A Very Cool Little Dot

Just really neat.



And the making of:

Huh. Cool.

It takes so very little to fascinate me.

Witness:

I am completely captivated by toilet paper rolls.



And post it notes. I love post it notes.



Paper tape is totally art.



I like crayons too.



I think this guy is nuts and he'll probably be dying soon, but he does some of those things that I've considered trying to talk my brother into trying:

http://www.popsci.com/mercuryfish
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-08/cool-hand-theo

And finally (since morning comes way too soon and I need to toddle off to dreamland) another take on Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance:"



G'night, folks,

Near Space Pictures... DIY for Under $200

This is just cool. Two MIT students with a weather balloon took some kick @$$ pictures from near space. Here's their page - they'll be posting a how-to guide shortly. Isn't it nearly science fair season?

I Want One!

How cool is that? OniMushaKid made it from pop tabs.

It's my most recent "coolest thing ever."

My New Best Friend

I got an iphone last week. OMG. I'm in love. This thing is THE COOLEST NEW TOY EVER! I have spent every second that I wasn't at work at home downloading applications (apps).

Some of them confirm my utter dorkiness... the light saber and the phaser, for instance. The shooting gallery with very lifelife shotgun noises may very well have saved people's lives this week. And they have bejeweled, which is the best game ever... organizing shiny things into patterns - never has there been anything more perfect for me. Then there are the apps that may come in quite handy... one of them uses the product bar code to go online and find comparison prices as you shop. One takes the lyrics from the song stuck in your head, finds the song, title and artist, then gives you the option to buy it from itunes. Another tracks the location of public bathrooms, for those times that you need one now. One is a German translater, to help communicate with my dear colleauges. I've got maps, news, music, search engines - really this gizmo is like something out of the Jetsons. I may not have my flying car, but I'm sure Apple is working on an app for that.

Science Geeks Unite!

That would be me. Or sometimes, science dork. Whatever. Every now and then, I totally geek out on people. Tonight I went over to a friend's house to watch that time warp show on Discovery. This episode wasn't as cool as the last one. Last time, they shot a lot of fruit, showed a really cool thing where sound vibration made a wine glass jiggle like jello, and a dog drinking water, which was pretty cool. This show? Still really cool, just not as cool. (Coming from me, that's a relative term.)

The priceless part of the evening (aside from subjecting my friend to the season finale of Project Runway)? They were showing a guy breaking concrete slabs with his hands and milliseconds before his hand hit, they cut to commercial. Both of us immediately squawked, then looked at each other and started giggling uncontrollably. The only thing better than being a total science dork? Being with others the exact same way. Yay for friends! And super fast camera speeds!

wineglass vibrations

Packaging Genius...

I think I've already established how easy it is to fascinate me, right? Well, here's the latest thing...

I love homedecoratorsoutlet.com. Love them! I have furnished quite a bit of my house from these people, and they're great. Aside from discount prices, which always make me happy, they send things quickly, the directions are clear and easy to follow and I don't think I've ever gotten anything that was missing anything - pretty much a miracle.

Anywho, the other day I was wandering around the site and found chairs. Generally, tables speak to me, but in this case, I really liked these chairs. I found them in the "5 or less" corner of the site, and pounced. I ordered two of them - what the heck, they're small. They arrived the other day, stacked and packed in a large box. Here's what they look like:



And now for the part that's got me so fascinated - the packaging on these things. Holy Origami, Batman! It took me over half an hour to unravel the first one. First, they took straw/hay stuff and wrapped paper around it.



Then they wrapped this padded paper around the chair in such a way that it looks like the chair, just a bit fluffier.





They wove the ends of the paper in and under and around so that no ends were sticking out ...





and THEN they took twine and wove a netting around the paper to hold it in place, complete with some rather intricate knots.



It's a bit fluffier now than when it arrived - my Sophia really likes crinkly paper. The furballs are both fond of this straw - I'm finding it all over my house.





One of them is still all wrapped up - partly so I could take these pictures and share the wealth, but also because I think it looks pretty cool the way it is. It's okay, I'm almost over it and probably by the next visit from the recycle truck, I'll have freed the second chair from bondage but right now I'm still marveling over the time and energy it must have taken to wrap each chair like that. Wow!

Digichromato-whatie?

This is the coolest thing. Pardon me while I totally geek out.


This is a color image of the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin. Founded around 1330, the Trinity-Ipat'ev Monastery in the old Russian Volga River city of Kostroma, northeast of Moscow, contained within its walls several old churches, including the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin shown here. Originally constructed in the sixteenth century, the church was demolished in the early Soviet period. This photograph may be the only color photograph ever taken of the church.

So, how'd they get a color photo of a church destroyed so long ago? Glad you asked.

It's called "Digichromatography." Between 1909 and 1912, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, with support from Tsar Nicholas II, completed a very ambitious survey of 11 regions of Russia. He took pictures with a camera of his own design (since lost) that recorded the images on glass plates. Our Library of Congress bought the plates from his heirs in 1948. The process of digichromatography enabled the creation of brilliant color images from these plates. At the time, he projected the images from the glass plates through red, blue and green filters to show a color image. How cool is that? He was hosting color slide shows in the very early 1900s.

He studied as a chemist, and devoted himself to the advancement of photography. His own original research yielded patents for producing color film slides and for projecting color motion pictures. The tours of Russia he and his team completed were done in a specially outfitted railroad car. To keep his images straight, he created albums to serve as photographic records of his trips across the Russian Empire. Each album is composed of contact prints--created from his glass plate negatives--which were mounted in the order in which he traveled.

Anyway, I know all this 'cause the Library of Congress is hosting an exhibition. (And I stole heavily from their website for my information.) So go here and check out the cool picts!