Missing Mary Road

Moritz Waldemeyer created this pong table with embedded LED lights and touchpads to create a truly interactive gaming table.

The Pong table is a dining table made from DuPont Corian with an aluminium base. There are 2500 LEDs integrated into the table top, together with two track pads they recreate the classic Pong game. When turned off, the integrated technology disappears completely, leaving a simple, beautiful and practical dining table.

While searching for invisible images,

A Dali-like painting of an invisible elephant by Nguyen Dinh Dang, and a cat who definitely thinks he’s invisible

Beware of the invisible cows of Mauna Kea. Beware of the invisible snowmobiler

“One of the most astonishing sensations in the desert is to walk in the middle of nowhere. Hours, with no mark…

Joe Bagley’s photo of two men in lounge chairs and a self-portrait of an invisible photographer taking a tea break

HG Wells Penguin Mug

This invisible globe is a hollow glass sphere with a spinning LED light ring to create different projections. (Other unique globes by the same globe makers)

An invisible lizard

An optical illusion with six invisible triangles. Can you spot them?

Vanishing Point puzzles

Invisible Suits are interactive suits made from special blue screen fabric (material used for work with video blue screen technique). The intended effect is the virtual “disappearance” of the persons wearing the suits: their bodies merge with the visual environment they inhabit.
The artist Willem Oorebeek prints black ink on black surfaces, and his invisible “Blackout” images can be seen only from a particular angle

The Do’s and Don’t's of Attending a Mime’s Birthday Party

The lost secret of invisibility by artist Howard Kistler

An invisible painting.

via GOB

so everyone either buys from ikea or copies off it. at least if you’ve just graduated and are single anyway or on a shoestring budget when just married. here’s a website that “hacks” ikea and allows you to use their furniture in creative ways. very fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8pK_q-_6dw

Worth1000 recently had a fantastic photoshopping contest of cartoon characters in historic art. this one of he-man is one of my favourites. there are some brilliant entries. check them out here.

One of the fun things about The Adventures of Asterix comic books is its use of latin phrases. Here’s a website that collects Asterix latin sayings and their translation.

Acta est fabula: It’s all over (lit. the drama has been acted out)
Alea jacta est: The die is cast
Audaces fortuna juvat: Fortune favors the bold
Auri sacra fames: The cursed hunger for gold
Aut Caesar, aut nihil: Either Caesar or nothing
Ave atque vale: Hail and farewell
Ave Caesar morituri te salutant!: Hail, Caesar! Those who are about to die salute you!

you have a square with red dots. don’t touch the red dots. hit the blue square. see how long it takes you to beat my score of 215.

just in case we annihilate ourselves, norway is doing something very cool. a noah’s ark for the modern world.

It’s called the Svalbard International Seed Vault, and it is, officially, Plan B. There are plenty of other seed banks in the world, of course — more than a thousand, designed as a source for planting in case seed reserves elsewhere are destroyed. But Svalbard will be there in case something happens to the rest of ‘em; something like massive floods, nuclear war, asteroid impact or some other unforeseen doomsday.

The vault will be built deep inside a mountain on a remote island near the North Pole, more than 600 miles North of Norway, the country that’s financing its construction. And they really thought of everything: it’s high above sea level, in case the ice caps melt. If its source of power is cut, the permafrost surrounding it will act as a freezer, providing natural refrigeration. The need for human maintenance will be kept at a minimum; there will be no full-time staff, just one visit per year from someone to check up on the facility. “If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios,” the project’s lead scientist said, “you cannot actually have too much dependence on human beings.” Construction begins in March. Let’s really cross our fingers that they’ll never have to make a withdrawal at this bank.

Today, British autistic savant Daniel Tammet is 10,220 days, or 245,280 hours old (that’s 28 years for you non-savants out there). He is blessed/cursed with the kind of savantism made famous by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (formerly known as “idiot” savantism), but Daniel manages to sustain relatively normal social interaction with others. (He credits growing up in a family of nine children, and thus being forced to socialize, for his normalcy relative to other savants, of which there are only about 50 known in the world.)

A lot of savants can do things that no normal person can do, like tell you what day of the week August 18, 1876 was without consulting an almanac, in about five seconds (it was a Friday), multiply 27 to the power of four in his head (531,441) or memorize and recite long strings of numbers with ease. But there are a few things he can do that even most savants cannot. For instance, he once learned functional Icelandic in a week, and recited pi to several thousand places from memory (without errors — it took more than five hours).

So how does he do it? As a recent profile of Daniel on 60 Minutes revealed, the answer may shed light on the abilities of all savants: he is a synesthetic. That is to say, he associates numbers with colors, just as composer Franz Liszt claimed to have associated music with color. (Hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams also claims to have synesthesia.)

Interesting note: one man who has done some crucial research in this area is Oxford professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of Borat star Sascha Baron-Cohen.

Also seems like Daniel has a blog.
via mental floss

Wordy is very addicting once you get the hang of it! This game is a cross between Boggle and Tetris, or maybe a wordfind puzzle. As the letters drop, click on adjacent letters to spell a word. You can go in any and all directions, and even change direction, as long as the letters are next to each other. Then click again on the last letter. If that word (of at least three letters) is in their dictionary, the tiles will disappear. But you have to hurry!

i can’t wait for this to be released. by the way, it’s been almost two months and i still haven’t been able to find a wii anywhere in this damn city. every time i go to a store, they get sold out the day before. it’s blood frustrating. eventually i’ll get my hands on one. don’t you worry. like i said, wii all love cricket.

wanna see some crazy sand castles? this is a gallery of the annual sand castling competition in belgium.