| memepool on the internet, everyone can hear you scream |
|
| Thursday Nov 11, 2004 | A slow Sunday night show turns into The Best Gig Ever. to Music by gator |
| Thursday May 6, 2004 | Help me. I'm trapped in the Kingdom Of Loathing, best
described as a tongue-in-bum-cheek web-based MMORPG. to Games by gator |
| Sunday Jan 11, 2004 | What do you mean, photoshopped? to Commerce by gator |
| Friday Sep 26, 2003 | Dyson is a primarily known as a
UK vacuum cleaner
manufacturer, but they offer a fiendish little flash puzzle game that
reminds me of Chu Chu
Rocket and Ricochet
Robot. to Games by gator |
| Thursday Sep 18, 2003 | Why don't we try to
destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?
to Science by gator |
| Wednesday Aug 20, 2003 | You can build
your own version of an early
mechanical
television. to History by gator |
| Wednesday Aug 13, 2003 | Norwegian Peoples Aid lists
130
land mines along with disarming and detection information. to Warfare by gator |
| Thursday Aug 7, 2003 | In the 60s and 70s, if you wanted to store more data than would fit on
your new-fangled disk
drives and you were frustrated by the slow access times of
tape
drives, then some of your choices were the Data
Cell and the spectacularly complex electron-beam-and-film
photostore. to Computing by gator |
| Monday Apr 14, 2003 | Have you been lusting after an IMSAI since 1983? You can get
an IMSAI Series
Two, complete with ATX mounting
for convenience. to Computing by gator |
| Thursday Mar 6, 2003 | There's a beauty to (re-)starting from scratch.
Primitive Ways
offers guides to Primitive
Technology, like
how to
make
fire, or
knap blades
out of old toilets. to Society by gator |
| Thursday Feb 27, 2003 | Metalwork doesn't have to be
explicitly decorative to be
beautiful. Consider, for example, stove burners and
drain covers. to Art by gator |
| Thursday Feb 13, 2003 | Simply start with a pencil,
and remove all that is not a chain,
spirit,
or geometric
figure to Art by gator |
| Wednesday Sep 18, 2002 | Desire for early
warning of impending nuclear
annihilation inspired NORAD to
post people to some pretty inhospitable locations:
spindly
towers in
the Atlantic and
sites
across
the
frozen
North.
to Warfare by gator |
| Tuesday Sep 17, 2002 | Dedicated artists
and tinkerers
have used desktop scanners as the basis for DIY CCD
scanning cameras. to Photography by gator |
| Wednesday Aug 14, 2002 | Space Imaging,
Terraserver and Spot offer easy access to
satellite imagery but
Global Security
and Cryptome's Eyeball offer satellite imagery analysis.
to Warfare by gator |
| Wednesday Jul 31, 2002 | You can
make your
own soap
by reacting fat
and sodium
hydroxide or another strong base. to Science by gator |
| Wednesday Jun 5, 2002 | When the
robots
take over, perhaps they will be nice enough to keep on
making
sushi to Food by gator |
| Wednesday May 22, 2002 | Before digital video effects, there were
analog video
synthesizers. One of these, the Scanimate, still has afficonados
today.
to Art by gator |
| Monday Apr 15, 2002 | The ETA Systems
ETA 10 was the only commercial liquid-nitrogen-cooled computer. Both
the LN2-cooled and the later air-cooled
models generated
plenty
of
memories to History by gator |
| Tuesday Apr 9, 2002 | Forget business-card
CDs. All the hip
kids
use
custom
shapes
now. to Commerce by gator |
| Tuesday Mar 19, 2002 | The USGS
minerals information service provides annual summaries
about commodity minerals.
to Reference by gator |
| Tuesday Feb 5, 2002 | Even though I should have known better,
I'd always thought you needed a full-out
clean room if you planned to
open a hard drive and have it operate again. These case modder sites
suggest
otherwise with
their clear-drive-cover projects. to Computing by gator |
| Sunday Jan 27, 2002 | The United States Fire
Administration (a part of FEMA)
publishes a series of
tech reports.
They
are
tragic
and
fascinating. to Health by gator |
| Tuesday Jan 22, 2002 | Most digit displays today are vacuum
fluorescents, 7-segment
LEDs, and LCDs.
