The COO of the company distributing this new fragrance — which goes on sale today — says: “I personally feel that the new Bruce Willis fragrance is the manliest scent in the world.” Among the reported ingredients are grapefruit, pepper, and vetiver. Yummy.
from BoingBoing
It’s hotter than Jennifer Lopez’s career in 1999 outside today and if you don’t have air conditioning, you’re screwed. City officials have some lame tips for beating the record-breaking heat, but we’ve got better suggestions. Step in and chill out.
Fan (manual): An age old remedy is to swoosh one of these wonderfully dramatic devices in front of your face like you’re Karl Lagerfeld at a fashion show. It helps while you’re doing it, but the moment you stop, the heat returns. Also, you end up getting yourself nice and sweaty by exerting all that energy. We’d suggest getting “the help” to do the fanning for you, but if you can afford that, there’s no way you’d be trapped inside without some cool air blowing on you. Fan (electric): A good breeze going in the room makes it feel cooler even if it’s just hot air blowing around. Park the fan nice and close to your face and it’s double the pleasure. Pretend you’re Tyra Banks at a photo shoot and your weave is just blowing in the wind. Make funny noises into the spinning blade and it’s hours of fun. Just don’t shell out $300 for one of those Dyson Air Multipliers. Sure, it looks impressive, but you know that shit will be $59.99 in a year or so. (And don’t you dare get a ceiling fan, those are just tacky.) Cold Drinks: This is essential, preferably with lots of ice. Don’t mess with soda or juice, though. Stick with water, iced tea, lemonade, or something similar. Feel free to liberally add various and assorted spirits. It’s hot as hell out there, you need something to relax. No Socks: Much like going commando, having cool feet is exceptionally refreshing. Just do everyone a favor and get some baby powder or something on those puppies. Being hot is bad enough without it being stinky. And please make sure they’re clean and properly groomed. Nasty feet remind us of hobbits, which reminds us of the fires of Mordor, which makes us sweat. Order In: If you cook in this weather with no air-conditioning, you’re an idiot. Order in your food instead. Be sure to tip big. That delivery guy just rode a bike to bring you that meal, and he’s probably sweatier than Richard Simmons’ glittery shorts when he’s done high-steppin’ to the oldies. Cold Compresses: Get a cloth or ice pack and get it all moist and cool and apply it to various parts of your body. This is magical. At first it’s unbearably cold, but like so many aerobics classics, the burn is worth it. Make sure you remove it before it gets room temperature and is just soggy, moist, and annoying. A friend recommended that we put a bag of ice directly into our underwear. That’s sweet, but it’s 100 degrees. Do you think we’re wearing underwear?
Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries could be part of a global revolution by carrying cargo around the world in airships instead of planes, one of the UK’s leading scientists has predicted.
The government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that massive helium balloons – or blimps – would replace aircraft as a key part of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions.
Despite languishing in sci-fi B-movies for most of the last 70 years, King said several major air and defence companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, were working on designs, and the US defence department had recently made a large grant to help develop the technology.
As a result, the helium-powered ships could be carrying freight – and even passengers – in as little as a decade’s time.
Got a netbook? Specifically, got a Samsung N130 or a Lenovo S10-2? Even more specifically, do you use it in and outdoors, but find it hard to read in the sun? We have good news! The Maker Shed will sell you one of Pixel Qi’s dual-mode displays as a straight swap-in for your existing LCD-panel.
The 10.1-inch screen runs in one of two modes. When indoors, or watching video, you use the regular LCD display, which will look pretty much the same as the one you already have. When you’re in to mood for some reading, or you are outside in bright sunlight, or you’re just running low on battery power, you can switch to the e-ink mode.
This disables the backlight and shows you hi-res, grayscale pixels, much like you’d see on the screen of the Amazon Kindle. Because it only uses power when updating the screen, it sips power.
There is also a hybrid mode, which lets the sun reflect off the back of the display assembly and back out through the color LCD. This both saves battery power and lets you view a normal color display outdoors.
There’s a great interview with Buzz Aldrin, the second man to ever walk on the moon. Below is an excerpt, but I recommend you read the whole thing.
“President Obama gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April, promising to increase NASA’s funding by six billion and send astronauts to Mars in the next two decades. Do you believe him?
I do. But what he’s describing is a very leisurely way. He’s talked about getting a bunch of things in the orbit of Mars by… what year did he say again?
The mid-2030s.
Well that’s all well and good. But I want to land on the damn place! And I want to minimize the expense. I want to make sure that when they land, they’ve got a support system. I’m convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we’re eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don’t come back? What if they stay there?
Then you’ve got a bunch of astronauts on Mars going, “Hello? Can I get a little help here? What the fuck?”
But then we send six more people, and now we’ve got twelve. It’d be between three and four times cheaper to send people there and then leave them there.
Do we tell them that in advance? Or do we just wait and spring it on them after they’ve landed?
Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that’s what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you’re there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn’t be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you’re there.
You’re talking about building a colony?
Exactly! Every twenty-six months, there’s a window of going to Mars that may last for about a month or so. It just so happens that there’s an opportunity to put a habitat on Mars in the fall of 2022. So we put a habitat there and you check it out for a year or so, and it’s unmanned. Then in the spring of 2025, I send a crew and they stay for a year and a half, and then I bring them back. I send another crew in ‘27 and then I bring them back. I send another crew there in ‘29, and they stay. And then in ‘31 I send six more people, three to one of the moons of Mars and three directly to Mars, and now I’ve got nine people there. I can add six every twenty-six months.”
Threadcakes is a new site where users take their favorite Threadless t-shirt designs and then turn them into cakes. The results? Awesome mouth-watering cakes.
The Bat Hook is as simple as any plug-in charger, but it’s great for on-the-go. It’s just a weighted hook with a razor blade in it, strung on the end of a cord: you toss it over the nearest power line. Its blade pierces the live wire, neatly and safely conducting electric current down to you, for convenient charging of gadgets, jumpstarting cars, or powering your roadside business. It even works in the rain!
“Avoid dead camera batteries by putting a strip of solar panels on your camera strap. Simple, and rather clever, right? That’s exactly what Weng Jie’s Solar Camera Strap does, although in coming up with the design he forgot an important point: you can’t charge batteries while they are in the camera.
While some cameras come with charging docks or have their chargers built in so you just have to plug in a cable, most require a separate charger into which you pop the battery: a far better solution which doesn’t put your camera out of action as it juices up. Weng’s device runs the power generated by the strap into the camera’s DC-in socket via cable. This would let you use the camera as long as the light is bright, but there’d be no buffer if the Sun were to dip behind a cloud (there are a pair of batteries within the strap, but that’s not really ideal).
Still, those are mere details. Give me a way to use my camera all day without having to worry about running out of power and you’d have my cash. If you ever sell this strap, Weng, get in touch. And please, please make it in a darker color so it doesn’t pick up my neck-dirt.”
Someone came up with a really detailed design for a camera that turns photos into stamps. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: The camera takes a picture.
Step 2: You pull it apart to reveal a rubber-stamp and ink-pad within
Step 3: ??? (this is where the magic voodoo comes in that somehow makes this work)
Step 4: You simply slap it down onto a piece of paper to get a monochrome rendition of the photo you took.
