Treehouses: For your kids or the kid in you!

Wow! Check out these cool tree houses! Daniels Woodland sells amazing, custom-built tree houses that resemble toontown dwellings, with curved and sagging rooflines and crazy, angular windows. The houses stand 14' high and are perched atop a giant, chainsaw-hollowed log. The overall effect is something like toontown in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

Each tree house is built in two main pieces: the playhouse and the log. The playhouse is made from cedar or ship lapped pine siding. The log is a real, old fallen tree that is hollowed out using a chainsaw. To get into the playhouse, simply enter the door in the hollow log, climb up the ladder in the center of the log and pull yourself through the trap door in the floor of the playhouse.

There is a lot more information on Daniels Woodland tree house pages, including many more pictures!

(Via Boing Boing)

Table Jumble

Amsterdam design firm Tjep created this collided jumble of tables and the primary conference table for an advertising agency. Other views of the table can be found here.

This project is best described by Tjep:

A controlled collision of 7 tables in the conference room of advertisement
agency StrawberryFrog
in Amsterdam. This table will be at the center of different view points,
cultures and motivations colliding with each other to form something new and
powerful, this idea is symbolized in the colors and design of the table.

(Via BoingBoing)

Modern Mona Lisa

This modern interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is on display at a high tech exhibition in Beijing. Entitled Technology Smiling, it is made up of hundreds of computer parts.

(Via Gizmodo)

Welcome to Fantazy Land

Theme parks are usually places of fun, laughter and excitement. However, when a theme park is left unattended and rundown, the laughter leaves it and is replaced with sadness and even an eerie sense of foreboding.

This abandoned Egyptian amusement park, Fantazy Land, showcases what neglect and abandonment can do to a place, once filled with the laughter and joy of children.

(Via Ueba.net)

The Earth from Space

Sometimes, within the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, it's good to sit back and think about what a beautiful place we live in. For a broader (and certainly more global) view of this, here are some amazing pictures of the Earth viewed from Space.


I particularly like the above picture of night and day in Western Europe. You can clearly see the city lights in the parts of Europe that are still under nightfall, which is clearly contrasted by the bright, clear day in the other part of Europe.

(Via Ueba.net)

Bad Tattoos

Do you regret your tattoo? Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now you realize, "What was I thinking?!" Misery does love company, so check out these pictures of other bad tattooing decisions.

I will admit that not all of the tattoos on the linked page are terrible, as we all make different choices and have varied tastes. But I'm sure you'll find some that you just have no words to describe or are glad are not on your body.

(Via Ueba.net)

Stonefridge

Heard of Stonehenge?

How about Stonefridge? Next time you're in the Santa Fe, New Mexico swing on by and check it out!

(Via Flickr)

10,000 Sheep

The Sheep Market is a collection of 10,000 created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Each worker earned $0.02 to draw a sheep facing left. These sheep drawings are available online and have been printed on collectable stamps.

Some interesting stats on The Sheep Market:

Average time spent drawing each sheep: 105 seconds
Average wage: $0.69/hour
Rejected sheep: 662
Collection period: 40 days
Collection rate: approximately 11 sheep/hour
Unique IP addresses: 7599

(Via J-Walk Blog)

Infinite Zoom

Check out these cool pictures. They are each made of other photos. Simply click on the the picture to zoom in and discover more photos.

(Via Boing Boing)

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

TechEBlog has complied a list of the top 10 strangest (or coolest, depending on your point of view) Lego Creations. Check out their list for a full breifing on the top 10, as well as some honorable mentions.

Here are my two favorites:

Lego Harpsichord

Lego Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite

(Via TechEBlog)

The One Million Swarovski Crystal Reveal

The latest million dollar (or in this case, a million Euros, which is worth more than a million dollars) website idea is MillionCrystalBody. It took nearly seven days to cover Chantal, the 20 year old model's body with one million Swarovski crystals, each measuring approximately 2mm. An auction organized by eBay specialist Marion von Kuczkowski, each crystal is being sold for €1. As more crystals are sold, more of Chantal will be revealed and her photos updated on the website.

The last stones in the auction will not be sold at the fixed €1 price, but will be auctioned via eBay. The proceeds of those final bids will go to a yet-unnamed charity. The person who wins the last crystal will have it personally delivered anywhere in the world by Chantal, the model who has revealed herself to the world, one crystal at a time.

