Randomness for 6/5

Standard

1) Grippy not Sticky: Stanford engineers develop a material that sticks without getting stuck.

2) Modern superhero comics done in a Golden Age style.

3) KITE FIGHT, a five minute documentary about the sport of soltar pipas, popular in the favelas in Rio. Video.

4) Segmented Glass Sculptures, via Marc Laidlaw

5) Boy Wonders. ::sniffle::

6) A plea for culinary modernism. Being honest about the way people *used* to eat.

7) Taylor Swifties.

Randomness for 6/1

Standard

1) Immortan Joe’s War Boys leave product reviews on Amazon. Shiny!

2) “Though she was a little-known B-movie actress in the 1950s, Allison Hayes also had a legacy with the Food and Drug Administration.

3) My Mad Max: Fury Ponies

4) Showing what’s real and what’s cgi in Mad Max: Fury Road. People have been praising the practical effects in this movie, which some internet bozos thought was a claim that there was no cgi at all. Which is ridiculous. Check out the before and after shots. Pretty interesting.

5) How Hollywood keeps women out.

6) Joint pain, from the gut. Dealing with auto-immune issues through the microbiome. It’s more complex than taking a probiotic.

7) How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body.

Randomness for 5/28

Standard

1) Darpa successfully tests the first bullet that can be steered after it was fired.

2) Geologists grill up stakes with lava… and ruin them.

3) Richard Prince Selling Other People’s Instagram Shots Without Permission for $100K Whenever I feel cynical about publishing, I think about fine arts and give my oil-painter wife a hug. (Of course, if he was skimming other people’s work from reddit, I wouldn’t be surprised…)

4) Feces rained down on outdoor Sweet 16 party. Dumped from a plane, obviously. Stranger than fiction

5) Nothing about this toy makes sense. Video. Don’t watch that without the sound.

6) Law & Order: Daredevil. Video. Also requires sound.

7) A Kickstarter for a horror video game about a blind woman. Cool.

Randomness for 5/4

Standard

1) An Analysis of the Shift in Color Palettes Used in More Than 50 Years of ‘Avengers’ Comic Book Covers.

2) Pancakebot will print your pancakes in any shape you can draw.

3) Norway is planning to ditch FM radio.

4) Why are board game boxes so big? I assume the transport issue is the difference in weight between 10 games and 16; the fewer games stacked on a palette, the less likely the ones at the bottom will be crushed.

5) The website for the “landscape hotel” where they shot most of the movie EX MACHINA is gorgeous design porn.

6) “My daughter spent this whole week preparing to GM her first D&D game.

7) Every question in every Q&A session ever.

Waste into power

Standard

I don’t normally blog about this sort of thing, but I do maintain an active interest in it, but I was pretty excited to read that Audi has built a plant (a small one so far, but they have plans to expand) that creates diesel fuel out of water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and renewable energy sources like solar or wind.

I’ve been waiting for this sort of thing to become feasible. Sure, people all over the world have been working on better forms of power generation using natural forces (like the people who are trying to drive turbines with artificial tornadoes, which seems like a cool idea but might work better in a story than in real life) but storing that energy for use in a mobile vehicle is still a huge issue. Better battery technology would be great, but 100% clean diesel would be preferable.

Then again, I’m still waiting for large scale versions of this guy’s machine that turns old plastic back into oil (video), except powered by wind or solar so some entrepreneur could start “drilling” the Pacific trash vortex.

Technology to turn waste products into power is pretty exciting, (says the guy who, many years ago, nearly bought a device that purportedly turned urine into household electricity).

Randomness for 3/31

Standard

1) Man trolls bookstore w/ fake self-help book covers.

2) A super-tall webcomic about unhappy stories.

3) Double space after a period? Single space? A history.

4) Arnold Schwarzenegger went to reddit to encourage a guy who had a rough day at the gym.

5) Joy Division + Teletubbies = This video

6) A businessman’s affair with his secretary, meticulously documented.

7) Thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon eye remedy proves effective against MRSA and other drug-resistant bacteria.

Randomness for 2/8

Standard

1) A Choose-Your-Own adventure game based on Twitter accounts.

2) Photographs of an iceberg that had recently flipped over to reveal the gem-like underside.

3) A very long exposure photograph of a rock climber wearing glow sticks.

4) Seattle sidewalk art that is invisible until it gets wet, aka “rain art”.

5) Amazon readers post troll reviews of anti-vaxxer’s “pro-Measles” children’s book.

6) Eight tips for studying smarter.

7) Leave aside the association of “white” with good and “black” with bad, this is just terrible phrasing.

Randomness for 12/21

Standard

1) Get your rage on with this complete ranking over every Star Trek episode ever.

2) 22 pictures that prove we live in the future.

3) There’s an “atmospheric river” flooding California.

4) What colour is it? The time of day expressed as a hexidecimal color.

5) Pixel art illustrations that tell a personal story.

6) The relationship between coffee and mesmerism, and the importance of morning rituals. Video.

7) Unused audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomnsky, recorded summer 2002, for the Fellowship of the Ring (extended edition) DVD.

Randomness for 11/11

Standard

1) An entire Tumblr dedicated to the question of whether MilSF author Myke Cole lays eggs.

2) Stan Lee responds to people who ask him when he’s going to retire. Video.

3) Dewitos: Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew.

4) Seventeen-year-old wins science competition by building an efficient algae biofuel lab in her bedroom. I hope this kid becomes a billionaire.

5) Do you get your hair cut at a barber? How to talk your barber about the haircut you want. Includes a helpful video.

6) Museum of selfies.

7) The novel then steps back in time to explain how Rico went from being just another one of Heinlein’s incurious teenaged dullards to an enthusiastic war criminal. In the process, it paints an interesting picture of the world Rico lives in, as well as of the contents of Heinlein’s id. James Nicoll reviews Starship Troopers.

Randomness for 7/30

Standard

1) A People’s History of Tattooine.

2) Batman’s mask would be good protection for Bruce Wayne’s secret identity, according to SCIENCE!

3) Scully likes Science (remix). Video.

4) Enjoy some pix of the world’s largest aquatic insect.

5) Hugo-winning author Lawrence Watt-Evans has been posting the openings to his many works in progress. Instructive.

6) “The Denny,” an advanced bicycle prototype designed for dark, hilly Seattle.

7) CG Deadpool test footage. I’d happily watch this.