If this bug freaks you out, be amazed by this: "The Longest Insect in the World" - more than half-a-meter long, it's the Phobaeticus chani (Chan's megastick):
Last Biscotti issue we published a scientific visualization of the galaxies in collision, now we found more realistic picture - an artist's conception - of how such tremendous event could look (or staged inside some Hollywood blockbuster) - more info:
"The galaxies themselves show surprising differences. One is a dead system that has formed all of its stars already and used up its gaseous fuel. The second galaxy is still alive and well, holding plenty of dust and gas that can form new stars.... both galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centers."
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Careful... It just moved
I would not be surprised if this machine starts crawling around the beach.... pulling itself after its rusted pipe leg.... messing with our minds...
This surreal image is part of the WebEcoist compilation of HDR water, snow and ice images, see more there.
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Dubai City Tower: 2.5 km high!
You've read about 1 km high skyscraper planned for Dubai (already approved) - link - but all this pales in comparison to this gargantuan project (click to enlarge image):
Dubai City Tower is planned for the Jumeirah City project... even includes a vertical bullet train: one-and-a-half mile tall, 125 mph elevator.
Read more about proposed outrageous structures and most fantastic properties on this page.
This lovely little guy is a kildeer, and he really was just born a day before the picture was taken.
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The Vinyl Wave
"Sound Wave" by Jean Shin, displayed at "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary" exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design... More wonderful sculptures are here
The great DIY video site Wonder HowTo just launched the 2008 Video Awards, honoring their top video creators by featuring the best videos of the year and having readers vote in 13 different categories. Our favorite, of course, is Weird Science category, hacks and pranks (lots of those).
For those of you who have never been to the site, they are the one-stop shop for all how-to videos on the internet. With a library of over 225,000 videos they provide the largest, most contemporary, and most diverse resource in this increasingly growing space. Voting will be open for one month, from October 13th through midnight PST November 13, so get over to WonderHowTo right now and vote on the 2008 Best How To Videos In The Universe.. You can also snag a free t-shirt, while there.
Oh, and we totally love this little mascot.
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Basil Wolverton - classic crazy cartoons
There is an appreciation article about his work here, including fascinating research "Acoustics in the Comics"
Collateral Damage site has compiled the best examples of using the subject of death in marketing: Click Here. Among the gems there are these coffins from T3 and Creative Coffins:
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This car wants to kiss you
This is 2001 model of Mitsuoka, Japan. It's got these cutesy lips, you know...
Oh wow! I come here every post and I never say anything but I've sent your link to a dozen people ... I am sorry I always lurk so silently and nevr speak up - you rock and all your posts are awesome! This art is incredible! Congrats on acquiring such amazing work under your banner :-) How wonderful for you and for us readers!
And here comes the two best jewels of the original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJefVspR88M&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_esCf2GSTI&feature=related , I just love the dance.
The "Heart Attack Grill" was about a block away from me when I lived in Phoenix. I remember the food being ok and the customers being unsightly (talk about OBESE). There was always some minor controversy about the way they had their "nurses" dress as well...
At least now I know where comes the inspiration for the BM in the manga Bio-meat Nectar. just look at the bottom of this page http://www.onemanga.com/BioMeat_-_Nectar/35/21/ :)
Great article, but I just wanted to point out that knitting and crochet, while both done with yarn, are different crafts. Knitters do not create crocheted objects and vice versa (well, some of them do, but you know what I mean). Of your pictures, the Cthulhu penguin, the eyeballs, the gollum hat, and Bender are definitely crochet. The rest are either knitted or a combination of the two.
Of all the photos, 13 of them depict crochet, not knit. And the funny thing is, the ski masks are dissed as crochet but are knit! I'm a big fan of strange crochet.
I have got to get back to that Dalek I was trying to knit. I think the bottom part looked better than the one shown here; I just have to figure out a better top dome for it. I came up with a great way of doing the neck grill, too....
To non-needleworkers, a good rule of thumb is to look for material that looks like its made up of a bunch of tightly-packed Vs. That's stockinette stitch, your basic knit stitch. (Knit when working on the right side, purl when working on the wrong side.) There are other stitches, like garter stitch, which looks like rows of little interlocking arches -- or like cheap fake chainmail, which is often garter stitch, spray-painted silver. (Convincing only at a great distance. Most of the knights in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" wore garter stitch fake-mail, because it's cheap.) But most knitting revolves around stockinette stitch, like the stuff shown above, so for these examples, that test will give you a good idea of which ones are knit and which ones are crocheted.
Man, I *love* that squid at the top of the page. Absolutely gorgeous. The nudibranch is stunning as well.
It's too bad the gal with the Dr Who patterns was forced by the BBC to take them offline. She had this awesome Ood that would've looked great next to the Chthulu knits.
think there was a bbc documentary on this. called to mars by abomb. they had footage from a small scale model test. it does work.
interesting because it takes the worry of weight out of the equation. instead of saving weight you build massive ocean liner level stuff because it no longer matters much.
it was canceled because the fall out is unacceptable amoung the other risks...
You'd think this project would immediately be called off instead of going as long as it did just by the fact that you'd severely pollute the atmosphere.
With a clean fusion bomb fallout wouldn't be a problem but yeah with dirty nukes, Quote: "Freeman Dyson, group leader on the project, estimated back in the '60s that with conventional nuclear weapons, that each launch would cause on average between 0.1 and 1 fatal cancers from the fallout."