In the good old days, though, there were a variety
of vacuum
display
devices, including the dekatron
counter/display, and the nixie tube. DIY
hardware hackers
are still building clocks
with them today. to History by gator |
| Sunday Jan 6, 2002 | The belt
manlift is a living-dangerously relative of the escalator and
elevator. to Transportation by gator |
| Sure, sure, we've all heard
about planespotting, but wreckchasing, or "Aviation
Archaeology"
seems more my speed.
to History by gator |
| Tuesday Dec 18, 2001 | If you live in the US, the Bureau of
Export Administration (among others)
reminds you: Don't export
nuclear
weapons components,
bio
weapons, or
other fancy
things to any bad people
or organizations.
to Warfare by gator |
| Sunday Dec 2, 2001 |
Unlike other another work
of the same name, the Bell
Jar is dedicated to amateur construction and use of vacuum equipment.
to Science by gator |
| To curl, you
need ice, stones,
and brooms.
to Sports by gator |
| Friday Nov 9, 2001 | Utility owners often request that you call before you dig in order to prevent
backhoe
fade and other
accidents. Though some of these accidents are horrible, they
can't compare in magnitude with the time a Texaco rig accidentally drilled a
hole from Lake Peigneur into the top of a Diamond
Crystal salt mine.
The
entire lake drained
into the mine
in a matter of hours.
to History by gator |
| Thursday Oct 18, 2001 |
I saw a tour of an
abandoned missile silo when it
made the rounds (back in
the day), but I didn't realize how many people were interested in
selling silos as homes.
to Culture by gator |
| Friday Oct 5, 2001 | Who knew there was such a market for
tchotchkes
commemorating
intellectual
property
awards?
to Commerce by gator |
| Friday Sep 28, 2001 |
The US General Accounting Office
publishes an immense
flow of reports on subjects from the topical
to the obscure.
to Government by gator |
| Monday Sep 24, 2001 |
Tour the
Kokomo Opalescent Glass factory and
look at samples
of
their
products.
to Art by gator |
| Monday Sep 10, 2001 | Learn to sculpt
and work
with concrete.
to Art by gator |
| Monday Aug 20, 2001 | Check out abandoned-places.com for gorgeous
photos of decayed industrial sites in Europe.
to Art by gator |
| Thursday Jul 19, 2001 | The Seemen are bringing their
brand of amiable hands-on mechanical destruction to New York this weekend.
to Art by gator |
| Sunday Jul 1, 2001 | I stayed up way too late last night playing this
addictive
bridge building game. Sadly, due to a trademark mess (these guys
had the name first), the the official site for the game
is down. Check out these
two
instead.
to Games by gator |
| Saturday Jun 30, 2001 | How are you at
guided missile trivia? to Warfare by gator |
| Tuesday Jun 26, 2001 | Oooo baby. Clear my high bit. The web is chock-full
of ASCII pr0n (including this
full-length ASCII conversion of Deep
Throat), but I can't seem to find anything in EBCDIC.
to Sex by gator |
| Wednesday Jun 20, 2001 |
I've only skimmed this
book, but my bet is that it doesn't tell you much about how to
cope with an 270
foot tank
of burning gasoline. It almost certainly doesn't go
into detail about boilover, when
water at the bottom of a tank of burning crude oil boils and causes a
steam explosion. Williams Fire and
Hazard's web site is one place to look for expertise. Don't miss
magazines like
Industrial Fire World or Industrial Fire Journal, either.
to Health by gator |
| Thursday Jun 7, 2001 |
OSHA Hazard
Communication standards require that labs and workplaces make Material Safety
Data Sheets for potentially hazardous chemicals available to their employees. Somehow, these MSDSs for
lethal nerve agents
like VX, Sarin, and
others seem beside the point.
to Warfare by gator |
| Sunday Jun 3, 2001 | This
fascinating chart of radio frequency allocations in the US happens
to look like a Monopoly board,
but that's not where the
similarities end.
to Reference by gator |
|
I'm still waiting for someone to write the an updated Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby that describes the
transition from Tom Wolfe's kar kustomizers to today's CPU overclockers. In the mean
time, I'm enjoying tales of computer-style hacks on the super-geeky Toyota Prius. Sadly,
the best list
I've found is members only, but there's plenty out there on hidden
to Transportation by gator |
| Monday May 7, 2001 |
Jearl Walker discusses
physics and psychology of dipping your fingers into molten lead.
to Science by gator |
| Sunday May 6, 2001 | The do-it-yourself industrial project narrative: some tinkerer decides
to take something that's normally the domain of heavy industry and build a smaller version
in their basement or backyard. They normally end up learning
something, but more importantly, by homebuilding something industrial,
they seem to grab just a little bit of that heavy industry power for
themselves. The web is full of stories of home
foundries,
and hobbyist
gas turbines
among others, and a trip to the bookstore will net you this fine tale of siege
weapon manufacture.
