andymonsters.com

Crafting a Daft Punk helmet in 17 months

Admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:44:02 +0000

Daft Punk is well known as a duo for producing great electronic music and for hiding their identity. Their videos usually see them dressed up as robots or represented as some form of animation.

Harrison Krix, who works under the name of Volpin Props, decided to recreate one of the most memorable Daft Punk helmets worn by Guy Manual de Homem-Christo. The finished article can be seen in the following photo:

This was no small project, and has taken Krix 17 months to complete. It involves sculpting, resin casting, chroming, vacuum forming, and that was before he started on fitting it with electronics for the light display.

The whole process can be seen reduced down to the three minute YouTube clip included below:

As you’d expect, if it took 17 months to make one there isn’t going to be another. So don’t expect to be placing an order for one of these any time soon unless someone else decides to take on the project and mass produce them.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/crafting-a-daft-punk-helmet-in-17-months-20100723/

Almost invisible mirrored tree house built in Sweden

Admin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:45:17 +0000

Lloyd Alter, TreeHugger

They said it couldn’t be done. When we first wrote about the almost invisible tree house to be built in Sweden by Tham & Videgard, 899 commenters thought it was computer-generated eye candy, impossible to build, and death for birds.

But the architects built it, one of six units in a “Treehotel,” which recently opened 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.

The four-meter glass cube looks as spectacular in reality as it did in the rendering. Kent Lindvall, co-owner of the TreeHotel, has been quoted as saying:

Everything will reflect in this — the trees, the birds, the clouds, the sun, everything. So it should be invisible nearly in the forest.

And what about the birds? According to Designboom, Lindvall says that a special film that is visible to birds will be applied to the glass.

The units are constructed from sustainably harvested wood and have electric radiant floor heating and “a state-of-the-art, eco-friendly, incineration toilet”

(Although I’ve owned an incinerating toilet, and it wasn’t that eco-friendly. It used a lot of electricity and created noise and some smells. But perhaps they’ve improved.)

But other than that minor quibble, this appears to be a truly “eco” resort. The owners say in Designboom:

“This is untouched forest, and we want to maintain it the same way. We decided, for example, to not offer snowmobile safari which is very common up here,” says Selberg. Instead, wilderness walks will be offered.

Where do I sign up?

All photos courtesy of Tham & Videgard.

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/56/almost-invisible-mirrored-tree-house-built-in-sweden.html

Second Act

Admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:46:25 +0000

Ten years ago, Jay Shafer downsized to an 89-square-foot house and reinvented both his lifestyle and career in the process.

A Mystery Over China

Admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:48:05 +0000

Mike Krumboltz

On July 7, something unusual happened near the Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, China. An oddly shaped bright light appeared, forcing the airport to close down and delay 18 flights. Things are now back to normal, but people are wondering, what was that “thing”?An …” />

An ABC News article on the mysterious sighting explains that some who witnessed the light are calling it a UFO. But, keep in mind, a UFO doesn’t necessarily mean little, green men.

There is plenty of speculation on whether or not the object was some sort of military aircraft or missile. The ABC article explains that a day following the sighting, “an anonymous source told China Daily that authorities already discovered the identity of the UFO after an investigation but could not publically disclose the information because ‘there was a military connection.’”

Authorities are continuing to look into the incident, but no public conclusions have yet been made. Despite, or perhaps because of the mystery, Web searches on “china ufo” quickly soared 576%. Related queries on “china ufo video 2010,” “china ufo sightings,” and “hangzou china ufo” also posted triple digit gains. Even now, a week after the sighting, online lookups remain high.

Truth be told, there’s not much left to be said. Something weird happened. Nobody knows what it was. And if they do, they aren’t saying. Check out the video below and judge for yourself.

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93848?fp=1

The Oakland Soldiers draw a crowd because of plays like this

Admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 04:49:09 +0000

By Jeff Eisenberg

If you’re wondering why coaches have flocked to AAU games involving the Oakland Soldiers this summer, highlights like this emphatic half-court alley-oop should serve as sufficient explanation.

Findlay Prep shooting guard Nick Johnson catches a 50-foot pass from a teammate in mid-air and throws down a smooth two-handed reverse alley-oop slam during a Peach Jam game on Monday in Augusta. Then, like a true showman, he finishes the play off with a smile and a salute to the camera.

