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Sarcastic fringehead

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:31:19 +0000

So, um yeah. It's a sea fish, lives in shells, is fiercely territorial, horribly aggressive, attacks anything that moves, and is apparently sarcastic (more on that later).

Pft, like you look any better.

Observe it in action:

The name comes from the origin of the word "sarcasm."

Quote:The word comes from the Greek σαρκασμός (sarkasmos) which is taken from the word σαρκάζειν meaning "to tear flesh, gnash the teeth"

And that it does.

At first I was like

But then, I

Blade 2, anyone?

Pancake art

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:40:40 +0000

Food art week continues! Here's some more cake art, of a bit flatter sort.

Quote:I'm a math teacher on leave for awhile to focus on my children. My family moved to Saipan last summer so my wife, a nurse-midwife, could deliver babies. The silly pancakes began earlier this year as a way to entertain the kids.

Feast your eyes on these doughy creations:

Bugs!

Fractals!

Seafood!

Organs!

Protozoa!

And I used to think making a smiley face on a pancake with chocolate syrup was high art.

See more at the Saipancakes blog.

Amazing Skyrim cake

Sun, 13 May 2012 10:24:45 +0000

Alduin the World Eater... cake!

Quote:[the base] was made of four 13″x18″ sheets of chocolate cake, soaked in strawberry syrup, and sandwiched with bittersweet strawberry ganache (5 lbs of chocolate). Alduin’s core is made of modeling chocolate. His scales, horns, and spikes are made from gum paste. The double-sided wings are half-and-half (fondant/gum paste). His eyes are Swarovsky crystals.

Source.

Google Zerg rush

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:40:00 +0000

Go to google
Enter "zerg rush"
???
Profit!

If you park like this, screw you.

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:29:36 +0000

Seriously? Do you really need 20 parking spaces? Asshole

Talk about inconsiderate.

Hi :)

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:17:48 +0000

Yeahh, just writing to say hi, that's all

The Pipe Organ Desk

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:06:30 +0000

By Kagen Schaefer, a guy who evidently likes to play with his wood.

Quote:When you push in a drawer on the desk the air is directed to one of the organ pipes at the front of the desk, sounding a note. Some of the air is also directed into a pneumatic logic board. The logic board within the desk actually keeps track of the notes played. When it picks up the correct tune it unlocks a very special secret compartment. The logic board, can be reprogrammed to pick up any tune, so at any time the song may be changed to a new tune. It is powered entirely by air, and it is made entirely from solid wood.

Front:

Back:

Organ pipes.

Air connectors connect from the small drawers in the back of the desk to the organ pipes in the front of the desk.

The pnumatic logic board. This is an air powered computer.
It reads eight different sources of airflow which enter through the pipes on the top.
The screws are adjusted to program the computer to accept any sequence, or tune.

When the correct tune is played, air is allowed into this mechanism called the pendulum lock.
This triggers a secret part of the desk to open up.

All large drawers have puzzles inside.
You will need to solve these puzzles to open other drawers or find secret compartments.

Unlocked and open desk.

Source.

Google unveils Project Glass

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:35:04 +0000

Quote:We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Source.

Might as well say it...

need help with xilisoft can just watch 3 minutes

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:07:07 +0000

Hello i really need help wiht Xilisoft DPG converter..

I can just watch 3 minutes on my movie , can anyone help me so i can watch the full movie ?

Over and out

my english is not so good but i try my best

Rouroni Kenshin live action trailer

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:37:49 +0000

Doesn't look bad. We'll see.

Opening in Japan any day now.

Yamaha developing Vocaloid music keyboard

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:36:50 +0000

Quote:An increasing amount of Japanese pop music of late is eschewing vocal cords for Vocaloid, a series of voice synthesizers developed by Yamaha that is designed to fill the role of human singers. The most famous of these is Hatsune Miku, who has an image and persona more visible than many "real" Japanese stars, though it's otherwise quite a niche phenomenon. One problem with Vocaloid tracks is the difficulty of authentic live performances, but Yamaha is working on something to combat this — a real-time Vocaloid keyboard that allows players to "sing" syllable by syllable.

