awesome duuuuuuude

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Nearly six and a half years in the making. 22 feet from bow to stern. Measuring a meter across at its widest point. 1/40th the scale of the real thing. Nearly a quarter-million individual LEGO pieces. And the whole thing weighs 330 pounds.

Behold the achievement of Jumpei Mitsui, who has faithfully rendered the World War II Japanese battleship Yamato in LEGO…

If this is not the biggest LEGO model of all time, it is certainly the largest one that I know of.

Mash here for more about this incredible model. And thanks to Shane Thacker for the great find!...

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K.C. Budd – aka “phreakmonkey” – is a guy who loves to play around with gadgets. So when he came into possession of a Livermore Data Systems “Model A” he decided to put it to good use.

So what’s a Livermore Data Systems “Model A”? It’s a way old-fashioned modem that was first made in 1964!

Here’s the video that phreakmonkey made of himself using Wikipedia with a laptop and a 45-year old modem…

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Brendan Powell Smith’s The Brick Testament is one of my very favorite websites ever. Guess it’s because I’m a student of the Bible, and also a lifelong LEGO geek. The Brick Testament is devoted to illustrating the scriptures with the classic building blocks. The wildly popular site has been around since 2001… but only now has Smith gotten around to LEGO-rendering the Book of Revelation! If you don’t mind some harsh language for dramatic effect, this is definitely a must-see. I think my favorite part of it might be Smith’s take on Revelation 12 and the war in Heaven.

So is it humorous? Heretical? An indication that Smith has finally gone too far? Whatever it is, his concise and rollickin’-fun technique with LEGO makes for a far more interesting and thought-provoking examination of Revelation than what the Left Behind novels turned into. For that reason alone, I’m ...

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Thanks to a newly-tested and approved recycling system aboard the International Space Station, its long-term crews are now able to drink water recovered from urine, sweat and breath exhalation. It’s the first time that water has been acquired and imbibed in space in such a manner.

The new system takes the combined urine of the crew from the toilet, moves it to a big tank, where the water is boiled off, and the vapor collected. The rest of contaminants – the yucky brine in the urine – is thrown away, said Marybeth Edeen, the space station’s national lab manager who was in charge of the system.

The water vapor is mixed with water from air condensation, then it goes through filters, much like those put on home taps, Edeen said.

When six crew members are aboard it can make about six gallons from urine in about six hours, Edeen

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A team of physicists at UCLA have developed a new photographic technique called Serial Time-Encoded Amplified Microscopy, or STEAM for short. Using common fiber-optics components, the new system is capable of recording photographic images at a staggering rate of once every 163 nanoseconds.

That’s more than six million photos in one second, folks.

It’s an innovation owing to quantum physics and laser light, not standard CCD chips like how most digital images are captured. And the resolution right now is quite small: only about 2,500 pixels, or a thousand times smaller than most cellphone cameras. But with refinement there is the possibility that STEAM will eventually be able to video record real-time activity within living cells.

Give ’em ten years: that’ll make for a helluva IMAX nature film!...

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Time for another entry in the “Things We Don’t Really Need But Are Lusting For Badly” file…

Wouldya believe that StarWarsShop.com is now selling the Darth Vader Toaster? For $54.99 you can have this kitchen appliance, which burns the evil visage of that most famous Dark Lord of the Sith into the surface of a slice of bread. Kinda sick, when you think about how the living remnant of what was once Anakin Skywalker is so charred and roasted under that black armor.

But I guess it’s true: there really isn’t any merchandise that they won’t stick the Star Wars brand name on 😛...

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Maury Marler just got his license to fly airplanes as a student pilot. Nothing unusual about that. But Marler is also 90 years old and living in a retirement community. He had a civilian license around 1941 but it’s long since expired. Sixty-six years after he logged his last flight, he showed up at a flight school and took to the cockpit again. Flying has long been his passion, and now he’s getting to satisfy it.

Maury Marler, you sound like a good man… and this blogger is gonna salute you for it 🙂...

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The Discovery Channel’s popular show Mythbusters gave a fright to the residents of a small California town when a detonation being performed for an upcoming show wound up making a bigger bang than expected. They set off 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate. A mile away, people in Esparto were literally thrown from their couches and the bang even shattered windows of houses (which the Mythbusters staff had replaced the same day).

The purpose of the explosion was to see if socks could literally be “blown off” of a mannequin. Can’t wait to see that ‘un 🙂...

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