Neil Gaiman’s Cthulkhelele: “

David sez, ‘Neil Gaiman posted this beautiful Lovecraft-inspired ukelele on Twitter.’

Cthulkhelele

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Light My Fire Firesteel: “

Made in Sweden, the Light My Fire firesteels are a remake of a classic. Use them to light dry tinder if you are in Daniel Boone mode. For the rest of us, they cast off a perfect spark to light any sort of gas camp stove, from the 2 burner Coleman car camp special to the micro backpack models. They also work for the previously CT reviewed DIY alcohol stoves.

Firesteels come in 2 sizes, small for survival-backpacking and a slightly larger size for those other times. Some of the most distinctive advantages are that it works when wet, it has no moving parts, no fuel to run out of, and lasts nearly 3,000 strikes.

I’ve used them for everything from car camping in the VW camper van to mountaineering stoves on Rainier climbs and they always are flawless. The smaller one always has a place in my first aid / survival kit; the larger one comes on car camping trips.

— — John Godino

Light My Fire Firesteel

$16

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Light My Fire

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[OMG, how incredibly cool. -egg]

Clock that knits a scarf: “

Industrial designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen created this knitting clock that cranks out a two-meter scarf every year. It’s called ‘365.’ From Design Boom:

‘365’ seeks to give a physical manifestation to the change of time. drawing from the
change that is witnessed through the growth of human bodies and hair, the same concept
is found in ‘365’ which translates time through the growth of knitted material. the clock
houses a circular knitting machine with 48 needles, a thread spool, a thread holder and
roll of yarn. moving in clockwise direction, one day leads to a complete round…

Knitting clock (Thanks, Sally Applin!)

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The Guy Who Worked For Money: A Shareable future: “My sometimes-collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum has written a story called ‘The Guy Who Worked For Money’ for Shareable.net’s ‘Shareable Futures’ series, science fiction stories about a future in which sharing is the norm. Other installments are Bruce Sterling’s ‘The Exterminator’s Want-Ad’ and my ‘The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening’:

‘I didn’t mean it like — you’re a banker?’ Nera sent an urgent message to her mouth to stop talking, but apparently it had to go by carrier pigeon. ‘Literally? Is that even legal?’

‘Oh Nera, come on,’ Malka said, laughing. ‘Do you read anyone’s page before you meet them?’

‘It’s definitely legal,’ Jörg said, ‘Outlawing money exchange would lead to even more extreme distortions in our metrics than we’ve got.’ His fingers flicked, his eyes briefly on a point above her head, and more incoming green pinged at the corner of her vision, but she wasn’t going to read his goddamn footnotes in the middle of the party. ‘The Free Society doesn’t compete on force or fiat, it outperforms on joy. Wherever there’s a reversion to the money economy, that’s a signal of a deficit of either trust, satisfaction ability, or information flow. It’s better to let that signal manifest rather than –‘

‘All right, all right,’ Malka said, patting Jörg on the shoulder. Jörg smiled his goofy grin.

The Guy Who Worked For Money

(Image: 337/365: The Big Money, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from daviddmuir’s photostream)

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Traverse Me [gpsdrawing.com] is a complete map of the campus of the University of Warwick, drawn on foot at scale 1:1. It required over 238 miles of GPS tracks which were walked over 17 days.
The author, Jeremy Wood, responded to the structure of each location by avoiding walking along roads and paths whenever possible. The route was recorded with GPS technology and was traversed in different stages over the 300 hectare site. Security was called on him twice on separate occasions and he lost count of how many times he happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.
See also:
. Biggest Drawing in the World
. Locative Disposition
. GPS Diary
. GPS Drawing (back in 2005)
Via @jwoodx.

Erik Davis visits Damanhur’s Temples of Humankind: “Our pal Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and Visionary State, is a fantastic tour guide to hot spots of spiritual high weirdness, from UFO cult hangouts to the San Francisco’s Vedanta Society Old Temple to Esalen. Erik calls himself a ‘spiritual tourist.’ The tourist part is important, he explains, because ‘serious seekers limit their pilgrimages in ways that the eclectic, omnivorous, and sometimes willfully perverse spiritual tourist does not. I have gotten as much out of tacky roadside shrines and UFO cults as the most charismatic buildings of the A-list faiths. It’s all about perspective. I willfully cut my sacred with profanation, and keep my eyes peeled for sparkling ironies as well as eruptions of the marvelous.’

