via backgroundcheck.org (Thanks, Dick!)

Click here to see the rest of the graphic

Hilarious.

On New Years Eve 2011 I was in Geelong at a restaurant, 800km from my home in Adelaide. This year I happened to be away from my children, who were staying elsewhere in Adelaide while I was interstate. My home was supposedly vacant. However I knew it was very hot in Adelaide that day (40C) and I wondered if this would affect my power consumption, for example an increased duty cycle on the fridge. I … Read More → "Using a Fluksometer to bust your kid’s house party while you’re out of town"

Purdue’s Society of Professional Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers have created the world’s most complex Rube Goldberg machine. The 300-step machine has set a new record for the largest functioning Rube Goldberg machine, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a simple task in a complex fashion. In this case, the engineers created a machine to … Read More → "The most complex Rube Goldberg machine in the world"

One of the most cherished culinary disciplines in Japan is the art and process of making sushi. But now even that exalted tradition may succumb to the march of technology thanks to the SushiBot.

In the cheaper Japanese sushi restaurants (kaiten-zushi), skilled sushi chef slowly roll your sushi in front of you with an old school pride and meticulousness. But the automatic sushi … Read More → "Robotic sushi chef can whip out 400 rolls per hour"

I needed a couple of AA batteries and found the display at the supermarket where they were all arrayed. Normally when I’m shopping in the supermarket, I tend to look at the price/kg or price/l when comparing similar products. In the case of the batteries, there was no such indicator. Fine, I thought, I’ll work it out myself. I grabbed a few different makes and scanned … Read More → "Measuring the capacity of different batteries"

Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
via The Atlantic

Continue reading

It’s a shame about Pluto. Now that the astronomical community has downgraded the once-furthest planet from the sun to non-planet status (technically it’s now referred to as a protoplanet or dwarf planet), our solar system is at risk of being unseated as the largest known planetary system in the universe. An astronomer at the University of … Read More → "The solar system with the most planets is now … HD 10180"

Ahh, the sights and smells of Spring: new life blooming, baby animal being born (at least according to Animal Planet), the beginning of baseball … if it weren’t for all that frustrating egg-dying we have to do, it’s be just lovely. Well, Egg-Bot’s here to save the day! This little robot will dye and decorate all your Easter and holiday eggs for you.

… Read More → "Robot will dye all your eggs for you"

Finding the right glue for the job isn’t always an easy task and if you get it wrong, your DIY project will fall apart before you even get started. Thankfully, DIY blog Design*Sponge has put together a chart describing which glue is best to use and when.
via Lifehacker

Continue reading

Read More → "Which glue should you use?"

A dirt bike daredevil in the Lincoln Tunnels proves that “America is back.”
via The Colbert Report