George

You hate to see it

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Lego’s official Apollo 11 anniversary set is pretty slick already, but aerospace engineer Adam Woodworth has made it even cooler by adding a set of propellers so that the lunar lander can actually fly, as spotted by Gizmodo.

Woodworth detailed the build in an Imgur gallery, and it’s seriously impressive. He hollowed out the inside of the set to make room for a battery and flight controller. (The battery is hidden inside the ascent stage half of the set, while the electronics are in the base). He also added the four T-Motor F40 spinning 4-inch propellors that allow it to actually fly. The motors are staggered to overlap so that Woodworth could actually get enough thrust from the set. He notes that the model is pretty heavy for its size,...

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Hoi Toider is a dialect spoken by long-time residents of Ocracoke, North Carolina. It sometimes sounds more Australian, Scottish, or like Elizabethan English than American English.

When older Ocracoke natives, or O’cockers as they call themselves, speak, the ‘I’ sound is an ‘oi’, so they say ‘hoi’ instead of ‘high’. That’s where the Hoi Toider name comes from: it’s based on how the O’cockers say ‘high tide’.

Then there are the phrases and vocabulary, many of which are also kept over from the original settlers. For example, when you’re on Ocracoke, someone might ‘mommuck a buck before going up the beach’, which means ‘to tease a friend before going off the island’.

“We have a lot of words that have been morphed to make our own,” said Amy Howard, another of William Howard’s descendants, who runs the Village Craftsmen, a local arts and crafts store. “[Hoi Toider] is a combination from a whole blend of cultures. A lot of the early settlers were well travelled, so they ran into lots of different types of people. For example, the word ‘pizer’ we use comes from the Italian word ‘piazza’, which means porch. So if you’re going to be sitting on your pizer, you’re sitting on your porch.”

You can hear some folks speaking Hoi Toider is these videos:

Ikea has released a free font called Soffa Sans, inspired by all the memes born from its online “Design your own sofa” planner. The tool allows for customers to design the layouts and configurations of Ikea’s couches, from the Vimle sectionals to the Vallentuna modular sofa series. Once it was discovered that the planner allowed for basically any configuration with no limit to the cost, it inspired some Sims-like creativity from users.

Acknowledging the planner’s full potential, Ikea worked with digital agency Proximity London to create the Soffa Sans font. Calling itself the “the world’s comfiest font,” Soffa Sans creates a typeface out of the Vallentuna couch in both isometric and bird’s-eye view versions.

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Visual engineer Steve Giralt constructs bespoke robotic cameras to capture unusual scenes for TV commercials, many of which feature food. The behind-the-scenes videos of how these rigs are constructed and work are fascinating. These two short videos about Giralt’s work are a good place to start:

There are many more on his website and on Instagram, like the s’mores smush and burger flipping.

Dan Nosowitz digs into the genealogies of bagel-making to find and define the true (i.e., disputed) origin of the everything bagel.

Let’s be honest, it’s probably not possible to have “invented” the concept of putting several different existing bagel toppings on a bagel. In patent law there is something called the rule of “obviousness,” a tricky concept, but one that’s both necessary and necessarily subjective. It states that something cannot be patented if a person with ordinary skill in a subject would naturally use the same idea to solve a problem. A painter, for example, cannot patent a jar of water for cleaning brushes, because any painter, understanding that water is used to clean brushes and that a jar is a good vessel to hold water, would come to the same conclusion. Or, for example, if there are five popular bagel toppings, it is fairly obvious to make a bagel with all of those ingredients. That’s not invention.

But there is one element of the everything bagel that is invention, and that’s the name. “Everything” is the accepted name for a fairly specific combination of toppings: It is not a “combo bagel” or a “spice-lover’s bagel” or, as the Canadians might call it, an “all-dressed bagel.” It is an everything bagel, and someone had to come up with that piece of clear, descriptive branding.

