DSD

I almost can’t believe this actu­ally exists.

… It’s very enrag­ing, and the Rode­na­tor pro­duces a result that has a sense of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and revenge — I mean your blow­ing ‘em up, I mean … I guess that’s a crude way of say­ing it, but I mean your putting gas down there, and the gasses go off and it pro­duces a good loud noise, and throws dirt around, and a lot of guys say: ‘You know, I don’t even care if I kill em it just makes me feel good to do it.‘

Today’s pho­to­gallery from the Big Pic­ture blog included an unusual scene…

A polar bear bites a mock Easter Bunny stuffed with food at the Buenos Aires Zoo in Argentina on April 9, 2009.

From Jan von Holleben, via Design You Trust. More here.

The bizarre and inter­est­ing site spacecollective.org has a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about Cher­nobyl, which, after hav­ing been aban­doned by humans for 20 years, is being retaken by its nat­ural environment.

The peo­ple are gone, and in their place are now thriv­ing pop­u­la­tions of deer, elk, wild boar, wolves, and even lynx. Trees are push­ing up through Lenin Avenue and moss is cling­ing to the bro­ken side­walks and aban­doned build­ings through­out the 19-miles that make up the Exclu­sion Zone. […]

Radi­a­tion lev­els are still too high for long term expo­sure, but the Ukraine has opened up the nearby city of Pripyat to daytrip­pers look­ing to catch a glimpse of what an urban cen­ter would look like after 20 years with­out a human foot­print.

Another strik­ing page on SpaceCol­lec­tive is the gallery, which has a wealth of sci­ence related/inspired imagery. Worth check­ing out, but though beau­ti­ful, it’s a lit­tle over­whelm­ing and poorly organized.

(From Lizzy Stew­art.)

I dare you not to smile :)

Kind of reminds me of

A totally sweet col­lab­o­ra­tive music project from Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey:

Bicy­cle Built For 2,000 is com­prised of 2,088 voice record­ings col­lected via Amazon’s Mechan­i­cal Turk web ser­vice. Work­ers were prompted to lis­ten to a short sound clip, then record them­selves imi­tat­ing what they heard.

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astron­omy, turns out to be an inspired poet:

A Poem Beyond Belief

A

is Ad hominem, attacks quite insult­ing,
They may feel good but no good is resulting.

B

is for Bible, they swear it’s all true,
But so do the Mus­lims, and Bud­dhists, and Jews.

C

is Cre­ation, 6000 years past;
But when looked at the evi­dence is always half-assed.

D

is Debunker, it’s said with a jeer.
But we can­not debunk with­out bunk, that is clear. […]

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site ded­i­cated to remov­ing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the exis­ten­tial angst of a cer­tain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a jour­ney deep into the mind of an iso­lated young every­man as he fights a los­ing bat­tle against lone­li­ness and depres­sion in a quiet Amer­i­can sub­urb.

Truly, mind­bog­glingly, fantastic

That, by the way, is some­thing like a Theremin. The cat, though tal­ented, is not this good.

The NYTimes has an inter­est­ing arti­cle today about artist and med­ical stu­dent Satre Stuelke’s Radi­ol­ogy Art project. If you’re an artist with access to expen­sive med­ical equip­ment, what bet­ter to do than scan ran­dom stuff and see what happens?

Stuelke’s medium of choice is a CT Scan­ner, which takes a series of X-ray images of an object with dif­fer­ent focal lengths and from dif­fer­ent angles. The data can then be assem­bled into a 3D image of the object through a process called “tomosyn­the­sis.” This, in turn, allows you to dis­cern impor­tant facts. For instance, appar­ently, the bunny to the right is filled with beans.

From the Uni­ver­sity of York Film­mak­ing Soci­ety comes this amaz­ing video of Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2, in one minute.

Are you Bill?

Turns out Pres­i­dent Obama picked his own bracket for the NCAA Tour­na­ment. This is per­haps unsur­pris­ing, con­sid­er­ing how big a bas­ket­ball fan he is. How­ever, the video of him con­struct­ing this bracket is sur­pris­ingly hilarious:

Three imme­di­ate responses:

1. This is awesome.
2. Does he implic­itly con­done gam­bling at the end of the video? (Not that I really care, but I’m sure Sarah Palin would be self-righteously incensed if she knew.)
3. Imag­ine what it’s like to be a col­lege bas­ket­ball player, know­ing that the pres­i­dent of the United States knows who you are, and is siz­ing you up.

The full arti­cle about Obama’s picks, includ­ing dis­cus­sion and com­men­tary is here.

Meet Beer2-D2 (via Makezine):

Beer2-D2

A sur­pris­ingly cool retelling of Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood (via Coudal Part­ners):

This video is truly awesome.

A hilar­i­ous post from Edith Zimmerman.

Via yayev­ery­day,

Jeff de Boer is a Calgary-based multi-media artist with an inter­na­tional rep­u­ta­tion for pro­duc­ing some of the world’s most orig­i­nal and well-crafted works of art. With an empha­sis on metal, he is best known for such bod­ies of work as suits of armour for cats and mice, armour ties and sword-handled brief­cases, rocket lamps and pop cul­ture ray guns, and exquis­ite high art, abstract works called exo­forms.