These impossibly creepy artifacts are dental training mannequins collected by Steve Erenberg of Radio Guy. Be warned, Steve’s site is chockablock with incredible medical, scientific, and industrial antiques he’s collected, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a major click-trap.
Everybody’s favorite Xeni recently linked to this cool collection of slayer kits from around the web. Many of these are antiques and have sold for large sums at major auction houses, but I remain dubious as to how serious anyone ever really was about the whole business. [via Boing Boing]
Interesting thread over on The Home Shop Machinist describing the use of H.J. Watts’ 1918 US patent 1,241,176 drill, based on the Reuleaux triangle (Wikipedia), for drilling a (mostly) square hole.
Are you one of the nine out of ten adults who purportedly believes you can tell when someone is watching you from behind? If so, does it occur to you that this is a kind of supernatural belief? Dr. Bruce Hood, Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol and the latest subject of our ongoing series of interviews with notable Makers, has some fascinating theories about how such “routine” supernatural beliefs come about as natural consequences of the normal psychology of child development. He also talks briefly about how his own childhood enthusiasm for the paranormal eventually came full circle in his mature scientific interest in the psychology of paranormal belief. Fascinating stuff.
The Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society, whose work I dearly love and have written about before, is compiling a complete prop edition of the Necronomicon from reader submissions! There was, apparently, a “Necronomicontest” of some sort to encourage submissions, the deadline of which has now passed, but they are still accepting “mad ramblings” here.
Yesterday was a big day for anthropology, seeing the first publication of some 15 years worth of analysis of a 4.4 million-year-old fossil skeleton of Ardipithecus Ramidus first discovered by Gen Suwa, then a graduate student of Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White, in Ethiopia, in 1992. Science magazine has made all eleven papers freely available to […]
The sponsors of this year’s Halloween contest are giving away microchips! To score some, go here, register, then choose the product line and device family you’re interested in and click on the orange icons to order free samples. From their press release:
Hey Makers in the United States, UK, Germany, France and Italy… We have the exclusive on some great news from Microchip! Beginning Friday, October 2, you will be able to get free microcontroller, analog and memory samples from http://www.microchip.com/samples/. That’s right, you don’t even have to pay for shipping and handling! This is a great opportunity to get some parts for your embedded microcontroller project in the Make: Halloween Contest 2009.