By his own and most other accounts, that person was David Gussin. Around 1979 or 1980, he says, he was a teenager working at Charlie’s Bagels in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York. “It didn’t actually say ‘Charlie’s Bagels,’ it just said ‘Bagels,’ but it was Charlie’s,” says Gussin. He was doing typical teenage job stuff: cleaning, working the counter—and cleaning the oven, where excess bagel toppings accumulated when they fell off. “One day instead of throwing them out like I usually did, I gave them to Charlie and said, ‘Hey, make a bagel with these, we’ll call it the everything bagel.’ It wasn’t that big of a deal; we weren’t looking to make the next big bagel. Charlie was probably more interested in what horses he was going to bet on.”

What’s weird, as Nosowitz notices, is that the everything bagel doesn’t include everything. An everything bagel with sunflower seeds is a mistake. “Everything” is sesame, onion, garlic, poppy, and salt. And it’s called “everything.” This is what’s invented, what is non-obvious. It is merely true.

The battle for supremacy in the world of hand hygiene is a dirty one, and nothing demonstrates this better than the depressing sight of a paper towel dispenser with a EULA.

That’s right: even dumb plastic boxes whose only use in this world is to hold paper towels apparently need an end-user license agreement now. In this case, the EULA — spotted by Harvard Library curator and Twitter user John Overholt at a recent conference — forbids the people who have to refill this Tork dispenser from using rival, non-Tork products.

What a world.

EULAs, if you’re not familiar, are contracts made between companies and customers that bind the latter’s actions in certain ways. You might have seen complaints about them in the context of digital...

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In this video, you can watch a simple neural network learn how to navigate a video game race track. The program doesn’t know how to turn at first, but the car that got the furthest in the first race (out of 650 competitors) is then used as the seed for the next generation. The winning cars from each generation are used to seed the next race until a few of them make it all the way around the track in just the 4th generation.

I think one of the reason I find neural network training so fascinating is that you can observe, in a very simple and understandable way, the basic method by which all life on Earth evolved the ability to do things like move, see, swim, digest food, echolocate, grasp objects, and use tools. (via dunstan)

Trump’s trade war with China is bad news for gaming

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Gaming lifestyle products have slowly but surely crept from the realm of clothing and specially designed furniture to food and drink. Perhaps you’ve seen Gamma Labs’ G Fuel or heard rumblings of Razer’s new Respawn energy drink mix. Maybe you even own a coveted gaming chair.

Well, Microsoft is getting in front of an all-new trend — gaming-oriented personal care products — by partnering with the brand behind Axe body spray to produce new Xbox-branded body wash, shower gel, and deodorant.

The product line, because it will be exclusive to Australia when it launches in July, is branded under Axe parent company Unilever’s Lynx line, which is just the name for Axe in markets...

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Comcast is reportedly working on a device designed to closely monitor a user’s health. That’s according to CNBC, which says the conglomerate is set to begin piloting the product sometime this year before a full launch in 2020. Having one of the most powerful telecom empires in the world tracking your health and lifestyle sure has an unsettling, dystopian ring to it.

“The device will monitor people’s basic health metrics using ambient sensors, with a focus on whether someone is making frequent trips to the bathroom or spending more time than usual in bed,” CNBC’s report says. “Comcast is also building tools for detecting falls, which are common and potentially fatal for seniors.”

Many products on the market today already have the motion...

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The North Face, in a campaign with advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, hatched a scheme to get its products to the top of Google Images by replacing Wikipedia photos with its own product placement shots.

In the promotional video, the company notes how all trips begin with an initial Google search, and often the first image that shows up is from a Wikipedia article about the destination. The company took advantage of this fact by trekking to popular tourist destinations like Guarita State Park in Brazil and Huayna Picchu in Peru to take photos prominently featuring its products. It then swapped out the original Wikipedia photos for its own or, in some cases, outright Photoshopped a North Face product into an existing photo.

The...

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Cue "Yakety Sax."

Oh my, this medieval town generator tool is super fun to play around with. By adjusting parameters like size, color palette, building styles, and which features to include (rivers, coastline, temples), you can make a random ichnographic map of a medieval town or city.

Toy Town is a related tool by the same person that allows you to move through a 3D visualization of a medieval town, a la Minecraft. (Unfortunately, you can’t generate a map in the 2D tool and then fly through it in the 3D tool.)

