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James Murphy + IBM Cloud + Tennis = Music?
LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is becoming a modern go-to guy for all things pleasant-sound-related. Take his proposal for making a musical change to NYC’s subway system, which would replace the tuneless ‘beep’ of a Metrocard swipe with a sequence of notes specific to each subway station. While this may seem trivial — and Murphy […]
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R.I.P. Joseph Grado, Founder of Grado Labs
We love Grado Labs and their Brooklyn-made headphones, and mourn the passing of inventor and founder Joseph Grado last Friday. Back in the 1950s, Grado, a life-long tinkerer, began using the skills he’d acquired as a watchmaker to make phono cartridges right in his home kitchen in Brooklyn. From these humble beginnings grew Grado Laboratories, a […]
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Building Huge Lego Models As a Job
Take a moment of your day, perhaps while sitting in your airless cubicle, to imagine what it’d be like if building cool things out of Legos was your career. It is for Adora Lo, a Model Designer for Merlin Studios tasked with designing architectural models for Legoland parks around the world. Spotlighted in Lifehacker, Lo […]
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The Complex Journey to A Day in the Life of a NYC Cab
You’ve probably already seen it by now: the mesmerizing data visualization displaying the movements of an NYC taxi making its daily rounds. It went immediately viral when it was published in July, and no wonder — from pick-up point to end point, tracing its path through the boroughs as the fares and passengers rack up, […]
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Drink Like a Wes Anderson Character
Yes, you’ll soon be able to indulge your fantasies of having a drink in the grand world of Wes Anderson’s imagination, as the detail-obsessed director has been put in charge of designing the bar that welcomes visitors to Fondazione Prada Milan, the newest of the fashion house’s art exhibition spaces. The Milan location, a permanent art […]
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A Requiem For a Dying Star
The world of outer space is weird, wild and endlessly fascinating, as scientists who study space-related data know full well — and as the recently-released Interstellar works so hard to put on display. But when the data is the un-glamorous kind, having to do with wavelengths represented on graphs as opposed to visually-stunning Hubble photographs, […]
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LED Lights: The Answer to Hunger?
In Eastern Japan, in a building no bigger than half a football field, a plant physioligist named Shigeharu Shimamura has figured out a way to produce 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. According to Shimamura, this rate of yield is exceptional — two-and-a-half times faster than what can be produced by a conventional outdoor farm. His secret […]
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Last-Minute and Low-Impact Costume Idea: Printable 3-D Masks
If you’re still hurting for a Halloween costume, how about one you can print at home and assemble yourself that’s also easy on the environment? These 3-D masks, designed by Steve Wintercroft, were borne of necessity, the product of his own last-minute costume brainstorming session. Wintercroft, a designer and craftsman who fashions everything from […]
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Building a Black Hole With “Interstellar” Director Christopher Nolan
The genesis of the new science-fiction film “Interstellar” has its basis more in the science side than the fiction, thanks to astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Thorne is a scientific thinker in the vein of Carl Sagan (or modern equivalent Neil DeGrasse Tyson) — interested in explaining his complicated field of study to the general public […]
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Build Virtual Reality Headset out of Cardboard, Save $350
With the Oculus Rift now available to game developers at a sticker price of $350, the world of virtual reality is poised to become much more exciting very soon. With the goal of bringing that new, glorious VR future to bear in an even speedier fashion, Google developers have released plans that detail how to cheaply […]
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Human Zoo: The Lost Tribe of Coney Island
Pay a quarter, watch a dog feast? In 1905, a visit to Coney Island would have included a mandatory stop at Igorotte Village to view a group of tribespeople acting out a heightened version of their local customs — including, yes, the slaughter and eating of a dog, a special-occasion ritual turned into everyday spectacle […]
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One Designer’s Funny, Skewed Vision of the World
Every day is bursting with potential, an opportunity to think, dream, create and discover something new — you just have to know how to look. That’s what designer Dominic Wilcox told himself, and that’s when he started to see things in a new, weird light. The results of this brand new perspective on […]