Archive for December, 2011
Simple Trick: See The Blood Vessels In Your Eye
By AutoBlog at 31 December, 2011, 3:30 pm
Sensory adaptation, the same phenomenon that causes you to stop hearing a continually ticking clock, also prevents you from seeing the branching network of blood vessels inside your eye. Except when you use the simple trick demonstrated in this video. The video was posted by thegnome54, a YouTuber studying cognitive neuroscience at Brown University. All you need to do it at home is an index card p …
Read More >>Apple Didn’t Invent The All-Touch Phone
By Hong Kiat at 31 December, 2011, 3:00 pm
In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and denounced the “smart” phone — ugly, mismatched keyboards of Nokia and RIM. Rightfully! But he also championed Apple as the mobile keyboard killer. However, IBM beat them almost two decades earlier. The Simon, an unassuming collaboration between Apple antithesis IBM and Bellsouth (?) in 1992, sported an entirely touch-based interface. No b …
Read More >>The Commenters You Meet In Yearly Roundup Hell
By AutoBlog at 31 December, 2011, 2:30 pm
Ah, the end of the year. The perfect time for publications of every stripe to dust off old content, repurpose popular packages and name their best/favorite/top everythings of the last twelve months. And, as NPR highlights with delicious accuracy, the commenters that come with those lists. It’s a terrific meta roundup, featuring personal favourites like The Person Who Is Exactly Right, The Un …
Read More >>Failed Flying Car Design Makes For A Lovely Dock
By Hong Kiat at 31 December, 2011, 2:00 pm
The flying car is still a few years from being a practical reality, let alone a sound business venture. So why do companies keep pouring millions into developing them when their designs clearly work better as a stylish iPhone dock? The Amethyst X-1 docking system even sounds like the code name for a flying car, but instead it stays close to the ground, boosting your MP3s through a set of three spe …
Read More >>The Perfect Cutlery For Your New Year’s Guilt
By admin at 31 December, 2011, 1:30 pm
You knew all that over-indulging during Christmas and New Year’s would cost you. But even if it helps you shed the kilos, is anyone really going to pay $US140 for this set of weight-lifting cutlery? The chromed knife and fork dumbbells each weigh around 1kg, and just the two of them will set you back $US109. But to really feel the burn and know you’re getting rid of all those sugar plu …
Read More >>Channel Islands Wood Biscuit Is My Dream Ride
By Gizmodo at 31 December, 2011, 1:00 pm
When awesome technologies intersect the sum can be even greater than the parts. Such is the case with the Channel Islands Wood Biscuit, a cutting-edge board design crossed with old-school materials. It’s beautiful, it’s functional and I need it. Grain Surfboards is a small company in Maine, US, and the boards they make are almost entirely composed of locally grown/milled northern white …
Read More >>Giant Car-Dispensing Claw Game Is A Projection
By yanko at 31 December, 2011, 12:30 pm
the official title of biggest claw game in the world must surely belongs to GM with this giant playable projection they created to hock the Chevy Sonic. The famous Roosevelt Hotel was used as the backdrop for the massive projection, created by the ad agency Gooby Silverstein & Partners. Players used an oversized gear shift as a joystick to direct the crane’s arm, and a mock gas pedal to …
Read More >>12 Tanks Made From Things They Shouldn’t Be
By Engadget at 31 December, 2011, 12:00 pm
Guns? Who needs guns when you’ve got the buisness end of a jet engine mounted on your tank’s turret? That’ll show those land mines who’s boss. Our friends at Oobject have assembled 12 of the oddest armoured vehicles to ever grace the battlefield. Looking for more absurd armour? Check out these 12 pink tanks, some armoured trains, and these armoured face masks. Antanov …
Read More >>Everything About Calendars, Explained
By Hong Kiat at 31 December, 2011, 11:30 am
The end of the year seems like as appropriate a time as any to take a deep dive into how and why our calendar got to be the way it is. And while you may have some of these facts scrambling around in the dusty recesses of your brain somewhere, I promise you’ve never seen them so lithely illustrated. My one quibble: the quick dismissal of the Mayan calendar apocalypse theory tacked on at the e …
Read More >>Watch Apple’s Ghostbusters Do Battle With IBM
By admin at 31 December, 2011, 9:30 am
I wish Apple still made ads like this Ghostbusters -possessed creation from 1984. The modern ones, while obviously very good at contributing to Apple’s bottom line, just seem so sterile in comparison. Apple’s enemy in this clip is “Blue”, an older moniker for IBM (and mostly retired, with the exception of a certain chess-playing supercomputer). Watch as the former c …
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