See also Auto-Generated Maps of Fantasy Worlds. (thx, ann)

Update: See also the Fantasy Map Generator. (via @mattg)

Back in 2014, a design studio called Neue won a national competition to redesign the Norwegian passport. What they came up with is bold and beautiful.

Norwegian landscapes fill the visa pages:

And if you shine a UV light on them, you can see the aurora borealis:

The landscapes surrounding us give a sense of belonging and pride, and fill a symbolic function for the entire nation. Images of scenery and landscape can easily become cliches, but by being widely accepted and deeply rooted in Norwegian culture, they are also very easy to identify with. In addition, to Norwegians, nature is more than beautiful scenery. It supplies us with rich fisheries, clean hydroelectric power, and various other industries.

I don’t think this new design has launched though…beyond a flurry of press about the competition back in 2014, I couldn’t find any evidence of the new design in the wild. (via dense discovery)

Have you ever wondered how mapmakers made bird’s-eye-view maps before the invention of satellites or even hot air balloons? I have and was glad to find Phil Edwards’ video on the subject:

Leonardo da Vinci is justly famous for a lot of different things, but we’ve heard somewhat less about his mapmaking prowess than his painting or mechanical designs. His 1502 map of the Italian town of Imola is the oldest surviving example of an ichnographic (i.e. bird’s-eye-view) map of a place, a type of map that is ubiquitous today in the form of satellite imagery.

Most Renaissance maps are known for their fanciful inclusion of dragons, castles, and undulating mountainsides, and most of them show buildings in elevation, or the “oblique perspective.” But da Vinci’s sought to capture the proportions and relationships between land features more accurately, and he developed new technologies to do so. To make this map of Imola, he may have used the special hodometer and magnetic compass he’d already invented (he’d been fascinated by maps and optics for years). With careful measurements in hand, he drew every “street, plot of land, church, colonnade, gate and square, the whole encompassed by the moat,” writes the Renaissance historian Paul Strathern.

Here is Leonardo’s Imola map (cropped) compared with a contemporary satellite image:

As Edwards notes in the video, Leonardo’s map is not strictly an illustration or drawing of a place but more of an infographic. We take this type of map for granted now, but 500 years ago, that shift was a genuine innovation.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, was once a prosperous town, largely supported by the coal industry. But in 1962, a trash fire near an abandoned strip mine ignited what remained of the 25 million-ton coal seam beneath the town. Year after year, the fire spread, releasing noxious gas, opening up sinkholes, and ultimately making the town uninhabitable — for humans, at least.

In the absence of humans and in the presence of rapidly heating soil, some interesting microbes have appeared: thermophiles. These microbes, which live at super hot temperatures, have taken a liking to some of the vent zones in Centralia, some of which have heated up to nearly 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) over the course of just a few short decades.

Ashley...

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If you look at the orbits of the planets adjacent to the Earth’s orbit (Venus & Mars), you’ll see that Venus’s orbit is closest to our own. That is, at its closest approach, Venus gets closer to Earth than any other planet. But what about the average distance?

According to this article in Physics Today by Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner, if you run a simulation and do a proper calculation, you’ll find that Mercury, and not Venus or Mars, is Earth’s closest neighbor on average (and spends more time as Earth’s closest neighbor than any other planet):

Although it feels intuitive that the average distance between every point on two concentric ellipses would be the difference in their radii, in reality that difference determines only the average distance of the ellipses’ closest points. Indeed, when Earth and Venus are at their closest approach, their separation is roughly 0.28 AU — no other planet gets nearer to Earth. But just as often, the two planets are at their most distant, when Venus is on the side of the Sun opposite Earth, 1.72 AU away. We can improve the flawed calculation by averaging the distances of closest and farthest approach (resulting in an average distance of 1 AU between Earth and Venus), but finding the true solution requires a bit more effort.

What the calculation also shows is that Mercury is the closest planetary neighbor to every planet, on average. Also, the authors of the paper don’t explicitly mention this, but the Sun (at 1 AU) is closer on average to the Earth than even Mercury (1.04 AU).