(Via Luxist)

Ikea Everyday Fabulous does NYC

From Cool Hunting:

Ikea has been making over parts of NYC in celebration of their Everyday Fabulous Exhibit (which ended May 23, 2006). Their stylists took on parks, turned hot dog stands into outdoor cafes, bustops into living rooms and strung up hammocks on street corners, bringing smiles to jaded New Yorkers and ICFF visitors, and looks of bewilderment on tourists. Cheeky and clever.

How cool is that?! If you haven't been to an Ikea, I suggest you visit http://www.ikea.com/ and select your location to see where the nearest Ikea is to you.

According to their website, Ikea's vision is: And they've done a fantastic job living up to their vision. A look through their catalog (in print or online) or a voyage through their store will leave you with a "wow, I can do all that for how much?" as well as an inspired feeling.

(Via Cool Hunting)

A square watermelon

Yes, you read (and saw) correctly. This is picture of a square watermelon. Found at the Horticulture page at the Purdue Extension Service in
Vanderburgh County, Indiana.

(Via BoingBoing)

NYC Subway Morning Demographics

A NYC blogger spent the morning noting the who rides and at what time. Take a look at the observations below. Pretty cool stuff!

Because I often work very late or come in very early to the office, I have
been able to observe some demographic patterns on the subways in the AM hours.
It’s interesting to see how the ethnic, class, professional, and gender makeup
evolves as the morning hours go by.

(Please forgive the generalizations inherent in ad hoc ethnography):

3:00-4:00 AM Drunks of all sorts, club kids, and winos. Late
night workers, busboys, getting off their shifts. Only a handful of people per
car. 6:1 male/female ratio.

4:00-5:00 AM Transit workers changing shifts. Maybe 6 people
per car. All male.

5:00 AM - 6:00 AM Blue-collar laborers, minorities,
immigrants. Half the car is asleep. Maybe 20 or 25 people per car. 9:1
male/female ratio.

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM Construction workers, blue-collar
laborers, hospital workers. 75% of seats in car are taken. 7:3 male/female
ratio.

7:00 AM - 8:00 AM Low-level office workers, civil service
workers, some Wall Street broker types. Mostly minorities, lots of black women,
lots of all kinds of women in fact. 90% seats occupied. 1:2 male/female ratio.

8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Professionals, white collar workers,
office workers. 100% seats occupied, many people standing. 1:1 male/female
ratio.

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Early-career yuppies running a little
late, creative industry workers, all sorts of professionals. 100% occupied. 1:1
male/female ratio.

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM Hung over office workers, some seats
available. 2:1 male/female ratio.

11:00 AM - noon Starting to see people who are running
errands for work, not just going to or coming from work. Plenty of open seats.
3:2 male/female ratio.

UPDATE: Great stuff from a 2004 New York Times special
section dedicated to the NYC Subways (thanks Gothamist):

A diagram of the hourly population density of the subway (the 1/9 line) over
the course of a single work day.

A drawing of the demographics and cultures along the F line (my line!)
station-by-station, by the excellent Danny Gregory.

(Via Boing Boing)

"Rocky" in 30 seconds

This Bunny Movie Parody of 'Rocky' compresses the movie into a 30 second clip. Taking all the major elements of the movie, animated bunnies re-enact 'Rocky'.

The Pop Culture Translator

Have you ever wondered what some pop culture people are actually saying? Some speak too fast or slow, have unintelligible accents, or just speak in slang. The Canadian College of English Language has an amusing Pop Culture Translator that breaks down the below clips into plain 'ol English. An amusing site, check it out!

Translated clips include:

Sean Paul "Temperature"
50 Cent "Just a Lil Bit"
System of a Down "BYOB"
Ozzy Osbourne "The Osbournes"
Brad Pitt "Snatch"
Gollum "Lord of the Rings"

Mahjongg

This a web version of the Chinese game, Mahjongg Solitaire. It's an addictive game, enjoy!

(Via MilkandCookies)

Video of airplanes dodging thunderstorms

Check out this time lapse video of airplanes dodging thunderstorms. This is from FedEx's Operations Center in Memphis, Tennessee. The music this video is set to is upbeat a perky, despite the severe weather the planes are avoiding.

(Via MilkandCookies)

Hipster Bingo

Are you a hipster? Do you love being a hipster? Do you love bingo?

Then check out Hipster Bingo!

(Via growabrain)