Stumbling upon these photos was a strange moment for me. I’ve been playing Borderlands recently, and it had never occurred to me that the monster excavator from the video game might’ve been based on a real-world machine–a real-world machine which, just by eyeballing it, looks like it might actually be bigger than the video game version. Dark Roasted Blend has a good article with lots of deets on the monster machine.
Volkswagen’s Fun Theory Awards aims to incentivize socially useful behaviors by making them into games. Previously, their funds have produced a bottle recycling machine played like a video game, a trashcan that behaves like a bottomless pit, and a public staircase turned into a piano keyboard (See links, below).
Blue LEDs on top, gold underneath. I love the shout of glee at 11 seconds when the image first appears. Mziwisky hits it out of the park with this one. Hats off to you, sir. [via Hack a Day]
OK, I call BS on this: I don’t think pumpkins really have skulls. I think infamous skull charlatan Noah Scalin really just carved a skull on a white pumpkin and stuck it inside a transected, you know, regular pumpkin. I didn’t just fall off the cucurbit cart, you know.
It’s called Charybdis, as in “between Scylla and.” Briton William Pye used a massive acrylic cylinder to give the appearance of a containerless volume of water. It’s installed at Seaham Hall, in Sunderland, England.
Although the Snowbird, made of carbon fiber and balsa wood and with a 105-foot wingspan, could hardly be described as “practical,” to me this seems like a major aviation milestone: Somebody, specifically University of Toronto PhD student Todd Reichert and co-workers, finally did it. All those old black and white “wacky inventor” blooper reels set to goofy music can eat it. [via Toronto Star]
The biggest and best-quality versions of these watermelon car images I can find come from a members-only forum post on this South Korean site, which appears to be some kind of auto marketplace and/or enthusiast’s hub. Problem is, the plates on the car do not appear to be Korean. Can anyone identify their nationality, or […]
