to track and control people. Maybe I’ve read a few too many dystopian novels.
It seems the more likely that people just wouldn't buy it, or wouldn't buy enough to make it a profitable venture. Would you consider such a tattoo? Link
(Image credit: Flickr user irina slutsky)
According to the longer version, this is a 1986 clip from the BBC-TV series That's Life. The George Hotel pub in Castle Cary, Somerset, has three German Shepherds, Jade, Guy, and Izzy, that enjoy a little seltzer. The dogs' owner speaks to them in Japanese -or at least that's what he said he was speaking. -via Arbroath
Once again, it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Do you know what the pictured item is? Can you make a wild and ridiculous guess?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update: the mystery object is a simple ice cube crusher. The first with that answer was just a guess, who wins a t-shirt! The funniest answer came from upiru, who said, "It’s a chewing-gum tester of course. Some clever students even use it to chew their gum discretly under the classroom table." That's good for a shirt, too! Congratulations, and thanks to everyone who played along. See the answers to all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
Postman's Park in London, England, has a small memorial garden featuring 54 plaques that honor common men and women who were never famous, but died during a heroic act of saving someone else.
The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was the brainchild of George Frederic Watts, a painter who, while eminent in the Victorian age, harbored a hatred of pomp and circumstance. Twice refusing Queen Victoria’s offer of a baronetcy, Watts always identified strongly with the straitened circumstances of his youth; he was the son of an impoverished piano-maker whose mother died while he was young. For years, in adulthood, Watts habitually clipped newspaper stories of great heroism, mostly by members of the working classes. At the time of Victoria’s jubilee, in 1887, he proposed the construction of a monument to the men, women and children whose deeds had so moved him—people like Fred Croft, a railway inspector who in 1878 attempted to “save a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by the train,” or David Selves, who drowned, aged 12, in the Thames with the boy whom he had tried to save still clinging to him.
Watts had to scale down his plans for the memorial due to fundraising problems, and kicked in a good chunk of his own money.
Link to story.
Link to an index of the memorials and the stories behind them.
(Image credit: Flickr user David Fisher)
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