Archive for September 29th, 2009

Human Tetris On The Streets

Watch as this groovy crew of 36 freeborders take over a street in San Fransisco with glowing Tetris shapes, to create a real life video game.

Gross Mechanical Tumor is a Computer Peripheral

Whoever designed this computer peripheral may need to seek help immediately. I mean why would you want to design a “mechanical” tumor that connects to your computer to measure your CPU?

Okay, aside from the geek bashing, the way this thing works is actually pretty cool. The flesh of this organic-looking material beats like a pulse as your computer processes data. The emphasis of the expansions and contractions depend on the amount of stress your computer is experiencing.

Equipped with a series of motors and pneumatic actuators, the mechanical tumor pulsates gently when the CPU load is low. When the CPU load is high, the tumor’s air compressor is activated, causing the lump of flesh to inflate.

Here it is in action:

One can only imagine the outcome if your computer goes into overload, crashes or decides to blow up…

Link

Geek Tattoos Are All The Fashion

The days of celtic design and British bulldogs appear to be coming to an end, with the tattoo trend now moving towards ‘geek’ design.

A new generation of computer whizz kids and nerds are opting to be inked with images of their laptops or print from a text book, rather than the ‘hard man’ traditional designs.

A USB computer cable, the equation for Pi, machine code made up of 0’s and 1’s, the Apple trademark, and even a symbol for the old Commodore 64, are among the bizarre tattoos chosen by the new generation of body art wearers.

World’s Biggest Online Choir

This is the world’s biggest online choir. Interested in joining? Check out amplichoir.com for more details on how to submit your song.

I’d like to see this group become huge. A bit more work on the syncing and it could be great.

100 Greatest Youtube Hits In 4 Minutes

I’ve literally seen 90% of those videos. I spend way too much time surfing – the net, that is. How many do you recognize?

Ohio – A Piano In Disguise

If I were to tell you that Ohio is a piano, you’d probably slap me in the face, however there’s more to Ohio than meets the eye.

Andy Woodruff, from CartoGrammar, noticed that Ohio has 88 counties, which is the same as the number of keys on a piano. So then the obvious thing to do, was to turn the state of Ohio into a huge piano.

Andy made a flash application, so that we can play the counties in Ohio, just like we’d play a piano.

How the keys are mapped to the counties depends on a specified data attribute: the notes and counties are ordered by that attribute and then linked to one another. For example, if the chosen attribute is population, the county with the lowest population is assigned the lowest-frequency piano key, the county with the highest population is assigned the highest-frequency piano key, and so on. The data I have here are a little out of date, but that doesn’t matter for demonstrating the idea.

Take a look at the Ohio piano here.

The World’s Tallest Horse

What you see before you is (unofficially) the tallest horse in the world. Poe the Clydesdale has been measured by his owner, Shereen Thompson, at 20.2 hands (80.8 inches), and now she wants the Guinness Book of World Records to confirm it.

It is believed that Poe, who is 10-years-old and lives on a farm in a farm in Tupperville, Ontario, will beat the previous record of Remington, from Princeton in Texas who measures a mere 80 inches.

Poe weighs 3000lb (1.5 tons), stands 10 feet tall with head raised, and consumes two bales of hay, 10lb of grain and 75 gallons of water each day.

The huge Clydesdale used to work as a dray horse in London, Ontario, pulling a cart filled with crates of beer. Now Miss Thompson displays the equine giant to amazed onlookers.
She said: “We take him to fairs across Lambton County.

“He is extremely popular, but his size always means people keep a cautious distance from him – although they shoudn’t, as he is a real puppy.

“But he does sometime forget his strength and drags me along if he wants to play or go chasing something that has caught his attention.”