Cassette Is Not Dead refurbs cassette tapes into handsome lamps. They operate on a barter economy -- send them 40 homemade mix-tapes and they'll send you a wallet made from one tape; send them 80 pre-recorded tapes and they'll send you a box lamp. Alternatively, you can buy the lamps for cash.

cassetteisnotdead.com (via Yanko Design)

Caleb sez, "I wanted to try making something in the style of "Q" from the James Bond movies. My idea was to make an emergency self destruct system for laptops and portable hard drives. It turned out pretty well, it is always fun to watch stuff melt!"

I wanted to implement thermite as a self destruct mechanism inside the device. To do this, I had to come up with a way to ignite the thermite. This stuff is very difficult to light. You have to get it really really hot. The easiest way is to use magnesium, which itself isn’t the easiest thing to light.

What I finally landed on was an ignition system that uses model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to light the thermite. The model rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer. However, it isn’t hot enough to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A small amount of gun powder would get hot enough to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot enough to light the thermite. I had to be careful though, because too much gunpowder would cause a rapid expansion, blowing the thermite everywhere instead of lighting it. You can actually see some red thermite being blown out of the external hard drive and the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.

Laptop vs Thermite: Slow motion destruction (Thanks, Caleb)

Michael Zoellner sez,

After watching Grant Gee's documentary "Joy Division" I wanted to print the iconic cover of their first album "Unknown Pleasures" in 3D. Unfortunately I could not find a single vector graphic or 3D model anywhere. There are articles about the history of the graphics, Peter Saville's artwork and PSR B1919+21. I even tried to visualize PSR B1919+21's waveforms. But in the end I spend an evening tracing the waves by hand.

The resulting SVG file was extruded and rendered in Processing with Richard Marxer's Geomerative and my RExtrudedMesh extension. OBJ export was accomplished with OBJExport. The model was printed on Makerbot Replicator with white PLA filament. The 3D model and the SVG graphic are published under a Creative Commons license.

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures printed in 3D

Michael McWhertor recounts Jason Rohrer's extraordinary Game Developers' Conference presentation from last March; Rohrer used a set of genetic algorithms to evolve and play-test a board-game that no human ever played, then he milled it out of a piece of titanium and buried it, along with acid-free rules encased in Pyrex, and buried it in the desert for someone to dig up in 2,700 years and play for the first time. It was in response to a design challenge called "Humanity's Last Game," and Rohrer certainly made a run at it.

To accomplish that, Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its mechanics.

Then he set about manufacturing it. Rattling off a list of board game materials that would be unlikely to last the intended passage of time (wood, cardboard, aluminum, glass), Rohrer ultimately decided to make the game from a resilient metal. He machined the 18-inch by 18-inch game board and the pieces future players will use out of 30 pounds of titanium.

Rohrer laid out the game's rules diagrammatically on three pages of archival, acid-free paper, hermetically sealed them inside a Pyrex glass tube — which were then housed inside a titanium baton — and set about burying them in the earth.

The game is now embedded somewhere in the Nevada desert. Rohrer's not exactly sure where, as he plotted out available public land far enough away from roads and populated areas, hoping to find a suitable, desolate location to hide the game. He buried it in the desert himself, he said, turned around and walked away from the game's indistinguishable resting place.

His finale was distributing about a million GPS coordinates spread across hundreds of envelopes, and explaining that it would take one person a million days (about 2,700 years) to visit each site and check it with a metal-detector. However, my money is on this being buried somewhere along the trash-fence at Burning Man.

Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert [Polygon/Michael McWhertor]

(via Kadrey)

Back in 2009, I wrote about Taschen's amazing "Magic 1400s-1950s," which presently goes for about $300. Taschen is reissuing the book in a cheaper edition, which'll cost you $42.22 when it comes out on July 1. Here's a review on Crackajack, providing a timely reminder of what a stupendous book this is. And here's what Boing Boing reader Peacelove said about the first edition:

PeaceLove sez, "Cory's recent post mentioning the 'books as objects' phenomenon compels me to mention the extremely delectable new Taschen book, Magic, 1400s-1950s. It's gargantuan, classy, profusely illustrated and expensive but if you are a magician or magic fan, you've just found the perfect holiday gift (hint, hint). Authors Mike Caveney and Jim Steinmeyer, along with contributor Ricky Jay, are all professional magicians, scholars and historians of the first rank. This is a serious work, as well as a gigantic love letter to the 500+ 'golden years' of magic."

