Arthur

Here’s more Christmas!

Touché, Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman (Dorkly).

Yep, that about sums it up.

[Source: Dorkly]

Note: Larger, legible version of the chart HERE. But first go HERE to take the Myers-Briggs assessment and get your letters. Remember that Harry Potter character personality type chart? Well here's a Star Wars one, created by Jenny of Geek In Heels. Is it accurate? Probably not. Who cares, just keep changing your answers on the test until you get the character you want. What did you get -- ESFJ? I'm an AT-AT. Bonus Star Trek version made by DeviantARTist loqutor right HERE. Thanks again to carey, who, for two tips in a row, wins a free lunch date with yours truly. Just so we're clear though, my company is free, not the lunch.

…a twerking Twi’lek!

[Source: Blue Milk Special]

When most people don’t get the order they’ve paid for, they flip out, especially during the holiday season. But not Josh Gates, host of SyFy Channel’s “Destination Truth.”

According to BuzzFeed, Josh recently opened a box from Amazon, expecting to find a “Destination Truth” t-shirt. Instead, what he received became one of the happiest Twitter “rants” ever.

Instead of sending me the #DestinationTruth t-shirt I ordered, @Amazon just shipped me hamburger earmuffs. pic.twitter.com/gFa1wUs1mn

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates)

December 12, 2013

But Gates quickly realized he got the better end of the mix-up.

#DestinationTruth t-shirt: $9.99. #HamburgerEarmuffs: $13.99. Who’s laughing now, @Amazon?

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 12, 2013

The hamburger earmuffs were welcomed by Gates, who realized he had comedy gold on his hands…er, ears.

Running late for work, but if I drive quickly I might be able to ketchup. #HamburgerEarmuffs @amazon

pic.twitter.com/wpqUJ1otwH

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 12, 2013

Amazon offered to rectify the situation, but t-shirts are boring.

Amazon: We’re happy to resend your order. ME: Sorry, I can’t hear you through all the lettuce and cheese. #HamburgerEarmuffs

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 12, 2013

The hamburger earmuffs were officially part of the Gates family.

ME: I’m having a salad for lunch. HAMBURGER EARMUFFS: Shhhhh. pic.twitter.com/SebUdH5XsO

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 12, 2013

I was hoping to sleep in today, but it looks like somebody is wide awake. #HamburgerEarmuffs pic.twitter.com/LvbhMW7nxg

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 13, 2013

Oh, just steamin’ my buns. #HamburgerEarmuffs pic.twitter.com/YKJoqjSBfC

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 13, 2013

“Help me Obi Wagyu Kobe. You’re my only hope.” #HamburgerEarmuffs pic.twitter.com/XfrvjxZgWQ

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 15, 2013

And in case you were trying to land your own sweet pair of hamburger earmuffs, you may now be in a bit of a “pickle.”

“But he waved goodbye saying – don’t you fry, I’ll be back again some day…” #HamburgerEarmuffs THE END! pic.twitter.com/EqjSBsaUmL

— Josh Gates (@joshuagates) December 17, 2013

 

But who got the “Destination Truth” shirt instead of the hamburger earmuffs??

[Source: For Lack of a Better Comic]

Games like Nintendo’s Big Brain Academy and apps like Lumosity promise to help you train your brain, but a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience says such brain training activities only work at improving your ability to do the activities themselves.

The study was done by professor Elliot T. Berkman from the University of Oregon’s psychology department and his team. They measured the brain activity of 60 participants using fMRI during a simple test where participants were asked to respond to an on-screen arrow by pressing a corresponding button. In some cases, the system would beep to tell participants to release the button.

This test measured the inhibitory control, or ability to control one’s responses and behaviors, of the study participants. It found that practicing the test every other day for three weeks did show improvement to inhibitory control during the test, but the evidence did not show that the training would translate to a benefit in performing other tasks.

