This lamp by designer Jethro Macey requires you to insert a coin before it lights up.
Coin Lamp is the first product in a range based on the concept of values and reward, it subtly heightens awareness of consumption through design.
No need to be subtle about it. This is exactly what I need to teach my kids not to leave every light in the house on! Put these in every room, and you can use the coins to help pay for the electricity bill at the end of the month. Link -via the Presurfer
Congress is burning the midnight oil negotiating over the bailout package, and I bet you dollar to donuts it’ll happen soon. But have you ever wonder how they arrived at the magic number of $700 billion figure for the bailout? The answer may surprise you:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
"It’s not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."
Whaaaa? Not based on any particular data point? Then why not make it $888 billion - it’s catchier and plus 8 is a lucky number.
Belly dancer Amira Sa’id has both beauty and brains (her college degree is in physics). And now, she also has a following of geeks who are enthralled by her rendition of Princess Leia belly dancing!
When she returned to performing following college and discovered a new affinity for Middle Eastern dance, it soon occurred to her that her various interests met within the gilded beauty of Princess Leia’s slave girl get-up.
"I danced in the outfit for the very first time at a Halloween show at the restaurant I perform at here in Orlando," Amira said. "I then wore the costume to dance at a 2006 sci-fi convention in Connecticut. It was hit."
As Amira continued performing for ever-growing crowds of Star Wars and Star Trek fans at her beloved cons, YouTube videos of her performances (like this one from Megacon 2007, embedded) began to circulate — building a little nerd buzz for the scantily clad nouveau celebrity. She was in demand.
UCLA mathematician Edson Smith and colleagues have found a really, really large prime number: it’s 13 million digits long!
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm. [...]
Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.
Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.
To visualize how large the prime number 243,112,609 - 1 really is, if you print out the number at 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page, it would be almost 3,500 pages long!
Sculptor Steven Woodward’s latest art project is a set of traffic signs, made from the same material as normal signs, but with pictures designed to slow traffic. Some feature pictures of people, others are based on cave art or animals, like the one pictured here. They were installed on Hamline and Thomas Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. Did they slow traffic?
“As I understand it, there was no change in traffic vehicular speeds whatsoever,” he said.
Traffic on Hamline didn’t change. With and without the signs, speeds were 33 miles per hour northbound and 34 miles per hour southbound. It was a similar story on Thomas Avenue. Eastbound speeds averaged 32 miles per hour with and without the signs. The westbound traffic slowed only slightly when the art signs were posted from 34 to 33 miles per hour.
However, traffic engineers did not take into account that the state fair was in full swing during the testing period. The signs will soon be moved to George Street for another go. Link-Thanks, panodk!
To make a building last for a long, long time, you just cut it out of existing rock! Take a look at eight such structures, carved over many years from mountains and cliff sides. Pictured are the Lycian Tombs in Turkey. Link-Thanks, Lauren Axelrod!
This year’s StreetWars tournament is in full swing in New York City. It is a shadowy sport (previously at Neatorama) in which participants are directed to kill each other off -with squirt guns! Players are directed to find their “target” (another player) and eliminate them. Then they inherit their victim’s target.
StreetWars was created in 2004 by Franz Aliquo, then a 28-year-old securities lawyer, as a cure for a boredom phase he was working through. Mr. Aliquo named himself Supreme Commander and, with a friend known as Mustache Commander and other helpers, has held several killing tournaments in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Paris. The game resembles the 1980s campus phenomenon Assassin, itself a reminder of the 1985 film "Gotcha!" starring Anthony Edwards and his paintball gun.
The contestants are mostly in their 20s or early 30s, from what could be called the kickball set; about 35 percent in the current war are women. "We had a 76-year-old grandmother in San Francisco," said Mr. Aliquo, who lives in Long Island City, Queens, and now is the events director at Thrillist.com, a Web site that distributes daily e-mailed lists of events in various cities. "She got two kills."
250 participants began the tournament earlier this month; 16 now survive. Tomorrow, the sudden death round begins, where everyone tries to kill everyone else. Read about the adventures of various players in the New York Times. Link -via Digg
Legendary actor Paul Newman has died at the age of 83 of cancer:
Paul Newman, the legendary actor whose steely blue eyes, good-humored charm and advocacy of worthy causes made him one of the most renowned figures in American arts, has died of cancer at his home in Westport, Connecticut. He was 83. [...]
