The idea is surprisingly simple once you think about it: pair a large touch-screen LCD display of the type used in the Microsoft Surface prototype and elsewhere with an ordinary mirror. Simple, but the result is, I think, a whole lot more interesting than just large-format touch screen displays alone:
There’s a blog entry on the gizmo from the folks who dreamed it up.
I like living in the future. 🙂
…and there’s an eBay auction going on right now for a full-size, hand-built, three-story-tall piece of Roman siege equipment, specially constructed by The Discovery Channel for a piece on the history of siege warfare.
I’m, y’know, just sayin’.
I’ve always been fascinated by fucking machines. The idea of a mechanical contraption designed and built to fuck the person riding it, relentlessly and tirelessly, appeals to the mad scientist in me. In fact, I could easily see myself making a living designing and building fucking machines, were it not for the fact that I lack patience and attention to detail, two qualities of incalculable value in the performance of said job functions.
Indeed, I’ve always wanted to own a steam-powered fucking machine, because the notion of such a thing appeals to my sensibilities on so many levels. It strikes me as being at once quintessentially steampunk and also a repudiation of Victorian social mores; and besides, how awesome would it be to have a partner being fucked by an enormous, clanking machine with jets of steam issuing out of it, while I cackle with glee and scamper around tending to the boiler and oiling the various parts of the machine with an oil can?
Ahem. But I digress. In any event, such a machine would be impractically big and unreasonably dangerous, and conversations with physicsduck about the practical realities of such a machine soon dashed any hopes that I might one day own such a thing.
However, I still like fucking machines, and on my trip to Los Angeles I met a couple of folks who do make their living designing and selling such machines. And they gave me one. Which is–get this–designed to accommodate two people at once.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Monkey Rocker Tango: The rest is even less safe for work
I’m a big fan of the new Battlestar: Galactica television show. It’s arguably among the edgiest and most brilliant things that’s ever been attempted in a mainstream TV show. It’s also unremittingly grim and depressing; fitting, I think, for a program whose premise is the genocide of the entire human race.
One of the things I particularly like about the show is the music in it. It’s unlike any science fiction program’s music I’ve ever heard before; stark, simple, and absolutely lovely. I’m especially fond of the opening title music, which I use as figmentj‘s ringtone on my phone:
What I didn’t know, though, is that the lyrics are in Sanskrit. Specifically, they are the Gayatri mantra (Sanskrit: गायत्री), an ancient Hindu hymn:
ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः ।
तत् सवितुर्वरेण्यं ।
भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि ।
धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात् ॥
Transliterated, it reads:
oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
tát savitúr váreniyaṃ
bhárgo devásya dhīmahi
dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt
It’s a mantra that appears in the Ŗg Veda, and it’s the second most important mantra in Hindusim.
And I think that’s pretty cool.
So in my ongoing exploration of my new status as a consumer whore, I’ve discovered that the Internet, long the place of porn and open source software, is also a most remarkable innovation in the field of finding things that I never knew existed but desperately want.
First on the list is this chair, made from the jaws of a torpedo loading crane on a nuclear submarine.
I want this chair. More precisely, I want to fuck in this chair.
Next on the list is Luis Berumen’s Zero Point Zero watch, made from a pair of handcuffs. The display built into one cuff shows the hour; the other shows the minutes. Who says digital watches can’t be cool?
And finally, Kacper Hamilton has designed a set of drinking glasses around the Seven Deadly Sins, each glass in the set embodying one sin. This particular glass is for Wrath.
This…is a tripod-mounted, twin-rotor Gatling gun that shoots rubber bands.
I know it’s almost impossible to absorb that much cool all at once, so sit back, relax for a second, and then read that again.
It’s a tripod-mounted, twin-rotor Gatling gun. That shoots rubber bands.
For the love of God and all that is holy, someone has built a rubber band minigun.
I mention this only because my birthday is fast approaching…in a strange twist of irony, it falls on Easter Sunday this year. Just so you know.
The world’s first scanning tunneling microscope, outfitted to do double duty as an atomic force microscope. This machine was invented at IBM Zurich in 1981; its creators won a Nobel Prize in 1986. And yes, it really is one of the coolest pieces of tech in the world.
See that orange round thing in the lower right hand corner? It’s an Arizona Iced Tea can. Some things in experimental physics never change. 😉
…via physicsduck
Video of a French guy who makes triodes (a type of vaccum tube) by hand. And when I say “by hand,” I mean glass envelope and all.
Pay particular attention to his testing equipment.
Man, this is really, really, really cool. If you like tech, you like seeing tech made, and you like old school tech, check this out. Worksafe, sound.
S&M blogger outs web host malware attack: When Google meets kink.