The Soldiers, who are sponsored by well-traveled NBA big man and Northern California native Drew Gooden, are one of the most heavily scouted teams on the summer circuit this year. Among the dozens of coaches who had a courtside view of Johnson’s alley-oop on Monday were North Carolina’s Roy Williams, Kansas’ Bill Self, Cal’s Mike Montgomery, UCLA’s Ben Howland and Maryland’s Gary Williams.

It’s certainly not hard to see why coaches would pack gyms to watch the Soldiers considering the talent on their roster. The 6-foot-3 Johnson is a Rivals.com top-50 prospect in the Class of 2011 and holds scholarship offers from the likes of Arizona, Arizona State, Gonzaga, Louisville and others. Guards Josiah Turner and Jabari Brown, and forward Kyle Wiltjer are all listed among Rivals.com’s top 25 for 2011, while 6-foot-9 forward Brandon Ashley is an elite prospect for 2012.

When ZagsBlog.com’s Adam Zagoria asked an assistant coach at the Peach Jam who he was looking at on Monday, he responded with a chuckle, “The entire Soldier starting five.”

No college program will be that fortunate of course, but it would be fun to see what happened if this group stayed intact.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/blog/the_dagger/post/The-Oakland-Soldiers-draw-a-crowd-because-of-pla?urn=ncaab-255681

‘Invisible Gorilla’ Test Shows How Little We Notice

Admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:50:56 +0000

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience Contributor

A dumbfounding study roughly a decade ago that many now find hard to believe revealed that if people are asked to focus on a video of other people passing basketballs, about half of watchers missed a person in a gorilla suit walking in and out of the scene thumping its chest.

Now research delving further into this effect shows that people who know that such a surprising event is likely to occur are no better at noticing other unforeseen events – and may even be worse at noticing them – than others who aren’t expecting the unexpected.

The so-called “invisible gorilla” test had volunteers watching a video where two groups of people – some dressed in white, some in black – are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were asked to count the passes among players dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black.

Watch the video for yourself:

These confounding findings from cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris detailed in a 1999 study revealed how people can focus so hard on something that they become blind to the unexpected, even when staring right at it. When one develops “inattentional blindness,” as this effect is called, it becomes easy to miss details when one is not looking out for them.

“Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it’s hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think,” Simons told LiveScience.

Gorilla infamy

Of course, these results are utterly counterintuitive, with 90 percent of people now predicting that they would notice the gorilla in the video. The problem is that this video has become so famous that many people know to look for a gorilla when asked to count basketball passes.

In new research, Simons decided to use the infamy of the invisible gorilla to his advantage, creating a similar video that asked for the same results from the audience.

“I thought it would be fun to see if I could monkey with people’s intuitions again using almost the same task,” Simons said.

Stop now! Before reading further, try his test out:

The idea with this new video was to see if those who knew about the invisible gorilla beforehand would be more or less likely to notice other unexpected events in the same video.

“You can make two competing predictions,” Simons said. “Knowing about the invisible gorilla might increase your chances of noticing other unexpected events because you know that the task tests whether people spot unexpected events. You might look for other events because you know that the experimenter is up to something.” Alternatively, “knowing about the gorilla might lead viewers to look for gorillas exclusively, and when they find one, they might fail to notice anything else out of the ordinary.”

Expecting the unexpected

Of the 41 volunteers Simon tested who had never seen or heard about the old video, a little less than half missed the gorilla in the new video, much like what happened in the old experiments. The 23 volunteers he tested who knew about the original gorilla video all spotted the fake ape in the new experiment.

However, knowing about the gorilla beforehand did not improve their chances of detecting other unexpected events. Only 17 percent of those who were familiar with the old video noticed one or both of the other unexpected events in the new video. In comparison, 29 percent of those who knew nothing of the old video spotted one of the other unexpected events in the new video.

“This demonstration is much like a good magic trick in which a magician repeatedly makes a ball disappear,” Simons said. “A magician can lead the audience to think he’s going to make the ball disappear with one method, and while people watch for that technique, he uses a different one. In both cases, the effect capitalizes on what people expect to see, and both demonstrate that we often miss what we don’t expect to see.”

