Serendipita

Lego and Dinosaurs

Oh boy… Henry Lim has created a stegosaurus from Lego. It is 6 ft (about 2 m) high and 14 (yes, fourteen!) ft (more than 4 m) long. I wonder how much the thing weighs…

Lego and Dilbert

Here are some Lego sculptures of Dilbert, Wally and the Pointy-Haired-Boss!
Andrew Lipson, the creator, says he’s going to build Dogbert next.

(Dilbert, a comic by Scott Adams, can be found at http://www.dilbert.com/.)

Lego and Mathematics

Lipson also has a collection of mathematical Lego sculptures!

The creations look pretty cool, and I wouldn’t have thought that it was possible to build such things from Lego. For those interested in math, there are Möbius strips, minimal surfaces, a Klein bottle, and cross caps. Wow!

I especiall like the Klein bottle which has hinges so it can be opened and one can see it ‘loop into itself’!

A mathematician named Klein Thought the Mobius strip was divine He said “If you glue The edges of two You can make a strange bottle like mine”.

Lego

Bricktannia is a whole Lego city. Pretty cute!

Link via /usr/bin/girl.

‘Bored of the Rings’

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

Jeremy posted this link to Rich Drushel’s Parody of Appendix A, The Lord of the Rings, which is unrelated to ‘Bored of the Rings’. The author says he has tried to write in the same style as ‘Bored…’, but changed a few names.

Color vision

There is an interesting article on the possibility of tetracromates in the Red Herring Magazine: Looking for Madam Tetrachromat - Do mutant females walk among us?, by Glenn Zorpette.

Link via /usr/bin/girl.

This time it’s todays sunrise!

One Book

The One Book List:

“I would like for each of you to decide on a single book that you would most like for the world to read for inclusion in the list. The book that, for you, was the most influential, or thought-provoking, or enjoyable, or moving, or philosophically powerful, or deep in some sense you cannot properly define, or any other criteria you wish to set.”

It’s a really interesting collection of more than 800 books. I’ve found lots of recommendations there. So many good books out there, but so little time…

Has anyone read Bored of the Rings, by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney? It is a parody on ‘The Lords of the Rings’, by J.R.R. Tolkien. If you have read it, do you recommend it?

By the way, my favourite book of all times is A Fine Balance (deutscher Titel: Das Gleichgewicht der Welt), by Rohinton Mistry.

Link via BookNotes. Thanks, Craig!

Webcam

If you prefer to see white-eyed assassin bugs (or other insects that might be on display), go to the web cam of the Insect Zoo in Ames, Iowa. For a certain amount of time, you can control the camera.

Thanks for the link, John!

More interesting stuff at the Exploratorium

The Exploratorium has a cool web cam on its roof. It seems that users can point it to one of eight points of interest by clicking on a number below the picture.

I’m not quite sure how it works… There’s only one camera, so what happens if several people want to point the camera in different directions?

They also have an intersting site: The Heart of the Matter - Inside CERN, the world’s largest particle accelerator.

Ooze

Outragoeous Ooze - a recipe to make you own, from the Exploratorium.

Link via /usr/bin/girl.

Cooking

Do you like salmon? I do, but I’m not sure I want to try to cook salmon in a dishwasher.

Interestingly, this really seems to work. At least, other people cook their salmon in the dishwasher as well - and the surreal gourmet even dares to add dirty dishes and soap!