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I think you could make a really good Star Wars movie where scientists discover force access is just a matter of implicit memory, and the robes and sayings are all just layered on top.
Happy New Year, geeks!
With sets like 70620 Ninjago City and 70657 Ninjago City Docks, The LEGO Ninjago Movie brought a cyber-punk aesthetic to official LEGO sets, which in cool factor is only eclipsed by the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the new LEGO sets from The LEGO Movie 2. While LEGO fans have certainly been building cyberpunk creations for many years, even more builders have embraced this aesthetic, inspiring numerous custom LEGO models, including our own Ninjago City collaborative display at BrickCon, featuring over 60 custom city blocks. Sebastian Bachórzewski is an incredibly talented builder who builds in everything from medieval to post-apoc style. His latest large-scale model is “Layers City,” featuring a slice cut from a teeming metropolis full of colorful characters.
Like Ninjago City, the top of the city features sleek, modern buildings bristling with technology.
The main street layer is a jumbled mess of shops and people, with air conditioning units hanging precariously out of nearly every window.
The people are the focus at the street level, with scenes of minifigs in crazy outfits with wild hair bustling about.
Signage is a huge part of the Asian cyberpunk aesthetic (as seen in movies like Blade Runner, which inevitably inspired the production design for later movies like The LEGO Ninjago Movie). Sebastian incorporates stickers from Ninjago sets to advertise the various goods and services available to denizens of Layers City.
Finally, the lowest level of the city features an abandoned rail line, graffiti, time-worn architecture, and characters you might not want to meet in a dark alleyway.
Ragged cloth, chipped stone, barrel fires, and exposed pipes emphasize the squalid conditions in which people at the bottom of the city live in compared to the high-tech tower at the top.
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Of course, all the really good philosophers are yelling on twitter.
There have been some pretty spectacular LEGO versions of Star Wars’ iconic trench run over the years, setting the bar pretty high for anyone taking on the theme. Pro building group Olive Seon have risen to the challenge, deploying intricate details worthy of the original Industrial Light and Magic model. Its nifty laser towers and exploded Y-wing fighter demonstrating some serious building talent, and a hefty upgrade from their first version, which we covered back in 2015.
The surprises don’t end here: rotate the diorama to reveal a complete Death Star interior. Each of the space station’s rooms acting as individual vignettes, from a scene showing Obi Wan’s deactivation of the tractor beam to a battalion of stormtroopers caught mid-explosion. There is plenty of humour here too: ever wanted to see the battle station’s locker room? Well now you can. My favourite feature though is the hilariously over-sized BrickHeadz Stormtrooper herding his droids.
The model is fully lit, as this photo from the builders’ studio shows.
The back is lit as well, with impressive tractor beam controls that almost look close enough to fit into the movie.
There are classrooms for Imperial cadets, though the teaching might be questionable.
And speaking of questionable, there’s no telling what Stormtroopers get up to in the side corridors.
Vader’s chambers are well outfitted with a magnificently lit meditation chamber.
R2-D2 and C-3P0 are up to no good, as usual, having apparently raided the larder while Luke wasn’t looking.
Looks like the Imperials have had a bit of success with tracking down Rebels, though, as they have a packed detention floor for prisoners needing even more security than Leia.
And if you weren’t convinced just how massive this model is yet, check out this image of the creators working on it.
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I had a guy ragequite my patreon over this, but we can all still be friends, right?
In Norse mythology, the god Oden is accompanied by two ravens; one named Hugin and the other named Munin. Respectively, their names mean “thought” and “memory,” and as legend goes, they fly the world by day and return to Oden at night to tell what they learn. This beautiful LEGO representation of Hugin is the work of builder Birgitte Jonsgard. It is one of the best brick-built birds I have ever seen. She did a truly lovely job on the body-shaping, and yes, his wings do unfold!
Also check out Birgitte’s still life art in LEGO form!
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My new website, skimmedit (tm) is just reddit but you can only read headlines and comment on what you think the article is about.
On the internet, a fierce debate rages. Are hot dogs sandwiches? Are Pop-Tarts ravioli? Is sushi toast? Into the fracas steps @phosphatide with their brilliant Cube Rule of Food. The idea is that you can fit all food into one of seven categories based on where the starch in a dish is positioned:
For example, enchiladas, falafel wraps, and pigs in a blanket are all sushi because the starch covers four sides of the cube like so:
Likewise, pizza is toast, a quesadilla is a sandwich, a hot dog is a taco, key lime pie is a quiche, and a burrito is a calzone.
The zero-eth category is a salad, i.e. anything that doesn’t include starch (like a steak) or in which the starch is distributed throughout the dish (like fried rice, spaghetti, and soup (“a wet salad”)).
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Pyrite is actually much more visually interesting than gold, but after the apocalypse comes, you won't be able to trade it for dune buggies, scimitars, and spiked helmets.
