Pokemon Art and Childhood

If only pokemon cards had illustrations like these I might have been inspired to be a cool artist, rather than a boring engineer. Oh well, at least I'll never go hungry. I think. Whatever the case, these are some sick drawings of the only characters ever than can only say their own names. Their limited vocabulary was made up for by their super special awesome fighting moves! Oh, what I would give to be a kid again. I literally couldn't stop saving the images to my computer, they bring back such wonderful memories.

Fried Plumbers and Crazyness

Those sparks are 12ft long! More like lightning, really, but either way those things could make an unlucky plumber very crispy. The tesla coils are seven feet tall which really puts the massiveness of this construction in to perspective. There are no speakers in this setup, and the sound is coming just from the electricity ripping through the air. Just like how thunder is the result of lightning, but on a much smaller scale. Pretty amazing if you ask me.  I am always awed at phenomena of sound from electronics, especially when it come to transistors and how when designing a computer the noise that the transistors make is taken into consideration. The conversion of electrical energy to mechanical sound energy is just fascinating.
On a crazy note, I can't wait until we can control the weather and are able to make every thunderstorm sound like a symphony orchestra of the gods. Or a hip-hop beat. 

Sports Divergence

Sorry, kid. I generally don't watch sports much anymore, but I used to play more than my fair share of basketball, and I still hit the courts occasionally. This kid, however, hit the court a little to hard, more precisely, he hold on to the rim a little too long. I do applaud his bunnies (as I also used to high jump), and I think he learned his lesson. The only time it is truly acceptable to break a backboard is if three conditions are met: 1) You dunk on a man, 2) add injury to insult by letting the shards fall on the dunkee, 3) you do not injure yourself. However, there is one grand exception that supersedes these; you are Michael Jordan. The second video shows all four. Sorry, European men in short shorts.

LED Cube

  

A cube made from LEDs and animated? Amazing. Hopefully in the future 3D TV's will be made out of something closer to this than what is currently available. There are instructions on instructables.com if you feel the desire to make one of these for yourself, I for one, am adding this to my list of things to build. It is supposed to take about four days for two people to build it, and another five days to program, but they provide software if you want it. This is an 8x8x8 LED cube, so there are 512 LEDs total, which are run by computer software that switches them on and off. Some of the patterns that this thing can make are absolutely stunning, like fireworks and waves and rainfall. Genius.

Kinekt Design Gear Ring

This gear ring actually moves! I'm generally not a fan of jewelry (I'm a dude), but this thing is pretty sweet. It would give me something to play with at all times, but I just wonder if the skin on my other fingers would ever get caught in the teeth. And I hope when it gets dirty (as it inevitably will) it doesn't seize, but it is made from  stainless steel so there are no worries about it rusting. All in all, a very neat idea that I would actually wear, for a reasonable price. Check it out at Kinekt Design.

Microfluidics Foch Lab

Microfluidic devices are really cool because at the micrometer length scale forces like surface tension have a greater effect than forces body forces like gravity. This makes the flow in these channels have very low Reynolds numbers, so the flow is generally laminar, and thus mixing occurs very slowly. The Foch Lab likes to set colorful microfluidic displays to classical music. Enjoy!

Electrohydrodynamics

That's quite a sesquipedalian word. For those of you that don't know, a sesquipedalian word is a long word, which makes sesquipedalia an auto-logical word, meaning that it describes itself. But that's a story for another day, today I want to talk about science. There's this really sweet video of a water-in-air bridge that can from when two water reservoirs have a large voltage placed across them and the reservoirs are pulled slightly apart. Take a look!