Wow! David K. Smith has made what seems a shoo-in for the title of World’s smallest model train – This is a Z scale model of an N scale train layout–a model of a model. And it works. I built it to sit in the window of a Z scale hobby shop on my “real” […]
I got jealous of Matt’s recent “SuperFoam” chair post and had to find one of my own. This one is from a Taiwanese design student named Yu-Wing Wu. The voids are non-random, being carefully designed to collapse into the shape of an armchair when you sit on the thing, which in its resting state looks more like a giant block of tofu than a chair.
I recently ordered some refillable paint pens from Art Primo, and this was in the box as a freebie. It’s the exact size, shape, and color as a cigarette, and among a dozen real cigarettes in a pack it’d likely pass any search completely unnoticed. It took me a minute to figure out its nefarious purpose: If you get caught in the vicinity of a fresh tag, after all, it’s best not to be found with a marker on your person. They’re manufactured by Germany’s On The Run, but you won’t find them on their website. The one I got was gold; the silver ones below were photographed by Flickr user $30,000.
I’m going to invent a time machine so I can go back and persuade my parents to name me Jonathan Brilliant, which for now am what made this impressive installation simply called “The Berlin Piece.”
My cell phone has a little eye molded into the case for attaching a lanyard strap. I want my A/V remotes to have the same thing so that if I should decide that I want to tie one of them to ,say, the leg of my coffee table, I won’t be driven to the same lengths as
Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver’s license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.
This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then…well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I’m sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.
Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the transceivers concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.
To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it’s really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world’s supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning “eternally,” only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world.
As for the “paradox,” well, it boils down to this: the three apparently-identical stacked gears on the end are driven by a single gear, yet move at different rates, which, of course, would be impossible if they were truly identical. News flash: They’re not. But I’m sure it was harder to fight boredom in the 18th century than it is now, and the build is undeniably gorgeous.
