 In this video someone out there on the interweb took the time to create stop motion homages to old video games like Pac-Man, Frogger, and Space Invaders. The items in the stop motion video are all from around the house like sponges, toys, cupcakes, salt shakers, leaves, bugs, rocks, etc. First up it features Centipede using cupcakes, muffins, birthday candles, and salt shakers. They did a pretty good job capturing the gameplay in all of them. Next up is Frogger which uses sponges, sequence, watchs, pretzels, and other such items to create a pretty accurate depiction of Frogger even down to the high score. Next up is Asteroids, Space Invaders, and finally Pac-Man where Pac-Man is played by a pizza.
Click over and check out the full stop motion video homage to classic video games. Source: BoingBoing
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Here is a book that I saw over on Google Books which was published in 1881. It is a futurist prediction of the time between 1881 and 1931. The author makes quite a few good preditions but also is a bit over optimistic is some of his other predictions. For example, some of his predictions which did not come to pass were that by 1931 racism would cease to exist, France and Germany would have peacefully resolved their differences over the Rhineland, and the failure of man to be able to fly. Some of the things which he predicted which did happen were the Panama Canal (he names three places where a canal would probably be built), the death of the telegraph and rise of the telephone, prohibition, the fall of Russia to communism around 1900 (though he predicted it would be peaceful), fax machines, and a bunch of other predictions. It's quite a few pages and I think I got to around 40 pages or so.
In this video they have a CH-47 helicopter strapped down to the pavement and they conduct a resonance test on it. This consists of running the blades up to a pretty high speed. There isn't any information in the caption on why they are running the test but some of the comments on the video suggest it is because they were having problems where the helicopter would invert midflight. Once this thing gets up to speed in the video it starts smoking and finally the whole tale rotor section piece there just rips loose from the rest of the helicopter and sags to the ground. Oops.
Here's a pretty crazy resonance video I found over on a video site. You maybe have seen some of our other blogs where they use resonance to form patterns in sand and water. In this video which is similar a guy has about a 30cm diameter piece of paper covered in moss spores. The paper is vibrated and it causes all kinds of crazy patterns to form in the spores (powder). The different frequencies cause different patterns to form. He focuses on two patterns in the video where the spores spin around like a galaxy in the center of the paper; first clockwise and then counterclockwise.
Over on Yahoo's most emailed photos they have several images of these tiny Pygmy Marmoset monkeys which have been kicking around in the top 25 or so for the last two weeks. The photos of these monkeys are from a zoo in Sweden but over on YouTube there is a video of the tiny monkeys in action at a zoo in Canada. According to the caption for this photo these tiny monkey's are the smallest monkeys in the world and live in the upper Amazon basin. The video of the Pygmy Marmoset monkeys shows an adult size monkey next to a baby and then has a hand that moves into camera range for a size comparison.
In this video they show you how to make a wall projector out of an old LCD and one of those overhead projectors. The video shows the guy taking an LCD monitor apart and removing the LCD itself from the case. He then places the LCD on top of the overhead projector projection area and tapes it down on the sides. Additionally he adds one small computer fan to the side to keep it cool (though I'm not sure how much good that tiny fan is doing). The end result is what looks like about a 100 inch screen projection on the wall. The whole setup can probably be completed in under $100.
In this video a group of people are driving down the road and it appears they are going to the World Cup in Germany but that is just a guess. The car has a jersey hanging in it and one guy is waving a small hand flag in front of the camera. Another car pulls up along side them on the freeway and there is a similar group of people in the second car waving flags and yelling (one guy in the back appears to have an open beer). The passenger in the front seat of the other car is holding their tickets out the window and waving them back and forth. Suddenly the tickets fly out of his hand and back down the freeway. Ooops.
So the guy in this video took the idea of a hamster wheel, sized it up, added a reward system, and put his cat in it. The video is of his cat running in the cat wheel and every once in awhile after the wheel goes around enough a piece of food is released and falls down a tube and into the cat wheel. It didn't seem like the cat was stopping to eat the food though so I'm not sure what the cat's reason for running in the cat wheel is. Perhaps the cat treat or whatever it is doesn't fall out very often. Additionally there is a stick which hits top of the wheel and creates a tap tap sound as the wheel goes around.