The keyboard is made possible by the relative simplicity of Japanese phonology, with only fifty or so possible syllables in the language altogether. Syllables are selected by simultaneously pressing a Roman alphabet key with a D-pad-shape modifier for one of the five Japanese vowels — so, for example the "K" key with an "A" directional press would result in a "KA" consonant. This is all done with the left hand, with the right hand controlling each syllable's pitch via a standard keyboard layout, and there's an LED display to confirm character input. The interface seems simple and logical for Japanese speakers, though it will take some practice to get right — Yamaha says that several players so far have been able to play nursery rhymes after around three hours with the device.

Source

Carved book landscapes

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:56:03 +0000

Quote:For the better part of three decades multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramee has worked as a stage writer, director, composer, a fabricator of musical instruments, a singer, sculptor, painter and writer. Among his sculptural works are two incredible series of carved book landscapes and structures entitled Biblios and The Great Wall, where the dense pages of old books are excavated to reveal serene mountains, plateaus, and ancient structures.

Source.

Mari0 (Super Mario featuring portals) is out

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:40:02 +0000

Quote:A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn't crazy enough, play 4-player coop, with everyone having their own Portal gun!

Features

Complete recreation of SMB

Elements from Portal

Portal gun that shoots portals

4-player simultaneaous coop

Level Editor that was used to create the levels in the game

33 different hats

Downloadable Mappacks

Game modifiers for extra fun

Source/download (free).

Six-legged giants of Howe Island

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:16:14 +0000

Quote:No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real.

They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What's more, for years this place had a secret. About halfway up, at 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know.

Here's the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there's a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island.

On Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It's a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a "tree lobster" because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.

Then one day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain, ran aground at Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. One passenger drowned. The rest were put ashore. It took nine days to repair the Makambo, and during that time, some black rats managed to get from the ship to the island, where they instantly discovered a delicious new rat food: giant stick insects. Two years later, the rats were everywhere and the tree lobsters were gone.

Totally gone. After 1920, there wasn't a single sighting. By 1960, the Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, was presumed extinct.

There was a rumor, though.

Some climbers scaling Ball's Pyramid in the 1960s said they'd seen a few stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked "recently dead." But the species is nocturnal, and nobody wanted to scale the spire hunting for bugs in the dark.

Climbing The Pyramid

Fast forward to 2001, when two Australian scientists, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, with two assistants, decided to take a closer look. From the water, they'd seen a few patches of vegetation that just might support walking sticks. So, they boated over ("Swimming would have been much easier," Carlile said, "but there are too many sharks."), they crawled up the vertical rock face to about 500 feet, where they found a few crickets, nothing special. But on their way down, on a precarious, unstable rock surface, they saw a single melaleuca bush peeping out of a crack and, underneath, what looked like fresh droppings of some large insect.

Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?

The only thing to do was to go back up after dark, with flashlights and cameras, to see if the pooper would be out taking a nighttime walk. Nick Carlile and a local ranger, Dean Hiscox, agreed to make the climb. And with flashlights, they scaled the wall till they reached the plant, and there, spread out on the bushy surface, were two enormous, shiny, black-looking bodies. And below those two, slithering into the muck, were more, and more ... 24 in all. All gathered near this one plant. They were alive and, to Nick Carlile's eye, enormous. Looking at them, he said, "It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world."

They were Dryococelus australis. A search the next morning, and two years later, concluded these are the only ones on Ball's Pyramid, the last ones. They live there, and, as best we know, nowhere else.

How they got there is a mystery. Maybe they hitchhiked on birds, or traveled with fishermen, and how they survived for so long on just a single patch of plants, nobody knows either. The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these insects protected and into a breeding program.

That wasn't so easy. The Australian government didn't know if the animals on Ball's Pyramid could or should be moved. There were meetings, studies, two years passed, and finally officials agreed to allow four animals to be retrieved. Just four.

When the team went back to collect them, it turned out there had been a rock slide on the mountain, and at first they feared that the whole population had been wiped out. But when they got back up to the site, on Valentine's Day 2003, the animals were still there, sitting on and around their bush.

The plan was to take one pair and give it a man who was very familiar with mainland walking stick insects, a private breeder living in Sydney. He got his pair, but within two weeks, they died.