Berkman said:

With training, the brain activity became linked to specific cues that predicted when inhibitory control might be needed. This result is important because it explains how brain training improves performance on a given task—and also why the performance boost doesn’t generalize beyond that task.

The fMRI scans taken during the trials showed that three areas of the brain are affected by the training, but also that the improvement is small. The next challenge for researchers is to figure out ways to increase the benefit and to make those benefits last longer.

Brain training games might not be doing as much good as we once thought, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less fun to play.

(Journal of Neuroscience via Medical Xpress, image via Leo Reynolds)

Meanwhile in related links

• Testosterone can make birds sing more, but not necessarily better
• Tone deaf? Science can probably give you perfect pitch
• After two concussions, this athlete is suddenly a musical genius

Because nobody wants to get eaten by a shark (although I have fantasized about it before), 320 sharks known to lurk in the waters off Western Australia have been fitted with tags that will send a tweet from the Surf Life Saving Twitter account if they swim within a kilometer of the shore. That way you know where not to go surfing. Or, if you're like me, where to pick a fair fight. Thanks to Chris, who once punched a shark in the mouth so hard he put all the teeth it lost under his pillow and made $65.

Finn understands! He's just a kid, but he already gasps romantic relationships. His analogy, though, is a bit off. Dating is more like stunt riding than a casual bike ride. That's because there's a high probability that you will be seriously hurt and carry around scars that you will feel every day for the rest of your life. You will be at least partially emotionally necrotized and those wounds will affect every other attempt you make to connect with someone on an intimate level.

And all of that from a cartoon! Adventure Time is a surprisingly deep story. Jeff Wysaski of Pleated Jeans has gleaned 20 valuable life lessons from it. Many of them deal with love and I will try to deal with them once I have eaten this gallon of ice cream.

 

20. Star Wars BFFs

(via Chris Gugliotti)

...

When Nathan G, AKA “701let” (…no, we didn’t ask) wasn’t beating panels in his day-job in Brisbane, Australia, you might have found him out on his front balcony, building this CX500 custom cafe racer over a “grueling’ six months. Battered by howling winds and hungry mosquitos in limited space was a test of endurance, but it also gave rise to the bike’s nickname; “Howler”. Nathan adds; “I could also call it the splutter, as my carbs desperately need a tune.”

“I don’t have a garage and I cant keep myself from modifying things. So I took all the furniture off the front balcony and started stripping down my first motorbike. You realise pretty quickly how little room you have once the bike is entirely in pieces.” Nathan also wanted to have something out of the ordinary; “I could have bought an R1 just like every other man and his dog, but I wanted my first bike to be out of this world”.

The bike is a 1981 Honda CX500 and was found on Gumtree, wearing a sheepskin seat cover and ‘rancid‘ high ride bars. Nathan felt he owed the bike some dignity. “My vision came from working on cars for the past 10 years, It was a cross pollination of ideas taken from different cars I had worked on. Trying to keep everything to as tight a budget as possible. I had just about searched every motorcycle on every website and had taken a lot of inspiration from vintage cars in the 50′s/60′s. I wanted it to look restored but still maintain some of the old rat look without making it a rat bike.”

After being completely stripped, every part of the bike was cleaned, sanded, painted, machined and then hacked to pieces or welded-up. The frame was cut four inches shorter under the seat. “The seat was then custom made by laying my own fibreglass seat pan and design a hook and leather strap method to hold it in place.” Nathan goes on to give some good advice, learned the hard way; “…Always make your fibreglass seat pan before you paint the frame. I cant tell you how much of a pain in the ass it was to paint it a 2nd time.”

 

“The engine was finished in high temp wrinkle coat with the shaved in logo, which I had taken from the old Honda car engines. The pipes were the hardest to deal with as I wasn’t certain how I wanted them to go. I have always liked the scrambler look and the CX500 is such a heavy looking bike that I felt I needed to take some weight out of the design. With the pipes up nice and high it also shows the engine and shaft drive off a bit better. The engine almost looks like a bomb or and old school jet engine or something. Hanging as low as it does.”

