The video’s a little self-promotional, but it’s still pretty cool to see the hugeness of the Wuskwatim Generating Station as it’s being assembled in northern Manitoba.

The $1.3 billion dam will generate 200 MW when it’s complete, sometime next year.

Manitoba Hydro also has a convenient “How To Build A Generating Station” tour, in case you’ve got $1.3 billion of your own money burning a hole in your pocket.

And, I found this video, taking a look at some of the earlier stages of construction, if you’d like to see some of the exterior dam works.

Manitoba Hydro, for what it’s worth, provides my power, although I pay them for the privilege.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a couple of educational videos up on YouTube called “Mars In A Minute” that teach you little tidbits about the Red Planet. There’s the one above, showing you how to get there, and sort of explaining why there’s a flurry of Mars launches right now, but there won’t be next year. There’s also another, asking is it really red?

I hope they do more — they’re just the kind of videos that are accessible and not condescending to kids in order to get them excited about space exploration.

This is really interesting! Although the paper cutouts just look like really big versions of those snowflakes you used to make in Grade 3, when they’re spun ’round on a bicycle wheel, they turn into animations.

I believe that the effect is only possible through film, which makes it kind of extra-interesting. If you see this in real-life, the wheels would just blur around and around, but when the revolutions of the bike wheel are synchronized just so with the shutter speed of the camera, you get a simple animation effect.

Love it.

(By Katy Beveridge, via Boing Boing)

I’m neither a doctor nor a dyslexic, so can’t vouch for the claims in this video, but it strikes me as something that would work, based on my casual knowledge of the condition. Very interesting approach to it, that’s for sure — even if the font does look a little like Chiller.

Find out more at StudioStudio.

(Thanks, Matt!)

I love these pencils, hand-stamped with catch phrases from The Big Lebowski. But I love even more that there are multiple sets of pop-culture pencils at this Etsy store — including classic rap, The Goonies, mostly dead wrestlers and mid-century designers.

And I love ever MORE that you can order custom sets as well!

I can’t beat the synopsis on MeFi:

When they were making The Karate Kid, they decided to shoot each scene’s rehearsal with budget cameras so the actors could watch themselves back afterwards. Now it’s been edited together so that it forms a version of the movie that looks like it was shot and made by eighth graders in their basement, including loads of unseen scenes.

(That green clears up after a couple of minutes.)

Part 2 is here, and it’s pretty easy to find the rest of the parts from there.

It’s a stunningly simple idea — obvious when you’ve seen it. And, in a variety of colours, it’ll set you back €15, plus shipping. That’s a mite too high for something that it readily available in its standard, fingertip burning form at Dollaramas around the country.

I wonder if you could just heat up a soldering iron and make your own, or something?

Well, now I want to go to Finland!

That time-lapse is just one of 10 mesmerizing time-lapse videos collected by Wired.

I live about 200 km from the city of Winnipeg. But nobody says that. Everyone always says “two hours,” because that’s how long it takes to get there.

Time is how people think of travel. Distance is useful mainly as an approximation of time. So that’s why a map that throws out that slavish devotion to geography, and instead concentrates on travel times, would be so useful!

Which is exactly what TimeMaps does (sorry, it’s in Dutch). By mapping out the Netherlands and correlating it with train schedules, recent design grad Vincent Meertens has made a web-app that visualizes how the “distance” (travel time) grows and shrinks over the course of a day. That is, when the trains run less often, like at night, it takes a lot longer to get where you’re going. And the map gets bigger, to represent that.

Meertens tells Fast Company that he’s hoping to add cars, bikes and other forms of transportation. His next project will be New York City.

It’s up for an award — you can vote for it here.

This is a “sunken” bridge, located in the Netherlands that gives the incredible perspective of walking through parted water. The bridge gives access to a 17th Century fort, which has long been protected by a shallow moat.

