Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Recently, the space probe Cassini sent back a mess (over 160) images taken with it’s wide field camera that were assembled into this breath taking image of our solar systems premiere ringed planet Saturn. The color enhanced image (shown here) shows not only the rings we are used to seeing but others that are too faint to be seen normally.
[via boingboing]
These are brilliant works, very much in the same line as the works of Tim Hunkin (a personal hero of mine).
… he started researching kinetics and developed his own system for animating wood-carved figures with the turn of a crank. One of the results was a small body of work featuring important modern artists acting out some of their more eccentric or unfavorable characteristics. In “Picasso and Barbie,” the famously promiscuous Spaniard paints a portrait from a model, in this case a scantily clad blond doll in a suggestive pose. A crank on the piece powers a network of exposed gears that move the artist’s arm up and down, as if painting, and turn his head back and forth from the model to the canvas.
[via suicidebots]
In 2004 I ended up having some time on my hands about three days before a big Halloween party. I did what anyone would do, I built robot costume out of cardboard boxes and dryer hose.
Sorry the photos aren’t better, for some weird reason I had set my camera on super low file size. I wish I had taken more shots of the build but I was trying to meet a deadline.
The whole thing was bonded together with tape (clear packing and gaffers), hot glue, and lots of brass paper brads. I used dryer hose for the arms and as it had to fit up to my shoulders I clipped the wires in them for about eight inches on the inside at the tops and covered them with some gaffers tape so I wouldn’t get poked. I tied them together with two short sections of rope,one across my chest and the other on my back. This kept the sleeves from coming off and falling to my wrists. I added some cardboard cuffs to hide the claw interface.
The claws were made from heavy tag board and regular corrugated cardboard. I wore them like mittens and my fingers ran through some cardboard loops on the inside so I could operate them. The hinges were paper brads.
I wanted rivets on my robot so I used about two boxes of brads all over the thing. They worked real well as surface detail and as actual mechanical reinforcements. I ran tape on the backside to avoid the sharp ends.
The name badge was simply an old LED chaser badge that I had built in the late 80’s. I mounted it to the costume with hot glue. I added some details like the chest logo and the static bag eyes after I slathered on a few coats of this water based gray paint I found at Home Depot.
The costume was a success, after the party I went trick or treating with my kids and I can’t tell you how many comments I got from kids and parents alike.
For more photos of my costume, got have a look at the photos on Flickr.
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Not all that long ago NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter did a little spying on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.
What would you say if someone told you that they are going to fly their model plane into a hurricane? Crazy right? That’s exactly what you would think but the bright lads over at the Aerosonde Corporation think it’s crazy not to. Each small airplane is equipped with scientific instruments that will monitor temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speeds inside the storm. This data will be transmitted back to a receiving station in real time as the tiny craft spirals into the eye of the storm and then back out. It’s hoped that such data will help NASA and NOAA better understand how these large storms develop in order to predict changes in hurricane intensity.
Well, I bet no one saw this one coming. NOT! South Korea has announced that they will be using automated gun emplacements along it’s border with the most friendly nation on the planet, North Korea. Did I see this in a movie once?
The Commerce Ministry said the robot, which can fire a machine gun or rubber bullets and sound an alarm when it detects suspicious movement, could dramatically improve surveillance capability.
The robot also can distinguish people from moving objects such as a vehicles from up to two kilometres (1.2 miles) away in the daytime, and half that distance at night, the ministry said in a news release.
Holy cow! How long will it be until something like this is installed at key points along the US boarders? A long time I hope. I’m going to pop Aliens in my DVD player and see just how effective automatic sentry guns can be.