This story was originally published on March 12th, 2016. It has been updated to include video, but it has not otherwise been edited as daylight saving time remains trash.

When Benjamin Franklin proposed daylight saving time — he invented it — it was a joke. These days, it's more like a practical joke we play on ourselves every single year. It's time to end this dumb prank once and for all.

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Entrepreneur Marc Köhlbrugge has launched Expensive Chat, a web-based chat service where every character typed costs a penny. As spotted by Motherboard, Köhlbrugge announced the site in a tweet, calling it “a social experiment to see what happens to a chatroom when it’s not a free-for-all, but every message cost you cold, hard cash.” And where does all that cash go? Directly to Köhlbrugge.

The site shows a leaderboard, with those who have spent the most at the top, and then the chat room itself. There are a few friendly messages, but in the short time Expensive Chat has been operational, it’s become mostly littered with ads for companies and services. There’s a box at the bottom of the page if you want to compose your own message to...

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A petition led to deniers becoming an in-game epidemic

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As you can see on the US wind map, it’s been blustery in New England for the past couple of days. Yesterday the observatory atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire recorded a wind gust of 171 mph, the fastest gust ever recorded there in the month of February. This is what yesterday’s “Hays Chart” looked like:

While it’s more that 50 mph slower than the 1934 record of 231 mph (!!), a look at the historical record shows that it’s one of the strongest winds ever recorded there and the strongest one since 1985.

While the observatory building itself is rated for winds up to 300 mph, humans venturing out at that speed might blow away. Here’s what a person battling 70-100 mph winds looks like:

On Instagram, someone at the observatory said of last night’s winds:

We could absolutely hear the winds yesterday! Sounded like a constant rumble similar to an earthquake. At the height of the storm our coffee mugs were shaking across the table and our bullet proof windows were constantly flexing back and forth.

(thx, meg)

There exist a lot of meme generators on the internet, but few are better organized or authentically made than the Death Generator. Created by programmer Foone Turing, the open-source tool first began as a generator for death screens from Sierra games, starting with Police Quest 2 in 2017. Turing gets most of his screenshots by actually playing through the games, and he’s now up to dozens of classic titles and newer games alike, from SimCity 2000 to Animal Crossing: Wild World.

“The inspiration was just seeing a bunch of screenshots going around, of games like PQ2 and vague memories of a Something Awful Photoshop post where they made fake SimCity 2000 advisor messages,” Turing told The Verge. “These games have very distinctive dialog...

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Photoshopping a meme is easy. But hunting through thrift stores, finding the perfect action figure to Frankenstein with another toy, designing and packaging it into a slightly off but believable product, and sneaking it onto a store shelf takes a little bit more work. Both have the potential to go viral, but memes are lost to the unforgiving sands of internet time, while the bizarre, bespoke toys can live on as a story for the next person who stumbles upon them.

Since 2015, Jeff Wysaski has been making fake signs and toys and leaving them out in the real world for people to find. Going by the name Obvious Plant, some of his recent creations range from believable bootleg dollar store finds, like Mobile Suit Garfield, to the more...

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LEGO has revealed the newest LEGO Creator Expert set with the Ford Mustang (10265). This set has been leaked on social media for about a week now but we have the full details of it. The Ford Mustang is set to release on March 1 for $149.99 and it contains 1,471 pieces. The cool thing about the Mustang is that it is able to convert to the muscle car version by switching out the engine and adding some side exhausts and rear spoiler while raising up the back wheels. Check out the full press release below.

10265 Ford Mustang
Ages 16+. 1,471 pieces

US $149.99– CA $199.99– DE €129.99– UK £119.99 – FR €139.99– DK 1,199DKK – AU $199.99
*Euro pricing varies by country. Please visit shop.LEGO.com for regional pricing.

Build and customize your very own 1960s Ford Mustang!

