As I was zipping through my Google Reader last night, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this image posted over on W5ARAN. After doing a little bit of extra digging, I found this tidbit of information about the festival, held in the textile-centric city of Gastonia, North Carolina: The Grand Cotton Festival was […]
If you’re not using your bike’s rear drilled brake bridge, you could try BillieGene’s Instructable for a recycled rear mudguard. It mounts to the brake bridge to keep your fixie from flinging mud up your back, which is a must for early springtime biking.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is making good use of their new computerized embroidery machine, first up is this Arecibo Message scarf: The Arecibo Message, one of the most famous messages transmitted as part of SETI, loosely translated, says: “Hi! We’re intelligent! We’re made of meat! Here’s where we live!” Binary designs like the Arecibo message […]
Holly of Chez Beeper Bebe shares this modern and more durable twist on a classic toy. I have a total love-hate relationship with those dime store trinket-y toys. I love them because they remind me of my childhood and how much I cherished all those bitty toys, but I also hate them because the stuff […]
But this video of Penn State’s Breazeale nuclear reactor “pulsing” is the first time I’ve ever seen any moving pictures of the phenomenon, which are somehow way more impressive. And since this is a phenomenon few of us will ever have an opportunity to witness first-hand, the 15 seconds it takes to watch the video definitely count as time well spent in my book. Note how the blue glow persists for some time after the reactor itself has been shut off.
Sunlight Labs, known for opening America’s government, had a problem when they recently moved facilities. Creating new keys for team members was becoming costly, so they figured out an alternative method of providing secure access using a WRT54GL, easily sourced components, and a trusty copy of Make: Electronics.
Really amazing. What’s going on in this cool time-lapse video from Italian YouTuber wwwperiodictableru isn’t a chemical reaction per se–it’s not oxidation or some other type of traditional corrosion. Turns out metallic or “white” tin spontaneously changes its so-called alpha crystal structure at temperatures below XX to the crumbly beta structure of “gray” tin. It’s the same stuff before and after–just different allotropes of the same element. The transformation, known as “tin pest” (Wikipedia), catalyzes itself–once it starts it just gets faster and faster.