Anonymous, as far as I know a H bomb is only "clean" because its fallout is small in relation to its destructive power. You still produce more than enough fallout simply because a fission bomb is needed as a detonator for the fusion. There is no clean nuclear weapon. The term "dirty nuke" can either refer to a fission bomb with relatively high fallout due to low efficiency or to a conventional chemical explosive with radioactive material around it. The latter thing does not cause a nuclear explosion, but scatters radioactive debris around. It is in no way suitable to power a spaceship.
You have to remember the TIME this was invented in.... people seriously thought this planet was going to be obliterated by nuclear war in the 1950s-60s.
And if there is a killer asteroid or extraterrestrial threat of any kind, it would be a last-ditch, everyone left behind is dead anyway, "When Worlds Collide" type of project.
The interwebs have been absolutely abuzz with talk about this project. I've seen it in a few documentaries and more than a few posts. I did love that TED talk tho.
We still need to solve the 'ol problem of traveling distances that would take tens of thousands of years however...
Project Orion and NERVA should be group projects for graduate Nuclear Engineering students. There should be ways to vastly improve performance and lover costs on both of theose systems.
Launch from Earth? Of course not. However, as anyone who has ever read SF knows, space ships are most easily built in space.
The cuts in time to Mars and beyond will prevent a lot of radiation problems.
Oh yes, exploding atomic bombs in space will pollute it. How could I overlook something like that. Darn!
Remember, the Sun is a natural nuclear fusion explosion that's been going on for about 4.5 billion years. Aside from that, all matter emits some miniscule amounts of radiation. Getting a sun tan is in fact a radiation dosage. And burning coal puts a lot of uranium in the air, since it's a trace element in coal. So an Orion ship's radiation should be kept in perspective.
Building it in space removes most of the risk to earth. And Orion or a Nerva type nuclear rocket (much different) open the whole solar system to human exploration. Instead of trips lasting years one can get around between planets in weeks.
Eventually we're going to have to accept that politically.
I've been a fan of Orion for decades. It's one of those Big Engineering concepts many engineers (and I am an engineer) are fascinated with. Adding to the attraction, the only thing keeping it from working is an international treaty.
Project Pluto isn't nearly as big, but has the advantage of being dead simple overall. One person working on it described the vehicle as being "...about as complicated as a bucket of rocks."
A ramjet is a very simple heat engine: cold air in, hot air out. For Pluto, the heat source was a nuclear reactor made from advanced ceramics, glowing bright yellow.
The sonic boom from this thing making a low pass would collapse most buildings. The radiation it emitted would sterilize the ground under its path. (Maybe a slight exaggeration there.)
They ground tested a developmental version of the engine, and seriously discussed building a test vehicle. That would have been dumped in the ocean after the flight. The realization that if they lost control of the thing it could fly over an inhabited area killed the idea.
Still, you have to wonder if maybe we could use it to explore the atmosphere of Venus, or one of the gas giants...
It's not a bad idea once you get off-planet. Someday, one of the export products spent up the space elevator will be nuclear bombs to propel enormous interplanetary vehicles.
It's not a bad idea once you get off-planet. Someday, one of the export products spent up the space elevator will be nuclear bombs to propel enormous interplanetary vehicles..
The idea that Orion is inherently unclean is untrue. The reason a bomb can be dirty is the stuff that gets sucked into an explosion (including bomb casings) and then spread around. That is why normal ground-level detonations (where dust and soil gets sucked in) produce vastly more fallout than airborne ones.
In the late 50s, the calculation was 1 to 10 premature deaths per ground launch of Orion. That isn't 10 specific people die - but that 10 people would statistically die earlier than they otherwise would have.
I personally do not think that risk is unacceptable. Many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people die prematurely every single year because of industrial pollution from cars, factories, industry etc. Likewise hundreds of thousands of peoples are killed or injured in road accidents, every single year. While these are tragic, nobody says the risk is unacceptable and we better give up cars/industry/technology and return to living in caves.
Anyway, another point is the risk can be further reduced today. A modern Orion would use a ground-based pusher plate to reduce fallout, and would use better/lighter bombs so less casings to be sucked in too.
The two remaining problems are EMP (electro magentic pulse), legal and political. The EMP problem can be solved by a sea launch say near the South pole. The legal issue is that it is illegal to take nuclear weapons in space or explode them - but this could be resolved by renegotiating international treaties if there was political will. The political problem is the biggest problem - many people, often regardless of how little they know about nuclear technology and nuclear science, are against anything nuclear, because it sounds bad to them or believing too much bad late night scifi.
The reason we need Orion is its the only way we can get a substantial presence in space. One Orion is equivalent to hundreds, even thousands, of conventional rocks. If we don't start using energy and resources from space (the first step of which is a large presence beyond the Earth), we are going to wreck this planet before too long.
1. materials don't BECOME radioactive do they? the dust and stuff from a ground explosion doesn't contribute to the "dirtyness" of the bomb does it?
2. why on earth would you LAUNCH with nukes? just use conventional rockets to get the thing into orbit (or just build it there) and then you can nuke away in space.
That 01-1-10 deaths figure would presumably have been calculated on the LNT (linear no threshold) theory of radiation damage. While that is still politically accepted the hormesis theory that at a low level radiation is actually beneficial has the evidence going for it.
Did a speech in 80's including this method as alternative to STS. Also included matter/antimatter propulsion. Only problem I foresee is NASA's history of accidents! That would be huge..
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Am I the only one who finds the idea of a 125mph elevator terrifying? o.o
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