It took a very long time for the Statue of Liberty to find a home on Liberty Island. In fact, for several years, her creators showed off pieces of her body in NYC and Philadelphia in an effort to drum up funds to finance the statue’s completion. The picture above is from New York City’s Madison Square Park, where her arm lived from 1876 to 1882.
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In 2004, the U.S. Army made a colossal mistake. It introduced a new digital camouflage called the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), a single pattern designed to work across all environments. Only a few months later, however, as the war in Iraq was intensifying by the day, every soldier on the ground knew the truth: by trying to work in every situation, UCP worked in none of them
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The family that sleeps in a giant sleeping bag together… is just weird. Regardless, this sleeping bag is big enough to fit your family inside. It’s great for unexpected emergency situations like if you’ve lost your house or something, but otherwise you are just going to drive each other crazy, hitting each other with your elbows and whatnot.
This sleeping bag is made from 100% Polyester and you can unzip the bag from the bottom up to allow increased airflow. Speaking of airflow, just a little warning. Do not use this thing as a family on taco night.
After you spend some time trapped in a nightmare cocoon with your them, you won’t even want to be a part of the family anymore. So enjoy it while it lasts.
[via This Is Why I’m Broke]
All you see from your window might be ice, but from this screen you’re eyes will catch nothing but beautiful things. From the worlds of art, architecture, and design, here are the most lovely things we found this week. Don’t you dare go outside; it’s way too dangerous.
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Photogravure is a printmaking technique that requires a hell of a lot of prep, but the ghostly effect of the finished work is awesome: it’s like part etching and a bit charcoal drawing, with the spirit of an old timey black-and-white.
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Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.
According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.
As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.
What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.
The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.
Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.
[via PSFK]
Noel Rubin designed the user interfaces for Star Wars Episodes 1 and 3, and now he’s put together a sizzle reel, showing just how awesome the computer screens on those ships really looked.
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I have my coffee. Your move, punk! I have been looking for a cool new mug, and I think this is the one. I don’t give a toss about the new Robocop reboot, just give me this mug.
This mug is made from ceramic and looks just like Robocop’s head. That’s all you need to know. Well, that and where we can buy one. Sadly, we may have to wait a while. It seems like the mug is only available for wholesale purchase right now. But soon, very soon it should make its way to retail channels and then it will be mine.
Bring me the head of Robocop and I shall drink coffee from it.
[via Chip Chick via That’s Nerdalicious]
Man, I really love nail art. You might not share the same kind of enthusiasm for crazy custom manicures, but we can all agree that the Laser Girls’ 3D-printed nails are decidedly cooler than your average press-on acrylics.
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These complex collars look like like they’re made from freaky shark jaws or the skeleton of some crazy underwater menace, but they were actually borne directly from a 3D printer. MadLab designer Madeline Gannon did start with an aquatic inspiration, though—the virtual movement of a digital squid.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
