Oh yes, please. Read the story about this “illegal” trailer at Ain’t It Cool News.

Grant and I are no strangers to ice cube trays. He has one of those old fashioned metal ones where you pull back the lever to crack the ice into cubes, and we have several of those silicone ones that come in the shape of bottles, or Christmas trees, or whatever, and bend like Gumby.

The most common ice cube tray, of course, is the standard plastic version, where you twist to crack the cubes. I’ve always thought they were kind of a hassle. Ice cubes always ended up on the floor, or just not cracking perfectly.

Ice cube trays and how well they work doesn’t really affect our lives, I know, especially when it’s so easy to go and buy a bag of pre-made ice that doesn’t have any of that gross freezer burn smell. But some ingenious soul has come up with a better ice cube tray:

Awesome. Really, how has no one thought of this before?

Apparently this is a world-famous photograph, taken by George R. Lawrence, but I’ve never before seen it. It’s a panorama of San Francisco, taken from a balloon or kite, about six weeks after the devastating earthquake of 1906.

Click on it to see the enormous full-size resolution — it’s 7,000 pixels wide.

And even that doesn’t compare to the original scan, which is a 158 MB tiff hosted at the Library of Congress. With that, you could print a four-foot-long poster that was the same resolution as a regular snapshot.

I’ve now got it set as my desktop background, and even though I’ve got a dual-monitor setup, with two 1920 x 1200 Apple cinema displays, I still had to downsize and crop this image. It’s wow.

Check out the photographer’s Wikipedia entry for more about how the photo was taken — and also how he built what was then the world’s largest camera (it’s a monster).

On the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s website, there’s a tale about him being hired to take aerial shots of that city. It didn’t work out quite so well.

(from Retronaut)

Launched in February, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — the “Hubble for the sun” — has started to send back some amazing footage.

Take this image for example, which is a full-disk multi-wavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun:

The red spots are relatively cool, while the green and blue spots are much, much hotter.

One of the amazing things about SDO is that it is able to study the sun in its entirety, rather than small patches like previous observatories.

An objectives of SDO is to learn more about the sun’s relationship to Earth. From NASA:

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate.

…

SDO will determine how the sun’s magnetic field is generated, structured and converted into violent solar events such as turbulent solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These immense clouds of material, when directed toward Earth, can cause large magnetic storms in our planet’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.

Another objective is to use SDO to predict when solar events are going to happen, probably in the hopes of avoiding the massive electronic damage a storm can cause here on Earth.

And for something related, but also completely different (which I saw on my friend Adam’s facebook) is a video called Black Rain created using raw images from the solar mission STEREO.

Kind of creepy, non?

Click on the image to see it full size. It’s worth it — probably worth keeping around, if you want to quickly pick an appropriate look for your next type-based project, but don’t want to just scroll through endless lists in the “paragraph” style sheet.

It’s a student project by Julian Hansen, and I also liked his near/far poster for a documentary film festival.

It was featured on the new-to-me design blog Inspiration Lab, but I found it via Coudal.

A designer named Alex has made an amazing set of tarot cards based on Lost. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll notice that the cards have subtle nods to various plot points associated with the characters.

Alex’s design is really simple, yet incredibly creative; it really matches the mood of the show. This set is based primarily on the first season characters, but I think it would be really cool if Alex continued on and made cards for characters like Mr. Eko and Desmond.

Check out the flickr set here for a closer view of the individual cards.

(Via TDW)

So, you’re a sci-fi or comic-book or some other kind of geek? And you like actual real-life science, too? Then this periodic table style poster of imaginary elements might just be right for your dorm room or parents’ basement:

(click to see double-size)

It’s $25 to get it poster size, from Russell Walks. It includes some doozies, like phlogiston, kryptonite, latinum … I have to say, it would be pretty cool in the right environment.

(via Gizmodo … via Urlesque, Neatorama, and Kotaku)

It’s no Skittlebrau, but if you like candy as much as you like liquor, you might be interested to learn that Vat19.com sells shot glasses made of gummy.

I’ve often thought that you could soak gummy bears in a bottle of rum or vodka, if you were looking for an interesting flavour. But now you can do the reverse.

The website says that they are more than durable enough to handle multiple shots but that they won’t survive the dishwasher. Which is good — no cleanup!

$15 for six is a little steep, but might be worth it for ….. oh shit, I almost wrote “for a child’s birthday party” before I remembered that these are shot glasses!

(via Coudal)

Genius, absolutely genius.

Jessica Hische has started a website called “The Internet Sends Me Cake.” It’s brilliant in its simplicity. In her own words:

If you send me a cake, I post a link to your work on the internet (both on this site and on twitter). You will be judged solely on your cake rather than your work, which makes this an equal opportunity link site. It is that simple and that awesome (for me and my studiomates) …. I have a preference for lemon cake with buttercream icing, cakes with fruit in them, or any cake with cream cheese frosting, but by all means be inventive. Cupcakes, pastries, and pies will also be accepted, but anything sent would preferably be handmade. I can buy fancy cakes if I want to, but I want YOUR weird lopsided handmade creation.