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Thanks to all the awful people on twitter who told me about the bags and bags of crap we've left on the moon.
I must admit that animals often catch my eye by themselves, but this immersive group of builds by Sven Franic is even better. It’s easily recognizable as Hedwig and a collection of Harry Potter’s possessions. But what impresses me the most is the exceptional attention to detail and unique use of parts. Take the ink-spill or the black hotdog wick on the candlestick, for example.
The conical hat from LEGO Ninjago sets was an excellent way to finish off the handle of the wand. Additionally, the 6-stud shooter and gold wheel were a great solution for the lamp filament. I admire the body-shaping for Hedwig, as it’s not an easy feat to produce nice feathers on a bird looking straight on, let alone from the side.
Sven is not a stranger to building birds. Back in June he produced a pretty epic toucan. You could even build your very own cuckoo clock bird using Sven’s excellent instructions!
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Here is some evidence for how territorial wolves are. This map is the result of 68,000 GPS-locations from 7 wolves in different packs from this past summer. Each wolf's collar took locations every 20 min (with the exception of the northernmost pack which took locations every 4 hr starting in October) for the duration of the summer...
This detailed GPS-data is incredibly valuable for understanding pack boundaries and also for our predation research. We visited every spot these wolves spent more than 20 minutes to determine if the wolves made a kill.
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Like 80% of recent comics have been inspired by a thing Scott Aaronson wrote.
In space, enemies can come from any side. And so rigorous armor is needed in addition to heavy armaments. Enter Patrick Massey‘s UNN-717 Olympia, replete with rows of chunky armor paneling and heavy turrets and a subtle submarine vibe (complete with rudder and diving planes). The nearly unbroken grey of the ship’s hull lends weight and scale to the model, helping it convey the ship’s monstrous size. And speaking of size, the LEGO model is no slouch either, ringing in around 3 feet in length.
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Years ago, when I was leading swamp walks at Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery, I noticed what looked like an oil slick on the surface of the water. One of the swamp walk leaders with much more experience, Jeff Ripple, explained that the natural oils from the cypress cones disbursed once they dropped in the water.Top photo via the Pics subreddit. The quoted text and the photo below are from Florida Hikes.
The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.I'm embarrassed to have excerpted so much text, but there is much more at the link - essential reading for anyone pondering the purchase of a diamond for a loved one.
The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa...
De Beers proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depression...
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life...
Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public's picture of the way a man courts -- and wins -- a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman...
An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption "A Diamond Is Forever," which was scrawled on the bottom of a picture of two young lovers on a honeymoon. Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds...
Not only did it organize a service to "release to the women's pages the engagement ring" but it set about exploiting the relatively new medium of television by arranging for actresses and other celebrities to wear diamonds when they appeared before the camera...
Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage...
An advertising campaign could instill the idea that the gift of a second diamond, in the later years of marriage, would be accepted as a sign of "ever-growing love."..
DeBeers devised the "eternity ring," made up of as many as twenty-five tiny Soviet diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of older married women. The advertising campaign was based on the theme of recaptured love. Again, sentiments were born out of necessity: older American women received a ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Soviet Union...
Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low. The "keystone," or markup, on a diamond and its setting may range from 100 to 200 percent, depending on the policy of the store; if it bought diamonds back from customers, it would have to buy them back at wholesale prices. Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut the widely held notion that diamonds go up in value...
But a panic on the part of investors is not the only event that could end the diamond business. De Beers is at this writing losing control of several sources of diamonds that might flood the market at any time, deflating forever the price of diamonds...
By the mid-1980s, the avalanche of Australian diamonds will be pouring onto the market. Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices. If they do, the diamond invention will disintegrate and be remembered only as a historical curiosity, as brilliant in its way as the glittering little stones it once made so valuable.
The spread of synthetic diamonds in China, originally designed for industrial purposes such as oil drilling, is posing such a threat to the global diamond market that it has forced dominant player De Beers to invest tens of millions of dollars on methods to identify the man-made stones that look exactly like the real thing...Indeed, even the most experienced diamantaire’s in the world can’t tell the fakes from those extracted from mines when using their naked eye, which is where technology comes in. More affordable prices, which are only seen dropping further over time, have already prompted budget shoppers to gravitate towards the man-made gems.“The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only increase because supply in natural diamonds has peaked and due to strong Asian demand,” said Georgette Boele, a coordinator of precious metals strategy at Dutch bank ABN Amro...
Companies producing such stones have sprung up all over China, churning out an estimated 160,000 to 200,000 carats of gem-quality diamonds every month. That’s enough to propel the country to the world’s top spot in terms of synthetic production, industry insiders believe...
In a 2015 case in Shanghai, authorities found that 14 per cent of the rough diamonds and set jewellery in a sample labelled “natural” were man-made. Similar incidents happened in Mumbai, India, which is the world’s No.1 diamond exporting country...