The scrambler pipes and old school leather belt are Nathan’s special touches. “The belt is to signify the vintage car scene. The same way we used leather bonnet straps on the old race cars of yesteryear. There’s nothing better than old leather and steel.” The final paint finish is taken from a BMW 7 series car – “All Class” as Nathan wanted a “Gentleman’s look“.

We asked how she rides, and Nathan tells us that the torque from the transverse V is immense and he loves the sideways torque reaction from the shaft drive when he pulls away, but then his last bike was a 125cc, so he admits that after that, anything will seem fast. Getting your chest and chin on the tank also helps…

Nathan has now got the bike building bug, so his balcony can look forward to accommodating a CB750F Supersport and then another CX500. We can’t wait to see them. Cheers for sharing with us Nathan.

Thanks to Chad’s Photography for the Photos.

A kung-fu renegade, time-hacking cop goes toe-to-toe with Hitler while riding dinosaurs with the help of some viking warriors. Go ahead…try to not be interested.

Make the movie happen here.

Laser Unicorns

The idea is simple: keep your stuff to the back, be it books or simply whatever you need to push out of the way while you get things down, and a single  fold in the desk will accommodate the rest.

The Kant Desk by Nils Holger Moormann has straightforward crossed ‘X’ legs made of wood, and detail-articulated panels showing how the surface pieces are slotted together.

Birch plywood is covered in either straight back or basic white, minimalist options in keeping with the overall simplicity of the design and idea.

All season, I've been getting annoyed by the Santa in the Petco commercials. He's just too well-groomed and polished and his casual clothes are almost creepy. That being said, at least he's not a hipster.

With the classic beard and mustache, it was only a matter of time before those hipsters appropriated Santa's style. Still, I'm surprised Mr. Claus would take on their terrible style. 

In the upside, at least Hipster Claus would be above sweatshop labor and would go back to organic, homemade toys made by fair wage elf workers like those that were popular a hundred years or so ago.

You can get your hands on this great Hipster Claus card over at Etsy thanks to CandidCaleb.

Air conditioning is great when it comes to comfort, but the exterior unit is a serious eyesore. But one couple, the creative minds behind House Pet, found a great way to make theirs significantly more attractive with a simple slatted wood cover. The lovely design is even easy to remove and store so it won't get messed up during the winter months.

You can find out more about how it was constructed over at our home design sister site, Homes and Hues. And don't miss these other great outdoor design ideas we have previously covered:

• The Living Wall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 
• STARPATH: Glow-in-the-Dark Pathways
• Shoot Swimming Pool Slide

A turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. A Cthurkey is an octopus stuffed inside a turkey and garnished with crab legs and bacon. The dish is named in honor of our Lord Cthulhu whose dreadful reign will hopefully begin soon.

Rusty Eulberg, a database administrator in Lubbock, Texas, invented it. His wife is a fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, so he made this uniquely terrifying dish for her. You can see more photos here.

The next year, Mr. Eulberg and his wife made a Cthicken with a chicken and squid. Next year, he may offer a Cthulu-themed dinner with a deep fried Cthurkey.

-via Kotaku

Inspired by water balloons inflating under a faucet, Torafu Architects designed these lamps and displayed them at the IFFT interior design show in Tokyo last month. Strictly speaking, they're not light bulbs, though they do have that shape. Each glass bulb is backlit by an LED. The light highlights the bubbles and curves in the glass.

It’s safe to say illustrator Mike Holmes really loves his cat Ella, so much so that he has been drawing cartoons about their relationship in his series Mikenesses since 2011.

Mike captures moments between he and Ella which are both awkward and adorable, and occasionally involve paranormal activity, then renders them in the style of famous animators and cartoonists such as Berkeley Breathed, Chuck Jones and Gary Larson.

Some panels are text free, some feature moments of comedic gold like the Nicholas Gurewitch inspired strip where doctors tell Mike they had to put down his pig, and he replies “she was a cat”. Don't worry- it's only a comic strip, and no real harm could ever come to Ella while she's busy inspiring Mike to draw silly cartoons!