She’s had two people send her free cake so far, and this is exactly the kind of thing that will go viral and will drown her in free cake. I wish I had thought of it.

I’ve blogged about Hische before (she’s the designer behind Daily Drop Cap) and while perusing her site, I also notice that she did a great design that I noticed in a Chatelaine magazine a little while ago.

But I think her latest endeavour, ahem, takes the cake.

(via Coudal)

When it comes to classic Easter candy, you’ve got your chocolate bunny, you’ve got your jelly beans, you’ve got your Cadbury eggs — and you’ve got your Peeps.

So why not have a little fun with that? Why not make Peep sushi?

It’s easy! All you need are Peeps, some Rice Krispie cake (buy the pre-made bars if you’re lazy) and Fruit Roll-Ups.

Of course, you will have do decapitate the Peeps. Full instructions are here, at Serious Eats, which counsels:

Don’t let silent Peeps screams deter you from your task. You’re a professional.

I can’t believe I missed this trailer when it came out in January. The A-Team was an important part of my childhood, and I’m thankful (and relieved) that it looks like the movie will be a faithful rendition.

There’s still the whole new-character-played-by-Jessica-Biel thing to worry about, though.

Tavis Coburn, with design agency Dutch Uncle, was commissioned to do up some posters for the 2010 BAFTAs, which he did in delightfully retro style. I love this one for the Hurt Locker, which looks like it was ripped from the cover of a deliciously pulp sci-fi paperback that I might have purchased for 75 cents from a used-book store as a pre-teen:

He also did Up In The Air, Precious, and An Education, but I think my second-favourite was the one he did for Avatar.

Coburn’s bio, on the Dutch Uncle site, says that his “unique style is inspired by 1940s comic book art, the Russian avant-garde movement, and printed materials from the 1950s/60s.”

Why, I think that’s a recipe for awesome.

Damn. This guy is good! It furthers my theory that people seem to have a lot of time on their hands, but, at the same time, I’m glad they do.

Turns out, he’s the same guy who did a video of the Wind Waker theme song that I thought I posted but couldn’t find. Hrm. Anyway, the musician’s name is Frederik, he’s from Sweden, and he’s super talented!

(via)

Every vehicle on the road today has been subjected to a battery of safety tests, including being smashed into walls with the ubiquitous crash-test dummies loaded inside. But who is keeping our nation’s chopper pilots safe?

The answer: NASA.

In what looks like a boss way to spend a weekend, the folks at NASA have been examining impact crashes of helicopters, like the one above. Yes, I know it doesn’t look like much, but according to the NASA page, the occupants would have “lurched forward violently, suffering potentially spine-crushing injuries.” You can see that in the slo-mo.

No, I don’t know why this responsibility falls to NASA. Nor do I particularly care. I’m just glad that they filmed it and put it on YouTube.

(via BB)

If you’re familiar with slide-shows on the internet, you’re likely familiar with the fluff — the Top 10 lists that make you flip through each item as a separate page; the endless angles of ‘gadget porn’; the galleries of red carpet celebrity shots.

There are great slide-shows out there, collections of really awesome pictures, but they tend towards the easy-to-curate. That is, someone will put together a slide-show of images from the Olympics, or scenes from Haiti. Some of the photos can be jaw-droppingly good, but they sort of stand alone.

Well, msnbc.com’s Bill Dedman has changed the game. He’s an investigative reporter, but his latest work isn’t a 10,000-word opus, in fact it isn’t a story at all. No, Dedman’s latest work is an investigative slide-show.

With a staggering 47 slides, Dedman tells the story of Huguette Clark, daughter of what you might call a “robber baron” from the Gilded Age. Yes, the 1920s. He rivaled Rockefeller as the richest American, lived on Millionaire’s Row beside the Vanderbilts, and pretty much bought himself a U.S. Senate seat.

His daughter (from his second marriage — a scandal in itself) inherited something over a billion dollars, in today’s money. She has several mansions, owns the largest apartment on New York’s storied Park Avenue, and once bought a castle in Connecticut but never spent a night there.

In an interview on Poynter, Dedman shares how his investigative feature turned into a slideshow — and how it’s turned out great:

I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.

I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don’t we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first — would that crimp the writing? — but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.

We’ve done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.

I clicked through just so I could get a look at it and pitch the idea at my own newspaper, but I ended up reading the whole thing. As Dedman noted in the interview, he had to lose as a lot of depth and context from the story, because the captions were limited to about 50 words. But in other ways, that terse approach also focused him on what was most important or most interesting.

It’s a great tale about a forgotten famous family. And a great way to tell it. Check out the slideshow here: “The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery” (Click launch to launch the pop-up slideshow.)

Give the behind-the-scenes interview a read, too.