Chris Squink (Squink!) is a graphic designer and painter in Dronfield, UK. His custom sculpted toys are a nice blend of dark and lovable, combining elements like sad, laquered eyes with, oh I dunno, dead birds and stuff. Creepy! And adorable.
These images are from his gallery and Facebook page and are all in private collections now, but there are plenty of others available in his shop along with a few paintings and other merch. Squink is currently closed to commissions.
Back in 1977, geek heroes Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan headed up the team that created the golden record — gold-plated copper disc that serves as a sort of time capsule for Earth, in the event that some alien species finds and explores the Voyager probe as it wanders out past Pluto’s orbit and into the 40,000-year journey to the nearest planetary system.
NPR rounded up this video a while back that features some of the sounds and images on the Golden Record.
http://vimeo.com/9409571
As Sagan noted, “the spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
You may find that the first 40 seconds are a little boring, but be sure to keep on watching till the end!
For the launch of the Galaxy SII in France, Samsung brought JayFunk, the internet Finger Tutting phenomenon, from Los Angeles to Paris to deliver an incredible and surprising choreography.
The official title of this video is “Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers’ locomotor performance,” but to tell you frankly, I don’t really care about the scientific value of this experiment. The only reason I’m posting this is because this is probably the first and last time you’ll ever see a guy wearing full plate armor running on a threadmill. Voilà.
A study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that soldiers carrying armour in Medieval times would have been using more than twice the amount of energy had they not been wearing it. This is the first clear experimental evidence of the limitations of wearing Medieval armour on a soldier’s performance.
In this awesome new short film by Tyler Shields, geek queen Alessandra Torresani tells the tale of her failed marriage with everyone’s favorite dark lord of the Sith, Darth Vader. Check it out:
Without wishing to stereotype, it’s hardly unheard of for merchandise in the Far East to be unlicensed imitations of products featuring Western brands. But it appears a new benchmark has been set with an entirely fake Apple store in China.
The store was found by a blogger living in Kunming, in the southwest of the country. Although US chains are starting to appear in the city, she was still surprised to see an Apple store spring up, complete with decor and staff clad in blue shirts.
It wasn’t until she made a second visit that she was able to confirm the entire store was a fake, with some of the bigger giveaways being the appearance of the words “Apple Store” on signs (real stores only use the logo), and the fact that the staff badges didn’t have names. The biggest giveaway of course is that that Apple itself only lists four stores for all of China, in the much larger cities of Beijing and Shanghai.
In talking to staff, having persuaded security officials that she was an Apple employee from the US, the blogger discovered that the people working in the store appeared to genuinely believe they were working for Apple.
Amazingly the blogger then discovered that just around the corner were two more fake outlets: another “Apple Store” and, less convincingly, an “Apple Stoer.”
It’s not clear if the devices on sale in the store are themselves counterfeit, though it seems likely as the locations don’t mix Apple’s list of official product retailers in the city. However, the Wall Street Journal says it has spoken to an employee at the store who says staff are well aware the store is not a genuine Apple store, but that the products are genuine and sold at the same prices as those charged by authorized retailers.