Via io9

(YouTube link)

Australian entrepreneur Steve Sammartino and Romanian teenager Raul Oaida teamed up to produce a full-size car made of LEGO bricks -and drive it down the street! The engines run on compressed air, which makes it silent (but deadly if it doesn't hold together).  

- The engine is made from standard Lego pieces and runs on air!
- The engine has four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons.
- More than 500,000 LEGO pieces.
- Top speed around 20-30km (We drive it slow as are scared of giant lego explosion)
- Built in Romania and shipped to a secret location in Melbourne.
- It's a Hot Rod design, mainly because hot rods are cool.

Before you say "shut up and take my money," you should probably stop and consider that you don't have that kind of money. -via Viral Viral Videos

McDonald's France just launched a new line of "American-themed" burgers that are supposedly served on Americanized breads. Granted, bagels are at least a little American -though we don't usually eat cheeseburgers on them, but I wasn't aware that shiny buns, like those in the Double Shiny Bacon are an American thing. Another weird one is the Double Cornbread BBQ, which isn't just served on cornbread, but also topped with corn chips.

While these might not actually be real classic sandwiches, the cornbread one does sound  pretty tasty actually. Still, I'm a little confused about the Double Shiny Bacon.

Via Eater

(Video Link)

Kay-Leigh and Gervan Diaz got married last Saturday. To mark the occasion, they had a driver perform burnout donuts around them in a BWM E46 while they kissed. It's romantic like the concluding kiss of an action movie as well as a demonstration of trust in the driver's skill.

-via Jalopnik

Whoa! The New York Times has a 25-question survey that tries to discern where in the U.S. you live (or were raised) by how you pronounce words. They pegged me pretty good, as I live in the triangle plotted by the cities shown in the above map. Well, I actually live a little to the east, but there are no big cities there, and I did spend ten years in western Tennessee. The questions are based on the Harvard Dialect Survey. When you are through with the survey, you'll get a map like this, and three smaller maps showing which particular words were most instrumental in finding your home. How well did it find where you are from? -via Boing Boing

A few weeks back Ben & Jerry introduced a Ron Burgundy themed ice cream called Scotchy Scotch Scotch. Ice cream that tastes like Scotch is cool and all, but Scotch that tastes like Scotch makes way more sense. Enter Great Odin’s Raven Special Reserve, a blend of Scotch whiskies with a 40% ABV. It’s not [...]
Visit IncredibleThings.com for the full post.

Pets are weird. I once met a pet turtle whose owners described him as “a real asshole.” He was an unfriendly little murderer who offered nothing to be happy about. And that guy is projected to last another 40 years! That gives his owners two options: Let the next 40+ years of their life get stained by the ownership of a terrible turtle, or actively discard this one-time family member. At least when the same thing happens with people you probably didn’t have a choice in the matter.

That’s why the best pets are the ones that crap out after about 15 years. They last long enough to accompany you through maybe 2 or 3 significant lifetime milestones, which is a hell of a lot better than letting a little cruel monster define the majority of your time here on this earth. Sure, you might get sad if your loyal dog or favorite rat bites the big one, but it’s better than your pet outliving you and your children remembering you by inheriting your tiny spoiled asshole friend.

This is also why robot pets will never take off.

wes

“We wanted to make an object that could only be done through 3D printing.” I think that Toru Hasegawa of the New York City-based Proxy Design Studio overstates his case. It might be possible to make this kinetic sculpture by hand. But since it has one million distinct polygons in the design, it would take a long time.

The Mechaneu is a structure composed of 64 interlocking gears. Turn one and all the others turn in time. It’s an exploration of what Mr. Hasegawa sees as the natural evolution of geometry to solve design problems. I don’t agree with (or perhaps don’t understand) his argument, but I think that the sculpture is cool.

(Video Link)