Magic. 1400s-1950s (Thanks, Rene!)

The Spanish firm Arbore offered these custom Escher-inspired floor tiles back in 2011; from the looks of things, they're still available. It's a very well-executed conceit, done in hardwood.

Diseño geometrico inspiración Escher (via Geekologie)

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to:

read manuscripts
< contribute to books or periodicals
do editorial work
judge literary contests
deliver lectures
address meetings
make after-dinner speeches
broadcast;

Under any circumstances to:

contribute to or take part in symposiums
take part in chain-poems or other collective compositions
contribute manuscripts for sales
donate copies of his books to libraries
autograph books for strangers
supply personal information about himself
supply photographs of himself
allow his name to be used on letter-heads
receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him.

The Best Decline Letter of All-Time: Edmund Wilson (via Making Light)

On Super Punch, set of photos of a beautiful, enbubbled, betailfinned Los Angeles land yacht spotted on the 101. Hoo-ah.

Saw a this on the 101 in Los Angeles today. It was caravanning with a bunch of classic cars.

Here's a video from last week's Maker Faire showcasing technologies for printing out 3D-ish objects using 2D printers: ModelBox turns a 3D model into a series of 2D images you print on acetate and set into a frame to cheaply and quickly prototype/simulate the 3D object; Zebra Images turns 3D models into holograms; and Lynx Laboratories demos its all-in-one 3D scanner.

3D Printing on a 2D printer?! - Maker Faire 2013 (Thanks, Francis!)

Google Translate says that the caption on this image is Japanese for "Bill of surprised frontispiece monster world." I can't really hazard any guesses beyond that, but hey, monster money!

『びっくり口絵 怪物世界のお札』 (via Crazy Abalone)

Elijah sez, "Recent news has been all about the commercial use of 3D printing - from food to weaponry. But recently, doctors at the University of Michigan used quick thinking and 3D printing technology to save the life of a 2-month-old child with a rare disease."

The scaffold was made of a bioresorbable material, polycaprolactone, so it would dissolve and be absorbed by the body after about three years. At this point, his airways should be fully developed and no longer need the stent.

The doctors used high-resolution X-ray scans of one of Kaiba's healthy windpipes to design a computer model for the life-saving brace.

Laser-equipped 3-D printers crafted the device in a few hours, and the university obtained emergency clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant it on February 9, 2012 at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor.

"It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK," said Green.

3-D Printing Saves Baby's Life [VIDEO] (Thanks, Elijah Wolfson!)

Taiwanese design student Kaylene Kau created this motorized prosthetic tentacle for a class project: "For this project we were pushed by our Professor to push the boundaries of current upper-limb prosthetic design. Through extensive research I found that the prosthetic functioned as an assistant to the dominant functioning hand. The prosthetic needed to be both flexible and adjustable in order to accommodate a variety of different grips."

PROSTHETIC ARM (via Kadrey)

Juha sez, "If you're going to build a protest movement, it might be better to stay off Facebook and Twitter because the cops are fully tuned into social media these days. The Open Source Intelligence Unit at London's Metropolitan Police Service has a staff of seventeen who work seven days a week - to track social media feed back and to monitor community tension. Having a sense of humour and understanding of slang gives humans the edge over social media surveillance software, UK cops reckon. The British cops are worried about 4G mobile broadband though because it'll generate much more data such as video."

The unit monitored some 32 million social media articles during the Olympics, with 10,300 tweets being posted every second during the opening ceremony.

“Companies will tell your that sentiment analysis from a piece of software is about 56 percent accurate … we would say it's lower, because it doesn’t pick up humour or slang,” Ertogral said.

In addition to looking at trends, he said the unit was also exploring association to establish influencers, particularly for protest movements.

“So we’re trying to build friend lists on Facebook, who’s connected to who, who are the influencers out there etc.”

Police tap social media in wake of London attack [Charis Palmer/IT News]

(Thanks, Juha!)

There's a lot of personality in Scott Musgrove's 5' tall bronze entitled "Walktopus." If that's a bit on the large side, there's a 20" version, too.

Sculpture (Thanks, Scott!)