Fourth Rule Search Results

News: The Best Places to Play Scrabble Online

There's nothing better than playing a game of Scrabble, feeling the smooth wooden tiles in your hand and savoring the heavy fumes of cardboard, cheap wood and plastic as you rearrange the letters on your rack into the perfect word. You try to keep a straight face while you watch your opponent sweat, but you can't help but release that diabolical grin of self-admiration as you play the elusive triple-triple. The score's recorded and you feel sorry for your bitter rival, but then you remember y...

News: The Morals and Dangers of Public Art. (A Warning)

I've decided to write this post so some of the fledgling street artists who may or may not follow this world in the future are informed about two things in the urban art world that are either not discussed at all, or distorted (intentionally or otherwise) to the point of misinformation. Those two things are, as the title says, the dangers of street art, and the morals of street art.

News: 4 Years of Spectacularly Pointless Marble Machines

So very pointless, yet unquestionably spectacular. The best kind of "art" performs no other function than to delight the viewer, and Japanese YouTube user Denha's complex marble machines do just that. But are marble machines art? You can call them that—or toys, scientific contraptions, engineering feats—but however you choose to label them, the best marble machines are complicated, skillfully crafted, and driven by the principles of potential energy, kinetic energy and gravity.

Eye Candy of the Day: WiFi Networks Visualized

Norwegian designers Timo Armall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen visually capture invisible WiFi signals by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. The trio set up a four-meter long WiFi-detecting rod with 80 LED bulbs to depict cross-sections through the WiFi networks of various Oslo neighborhoods. Armall says:

News: IBM's “Watson” Supercomputer Demolishes World's Top Jeopardy Players

A testament of man vs. machine will air on February 14th, 15th, and 16th when IBM's supercomputer "Watson" is pitted against the world's fiercest Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, for a chance to win a cool $1 million. It took researchers four years to build Watson, a machine mastermind the size of ten refrigerators and equipped with complex algorithms capable of decoding the complexities of the human language (no small feat). Watch below as Watson kicks ass in a practice round ...

News: Best places for fabric?

I admit it, I'm lucky - I currently live about an hour away from the Fabric District in LA, and was recently just about ten miles down Pico Boulevard from it. So I'm incredibly spoiled - I'm used to being able to find crushed panne velvet for four dollars a yard, or a rich brocade for six dollars a yard. A friend and I once found some faux fur for about fifty dollars a yard - which sounds expensive until I say that the pile was about two and a half inches long, a rich brown color and 60" wide.

HowTo: Grow Your Own Snowflakes

CalTech's Kenneth Libbrecht reveals the sublime beauty of snow crystals when photographed with a specially designed snowflake photomicroscope. The physicist is author of the Field Guide to Snowflakes and The Secret Life of a Snowflake, and recently posted an instructional guide for growing your own snow crystals.

News: Touchpad Made with Paper and Pencil Scribbles

Who says nothing productive ever came out of doodling? Certainly not the hacker responsible for this fun (and at least somewhat functional) paper-and-pencil touchpad, which takes advantage of the natural conductivity of graphite: There isn’t much to explain here. It just uses pencil graphite on paper as a kind of two dimensional potentiometer. Four voltage dividers between 5v, 2M ohm resistors, the paper, and my grounded finger feeds signals from each corner into an Arduino. The Arduino does ...

Tony Hawk: Still the World's Best Skateboarder at Age 42

Tony Hawk may very well be the greatest skateboarder of all time. At age 42, the legendary Hawk can still pull off a 900. For those who don't know, a "900" refers to a 900 degree aerial spin off of a skateboard ramp. This is one of the most insane skateboarding tricks, and Hawk is one of only four (in the world) who have ever pulled it off.

Alien Swarm: Free Game from Valve!

You can get Alien Swarm for free on Steam starting today. Alien Swarm is a 4 person co-op adventure with an updated Source engine and the ability to create custom levels. Think of this as a top view Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, but with aliens. Too bad they are not zombie aliens, but it's a free game so we can't complain.

News: TREASURE ISLAND Lineup OUT NOW!

I guess this leaked a couple days early. *edit* Looks like they just deleted the news post off the website, but I managed to save a copy (see below). Wow, such a solid lineup. You do not want to miss this! If I was only able to go to one San Francisco festival this summer and had to choose between this and Outside Lands, Treasure Island would be the easy winner. Even though The Strokes are one of my favorite bands and are headlining OL, I would choose Treasure Island because this line up is j...

News: Cardboard Mechanics

We love it when everyday material is used in a new and unexpected application. Cardboard is something most of us take completely for granted. We need it when we're moving, and that's about it. When Frank Gehry created the cardboard chair in 1972, he blew the minds of both the furniture and the design world. So strong. So durable. So fluid.

News: Working Bugatti Veyron Built with 10,000 Empty Cigarette Packs

Cobbled together from thousands of empty cigarette packs, this electric-powered vehicle puts the "car" in carcinogen. Looking suspiciously like something the China National Tobacco Corporation would commission as part of an advertising campaign, the Bugatti Veyron-style auto is actually meant to discourage smoking. The English-language version of the People's Daily offers the following explanation:

WARNING: House-On-the-Go May Induce Nausea

Experimental house, "Roll It", is a collaborative project within Germany's University of Karlsruhe. The basic concept is as follows: using a cylindrical design to maximize space within a minimum housing unit. Not sure how "space efficient" this would actually be, but using it as transport could be fun (until the nausea inevitably sets in).

News: Asteroids

This is fan art for a movie that has been announced but I don't think the script is even written. Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to win the film rights to the classic Atari video game Asteroids. Newcomer Matthew Lopez, who came out of Disney’s writing program and did work on Bedtime Stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Race to Witch Mountain, has been hired to write the screen adaptation.