“A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that people don’t pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and ‘expecting the unexpected,’ we will be able to notice anything important,” he added. “The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn’t suddenly help them notice other unexpected things.”

Once people find the first thing they’re looking for, “they often don’t notice other things,” Simons said. “Our intuitions about what we will and won’t notice are often mistaken.”

Simons detailed his new findings online July 12 in the journal i-Perception.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100713/sc_livescience/invisiblegorillatestshowshowlittlewenotice

Wipeout on world’s largest skateboard worth a million laughs

Admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:52:16 +0000

By: Pete Thomas, GrindTV.com

Not even Shaquille O’Neal, if he knew the slightest thing about skateboarding, could handle the world’s largest skateboard by himself.

The over-sized but otherwise realistic contraption is 36 feet 7 inches long, nearly nine feet wide and weighs 3,800 pounds.

It requires a group of people to successfully ride and even then it’s usually a short and precarious journey that results in a highly comical wipeout.

So it was predictable that when California Skateparks owner and board co-designer Joe Ciaglia recently tried to give the WLS a solo-whirl down a grassy knoll, he was forced to bail from and nearly trampled by an out-of-control unit that flipped in a wild crash farther down the hill.

What might also have been predictable was that the madcap episode would end up on YouTube and be witnessed by more than a million people.

It’s titled “Joe Ciaglia vs. the World’s Largest Skateboard” and it was posted July 1. On Monday its viewership surpassed 1 million, a testament either to the popularity of skateboarding or to the the fact that people simply love a good laugh at other people’s expense — or both.

“Obviously with me falling it got a lot more attention that it would have had I not fallen,” Ciaglia said. “If you look closely my foot hit the tire and my shoe got knocked off.”

It also helped, from a popularity standpoint, that the original WLS was unveiled during a 2009 episode of MTV’s “Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory,” and that the celebrity/skater designed the board with the help of Ciaglia.

That board is in Dyrdek’s warehouse. The latest model, owned by Ciaglia and referred to simply as “the big skateboard,” is an exact replica and was recently displayed at New York’s Times Square.

http://www.grindtv.com/skate/blog/18823/wipeout+on+worlds+largest+skateboard+worth+a+million+laughs/

The Force is Strong With This GPS

Admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:53:37 +0000

by Mike Ryan

“Rebellious, you are.”

In “The Empire Strikes Back,” Jedi master Yoda scolded his student, Luke Skywalker, for not properly listening to instructions. It’s nice to know that a GPS device incorporating Yoda’s voice will be equally as ornery to stubborn drivers who feel they don’t need directions.

TomTom, a company that makes global-positioning devices, recently signed a licensing deal with Lucasfilm to use three “Star Wars” character voices (Han Solo will be the fourth in August) in an effort to get drivers to their destination in the safest and nerdiest way possible.

Yoda’s GPS voice – Star Wars navigation @ Yahoo! Video

Well-known character voices are certainly not a new phenomenon when it comes to GPS. Turn-by-turn instructions featuring the voice of the Knight Industries Two Thousand (better known as KITT from “Knight Rider”) or Stewie from “Family Guy” have been popular choices for the last couple of years. Celebrities ranging from Michael Caine to Snoop Dogg have also lent their voices, but this is the first time that Lucasfilm has gotten into the GPS voiceover market.

David Beckham, sports greats recreate ‘Star Wars’ >>

“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” the voice of Darth Vader warns drivers who miss their turn. “Take the third left – it may be our only hope,” pleads C-3P0. For that special someone who feels that a pristine collection of mint-on-card original “Star Wars” action figures isn’t enough to ensure that dating will be difficult, this announcement is truly a godsend.

Photos of the Star Wars saga >>

For its part, TomTom kind of gets that this is a nerd’s dream, releasing a couple of videos depicting the recording sessions of the Yoda and Darth Vader versions.

Darth Vader GPS recording session @ Yahoo! Video

Star Wars GPS Voices – Yoda records directions @ Yahoo! Video

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-star-wars-gps.html

Super Mario Beatbox

Admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 04:54:31 +0000

RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time

Admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:56:10 +0000

Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.