Miss Cellania's Blog Posts

Animated Interactive Starry Night


(vimeo link)

Digital artist Petros Vrellis created an interactive version of Vincent Van Gogh's painting Starry Night. The brushstrokes movie and activate music. Vrellis tells more about the project at Creative Applications. Link -via The Daily What

 

See also: Starry Night is Everywhere!

Sewage Plant Hosting Valentine's Day Tour

For those of you looking for ideas for a romantic Valentine's Day date, the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn is offering a morning tour of its sludge-processing facility.
Put on some comfortable boots, snuggle up with your companion, and hold your breath when the plant’s ruggedly handsome superintendent, Jimmy Pynn, explains how the city cleans 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater each day.

You’ll get to see every aspect of the plant’s waste treating process, and even take a trip through its suggestively shaped digester tanks, where plucky microorganisms break down what you and your date ate for lunch yesterday, producing methane and carbon dioxide gas.

And at the end of the tour, Pynn will give each attendee a Hershey’s Kiss — because there’s nothing sweeter than protecting the environment.

One thing's for sure -it will be a Valentine's Day neither of you will ever forget. Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: New York City government)

1UP Mushroom Burger



Mario fans, make your own 1UP Mushroom Burger with tips from momo! at Instructables. This particular burger has a veggie mushroom patty, but you can get the same effect with meat. The spots on the bun are mozzarella cheese! Link -via Laughing Squid

11 Amazing Thank You Notes From Famous People

The art of the thank you note is not practiced as much as it once was, even though they always make the recipient happy. Mental_floss has collected some of the best thank you notes ever from the archives of Letters of Note. For example, here's a note Neil Armstrong sent to the Extravehicular Mobility Unit engineering team.
To the EMU gang:

I remember noting a quarter century or so ago that an emu was a 6 foot Australian flightless bird. I thought that got most of it right.

It turned out to be one of the most widely photographed spacecraft in history. That was no doubt due to the fact that it was so photogenic. Equally responsible for its success was its characteristic of hiding from view its ugly occupant.

Its true beauty, however, was that it worked. It was tough, reliable and almost cuddly.

To all of you who made it all that it was, I send a quarter century’s worth of thanks and congratulations.

Sincerely,

(Signed) Neil A. Armstrong

You'll enjoy the others just as much, if not more. Link

The Greatest Toy in the Universe


(YouTube link)

This video introduced me to Jaimie Mantzel. He not only builds toys, he builds everything else! The top comment at reddit tells more about him.
This guy is a complete and total bad-ass. Seriously. (He's also nearly constantly manic too, but I digress.)

He has this giant tree-house he built in the middle of the woods by hand which he actually lives/lived in. When he realized he needed a lumber mill to build a giant workshop to go along with his tree house in the woods, he made one himself, with two tires, a motor, and some aluminum poles (no joke).

Why did he need a giant workshop in the middle of the woods, you ask? To build a working life size version of this robot of course! And he did it using 99% junk yard scrap MacGyvered together (like everything else he does). He also wore chain-mail while doing all this to 'stay fit'.

He has a video blog with tons of videos on YouTube. This guy is so interesting he has caused countless people to spend 10+ hours watching his videos in a single sitting (myself included!). Just look at the other comments here and you'll see how common an occurrence this is.

P.S. Almost forgot! His "tree house" has a giant trampoline in one of the rooms integrated into the floor (one of those giant backyard ones).

P.P.S. He also somehow convinced his lady-friend to move out into the middle the woods and into his tree-house with him while he did all of this. :o

Anyway, this toy does not yet have a name, but he is working with a toy company to eventually produce it. -via reddit

Building the Lego Super Star Destroyer



Tran, Ken, and Rodney (who writes for GAS) got together to build a 50-inch long Super Star Destroyer from the deluxe LEGO kit. All 3152 pieces of it. And they documented the process in photos, which you can see at Geeks Are Sexy. Link

Beer Bottle Excavator Trick


(YouTube link)

The person operating this Bobcat E50 excavator no longer has to fill out employment applications; he just sends the YouTube link! -via Bits and Pieces

Directions


(YouTube link)

Nisheisha lives in Jamaica, but there's no chance you will find her home. I have learned from experience that you never trust directions given by children or by people who do not drive. I've also learned from experience that those are the people who will ask you for a ride. Oh, they may be able to show you where they live, but you'll be past a turn before they tell you to turn "back there." Go ahead, ask a child near you for directions to some nearby landmark! -via Cynical-C

The Art of Living



Grant Snider at Incidental Comics found the secret to making life a lot more artful, interesting, and ...strange. Link -Thanks, Rich!

The Science Fiction Effect

Scientific breakthroughs inspire science fiction. But that door swings both ways, because popular science fiction and its reception also affect scientific research and its reputation, as the general public is more likely to read a science fiction novel or see a movie than to discuss the merits of the latest genetic studies. The most popular science fiction comes from someone who follows science and thinks, "What could possibly go wrong?" The classic example is the group of young educated writers who got together around the time Luigi Galvani was getting publicity for his experiments in animating frog muscles with electricity.
While the group of friends at Lake Geneva imagined the ghoulish possibilities of galvanism, one young woman was so horrified by the idea of reanimating corpses that she subsequently had a dream in which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This dream inspired her to write a horror story in which a "mad scientist" creates a monster out of dead body parts, a monster that wreaks havoc and kills innocents. The author is Mary Shelley. The story, of course, is Frankenstein. Considered by many to be the first true work of science fiction, it was certainly the world's first cautionary tale about the perils of science messing around with life.

There are other examples in a post at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Author Laura H. Kahn wants to encourage scientists to write more fiction, so that stories about science could be more informative, and maybe a little less horrifying. Link -Thanks, Janice!

Dog with Cat



The person who submitted this photo to Black and WTF took the picture himself in the 1950s. Link -via Buzzfeed

'Rasputin Was My Neighbor' And Other True Tales Of Time Travel

When we heard of the death of Florence Green, the final surviving veteran of World War I, many people stopped and thought about the old people who are our living links to history. Robert Krulwich at NPR has a list of people and stories that span a lot of years, like the guy he met in 1973 who recalled living near Rasputin, the mad monk of Imperial Russia.
How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn't seem possible. Yet the old guy said, "Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea."

I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.

Other stories involve an eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination who appeared on television, Civil War widows who saw the 21st century, and the man who met both President John Quincy Adams and President John Kennedy. Link -via Breakfast Links

The Volkswagen Octophant



Caleb Kraft decorated his 1977 VW Microbus with a mural of an "octophant," an elephant head with a trunk and tentacles! That's not all -he installed handmade stained glass in the van as well. So if you see a Microbus with stained glass and an elephant inside, you know who it is. Or continue reading for a video of the project.

 
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Big Wax Job



You have to wonder if the eight-foot-tall woman has to pay extra to get her legs waxed. Or is the aesthetician just very small? There's some question of whether this picture is a Photoshop disaster or just a photo taken at a strange angle. What do you think? Link

Paper Mâché Rhino Escapes from Zoo


(YouTube link)

Zookeepers at the Tama Zoo and the Ueno Zoo, both in Tokyo, undergo annual training in what to do if an animal escapes. Although the training is serious business, it appears ridiculous to onlookers because they cannot use real animals. This year's escaped animal drill at the Ueno Zoo featured a papier mâché rhinoceros. It appears to be the same fake rhino they used for the drill in 2008. Link -via Arbroath

See also: the Ueno Zoo's zebra drill and the tiger drill at the Tama Zoo.

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