LEGO Gun

Thriller Automatic is a LEGO gun designed by http://www.xubor.com

Eat and dance for no reason or for bread

Raymond Scott Documentary

Raymond Scott's son Stan Warnow is making a documentary about his father's live. Here is a quick preview.

Large Bird Swarm

Ghost

Russian Grandmas...

Finding ARPANET: The First (Physical) Site of the Internet

The birth place of the first internet transmission was on October 29th 1969 at 10:30pm from room 3420 (aka 3424) in Stanford University. ...uh supposedly!

BMWs Cloth Shapeshifting Concept Car

[via Wired]

Fast 3D in Flash

Click here to view the demo.

Alternativa3D tech specs:
• signals system — only nesessary calculations
• BSP — quality polygon sorting, "sharp" crossings
• n-gons support
• reusing layers (only changed regions redrawing, polygons are independent)
• objects hierarchy
• only necessary matrix, coords and UVs recalculating
• perspective correction — dynamic triangulation
• collision detection

And this is not all. In a future we’ll create and implement some new features:
• dynamic lighting and shadows (point and directional lights)
• bump lighting
• parallax mapping
• automatic UV-mapping
• sprites, 3D-sprites
• sprite lighting
• texture objects
• Global Illumination imitation
• sprite pre-render system (phases render on server using uploaded 3D-models)
• animation system (including inverse kinematics)
• 3D-objects interactivity
• physics simulation

Source code and more info »

[via 3D Thing]

Penguin Shit, Nuclear Reactors, Technical BBQing and Whale Sex (TED)

A very funny and entertaining video about renaissance man Nathan Myhrvold and the things he does.



Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire. Listen for wild stories from the (somewhat raunchy) edge of the animal world

Weathered walls repaired by Legos

Artists repair walls in Italy with Lego's [via Gizmodo]

Fastfood Feedbag (Onion)

Extreme Ski Gliding

This takes the cake for extreme sports. One wrong move and ski master equals hamburger.

Radiohead Hardware Performance

A Radiohead song reconstructed using the sounds from various gadgets.

The Moog Guitar

Infinite sustain and muting control. Every guitarists dream.

I imagine that it works similar to a Ebow with a magnetic field controlling the sustain and muting with a little help from a logic board and pickups, but for each string. When I realize that, it makes me wonder why this wasn't thought of before.

Now this dream will not be yours for $6500.

Product Page »

Radiohead - End Inhuman Trafficing Video

A powerful video juxtaposing the two lives of kids. One a regular suburban kid and the other is forced to work in a factory.

Unison, fourth and fifth...and nothing else

“Unison, fourth and fifth, that’s what its all about. All other intervals are shit!”

Dancing Nanobots

These robots are just the size of a hair, but up to five of them can be independently, wirelessly controlled to work (and dance) in harmony. The robots are able to move by inch-worming 10-20 billionths of a meter at once somewhere around 20,000 times a second. The result is small robots that can make their way around with relative alacrity, but still home in on precise movements. [va Gizmodo]

Optical Illusion

Why does the illusion work?

The visual system needs to determine the color of objects in the world. In this case the problem is to determine the gray shade of the checks on the floor. Just measuring the light coming from a surface (the luminance) is not enough: a cast shadow will dim a surface, so that a white surface in shadow may be reflecting less light than a black surface in full light. The visual system uses several tricks to determine where the shadows are and how to compensate for them, in order to determine the shade of gray "paint" that belongs to the surface.

The first trick is based on local contrast. In shadow or not, a check that is lighter than its neighboring checks is probably lighter than average, and vice versa. In the figure, the light check in shadow is surrounded by darker checks. Thus, even though the check is physically dark, it is light when compared to its neighbors. The dark checks outside the shadow, conversely, are surrounded by lighter checks, so they look dark by comparison.

A second trick is based on the fact that shadows often have soft edges, while paint boundaries (like the checks) often have sharp edges. The visual system tends to ignore gradual changes in light level, so that it can determine the color of the surfaces without being misled by shadows. In this figure, the shadow looks like a shadow, both because it is fuzzy and because the shadow casting object is visible.

The "paintness" of the checks is aided by the form of the "X-junctions" formed by 4 abutting checks. This type of junction is usually a signal that all the edges should be interpreted as changes in surface color rather than in terms of shadows or lighting.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view.

More Info »

Office Man Goes Totally Bezerk

This is by far the best office freak out I have found. It's to over the top, I wonder how real it is...still very entertaining. If it is real I feel sorry for the poor guy smashing everything. Seems like he had enough of things...and we all know that feeling.



Second angle with sound:

Real-time Stats of the World

This is pretty neat. Shows you in real-time what things are taking place (death, birth, computers sold, etc.)
http://www.worldometers.info/

Contact Jugglers

Glass Ball, Fluid Liquid Dancer

Tennis for Two: first video game, 50 years ago

1958

NASA - Visible Magnetic Fields

It's not real, but a 3D mock up of what they may look like. Still pretty neat.

Brilliant Analog Traffic Signal

This analog traffic signal was in use from the 1940s through the 1970s in Australia. Instead of solid lights, the analog rotating signal shows you exactly how much time you've got left in a green or a red, allowing you to better time your "floor it, we can make it" so as to not run the light and get caught by the intersection cameras.



Stop Sign, Stop Light, Traffic Light, Clock, Hands, Rotating

Skateboarding in a waterpark