Your Comments

And we’re back with our thirty-ninth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Makezine, our Facebook page, and Twitter.

In response to Snake Cake! Run for your Lives!, P. Burmese says:

As striking as it appears I’d recoil from a second helping.

In the piece Beauty’s Bionic Bald Eagle Beak, James Patrick remarks:

It a fantastic accomplishment. I wonder if one could sedate the animal and scan its beak in 3D to create a more accurate, custom prosthesis.

In response to Haunting Drone Instrument, user Eric Freeman says:

i’m telling you, send this link to Bear McCreary (composer, Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica) … maybe he can mix this instrument into one of his scores…

In the piece Back Yard Roller Coaster with 12′ Drop, Clifford Paul says:

This coaster looks great and is nothing in terms of pure mortal danger; in Chelyabinsk, Russia our family beheld a dollar (please read 28 rubles) carnival of DIY created “Big Wheels” for the children to participate in a what might be envisioned as a Roman arena chariot race. No horses for these chariots, but these tricycles were complete with unpadded seats repurposed from old 1940′s tractors, adorned with jagged metal shards and welded joints, guaranteed to fail rusted through frames, and bike wheels from old Soviet-era bicycles.

Parental terror could not be derived from these vehicles, nor seeming disinterest in the eat-or-be-eaten manner by which most of the unsupervised tots were colliding, nor the seeming lack of triage for the hapless participants. No, the terror was not with the rides, riders or audience – it was the man arc welding 20-foot I-beams with the electrodes and power source just inches from the Russian Circus Maximus.

Given a choice between a cleanly designed PVC track or dismemberment/ electrocution in a Russian playground I know what every parent would choose.

In the article Lampshades from Coffee Grounds, user trkemp writes:

One of the questions I have when I see a “new” material, like wood putty made from coffee grounds, is: what is the long term stability and safety of it? Will it retain it’s color? Will it disintegrate? I know that as a child I often built things out of unconventional materials. When I went through boxes of my old stuff from my parent’s I discovered that many of my early creations looked awful or were falling apart.

Just because this is “patented” doesn’t mean that any long term testing has been done on it. Will it out-gas something when the light bulb warms it up. Will sitting in the sun make bits flake off and fall into your Cheerios.

Using traditional materials and finishes may seem less wonderful in some way, but you know what the end results will be.

Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.