It was designed by RO & AD Architects and uses a type of modified wood called Accoya wood, which offers increased durability against something like water.

Apparently from afar, it appears as if there’s nothing in the water, and you only see it once up close. I love that you can reach over and touch the water. There must not be too many issues with the water level increasing, otherwise they might not have gone with this idea. Very cool!

(via)

Amy found this video this morning. It sort of reminded me of that scene in Jurassic Park (“They’re moving like birds. They DO move like birds!”) but because it’s real, it’s a little bit more magical. Although composted of individuals, the flock seems to move as a single living organism.

A two-and-a-half-year-old article in the Telegraph explains the reasons behind the flock’s swooping patterns:

It’s all about safety in numbers – none wants to be on the outside, none wants to be first to land …. Impenetrable as the flock’s movements might seem to the human eye, the underlying maths is comparatively straightforward. Each bird strives to fly as close to its neighbours as possible, instantly copying any changes in speed or direction. As a result, tiny deviations by one bird are magnified and distorted by those surrounding it, creating rippling, swirling patterns. In other words, this is a classic case of mathematical chaos

Because it freaking floats!

It’s surprisingly power-efficient, using just 3W to float and 15W when the LED array is fully lit, at least according to the specs at the store. Oh, and technically, I guess the lamp is only €980, but when you consider taxes, shipping and a North American adapter for the plug, you’re well up into four digits, even in terms of Euros.

Novum 11/11 – Making Of Cover from Paperlux on Vimeo.

Wow, this is pretty cool! Using HTML5, the people at Scroll have built a web-app that works a lot like professional page layout programs like Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign.

Sure, it’s rough around the edges, and the power and capabilities are limited, but you can essentially drag-and-drop text or photos to create the online layout you want for a webpage — in the exact same way you would create a print layout.

Is it revolutionary? No….? But I kind of want to say “almost.”

Find out more, or request an invite: scroll mkr.

This is all over the news today, but it took a little bit of Googling before I found their actual website.

It’s called the Nest — and it’s basically the Dyson vacuum of thermostats. That is, it’s a sleek, well-designed a gadget that promises to be an order of magnitude better than a consumer appliance we’d all thought was basically done evolving.

The Nest is plugged as the first user-friendly programmable thermostat. As the owner of a very nice programmable thermostat already, I didn’t think that I would be interested in buying a new one. After all, mine can do just about everything I would want it to do.

But it’s so very, very hard.

Okay, first world problem. But the “program” part of my thermostat really isn’t intuitive, and therefore, I don’t use it. I turn up the thermostat in the morning when I get up, turn it down again when I leave for work, up when I get home, and down again when I go to bed. (Okay, pretty much Amy does all that.)

The Nest thermostat will remember my habits and program itself for me. So I don’t have to get up and turn it to a warm morning temperature, it’ll do that for me so it’s warm when I get up. And I don’t have to worry about forgetting to turn it down when I’m gone.

Three things give me pause before clicking the “pre-order” button. First, it’s $250, although that’s not a ridiculous amount of money for a gadget that could pay for itself in a Manitoba winter. And also that looks cool.

Secondly, though, it’s pretty online-based, and I’m not too sure how much I want to rely on an unknown third-party for my thermostat. Especially given that it auto-updates. So, the theoretical worst-case scenario sees a hacker get into their site and push out a malicious update. And maybe they just mess with the thermostat controls. But maybe they turn my heat off in February. While I’m away for the weekend. And my pipes freeze and burst.

Or maybe, they use my trusted thermostat’s access to my secured wifi and somehow get into my actual computer …

Thirdly, and this is one of the most frustrating things, I have scoured their website (seriously, scoured it) and I can’t find anything that says whether it will do Celsius. Everything’s given in Fahrenheit. Ugh. Talk about your American blind spot.

I mean I’m pretty sure it will? But I can’t be sure sure.

It’s almost as bad as their insistence that, after giving them my country of residence, that I give them my zip code.