Delicious Monster - Catalog Software

Software that helps catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games. ...and it's only $40.

Just hold a CD or DVD or video game or book or whatever up to your webcam, and it magically reads the UPC and downloads that item’s cover and all pertinent information about it. It then displays all of your stuff on photorealistic shelves.

Good for collectors that have too many things to remember, for people with large libraries or to keep track of valuables in case of a fire or break in.

Product Site »

[via Gizmodo]

1980s Cell Phone Montage

After watching this I now see why it was rude to talk on cell phones. They were ugly, foreign and bizarre, only the rich had them and they had bad reception so you had to yell.

Baby Sloths

I love how slow they move. Trippy.

Thank God for crash tests

Crash testing was held at 64km/h or approx. 40MPH. Hopes of exporting this truck was shattered... Good riddens.

Dimp - Direct Video Interaction

This is a novel and fun way to play with video. Why didn't I think of that :/

Efficiant Image Recognition

US and Israeli researchers have developed software that can identify the subject of an image characterized using only 256 to 1024 bits of data. The researchers said this "could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do." As an example, they've picked up about 13 million images from the Web and stored them in a searchable database of just 600 MB, making it possible to search for similar pictures through millions of images in less than a second on a typical PC. The lead researcher, MIT's Antonio Torralba, will be presenting the research next month at a conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[via Slashdot]

Fluid Pop & Lock (Robert Muraine)

Some seriously psychedelic popping and locking from Robert Muraine on So you think you can dance.

Social Networking Wars (Cartoon)

Different ways to put on jeans

Music Vest.. for when your just hanging around

Shutting off your brain with magnets

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a process in which you run an electromagnet over parts of the brain, which essentially turns them off.

Energy Distribution Visualization

This is a chart from the Lawrence Livermore National Labs that shows the sources of energy that we start with traces the paths to its consumption. One of the observations this chart gives us is that more than half the energy that is produced is lost in transmission and distribution to the factories, vehicles, and homes. The insight that follows is that saving one unit of energy at the point of consumption results in two units being saved at the point of production. [via Technology Factors]

No News BBC

Monkey on a goat on a cup on a tight rope

Holy Crap!

Fire retardant that looks and acts like water

This new fire retardant is a chemical that evaporates five times faster than water. Because of this and the fact that it doesn't conduct electricity, it will not cause damage to water sensitive things like artwork or electronics.

Watch the video »

Fractal Drawers

By properly staggering 23 drawers of varying sizes, Takeshi Miyakawa has made use of every inch inside this cube. [via Gizmodo]

Historic Movie Rental Store (Onion)

Blockbuster

Paper Art by Jen Stark

Annual - Have your period once a year (SNL)

MUTO - Amaizing Wall-Painted Animation

Short film by Blu
an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

music by Andrea Martignoni
produced by Mercurio Film
assistant: Sibe

blublu.org/
blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

Street Art, Graffiti

Multitouch Missile Command

My favorite game ported to a multitouch interface. Big probs to my friend Steve Mason for contributing to this Obscura Digital project. I assume this was a test for something more complicated, but I think missile command is a pinnacle use of hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware and development.

Hail Mr. Mason!!

El Camino Del Rey (Walkway)

Watch for a few minutes at least... it gets to some intense points. Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.

Reminds me of Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider.

Ingenious Scrollbar

African fractals (TED)

"I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof." This is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families, while researching the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigo

Do schools kill creativity? (TED)

The last three minutes of this talk are very profound.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (TED)

Paul Staments home page »
Prototaxites on Wikipedia »

Podcast: Paul on smallpox »

Machine music made from Citezen Cane

Installation proposal for artbots 2008:
Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part's not done yet, so you won't see it in the video.)

In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.

Japanese Human Massage Chair

Genghis Khan Massage Chair skit from the Kinchan no Kasoh Taisho special.

Helping regular people make techno

Hehehe, so freaking funny...gets really good half way in.

Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh, in The Pod, a short-lived series from a few years back: "The Pod are a late eighties electronic dance outfit trying to cope with the mid nineties post rave come down."

Open source multi-touch display

Cubit is an open-source, multitouch, tabletop display, similar to Microsoft’s Surface but less expensive and requiring assembly. The top picture shows a user whose fingers are leaving traces on the table’s surface. The bottom picture shows the Cubit unit, fully assembled.

Learn more »
Learn how to build one at home »

Babies droped off roof for good luck (India)

Watch Now »

How To Sync Five Metronomes

This is one of those things you never knew you didn't need to know. This guy uses a mobile plank and two tin cans too synchronize five metronomes.

1989 Virtual Community Meetup (WELL Party)

Learn more about it »