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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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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1942 adding machines: a marvel of non-essential zero elimination!: “

This 1942 ad for a Comptometer mechanical adding machine celebrates the joy of spending hours every day doing what spreadsheets today accomplish in an eyeblink. I love the feature-list: no glare dials, the elimination of non-essential zeroes, and a marvellous ‘Keystroke Censor.’

Collier’s January 17, 1942

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Locksmith’s swirling mural of discarded keys: “

The facade of NYC’s Greenwich Locksmith is an elaborate, beautiful mural made of thousands and thousands of discarded keys and locks. ScountingNY writes, ‘The key facade was designed and installed entirely by owner Phil Mortillaro back in October, and I can’t tell you how beautiful it is up close. It almost feels like the locksmith version of a Pollock painting – tens of thousands of keys seemingly strewn about haphazardly, yet in the mess, patterns emerge.’

The Coolest Locksmith Shop in New York City

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Hamster-powered strandbeest walker: “

The mad genius at Crafbuartworks created a miniature, hamster-powered strandbeest walker. The walker is hamstered by the intrepid Princess, who is a champ.

The hamster powered? that’s just stupid, which is the exact reason why I did it. It’s different, hasn’t been done before, yet it’s in so many what’s-under-the-hood jokes. It also had a high likelyhood of working, so I had to attempt it. Only problem: I don’t have a hamster, I don’t want a hamster for a pet, and I don’t know what sort of power and weight a little critter like that has. All I know is that I’ve seen them go ballistic on the hamster wheel, and so they must have great weight to power ratio.

I quickly removed the gearing and windmill, cut some plastic and mounted a hamster ball to this contraption. I used ball bearings on the hamster ball axels, and mecanno sprockets/chain to transfer the power from the hamster ball to the main crank. I did some initial testing with my son’s motorized train inside of the hamster ball, so I had fair confidence on the gear ratio needed for it to work.

Then my sister in law (who runs a great craft blog, Crafty Carnival) came to the rescue, and was able to borrow one of her friend’s pet hamster. Enter Princess the Hamster. Princess is a tiny little thing, much smaller than what I had imagined and prepared for. I was afriad that her weight wouldn’t be enough to get the ball going. But luckily it all worked out great, and test pilot Princess had no problems getting the strandbeest up to speed.

Hamster Powered Walker

(via Making Light)

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Yesterday’s amazing house of tomorrow is today’s boring house of today: “The June 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics had an article called ‘The HOUSE that RUNS ITSELF,’ and it describes a cutting-edge, supermodern house of the age of marvels. The house in question is so marvellous because it contains all the basic stuff we now take for granted and it’s kind of wonderful to hear it described with all this breathless excitement:

Imagine, if you can, the delight of the woman who steps into her ‘ready made’ house and finds the kitchen already equipped with electric refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, electric or gas stove, built-in clock, abundant cupboard space–and even a two-day supply of groceries on the shelves. And she never will be bothered by cooking odors because an electric exhaust quickly removes smoke, dust and fumes from the kitchen. In addition to the windows, indirect lighting gives plenty of illumination for her work in the compactly designed room.

In the bathroom, this same housewife will find bathtub complete with shower and anti-splash curtain, the large basin that also may serve as the baby’s bathtub, triple adjustable mirrors for her husband’s morning shave and an extra electric heater for warming up the room quickly. The conditioned air issues from grills set into the wall near the floor and a built-in clock tells the ‘man of the house’ just how long he has before his train or street car comes along. The packaged home is prefabricated, having a steel frame and walls of asbestos-cement, a material that looks like stucco. That means that it is fireproof, termite-proof, practically earthquake and hurricane proof and protected against lightning. Scientific insulation not only assures the owner of getting his money’s worth out of his fuel, but it combines with acoustical ceiling materials to give the extra advantage of soundproofing. The house is built on a cement foundation with three feet of air space below the first floor. Since the motor unit does all the work, a basement is unnecessary.

The HOUSE that RUNS ITSELF (Jun, 1935)

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Captain Nemo’s Daughter doll by Marina Bychkova: “

Incredible porcelain doll maker Marina Bychkova was profiled in the second issue of Craft magazine (which my wife Carla edited).

Here’s one of Marina’s recent creations, Captain Nemo’s Daughter. It is limited to 10 pieces, but I’m not sure if any are available. There are more pictures at her website. Her blog is excellent, too — here she describes her painting process.

Captain Nemo’s daughter 2010

Previously:

Marina Bychkova incredible dolls

Marina Bychkova ‘Mermaid Song’ doll

Marina Bychkova’s Enchanted Dolls

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Cthulhu: the neck-tie edition: “

From College Humor, this Cthuloid cravat advice.

5 New Ways to Tie a Tie

(Thanks, Gaberussell, via Submitterator!)

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Why women shouldn’t be “burdened” with the vote: 1915: “

This 1915 Boston Journal ad warning against the dangers of women’s suffrage lays all manner of dangers at the feet of ‘burdening’ women with the vote, including increased taxes and divorce. It warns that extending the vote to women is a joint plot of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and Mormons. Good to know that we’ve come so far in our political rhetoric.

1915 – Suffrage

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Payday lender association spoof site: “

Christopher Maag of Credit.com wrote about a spoof site called the Predatory Lending Association, which makes fun of those payday lenders that make big profits gouging the working poor.

The Predatory Lending Association offers tools including a ‘working poor finder,’ which places gun shops, liquor stores and pawn shops on the map and shows would-be investors in payday loan stores the best locations to open new locations. It also gives tips on finding for the most profitable races to discriminate against.

‘It’s easy to find the working poor,’ the predatory lenders site says, ‘but our studies reveal that a difference in location of even a few city blocks can impact profits by as much as 45%.’

The PLA spoof was one of the first websites created by Front Seat, a Seattle-based company that usually makes web tools more earnest than snarky.

Payday Lender Spoof

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