Fallen AT-AT snow fort
From reddit user jabo27. [via Geekologie]
Made On Earth
Monster Krupp bucket excavator eats stray bulldozers
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.
Fun Theory Award winner rewards safe drivers with lottery tickets
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).
RC Heli with POV display
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]
Total cucurbitaceous craniectomy
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.
Whirlpool fountain
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.
Centuries of cranks vindicated by human-powered ornithopter flight
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]