In 1982, Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner founded Newman’s Own, a food company that produced food ranging from pasta sauces to salad dressing to chocolate chip cookies.
"The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films," Newman once wryly noted.
To date, the company — which donates all profits to charities such as Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang camps — has given away more than $200 million. Newman established the camp to benefit gravely ill children.
We covered the case of Henry Earl a while ago on Neatorama. Since then, he’s been arrested for … oh, a few hundred more times …
For those of you who don’t know, Henry has the dubious distinction of being the most arrested man on Earth: he’s been arrested an astonishing 1,332 times!
YesButNoButYes has a really nice clip of Henry’s mugshot montage from over the years. Ah, the memories! Link
IT consulting firm Robert Half Technology asked over 1,400 CIO weird questions people ask their company’s tech support. Here are some of the oddball questions they got:
CIOs were asked, “What is the strangest or most unusual request you or a member of your help desk or technical support team has ever received?” Their responses included:
* “Why isn’t my wireless mouse connected to the computer?” * “My laptop was run over by a truck. What should I do?” * “Can you rearrange the keyboard alphabetically?” * “How do I read my e-mail?” * “My computer is telling me to press any key to continue. Where is the ‘any’ key?” * “Can you reset the Internet for me?” * “There are animal crackers in my CD-ROM drive.” * “Can you build me a robot?”
The Ariel Atom is one sweet car, but it costs a lot of money. So Flickr user Proximacentauri decided that he’s going to build his own. Behold the z59, which was made out of … junk!
This is the final result of 15 months and at least 800 hours of work in the garage. This is not counting time spent designing, ordering parts, negotiating prices, etc.
The car was built from scratch. The engine is an Acura k20a3 from an RSX. It sounds awesome.
Special thanks for the Make community for inspiring the maker spirit in me. Building stuff yourself is a much better way to be a citizen than senseless consumption.
The car has a good amount of junk (recycled stuff) in it. The stainless panels all came from old appliances. The black body panels came from an ancient kayak and an old doghouse. The throttle pedal was made entirely from salvaged parts from a dumpster at an engineering firm around town. Of course, the engine was also recycled from a crashed car.
It’s a blast to drive.
0-60: 4.5 seconds MPG: 35+ miles per gallon The best part: the bizarre looks I get from random strangers.
British comedy actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who played Borat and Ali G., crashed a Milan Fashion show by jumping onto the stage and strutting along the catwalk in character for his new movie "Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt."
Times are tough in today’s banking sector and a lot of people are losing their jobs. Take, for instance, Washington Mutual or WaMu, which collapsed a few days ago.
But don’t cry for WaMu CEO Alan Fishman, who was on the job just 17 days before the what is now called largest bank failure in the history of the United States:
As Congress argues over limits on executive pay, the New York Times reports that the chief executive of Washington Mutual, who was on the job just 17 days, is eligible for $19.1 million in compensation.
For short-time CEO Alan H. Fishman — named to run the failing bank less than three weeks ago — that would work out to $1.12 million per day (assuming he worked weekends). If he worked eight-hour days, it works out to $140,000 per hour.
"Dead Star" is a sculpture by Michel de Broin made from used up batteries:
Dead Star is made from residual battery at the end of their duty. Left to itself, the sculpture will slowly cool down since there is no longer electronic activity taking place in it. The hundreds of batteries were once used to power appliances before they finish their cycle in a recycle facility. Retrieve from death, they were assembled again in this whole structure.
light-Bot is an easy to learn and surprisingly fun Flash game by Coolio_Niato where you have to guide a little robot to light up a certain square.
Belly dancer Amira Sa’id has both beauty and brains (her college degree is in physics). And now, she also has a following of geeks who are enthralled by her rendition of Princess Leia belly dancing!
UCLA mathematician Edson Smith and colleagues have found a really, really large prime number: it’s 13 million digits long!
Sculptor Steven Woodward’s latest art project is a set of traffic signs, made from the same material as normal signs, but with pictures designed to slow traffic. Some feature pictures of people, others are based on cave art or animals, like the one pictured here. They were installed on Hamline and Thomas Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. Did they slow traffic?
This year’s StreetWars tournament is in full swing in New York City. It is a shadowy sport (
Legendary actor Paul Newman has died at the age of 83 of cancer:
We covered the case of Henry Earl 
Times are tough in today’s banking sector and a lot of people are losing their jobs. Take, for instance, Washington Mutual or WaMu, which collapsed a few days ago.
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