After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You might even take your time or check back every now and then as the rabbit will wait for you 20 years from now on.
This absolutely awesome! It’s big enough you can see it on Google Maps!
Via Design You Trust
Original article in Italian via Designaside
You’ve seen the now-famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster and its many many variations, but did you know that this British WWII poster was never distributed to the public and was discovered only recently in an English book shop?
In light of this article (and many more political theories), one could easily correlate this to certain political ideologies that tend to favour education for the select (rich) few and leave the vast majority uneducated, thus easily manipulated, even by the worst dumbass in history.
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
Read the rest of this fascinating article on People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say – Yahoo! News.
The Vieux Panier boutique hotel in Marseille commissions artists and designers to decorate each of their five bedrooms once a year. The juxaposition of the historic 17th century former grocer’s with bold contemporary interior design is a striking one and definitely not for the faint-hearted.
I for one could come up with activities way better than sleep in this schyzodelic decor.
See and read more in the original article from Stylist Magazine
Kensington (dark) Market
I wonder if reading Twilight is a prerequisite to entering this shop.
Kensington Market, Toronto, February 25, 2012
WOW… just wow. This stunning picture is composed of many images downloaded from the Opportunity rover that’s been roaming the surface of Mars for several years now. Absolutely beautiful!
The individual frames for this image were taken and downlinked a few weeks ago, but it took Don Davis many hours of meticulous labor to assemble it into this beautiful postcard from Mars. Take a moment to be the rover, standing there, covered with fine red dust, on a cold day in Martian winter, the yellow Sun taking its light with it as it sinks behind you.
Stan Wadlow Park, East York
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, cryptographer, and logician, plus the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He also worked in biology, and now, 58 years after his tragic death, science has confirmed one of his old biological hypotheses.
via io9 – Scientists confirm Alan Turing’s 60-year-old theory for why tigers have stripes.
How do you read a digital display when you’re an astronaut siting on top of a giant vibrating rocket blazing through the atmosphere at mach 20? Good question and NASA is lucky to have plenty of teams they could consult to solve issues.
A few years ago, back when the Constellation Program was still alive, NASA engineers discovered that the Ares I rocket had a crucial flaw, one that could have jeopardized the entire project. They panicked. They plotted. They steeled themselves for the hundreds of millions of dollars it was going to take to make things right.
And then they found out how to fix it for the cost of an extra value meal.
Great example of lateral thinking here, akin to what happened in the 60’s when astronauts needed pens that could function in zero gravity. The Americans had a company spend a bazillion dollars to develop a pressurized ink ballpoint pen while the Soviets used pencils.
via GIZMODO – How NASA Solved a $100 Million Problem for Five Bucks.
Motion-blur Superman - Link to the 4 Walls gallery
Korean artist KANK Duck-Bong creates sculptures that appear to be in motion using PVC tubing.
via Kottke
Sunflowers benefit from millions of years of evolution to harvest sunlight. Scientists find out it’s 20% more efficient than the best computer models, so they do the next logical thing: apply the design to a solar plant.
The well-tuned geometry of the florets on the face of the sunflower head has inspired an improved layout for mirrors used to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity, according to new research.
The sunflower-inspired layout could reduce the footprint of concentrating solar power (CSP) plants by about 20 percent, which could be a boon for a technology that’s limited, in part, by its massive land requirements.
“It is very scary that we did all the [numerical optimization] work and then we go back to nature,” Mitsos said.
Cory Doctorow has a good introduction to a very good article that describes the importance of software piracy for data preservation purposes.
A PC World editorial by Benj Edwards recounts the history of “copy protection*” for software, and discusses how the cracks-scene, which busted open these software locks, is the only reason the legacy of old software is available today. There’s a trite story about the persistence of paper and the ephemerality of bits, which goes something like this: “We can still read ancient manuscripts, but we can’t read Letraset Ready, Set, Go! files from the 1980s.”
Software piracy is vital to preservation – Boing Boing.
Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.
Or skip to the article directly PCWorld – Why History Needs Software Piracy