Adam And Eve And Patrick

That left the other two. They were named "Adam" and "Eve," taken to the Melbourne Zoo and placed with Patrick Honan, of the zoo's invertebrate conservation breeding group. At first, everything went well. Eve began laying little pea-shaped eggs, exactly as hoped. But then she got sick. According to biologist Jane Goodall, writing for Discover Magazine:

"Eve became very, very sick. Patrick ... worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. ... Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand."

Her recovery was almost instant. Patrick told the Australian Broadcasting Company, "She went from being on her back curled up in my hand, almost as good as dead, to being up and walking around within a couple of hours."

Eve's eggs were harvested, incubated (though it turns out only the first 30 were fertile) and became the foundation of the zoo's new population of walking sticks.

When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick showed her rows and rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the captive population. Howe Island walking sticks seem to pair off — an unusual insect behavior — and Goodall says Patrick "showed me photos of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him."

Now comes the question that bedevils all such conservation rescue stories. Once a rare animal is safe at the zoo, when can we release it back to the wild?

On Howe Island, their former habitat, the great-great-great-grandkids of those original black rats are still out and about, presumably hungry and still a problem. Step one, therefore, would be to mount an intensive (and expensive) rat annihilation program. Residents would, no doubt, be happy to go rat-free, but not every Howe Islander wants to make the neighborhood safe for gigantic, hard-shell crawling insects. So the Melbourne Museum is mulling over a public relations campaign to make these insects more ... well, adorable, or noble, or whatever it takes.

They recently made a video, with strumming guitars, featuring a brand new baby emerging from its egg. The newborn is emerald green, squirmy and so long, it just keeps coming and coming from an impossibly small container. Will this soften the hearts of Howe Islanders? I dunno.

Watch video here.

What happens next? The story is simple: A bunch of black rats almost wiped out a bunch of gigantic bugs on a little island far, far away from most of us. A few dedicated scientists, passionate about biological diversity, risked their lives to keep the bugs going. For the bugs to get their homes and their future back doesn't depend on scientists anymore. They've done their job. Now it's up to the folks on Howe Island.

Will ordinary Janes and Joes, going about their days, agree to spend a little extra effort and money to preserve an animal that isn't what most of us would call beautiful? Its main attraction is that it has lived on the planet for a long time, and we have the power to keep it around. I don't know if it will work, but in the end, that's the walking stick's best argument:

I'm still here. Don't let me go.

Source

Pokemon Black/White 2 announced for the DS

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:35:34 +0000

Spoiler (Click to View)

Official page.

Jeremy Lin exposed!

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:46:15 +0000

P......S......Vita Vita Vita Vita Vita Vita Vita

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:28:36 +0000

who's gonna be getting one? funny thing is, this will be the first sony gaming system I own. gonna get the 3g/wifi launch bundle (not the First Edition) seeing as the memory card alone rounds it up to the same price of the regular console. This one actually looks like it is gonna get some good support. Hope it doesn't start any fights with my 3DS

Games. In. SPAAAACE

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:38:16 +0000

Quote:The hype for one of the year's hottest video games, Mass Effect 3 (out March 6, on PS3, Xbox 360 and PCs, ages 17-up) is reaching new stratospheric heights.

Next week, a select intrepid few will have the opportunity to play the full game before it hits stores. Publisher Electronic Arts will be launching copies of the game into space using weather balloons that will be released in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, London and Paris.

Each game has a GPS tracking device onboard and fans can track their return to the Earth on masseffect.com to find a copy and play it a week or more before the game hits stores. (Might not be a bad idea to follow @MassEffect, either.)

Source.

And it's not technically space because weather balloons only go so far up but it's still kinda space. Sorta. A little bit.

Well it's cool either way.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:28:07 +0000

Epic tree chopping action.

Lucas: "Greedo always shot first, you bloodthirsty idiots."

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:18:07 +0000

From his Hollywood Reporter interview:

Quote:The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

You may think that this scene shows Han shooting before the other guy manages pull the trigger, but that's because you're easily confused and also blood-thirsty criminals and want Han to be one too.