to Culture by gator |
| Thursday Mar 22, 2001 |
Good god! I've heard enough
about the Mir
de-orbit
saga. I'd rather
read about studies of
what
happens when things hit planets.
to Science by gator |
| Friday Mar 16, 2001 | The perils and pleasures of applying statistics to government, science,
and death.
to Science by gator |
| Thursday Mar 8, 2001 | I'm terribly sorry, but when faced with the Skipping Movement, I feel
compelled to respond with emotions that serve only to validate the
slight
persecution that seems to underly the movement.
to Society by gator |
| Friday Feb 2, 2001 | I've seen a few episodes of Scrapheap
Challenge (or, Junkyard
Wars, as it's known in the more combative USA), and it's great
fun. The official sites are about what you'd expect, but
the NERDS answer all the
interesting
questions from their experiences on the show.
to Television by gator |
| Monday Jan 15, 2001 |
It's Finding Kitten, published by O'Reilly and Associates.
to Art by gator |
| Wednesday Jan 10, 2001 | In 1942, Bell Labs
built a digital encrypted speech transmission system
with one-time-pads stored on 16" records. to History by gator |
| Monday Jan 8, 2001 | Tamper-resistant
hardware uses physical security to perform sensitive operations (like
decryption and public-key signature) safely in a potentially hostile
environment. This technology is used in applications from postage to safeguarding
nuclear weapons, and attacking it is the subject of much research.
Commercially available tamper-proof systems include GEMPlus smartcards, crypto iButtons,
and
extremely secure devices from
IBM.
to Computing by gator |
| Friday Jan 5, 2001 |
When a joint is flexed enough that the volume of the space between the
bones substantially increases, sometimes the gases dissolved in the
synovial fluid between the bones come suddenly out of solution. This allows
the joint to expand further, and it also makes a popping or cracking
noise.
Read
all
about it. to Health by gator |
|
The solitaire card game FreeCell
gained wide exposure (and, perhaps, some
notoriety) from its inclusion in various Microsoft
operating systems. Check out the FreeCell FAQ,
including a pointer to an unsolvable
instance of the game. Also, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find
out that freecell.com hosts an
advertiser-supported web version of the game. to Games by gator |
| Tuesday Dec 5, 2000 | The
Hanford Site
spent most of the
cold
war
war
producing
plutonium and
uranium
for the US Nuclear
weapons
program.
After a both
productive
and checkered
past, it is now among the most polluted sites on the planet.
Millions of gallons
of radioactive and toxic waste are stored in 177 enormous underground tanks.
149 of these tanks have only one shell, and many of the tanks are
leaking waste
plumes into ground near the Columbia River.
Tank
106-C had so much strontium 90 in it that it would regularly heat up and
require cooling water, though it's a bit better now,
even if it may still give off flammable gases.
The DOE has documented
some of the site's history and some of the lessons
learned during the cleanup in their extensive website.
Unfortunately, not all is well at Hanford, and the Government Accountability
Project has also had to document
other facets of
the site's history. The Tri-City Herald also has an archive of local news about the Hanford
cleanup.
to History by gator |
| Thursday Nov 30, 2000 | Acrylic-encased pieces of Liberty Bell 7, the
Mercury
space capsule that the late
Gus
Grissom flew in 1961, are for sale.
Rather than spending too much time pondering whether this is ingenious or
merely tacky, you should read The
Right Stuff or watch Apollo 13 instead.
|
| Wednesday Nov 29, 2000 | Unamerican Activities is sooo
two years ago. To be a
hip kid these days, get your wry
commentaries on industrial
culture from an industrial source, like EMED Co, Prinzing, or Seton.
Don't forget this stunning
hazard sign or this potential RSI
awareness sign.
to Commerce by gator |
| Monday Nov 20, 2000 | There
must
be
a
better
corporate
naming
scheme
than
taking
some
random
noun
and
sticking
"red"
in
front
of
it.
to Commerce by gator |
| copyright © 1998 - 200666666 memepool.com - all rights reserved. for entertainment purposes only. all content is provided as is, with no warranty stated or implied regarding the quality or accuracy of any content on or off the memepool.com website. all trademarks, servicemarks, and copyrights are property of their respective owners. |
| To find out how to become a regular contributor, contact contrib@memepool.com To tell us about a link or two, contact link@memepool.com Questions and comments should go to comments@memepool.com Memepool is run by Joshua Schachter and Jeff Smith |