Brendan.jordan

Hold the phone. McCarren Park is getting an ice skating rink?!

It’s true! The McCarren Park Pool located on the Greenpoint-Williamsburg border will serve double duty, transforming into an ice rink during winter months. The rink will open on November 15 and will be the first of its kind in northern Brooklyn.

The rink will sit atop the concrete plaza that juts into the center of the pool (known as “The Beach” to swimmers). At 7,200 square feet it will accommodate more than 300 skaters.

The rink won’t be big enough for hockey leagues, but the parks department will offer classes, workshops and demonstrations in hockey, curling and figure skating. Time to get your Tara Lipinksi on, Greenpoint! The rink will also include a gift market and food carts.

If you don’t have skates, don’t worry. You’ll be able to rent them for $5. The rink will be open 11am to 10pm every day of the week through at least January depending on its popularity. Skating will cost $4 for children and $8 for adults. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than Manhattan prices. Ice skating at Central Park’s Wollman Rink on the weekend will run you $18. Rockefeller Center? $27. And that’s not including the fee for skate rentals.

An ice-skating rink was part of the original $50 million pool reconstruction plan, but those plans fell through last year due to financial woes. According to The New York Times, park officials are hoping for success at the McCarren Park rink. Any revenue generated will go towards improving parks in northern Brooklyn.

[ By Steph in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

Small electrical impulses detected by a brain-computer headset produce strange and amazing 3D printed objects in a new project by George Laskowsky of Thinker Thing.  The Emotiv EPOC headset analyzes brain patterns and uses it to understand the wearer’s emotional response to certain features in visual stimuli; in this way, the wearer is able to ‘grow’ a three-dimensional model with their mind.

Laskowsky successfully created the first real physical object made with brain patterns in May, and set out to fund the project on IndieGoGo. Thinker Thing will take the invention to Chile, where children will use the technology to create fantastical creatures, which will be exhibited in a gallery.

How is it possible to create an object with the mind? “We use your brain patterns to evolve a 3D model from a genetic seed, which can then be made real with a standard 3D printer. The DNA seed defines the start point of an evolutionary chain for the object. Dinosaurs are very diverse, for example, but they can be traced back to a single common dna ancestor. We create this first DNA definition as the first building block from which all future objects evolve.The DNA of the object is then mutated over each generation, and how well that new mutations does, whether it lives or dies, is determined by the mind.”

“We are all born creative, our brain begins like an open field and can make connections in many directions, it is only later we become stuck in the ruts and troughs of the paths that our mind constantly treads, paths so deep we are sometimes unable to see that there is still an open field around us. Mistaking skill (a learned ability) with creative imagination is like believing walking in a deeper rut gives you greater freedom of movement across the field.”

Learn more at IndieGoGo.

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[ By Steph in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

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Taking on a DIY project often means that, unlike building furniture from IKEA, you won't have the nuts and bolts that you'll need set aside and packaged for you. To that end, the folks at Bolt Depot have put together a handy cheat sheet that you can use as field guide to fasteners. More »

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

A talented cast, backed by brilliant directors and writers, makes you feel like part of the action – not just through the actors telling a story, but also via the familiar spaces they regularly occupy in each episode (sometimes for years).

Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde is an artist and designer who painstakingly analyzes and draws out the rooms your favorite characters and their tales occupy, be they the charming sitcom Golden Girls or the macabre drama of Dexter.

And while our minds generally complete the picture for us, many of these famous dwellings do not really exist in a complete way, and some are never fully shown because of camera, entrance and exit placements, leaving our imagination to fill in the gaps.

In some cases, the action spans more than a single apartment, as in Friends where it is ultimately about two neighboring units and the hallway in between.

In other cases, like the Simpsons, seeing the plan makes you realize how simple it is in a fictional world that is wacky in so many ways – it is the backdrop, not a character itself. In the end, real life or otherwise, everyone needs doors, floors, windows and walls. Check out DeviantArt for a closer look or to buy a print.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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For nearly 30 years, Alex Trebek has been the man with all the questions, leading Jeopardy!, the brainiest game show on television, through dramatically changing times without fundamentally changing a thing. But Trebek has suffered some health problems, including a mild heart attack last summer, and he’s expected to retire from the post in 2016. Meanwhile, Matt Lauer is the $25 million captain of the sinking ship known as NBC’s Today show, which has recently hemorrhaged viewers to ABC’s Good Morning, America, now the #1 morning show in the country. On Wednesday, the New York Times’ Brian Stetler broke a juicy story about the terrible dysfunction at the Today show, with one anonymous source after another blaming Lauer for fostering a toxic relationship with both staff members and the public at large. Lauer’s fingerprints could not be wiped from the messy departure of co-host Ann Curry ...

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