This work by sculptor and musician Bradley N. Litwin, of Philadelphia, is called "The Octapult." In his words:

With 8 synchronized catapults, 160 plastic balls per minute are launched, caught, and recirculated. Made mostly of wood, the work is ~36 inches in diameter. On permanent display in the lobby of Lower Merion Elementary School, Merion Station, PA.

Look, Ma, it's a motorcycle with four wheels. Not a bike but, um... a "quike," maybe? It's the 4RWF V8 from "Cosmos" Muscle Bikes. ("Cosmos?" Really?) Four wheels or no, they're at least going to have to hire a copy editor for their website before they'll persuade me to part with the nearly $100K it reportedly costs. [via Born Rich]

From Photobucket user 8jarjar8, this video of a Chinese-lion-dragon style AT-AT costume with lighted cheek-lasers. Don't really know anything about the makers/wearers. Anybody with info, please feel free to comment. [via Geekologie]

I can't seem to find a way to describe these "link mugs" without venturing into uncomfortable sexual metaphors, so I'll just let the photos speak for themselves. So you can, you know, carry a bunch of them at once. [via Slippery Brick]

John Russell made this fantastic haunted house prop. In his own words:

Two aliens contained in suspended animation chambers. A central control unit monitors and sustains life support functions. The control screen is a looping flash animation. Every few minutes, a malfunction state is triggered. Sound and graphics announce the error, and a Make Controller board is used to trigger emergency flasher lights and a fog machine (simulates a cryogenic coolant leak).

The video shows the system going into its "malfunction state." Awesome work, John!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PST, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

There are lots of custom knife-makers out there, and plenty that specialize in exotic or fantasy knives, but there is only one I know of who has gone so far as to invent a fictional world, complete with geography, mythology, and history, as a context for his work.

Virgil England installed and photographed this life-size dragon skeleton in Chugach National Forest in Alaska in 1990. In his own words:

The part of the Dragon that is exposed is about 18 feet long. The wing is 15 feet high. The skeleton is carved whale bone and forged mild steel with reindeer rawhide stretched and stitched over the bones. I did it to display a 59 1/2 inch two handed sword called "The Veil of Tears". After the ten hour photo session It went to a three day showing in San Francisco then to the buyers.

Virgil's handmade knives are highly sought after among collectors, and you can view more of his edged work at his personal website. The photos of his "Chugach Draegon" that appear with this post are being published online here for the first time. Click on each to see it at full resolution. [Thanks, Virgil!]

Peter Johansson is building a professional-grade medium-format camera. Like, from scratch. He's about 80% done and has done a wonderful job documenting the build. [Thanks, Billy!]

Reader Dave Adams submitted this cool Pac Man pumpkin display, complete with ghosts, dots, and fruit. Shown immediately above under regular and UV light. [Thanks, David!]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still three days left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week on the internet. I'm moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel. [via Neatorama]

That's no treehouse, that's a foresthouse!

The Worlds Greatest TreeHouse

These "musical towers" are featured in the short film 901: After 45 Years of Working by Eames Demetrios. 901 documents the dismantling of the office of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1988 following Ray's death. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.

The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.

The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15' tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.

There does not seem to be any video of the towers in operation available online, but 901: After 45 Years of Working is available on the first disc of The Films of Charles and Ray Eames, which also includes final and rough draft versions of the classic Powers of Ten. Highly recommended.

Wow! David K. Smith has made what seems a shoo-in for the title of World's smallest model train -

This is a Z scale model of an N scale train layout--a model of a model. And it works. I built it to sit in the window of a Z scale hobby shop on my "real" train layout, the James River Branch.

- and this isn't even his first micro layout, check out one of the larger yet still impressively eentsy predecessors. [via Neatorama]

I got jealous of Matt's recent "SuperFoam" chair post and had to find one of my own. This design is from a Taiwanese student named Yu-Wing Wu. The voids are non-random, being carefully designed to collapse into the shape of an armchair when you sit on the thing, which in its resting state looks more like a giant block of tofu than a chair. No word on how it was manufactured. [via Neatorama]

I recently ordered some refillable paint pens from Art Primo, and this was in the box as a freebie. It's the exact size, shape, and color as a cigarette, and among a dozen real cigarettes in a pack it'd likely pass any search completely unnoticed. It took me a minute to figure out its nefarious purpose: If you get caught in the vicinity of a fresh tag, after all, it's best not to be found with a marker on your person. They're manufactured by Germany's On The Run, but you won't find them on their website. The one I got was gold; the silver ones below were photographed by Flickr user $30,000.

I'm going to invent a time machine so I can go back and persuade my parents to name me Jonathan Brilliant, which for now am this guy what made this impressive installation simply called "The Berlin Piece." [via Dude Craft]

My cell phone has a little eye molded into the case for attaching a lanyard strap. I want my A/V remotes to have the same thing so that if I should decide that I want to tie one of them to, say, the leg of my coffee table, I won't be driven to the same lengths as this guy.

Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver's license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.

This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then...well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I'm sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.

Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the antennae concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.