Discover the magic of an iconic 1960s American muscle car with the LEGO® Creator Ford Mustang, featuring dark-blue bodywork with white racing stripes, bonnet scoop, printed mustang grille badge, GT emblems and 5-spoke rims with road-gripping tires. Developed with input from Ford, this authentic replica comes with optional add-ons for customization, including a selection of license plates, supercharger, rear ducktail spoiler, beefy exhaust pipes, front chin spoiler and a nitrous oxide tank. You can even adjust the lift of the rear axle for an extra-mean look! Remove the roof panel or open the doors and you have access to the detailed interior with handsome seats, radio, working steering and a mid-console gearshift. Store items in the trunk or lift the hood to reveal a detailed big block 390 V8 engine with battery, hoses and air filter detailing. This advanced building set has been designed to provide a challenging and rewarding building experience full of nostalgia and makes a great centerpiece for the home or office.

• Authentic replica of a 1960s Ford Mustang featuring dark-blue bodywork with white racing stripes, air scoop, 5-spoke rims with road-gripping tires, and a selection customization add-ons.
• Open the doors or remove the roof panel to access the detailed interior with handsome seats, radio, mid-console gearshift and working steering.
• Open the trunk to store items and lift the hood to reveal a detailed Ford Mustang V8 engine with battery, hoses and air filter.
• Also includes a printed mustang grille badge and 2 GT emblems.
• Customize the Ford Mustang with the included supercharger, rear ducktail spoiler, beefy exhaust pipes, front chin spoiler and a nitrous oxide tank.
• Choose from a selection of license plates.
• Lift the hood to check out the realistic engine detailing.
• Adjust the lift of the rear axle for a real mean look!
• This Mustang toy car model includes 1,470 pieces and is suitable for ages 16+.
• New-for-March-2019 special elements include 5-spoke rims, 2×8 brick with bow, 1×3 mustang logo tile, 2×4 bow with ‘GT’ Emblem.
• Measures over 3” (10cm) high, 13” (34cm) long and 5” (14cm) wide.

Available directly from LEGO Stores & shop.LEGO.com from
1st March, 2019

The post LEGO Creator Ford Mustang (10265) Officially Announced appeared first on The Brick Fan.

Can you imagine?

Ah, the Blue Shell. As is to be expected, Mario Kart's very own rage-inducing spiky ball of doom, destruction, and relationship breakdowns has claimed yet another victim and, this time, it's even ruined a world record speedrun attempt.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Millennials have killed many things: cable television, golf, McDonald’s, and now, apparently healthy sexual relationships.

A new gadget currently being Kickstarted called “LoveSync” is the Amazon Dash button for horny men and women who don’t feel comfortable telling their partner they’d like to have sex. Instead of leaning over and vocally asking your girlfriend or boyfriend, the LoveSync button does it for you. Essentially, there are two buttons — one for you, and one for your partner. If you’re feeling horny, you tap your button, which sends a signal to your partner’s button, basically asking if they’d also like to have sex. Your partner then has two options: they can either tap the button back, letting you know they’re ready to get...

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The magnetic field that surrounds our planet is constantly shifting. But recently, near the Arctic, it’s been so active that researchers had to release a crucial update to a computer model that allows maps and other navigation software to correctly point North. The public release of this update to the World Magnetic Model (WMM) has been highly anticipated, but it was delayed until Monday due to the recent US government shutdown.

Unlike the geographic North Pole, which stays put at the top of the globe, the North Magnetic Pole moves, and it historically does this at a fairly steady rate. Lately, it’s moved at about 31 miles (50 kilometers) per year. Since compasses were invented hundreds of years ago, we’ve used the magnetic field to...

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When you think of competitive gaming and e-sports, your mind probably drifts toward massively popular online games like Fortnite or Overwatch. But there are plenty of less-heralded games making their way in the space, including games about farming. Today, developer Giants Software announced a new Farming Simulator League, which is exactly what it sounds like: a competitive tournament for the enduringly popular PC series Farming Simulator.

It will consist of 10 tournaments across Europe, including big events like Gamescom and Paris Games Week, culminating in a grand final at FarmCon 2020. The developer is putting up €250,000 in prize money (around $280,000), and it has lured big-name sponsors like Logitech and Intel. The new league will...

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Are we having fun yet?

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