Castle Grayskull igloo in Brooklyn: “

Brooklyn artist Kilroy III celebrated the snowmageddon by building a huge, magnificent Castle Grayskull (of He-Man fame) igloo. It’s the artist’s second attempt at a Grayskullgloo, the first being one he attempted in the 1990s in Ohio. The primary sculpting tools were a Korean soup bowl and a spoon.

SPOTLIGHT: Snowmageddon Spawns Castle Grayskull by Kilroy III & Friends | Brooklyn Igloo

Castle Grayskull | Snowmageddon | Kilroy III (Flickr)

(via Geekologie)

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Damselflies’ curious mating posture: “

National Geographic’s photo of the day brings us a peek into the tantric lovelife of the damselfly. The male arches his abdomen to move sperm from his secondary genitalia so the female can bring her genitals into contact with it, making the heartlike ‘wheel position.’

Damselflies

(Thanks, Marilyn, via Submitterator!)

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Spousal irritation checklists for marital bliss, ca. 1930: “

These old data-collection checklists were used as part of a 1930s project to enable husbands and wives to give one another constructive feedback and end seething resentments by identifying and tabulating frequent sources of irritation.

In the 1930s, [Scientific Marriage Foundation founder George Crane] went around to a bunch of husbands and said, ‘Hey husband, what does your wife do that annoys you?’ And then he added all those complaints up and created a handy chart that let you rate your spouse against the generic ideal/anti-ideal. That’s what you see in the chart above.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Try Out This Marital Rating Scale

(via Neatorama)

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Homebrew junk action figures made by US soldier in Afghanistan: “
Noah Scalin sez, ‘Check out these amazing articulated action figures made from bottle caps and other found materials by Private First Class Rupert Valero, who is stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Wilson in Khandahar, Afghanistan.

A former oil rig engineer, Valero has been a collector and customizer of 6′ super-articulated action figures for many years, but since being stationed in Afghanistan he has begun making his own figures entirely from upcycled materials.’

Upcycled Action Figures in Afghanistan

(Thanks, Noah!)

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[Somehow this is incredibly awesome. -e]

Video: Aquatic carnivorous plant gulps a meal: “

In this video, you can watch a carnivorous aquatic bladderwort plant suck down tiny crustaceans in half a millisecond. Slurp! From Science News:

Using high-speed cameras, researchers have gotten the first good look at how these underwater plants spring their ambushes. Bladderworts sport trap doors that buckle in with a tiny nudge, creating a whirlpool that sucks in wee critters — all in about half a millisecond. That’s some of the fastest plant action on Earth, a French and German team reports online February 15 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B…

“Utricularia are the smallest of carnivorous plants and also, evidently, the most sophisticated,” says Lubomír Adamec, a plant physiologist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. These netlike veggies are dotted with tiny traps, often no wider than an ant is long.

Small or not, the traps are masterpieces of suction. Pumped nearly dry, the chambers set up a pressure difference between the plant’s innards and the water outside. When swimmers brush up against a series of hairs along the trap door, the door bursts open and sucks water and crustaceans alike in.

‘Carnivorous bladderworts suck up prey‘

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Scott D. Wilson medical/monstrous/insectoid artwork: “

Los Angeles artist Scott D. Wilson creates gorgeous insect drawings, faux taxidermy chimeras, and micro-wunderkammern all the while bringing ‘tenderness to what most people find repugnant,’ says artist/blogger Stacey Ransom who pointed me to these fine specimens. Scott D. Wilson’s Ideal Monsters

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Book uses colored thread between pages to make hyperlinks: “

Maria Fischer’s ‘Traumgedanken’ book is a collection of ‘literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts’ about dreams. The book uses threads pierced through the pages and affixed to other pages to make physical hyperlinks between ideas.

On five pages there are illustrations made out of thread. Their shape and colour relies on the key words on the opposite page. This way an abstract image of the dream about dreaming is generated.

In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type’s actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.

Traumgedanken

(Thanks, Michael Chabon!)

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Man’s head rejects implanted camera: “

Artist Wafaa Bilal mounted a camera on a titanium base inserted between his skull and his skin, and planned to live with it embedded in his head for a year. Though he took antibiotic and steroid treatments, persistence was futile: his body rejected part of the implant, forcing its removal last week. Photo: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi

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Realtime API for Congress: “

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez,

The Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Congress API is now available for everyone to follow a range of Congressional activity as soon as it becomes available online. The feeds in the Real Time Congress API include floor updates, video from the House and Executive branch, bills, votes, hearings, amendments and more. This collection of live feeds is filterable, sortable and sliceable, giving developers a chance to customize the data to fit their needs in either JSON or XML format.

This newly expanded API offers unprecedented access to Congressional information and will be integrated into our Congress app for Android, Stream Congress, our iOS app and the upcoming Roku apps. Unlike the archival data available from GovTrack and the NYT Congress API, the Real Time Congress API covers only the 111th and 112th Congresses.

The Real Time Congress API

(Thanks, Nicko!)

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