I can not help it and it certainly isn’t because of my closet goth style, but I do like these cigarette packs. Great design and sarcasm at its best.
Design by R.J. Reynolds.
Tag Cool
Best Cigarette Package You’ll See All Week
LEGO Naming Convention According to Kids
Brilliant PDF with the official name of LEGO bricks and how 4 kids, all younger than 8, call those blocks.
Drought Problems In Ethiopia Almost Solved. Country To Get Its Own Oceans
According to researchers, you know those people who get paid to claim things other researches then have to prove are true, have claimed that a 35 mile long crack, up to 20 feet wide, in Ethiopia may be the source of a new ocean.
Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.
“We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this,” said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochesterand co-author of the study.
Water problems solved. But things would get worse even: the new ocean is said to connect the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. Errr… yeah.
So when we translate all the sciencalese we come to this: the largest ass crack in the world will connect two seas which are already connected together all while solving the drought problem in Ethiopia. Wait, what happens to Ethiopia?
Via MSNBC.
The Internet Turns 40 Today
After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, on October 29, 1969. The ARPANET was one of the “eve” networks of today’s Internet. Following on from the demonstration that packet switching worked on the ARPANET, the British Post Office, Telenet, DATAPAC and TRANSPAC collaborated to create the first international packet-switched network service.
Via Wikipedia.
11 Years in 2 Minutes: The Google Story
This IS cool animation, simpled and with some history even. The Google Story in slightly less than 2 minutes.
Tron 1.5 Rise of The Virals: Soundtrack Available Online [Free]
Apparently Disney had already started work on ‘Tron 1.5′ in 1998. The soundtrack to that movie is now available online at Tron.fm.
In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.
“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.”
Kasabian Football Hero
Kasabian plays : Guitar Hero Football. If it weren’t Kasabian I might have found it awesome. Now… bonus point for coolness but big no for music. Oh give me a break, fans!
Nerds United (And Trekkies): Join The Klingons!
There’s not much to say about this one. Other than ‘You know you want to!
What Religion Should You Follow?
Title says it all. Another one for our awesome flowchart collection.
Fight Club Actually Is Calvin & Hobbes
This one is old but I had never read it before.
In both cases, the entity that began as the ideal companion soon took on a more realistic, three-dimensional quality. In other words, they became real. This is evident in that both Hobbes and Tyler also began to function as scapegoats for their creators. For instance, consider that Calvin often blames broken lamps and other assorted household mischief on Hobbes, and that Jack is inclined to believe that Fight Club and other various anti-society mischief is brought about by Tyler, not himself. Calvin claims Hobbes pounces on him every day after school; Jack believes Tyler beats him up next to 40 kilotons of nitroglycerin in a parking garage—the list goes on and on. The relationships between the two sets of friends are the exact same. Is this mere coincidence?
Read the complete argument at Metaphilm.
Metallica Pinball Machine (built with Linux)
It is a generally known fact that you can not be a real metal band without having your own customized pinball machine. Right? Right.
So James Hetfield, lead singer of a well-known DRM supporting commercial band with metal tunes went ahead and ordered his own band pinball machine. Obviously sound in this machine is one of the main elements.
Creating a one-of-a-kind pinball experience is a much different beast, but we were able to catch up with Wade Krause and Tanio Klyce, two men who put together a special table for some big pinball fans: Metallica.
“[Singer] James Hetfield saw the Hellacopters game that [artist Dirty Donny] and I made a few years ago and he wanted us to build him a custom game,” Krause told Ars. That was the genesis of the project, but it takes real ingenuity to take an existing machine and modify it so that both the art and the play matches the feel of a band. Here’s how they Krause and Klyce pulled it off.
Ars Technica has the compelte story behind the making of the machine.
Rome’s Population in History
David Galbraith studied the population of Rome over the last 3000 years. Interesting discoveries:
the rise and fall of Ancient Rome was roughly symmetrical (compared to the rapid decline of societies such as Greenland in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’); the population during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K); Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees); the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome.
Go look at the nice graph here.
Superhero Comic Mashups
Cool mashups of geek movies/strips with long lasting popular comics.
Garfield – He-man
Peanuts – X-Men
More samples at Ryan Dunlavey’s blog.
How to Make A Twin Lens Reflex Camera From Cardboard
No manual or instructions here, just a link to an awesome time-lapse video of the making of one.
Star Wars in ASCII
Star Wars in ascii.
