Have a look at this incredible model jet video that just showed up on digg:

I’ve seen videos for remote control jets around for a while, but never really thought about the kinds of technology that these new breeds of models require to make them work… miniature jet engines!

Remembering back to my youthful obsession with remote controlled cars and the excessive cost associated with those, I could only guess how much these tiny jets must set the average enthusiast back. I decided to do a little bit of investigation and found this site.

These little suckers are not cheap! A single engine is $2,700 to $5,000 making the plane in the vid above cost anywhere up to around $20,000 just for the engines. Just imagine if the pilot (controller??) wrecked their plane in the forest (to be fair, the vid clearly shows some sort of mechanical malfunction, and kudos to them for being fully prepared with fire extinguishers):

Ares is a Cuban artist who draws some genuinely arresting political cartoons. I keep going back to look at this one.

Via Drawn!

Last weekend I attended >play, the digital media conference put on by the Haas School of Business. It was OK, but during the games panel, I heard some insulated gaming industry folk chit-chat. One of the more sinister phenomena talked about was “advergaming.” I’d heard of America’s Army, a shoot-em-up network game that’s designed to be a recruitment tool.

But I’m torn over “Sneak King.” The terrifying King of Burgers has a way of sidling up unnoticed (NOT a Seinfeld reference). In this game, you are supposed to sneak up to hungry people, and then jump them, giving them Burger King food. I just think that paying $4 to play a game in which you wear a mask and force-feed triple Whoppers to innocent strangers is horrifyingly (deliciously?) hilarious.

Is this just the natural progression from Joe Camel and Count Chocula? Advertisers know what kids want. Kids didn’t want to stop watching cartoons to learn about cereal, so Toucan Sam and Tony the Tiger were born. Is the media literacy and critical thinking of most kids (and some adults) too weak to withstand the wiles of advertisers anymore? Should we protect them? If tobacco suits caused Joe Camel to ride into the sunset, is there any case for censuring Ronald and the King?

I guess I should let the trailer do the talking:

Speaking of Count Chocula, some of us had speculated on his brothers, and Franken Berry was particularly easy to remember. Others in the bunch are Boo Berry, Fruit Brute, and Yummy Mummy.

This little vid is a testament to the power of Youtube and the Internet in general. In the past, a work like this might only have been seen in a local gallery or at a student’s final project show. Thanks to Youtube and other like video services, student artists can distribute their works to a larger audience.

I’m currently working on a project exploring 3d modeling as open source content for a class at Berkeley’s iSchool. As you might imagine, sharing 3d models is not simple task (think about how hard it can be to share text documents). We’ve identified venues like Youtube as gateways into open source like communities, where artists can display their works to gain recognition, but also where modelers & artists can meet up to share techniques and skills with each other.

Don’t look too deep for a meaning in this vid, just enjoy some great work:

Their work is intense the way urban Africa is intense: intensely zany, intensely warm, intensely harsh, intensely political. True, you could say the same of New York or New Delhi, or any major cosmopolis being shaped by globalism these days. Yet every place has very specific intensities. Africa does, and they are distilled in the art here.

Some wonderful imagery in the NYTimes article on this show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. There’s an array of styles, most of them in the European vein, to my eye. A lot of soft, naturalistic lines, as opposed to the active, often harsh linework of American superhero comics (Kirby et al.), or the neurotic (Crumb) to antiseptic (Clowes) styles of the American underground. However, I’ve never found museum exhibitions of comics to be very fulfilling. As far as user experience goes, comics are far more like books than paintings, and standing in front of a wall at a distance isn’t my favorite way to read.

without game genie…

click

http://www.myspace.com/totallyradd

Browsing through a few Black Friday circulars I noticed this page on OfficeMax’s website. But more specifically, the pic below. See the full product description page here.

I’m surprised Staples isn’t offering competing Jedi weapons…

An oldie but goodie:

Remember, frying a turkey is always both life-threatening and hilarious.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been facinated by most things aquatic, but especially squid. From giants to vampires (ok, which technically isn’t a squid), to their ink and chameleon super-powers they are an incredibly diverse and interesting bunch of animals.

So anyways, I followed a link on BoingBoing about a squid yesterday, and ended up on threadless, where there was this shirt for sale. How cool is that?

Roger Magoulis from O’Reilly came to my NLP class, and while he was lecturing, he inadvertently showed us an official-looking paper that contained only the word chicken.
I had one helluva time finding it, and I want people to go through this miserable process to find the funniest paper ever.

Can you find the research paper found in this screenshot? If you can, let me know how you found it! Don’t post the link to the paper, I’m curious what strategies people use, when the only term in the document is “chicken.”

And try not to look at the comments, where people have posted their “solutions.” I’m curious how many unique or innovative search tactics we can come up with.