flickering pictures

Nicholas Branson, a Digger and FP reader, sent me a link to this very cool video of a 3D painting that seems to change pretty dramatically depending on your perspective. The painting is apparently on display in the Business Design Centre in London. Thanks, Nicholas!

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If you’re one of those people who desperately craves individuality, or if you just happen to love the unusual, TokyoFlash makes your watch. The one above — the “Star Performer,” from the company’s “Pimp” line — comes with blue or white LEDs and costs $94.96. Unfortunately, I’m neither cool enough nor geeky enough to pull [...]

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This portable laser-generated bike lane is the neatest simple idea I’ve seen in a while. But is it for real, and is it for sale? From Yanko Design: Only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 – $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them [...]

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Information Week reports: Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. “I’m attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No.” You heard it here first, folks. Creepiness aside, Aiko can read, do math and recognize people, and responds to touch and voice commands. She [...]

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Knowing that this story combines three of my favourite things — beer, Eastern philosophy and neat-o whatnot — a buddy of mine sent me some info about this most postworthy endeavour. Lloyd Alter at Treehugger reports: Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building [...]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius. And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore. From the Times of [...]

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Space elevator: a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space as a way of non-rocket spacelaunch. Picture a super-strong ribbon thinner than a sheet of paper, one metre wide and long enough to wrap two and a half times around the world. Now picture it extending into space, the [...]

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I love this sort of thing. From Damn Interesting: In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes [...]

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Researchers at UC Berkeley have diverted light around three-dimensional objects in a way that gives the impression they aren’t there — a lot like a Star Trek-style cloaking device, and that guy on the right. Science is cool. From the Guardian: Researchers funded by the Pentagon have managed to make material that has the potential [...]

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For the last little while, vacation time, jet lag and three weeks worth of e-mail/voice mail have joined their sinister forces to create a great sucking whirlpool of unproductiveness and exhaustion — one that pulled my desire to post down to the deepest darkest abysses of the undersea. As of today, I’ve returned home, toweled [...]

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