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It's too bad cyborg technology hasn't gotten beyond fork-shaped hands, though.
A likely story, “John Stevenson,” if that is your real name.
“Stevenson” is a 70-year-old Scot from Inverclyde (or so he claims) who had planned to fly to New York City on December 3 along with a companion purporting to be his wife, “Marion.” They reportedly described the purpose of the trip as a “holiday,” but no details were provided. But the trip is on hold now, after eagle-eyed bureaucrats at Customs and Border Protection noticed that “Stevenson” had answered “yes” to a question on the immigration form that asks whether a traveler plans to do any terrorism while in the United States.
Of course, he claims this was a mistake.
In most cases, travelers need a visa as well as a passport to enter the United States legally, but citizens of about two dozen countries can apply for a visa waiver. 8 C.F.R. § 217. This can usually be done online through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, which is what “Stevenson” was using. The ESTA form asks for basic information like name, address, passport number, and so forth, and then has a series of questions that, if answered “yes” truthfully, will make all the prior questions irrelevant. The applicant may not be denied a visa for that reason alone, but will have to visit a consulate and fill out more traditional forms. In this case the applicant was tripped up by the ESTA terrorism question.
I tried to get a look at this on the ESTA website, but couldn’t get to that question. The online form has multiple pages, and this question is on a later page. Answering all the earlier questions truthfully wouldn’t work (I’m a U.S. citizen so don’t need a visa), and I didn’t know what false information to provide (e.g., I don’t have a passport number from another country). Please understand, I did my best to fabricate the necessary answers on this government form in order to get this information for you. I just didn’t succeed. But most likely the ESTA question is the same as the one on the I-94W Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver form. And on that form, the question reads as follows:
Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide? ___ Yes ___ No
Obviously this presents any terrorist, spy, saboteur, or … genocide-committer with an inescapable dilemma. Either they tell the truth, which at a minimum will mean it will be utterly impossible to get into the U.S. to carry out their plan, or they lie, in which case they will be in really big trouble for lying on a government form. Law enforcement may not even need to get involved, because the mental effort required to struggle with this conundrum will frequently cause the evildoer to have a disabling stroke, or simply to explode into easily manageable chunks of foul-smelling goo.
“Stevenson” didn’t suffer either of those fates, but the question did trick him into saying “yes.” He of course blamed the website. “We were filling out the visa form,” he told reporters, “and it kept timing out before we could tick all the boxes.” When he managed to reach the “terrorist” question, he claimed he answered “no” and the website then had another issue. The answer then “must have jumped from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ without me knowing,” he expected listeners to believe.
When the alleged grandfather noticed his “mistake” after completing the form, he persevered, contacting U.S. officials directly to give them his information. Of course, this did not fool them. “They looked up my ESTA number and said ‘you’re a terrorist,'” he said.
Once an ESTA application is denied, the applicant can’t use that system again. He or she can still apply for a visa in the regular way, but that is more expensive and takes longer, so it is unlikely that this would help the “Stevensons” in time for their December 3 “holiday.” United Airlines has told them that the cost of the flights, at least, would not be refunded because of missing travel documents. One source suggested the couple might be able to “fix the error” by visiting the U.S. embassy in London and talking with officials. Following that interview, they would presumably be cleared to visit either New York temporarily or Guantanamo permanently.
The New York Times claimed that the Department of Homeland Security could not or would not explain the reason for the ESTA terrorism question when asked about this report, and according to the Times, “it is not clear why any terrorist, spy, saboteur or mass murderer would answer ‘yes.'” But the Times apparently did not check the CBP’s Frequently Asked Questions page, which makes clear that “ESTA counterbalances vulnerabilities inherent in visa-free travel by adding a layer of advance scrutiny that enables DHS frontline personnel to focus even more on the small population of potentially dangerous travelers.” Though I guess, to be honest, that doesn’t really explain how the question “are you a terrorist” does that.
Still, DHS promises that it “has carefully developed the ESTA program to ensure that only those individuals who are ineligible to travel to the United States under the VWP or those whose travel would pose a law enforcement or security risk are refused an ESTA,” and that’s certainly good enough for me.
As far as I can tell, no actual terrorist, spy, saboteur, or mass murderer has been refused an ESTA to date for answering “yes,” but the Times reports that last year CBP kept out a baby whose grandfather made the same “mistake,” and that earlier this year a former NATO secretary general was refused an ESTA because he admitted he had visited Iran (also a no-no) in 2013. So even if the questions didn’t stop terrorists, they have been proven to keep out babies, NATO secretaries general, and Scottish grandparents, making America that much safer.
Building realistic-looking home decor is a niche that Heikki M has been a master of for years. The use of scale, colors, lighting and the absence of LEGO minifigures all factor into the illusion that you are looking at a real-world space. This latest model is directly inspired by furniture website photograph. LEGO bricks have never looked so comfortable.
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