If we look at good-quality 1 carat diamonds, we find that they are quite expensive compared to the industrial diamonds we saw earlier. Now, the diamond monopoly hasn't kept prices quite as high as LSD, however they are doing a very impressive job of trying. LSD doses measure in the micrograms, which makes the per-pound "street value" of the stuff astronomically high.

Today's piece on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories compares the relative monetary density of various commodities. Like, did you know that Kopi Luwak coffee is worth its weight in human blood? Good to know!

The monetary density of things

Ingenious evaporative cooler built to cool camel's milk in Somalia. I love the use of corrugated galvanized iron sheets and sisal sack fabric to create the airflow and cooling system.

The upper ends of the fabric overhang in a water trough that rings the top of the cooler. Capillary action causes the water to slowly trickle over the inner and outer surfaces. A small vent keeps the interior air circulating and wind guides or tunnels direct air flow over the exterior surfaces.

Evapocooler invention for cooling camels milk in Somalia

Yes, you too can learn to operate the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, because they just published the 1,589-page technical detail document. Via Hackaday.

More:

• First particles injected into Large Hadron Collider atom smasher
  
• Better safe than sorry - keep the Large Hadron Collider on all the time!
  
• Photos of the Large Hadron Collider
  

Some screws, a cardboard tube, and a half-pound of dry lentils and you've got yourself a Shamanic sound-maker.

How to Make your very own Rainstick!

More:

• DIY Rainstick

Although the maker himself explains that he "has no idea why someone would need one of these", we like the bizarre nature of this hack. Check out the step by step directions at the link below.

Lighter Bottle Cap

On Street Use, KK has some nifty pics of improvised street tech spotted on the streets of Thailand. The images are from a book of photographs by Thomas Kalak called Thailand - Same same, but different!

Improvisation in Thailand

This bus stop billboard ad spotted in Australia was made using 7,563 individual pieces of dice turned into pixels to form a giant face. Although it probably would have been a lot easier just to print this image, we like the idea of using dice as perhaps a way of increasing the "chances" you'll get the opportunity to see this on the street.

via Core77

Here's some info on a custom built "Carbon Dioxide Aquarium Reactor" that combines baking yeast, sugar, water, and tubing. Pretty interesting documentation of the build at the link below.

Homemade DIY CO2 Reactor

Apparently even kidney dialysis machines designed for children were too big for Millie Kelly's 6-pound newborn body, so Dr. Malcom Coulthard (UK) made her a miniature dialysis machine - in his garage. It just goes to show that innovation can still happen at the individual level, even in the medical field.

Mister Jalopy of Dinosaurs and Robots points us to these cool collections of classic camping kerosene lamps and stoves. Having spent the better part of my youth hiking and camping, I fondly remember a lot of these models.

Spiritburner.com
Motoshi Makino's Classic Camping Collection
Other awesome stove/lantern collections via Spiritburner.com

The "Southstar" by Josh Goldberg and Glen Duncan is a 9 foot tall LED sculpture shaped like an asterisk with 5, 6 inch panels of 36 LEDs on each spoke. The panels alternate between orange and blue colors and are controlled by a VU meter circuit, gating power to the LED panels depending on the strength of an audio signal sent to the circuit. Check out the video for the full explanation of this project.

This video shows a site specific film called the "Image Mill" projected onto 81 individual grain silos that are each 30 meters tall. The film was shot in such a way so that the contours of the silos are integrated into the picture to create a more realistic image landscape. Watch the video and you will understand.

via Wooster Collective

The "CordWrap" is a simple addition to any wall power outlet. Simply replace your current outlet cover with a cut metal fitting with its ends protruding from the surface of the wall. Use these protruding ends to wrap the extra cord around it so that it doesn't clutter your floor. Another benefit of this design is that your cords wont be accidentaly pulled from the wall.

CordWrap

Shades of Soylent Green -- G.V. Rao has built a pedal powered refrigeration unit that can be pedaled to nearly freezing in about 25 minutes using human power rather than a motor to run the compressor. A little more information here & here...

Over on Dinosaurs and Robots, Mister Jalopy has been enthusiastically blogging about nifty small buildings, backyard offices, rural getaways, i.e. "shackitecture." Definitely worth checking out if Lilliputian dwelling is your idea of fun.

