A Game Investigating The Rhetoric Of Fear Culture

we make money not art: Blowhard is a game, created by Ryan Schoelerman and Sky Frostenson, in which two players compete by breathing into a CPR mask, where a breath sensor translates cumulative respiration into the player’s current level of anxiety, shown on a screen in the same color-coded system used by the Department of Homeland Security’s Threat Advisory System. […]

Free Handphone Charging, Anybody?

Rediff.com: All you need to charge your mobile is — air! Students at the Department of Industrial Design at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi have attached a turbine with a mobile phone that helps charge it even when the user is travelling, Head of the Department Professor Lalit Kumar Das told PTI. “The electricity generated by the turbine when moved […]

Tempting Downloads

Wired News: College junior Kyle Taylor is downloading hundreds of songs by No Doubt, Bruce Springsteen and others onto the Compaq laptop in his cramped dormitory room. With a few more clicks of his mouse, Taylor is watching commercial-free Seinfeld episodes on his computer. In just minutes, he then downloads the entire movie A League of Their Own. The 20-year-old […]

Turning Your Wall Into a Work of Art

STLtoday.com: It’s easy enough to hang artwork on your wall, but have you ever considered turning your wall into a work of art? Beyond faux finishes, crown molding, chair rails, wainscoting and baseboards, new decorating techniques and products are giving three-dimensional grandeur to walls that is nothing but artistic. Maya Romanoff of Chicago, a textile designer and wallpaper master, said […]

Kabbalah and Energy Drinks

mcall.com: Combine medieval Jewish mysticism, a fizzy strawberry-flavored drink loaded with vitamins and a splash of holy water and you have the perfect fusion of two of the hottest fads sweeping the country: Kabbalah and energy drinks. Next week, the hip, the curious and the thirsty in the Lehigh Valley will be among the first consumers east of the Mississippi […]

Scientists’ Use of 3G

Mobile Digest: Orange tells us that its 3G Mobile Office card is being put to unusual use by scientists in the UK. Researchers over here are using the cards to let them access and control one of the largest fully robotic telescopes in the world based over in Hawaii. They can access the internet from their laptops to connect to […]

Puppy/Polar Bear Children’s Fridge

Gizmodo: A fridge so adorable that you could just eat it up is really the last thing you want when struggling with your diet [You actually wrote that? —ed.], but for the skinny crowd, Fujitronic makes a series of animal-styled mini-fridges. Available shaped as a polar bear or puppy dog, they feature an on-door LCD which can house a virtual […]

Hello Kitty Invades The Xbox

Engadget: Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time until Hello Kitty worked her evil magic upon this particular gadget, as she has on oh so many others. The Hello Kitty Crystal Xbox Console takes that definitively non-pink Xbox and converts it to its long-latent color scheme. During the promotional period the entire bundle comes with a Helly […]

Seeking Honey Bees

WorldChanging: Another great find from the Doors of Perception conference in Delhi: the Honey Bee Network, here in India. It is a network of people designed to find hackers and inventors from the countryside, the sort of people who don’t have two pennies to rub together but invent a coconut-tree-climbing machine so they can work better, or a man who […]

Toothbrush + Music = Tooth Tunes

We Make Money Not Art: Hasbro plans on launching a musical toothbrush called “Tooth Tunes” reports the WSJ. “When pressed to the teeth, the toothbrush renders a recorded riff from a pop star that lasts two minutes — precisely the amount of time dentists say children should spend brushing their teeth. How does it work? “The two-minute recording is stored […]