Last year, Erik visited the Federation of Damanhur, an intentional community just north of Turin in the foothills of the alps, where the residents carved out a labyrinth in the mountain to create their Temples of Humankind. It sounds, and looks, breathtaking. From HiLobrow:
With over six hundred permanent residents, and hundreds of more “citizens” of various grades scattered around Italy and the world, Damanhur possesses an enviable range of quality businesses, workshops, schools, healing centers, and quasi-independent collective homes, all organized according to an innovative governance system notable for its pragmatism and productivity. Damanhur organizes conferences, restores medieval buildings, sells high-end cloth and foodstuffs, and trades goods and services among themselves using their own currency.


But the community’s on-the-ground success story pales in comparison to what that hole in a mountain became. Over the weeks and years, without much formal training, working at night and with music blaring to cover up the drills, a select crew of Damanhurians hollowed out a series of mighty chambers and passageways, all without other members of the community—to say nothing of the greater world—clueing-in to their secret work. With tenacious devotion and a startling degree of art, they transformed these underground spaces into the Temples of Humankind: a remarkable otherworldly honeycomb of sacred murals, onyx mosaics, stained glass, sculpture, inlaid marble, hidden passageways, precious metals, mirrored stone, alchemical elixirs, and—who knows?—maybe even the cosmic energy circuits, intergalactic portals, and temporal wormholes that the people of Damanhur suggest are the ultimate functions of their sacred architecture.

Erik Davis visits Damanhur (Thanks, Greg Taylor!)

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Never-Ending Drawing Machine: collaborative paper computing system: “

At MIT’s Center for Future Storytelling, my friend David Robert is co-developing the Never-Ending Drawing Machine, a mixed reality ‘paper computing’ platform for collaboration. The system enables you to work in a physical notebook and then bring it to the system to share and augment the pages digitally over the network with other people. It’s based on Derivative’s TouchDesigner software and an Arduino-based physical computing platform. From the project description:

For each page, the system loads the appropriate background content and lets you take a picture and send it back and forth to your friend or collaborator using an identical table somewhere else on the network (co-located or remote). Your collaborator also has an enhanced sketchbook and if it’s on the same page each table will see everyone’s latest additions.

Participants don’t have to be on the same page. The sketchbooks allow non-linear, asynchronous access to the evolving, co-created content with a physical editing interface. It’s a cool analog/digital hybrid model that requires no expertise and is fun just to use. Sound may also be recorded – on a blank page for example, and sent to inspire someone else’s drawings.

Never-Ending Drawing Machine

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For carbon sequestration to work, containers need to leak less than 1% per millennium: “Carbon sequestration — pumping the carbon emitted by coal and other ‘dirty’ power plants underground — is an attractively macho, big-engineering style solution to climate change. Rather than developing new kinds of power (which might favor new companies and regions) or new patterns of use (which might require effort on the part of individuals), we simply contract with firms who take all our carbon and lock it away underground for millennia. What could be simpler?

Carbon dioxide sequestration isn’t a great global warming solution unless we develop less leaky equipment or commit to regular re-sequestering, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience. If the containers used don’t leak less than one percent every thousand years, atmospheric carbon would have to be monitored carefully and resequestered on a regular basis over tens of thousands of years in order to match the effects of reducing carbon emissions. Otherwise, sequestration would only slow the warming, not stop it.

Carbon sequestration too leaky to stop global warming

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Invisible homeless man: “

World’s greatest homeless sign ever (Thanks, Joe Sabia!)

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Why heterosexual men are attracted to women with small feet: “

The face on the left is a composite of eight women with ‘unusually small feet.’ The face on the right is a composite of ‘eight women with unusually large feet.’

The morphs were created by evolutionary psychologists Jeremy Atkinson and Michelle Rowe at the University at Albany, New York. Atkinson called them the ‘most strikingly different morphs I’ve ever seen.’

These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students. The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found.

…

Atkinson thinks men find these features attractive because they serve as markers of a healthy childhood. Biologists know that stress and poor nutrition during foetal development and puberty can affect sex hormone levels and cause earlier puberty.

New Scientist: Why men are attracted to women with small feet

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