To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it's really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world's supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning "eternally," only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world. [via Hack a Day]

Beautiful photographs by Tina Buescher of Jim Donnelly's orrery based on the mechanism known as "Ferguson's mechanical paradox." Good information about the orrery is provided by Ian Coote's page. As for the "paradox," well, it boils down to this: the three apparently-identical stacked gears on the end are driven by a single gear, yet move at different rates, which, of course, would be impossible if they were truly identical. News flash: They're not. But I'm sure it was harder to fight boredom in the 18th century than it is now, and the build is undeniably gorgeous.

It looks like Mr. Bones does not actually have a singing part in this delightful orchestration of Danny Elfman's "This is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas by YouTuber HalloweenJared. He just bobs his head and taps his foot. (Maybe he needs a tambourine?) The anorexic front man for the Gourditos does, however, show off his famous vocal chops in their cover of Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash," and also here in a smoking duet version of the elder Ross Bagdasarian's "Witch Doctor." There's some how-to info on HalloweenJared's blog here. I wonder if they do funerals?

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

It's like a pop-up book, kind of, except way more complicated and expensive and made of Lego elements by YouTube user talapz. Words fail me, too. [via The Brothers Brick]

There's an odd synchronicity here with last week's post about the coin-scavenging-crow training machine. This time it's a whack-a-mole style video game that you play by dropping glass bottles into the slots when they light up. See it work around 0:40.

In a side note, Volkswagen's Fun Theory Award is now definitely on my radar. Besides this project, their competition to incentivize socially-useful behaviors by turning them into entertainment also produced the world's deepest rubbish bin and the subway staircase piano keyboard. [via Hack a Day]

By deviantART user ~tallydragon. [via CRAFT]

Pretty amazing yard art by YouTuber koUNit1. [via Geekologie]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

The first presenter at last Thursday's Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his "Reverse Geocaching Puzzle." Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 attempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.

A beautiful wooden radio from designers Solène Le Goff and Christophe Gouache. Solar and/or wind-up powered. [via Dude Craft]

Josh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts. So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food. The project, dubbed "CrowBox," made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007. Now he's made the complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. And there's no reason you couldn't train your fly-monkeys-fly to gather other crow-portable objects. Twenty-dollar bills? Keys? iPods? Human eyes? The possibilities are endless. Set one up at the beach! Train seagulls to trade whole wallets for pre-shucked oysters!

So, you may think, somebody took an old pocketwatch and fit it with a PCB and some LEDs. Ho-hum, perhaps? Seen it? Done it? Got the T-shirt? My response: there's concept, and there's execution. The concept here may be of the non-earth-shattering variety, but the execution is exquisite. Must. Watch. Video. To appreciate just how cool this thing really is. It ticks, for one thing, and when the minute and hour "hands" advance they sweep around the face in a visual gesture reminiscent of John Taylor's Corpus Clock. And besides flawless aesthetics and stellar workmanship, the watch has a great story, too. Its maker, Paul Pounds, explains:

My grandfather was a horologist. When he passed away in 2005 I inherited from him a collection of broken pocketwatches. As my skills are in microelectronics, rather than micromechanics, I felt it would be a fitting tribute to him to produce an electronic movement in place of one of the broken ones he'd never had the time to fix.

I never knew my grandfather very well, on account of our living some distance away from him all of my life. He struck me as a quiet, unassuming sort of man, but this fit very well with his astonishing skill as a horologist. In his heyday, he was among the best watchmakers in Australia. His steady and patient hand able to finely adjust the most diminutive gears and escapements of a clockwork mechanism. He was particularly recognised for his ability to perform delicate work in the smallest of mechanical movements, the lady's wristwatch.

During the Second World War, his expertise was considered too valuable to allow him to go and fight, and instead he was sent to fabricate precision mechanical systems at the Toowoomba Foundry. He was told that if he tried to enlist he would be arrested and sent back!

Such was his skill that when the Australian Horologist journal issued a challenge to drill a pin from end to end, he achieved it by boring a hole by hand, using tiny drills he made from sewing needles. Not one to let it rest there, he topped this feat by filing and turning down another pin on a minature lathe, and threading it through the hole. Then he raised the bar again with a three-penny piece drilled and threaded through the edge of the coin. He produced a small number of these pins and coins to amaze his clients.

Although he never got to see it, I'd like to think he would have enjoyed seeing one of his old broken watches turned into something new and useful. This project is dedicated to his memory.

[via Hack a Day]

I stole this post title and all from Tiffany of Curious Goods.

Anne Troake is a choreographer and filmmaker from Newfoundland. Her film Pretty Big Dig is the best of the many "dancing heavy machinery" videos I've seen on YouTube.

Be ready when the zombies come! From silohome.com:

NY's Adirondack State Park - During the late 1950's and early 1960's when the Cold War was escalating, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos (each for 18 million in 1961, with the rising cost of construction today one could barely fund the excavation.) to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex accessible by plane or car. The real estate includes 20 acres of land with approximately 78 acres available as 10 approved building lots. The home is conveniently located to Montreal, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh and boast such outstanding year round activities as golfing, hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and world class skiing.

The price, regrettably, is north of two megabucks. But when I finally marry that wealthy heiress this place is at the top of my shopping list. Bruce was nice enough to provide us with a high-resolution scan of the plan view, above, which (for the time being anyway) is exclusive to Make: Online. You can click on the image above to see it at 1000 pixels wide.