Shackitecture

WebUrbanist posted a collection of impressive building conversions - the most eye-catching entry of the list is Joanne Ussery's very sweet Boeing 727 turned luxury living quarters -

What could be better than an amazing house made out of an airplane? A cheap one. The plane itself cost just $2000, though moving it cost $4000 and renovating it for habitation took another $24000 - but that’s still just $30000 for a truly amazing and unique home. The original airplane fold-down stairs were kept and are operated by a garage door opener and one of the original airplane restrooms still works as it always did. And the cockpit suspended over the lake below? Her own personal jacuzzi of course.

More:

Boeing 727 room add-on

The "Telemegaphone Dale" by Magnus Torstensson and Erik Sandelin is a loudspeaker post on top of Bergkletten in Dale, Norway. To use the project, just call it with your cell phone and your voice is amplified and played out the hilltop speaker. The project officially opens on August 2nd and is part of a larger project called "Parafunctional Payphones" that addresses public, telephonic art installations.

Telemegaphone, via Doors of Perception

This version of the classic "color organ" (a device tht translates audio signals into light patterns) uses high intensity LEDs that are controlled by a discrete transistor drive circuit. Since this design uses LEDs it needs minimal power to run and was designed specifically for extended battery use. Check out the link below for circuit diagrams and specifications on how to build these.

Discrete LED Color Organ

There's an exhibit of site-specific earth art installations going on at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario, Canada. Artists from all over the world have come to install unique environmental pieces, which will be on view until October 13. There are sod ramps, floating sculptures, and other Andy Goldsworthy-esque pieces. There's also a tumblog of installation photos, which shows how some of the pieces were constructed and installed. Via Cool Hunting.

Scott Weaver made this huge kinetic sculpture of San Francisco entirely from toothpicks. A ball travels through it, touring the elements of the city. I'd hate to be transporting this thing on a windy day! Via Laughing Squid.

With the exception of Brad Litwin's piece entitled Extra-Universal Movement, I don't know if I've seen such an elaborate hand-cranked wooden machine. This gentleman has constructed an amazing device using only wood and glue -- no nails, no screws or ball bearings. It is quite an achievement. It is my sincere hope I'm doing things like this at 70 years old. Bravo!

Via Land-o-Links.

"built from pvc pipe ,junk, spare parts, engineering findings and driven by 4 modified industrial vacum cleaner motors. off a 12 volt car battery. it will run any game made, as it's really just a sit-in force feedback motorized joystick...."

*The flight Sim Project:* You ever have a dream that just once, you could really make something crazy-- something completely unrealistic, something that would be really COOL?

My dream, and as dreams tend to rub off on people, the dream of the group of guys our Girlfriends and wives call "The Lost Boys".  we get together during weekends , bring our computers hook up to the LAN and play computer games, browse the internet, or whatever suits us, and between rounds of running in an online "Nascar 3" race (a racing game that can be played over the internet) I was browsing web pages, under Driving simulators.

This search led me to some obvious places, a page to Star tours, to a company that make those devices, to the simulators at NASA and Whitesands naval air base, and I came across a tiny reference to acesim,a home built flight motion cockpit.  I'm thinking to my self, self, that's pretty cool, I should build one of these.... I showed it to Jerry Storvik, who is a ex-rececar driver and owner of a Dental Vacuum suction manufacturing company, and he decided that is was indeed, really cool, and that it really needed to be fully enclosed, and bigger, and stronger, and be able to rotate in any direction, and motorized... etc.....

Thus our sim was conceived,  the following links take you to the various days we spent building the device, and doing testing and adjustments to it.. anyway, its a very cool thing, if I do say so myself.

Here's an Instructable and video on Furoshiki, the Japanese art of cloth-folding to make various bags, carry-alls, and sacks.

Paper, Plastic, or Furoshiki?

Jeremy Mayer makes these really fantastic evocative sculptures from old typewriters. I'm amazed by what he uses for each body part, and how he could have imagined to put things together the way he does. Via BoingBoing.

Here's part two of BBtv's tour of the TCHO chocolate factory that David covered in his Proto column in MAKE Volume 14. I love the way they've bodged together village tech, Home Depot specials, and high-tech components to create machines and sensors for a few thousand bucks that would cost tens of thousands on the market.

TCHO Chocolate, part 2: magical machines, mysterious molecules.

More:

• TCHO chocolate on BBtv

This car mod turns it into a cartoon car getting blown up in an explosion or being melted by the sun. We're not sure if it is actually drivable or not though.

Extreme Car Mod From Hell Spotted in Bali.