This retractable windshield shade is perfect for the mobile sauna you call your car

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It's the middle of summer, which means you're off doing stuff nearly every weekend. But that also means you have to get in and out of your parked car, which probably heated up to ungodly temperatures when you were out and about. — Read the rest

YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning instructions, but leaves up the lethal tips

"Fractal wood burning" refers to using hacked microwave power supplies to char Lichtenberg figures into wood. It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have been killed following instructions contained in viral videos. Ann Reardon recently posted a thorough debunking of the method, which quickly became popular in its own right—a timely and essential remedy to a lethal problem that social media companies are under no obligation to deal with themselves. — Read the rest

Scientists decipher how Romanesco broccoli gets its freaky fractal shape

Romanesco broccoli (aka Romanesco cauliflower) is a quite strange (albeit tasty) vegetable that looks otherwordly in its freaky fractal formations. Every bud is self-similar, resulting in a logarithmic spiral. Now, researchers at the French National Centre for Scientific Research have determined that the natural (approximate) fractal nature occurs because each bud is a failed flower that becomes a shoot that produces a new flower that fails and so on. — Read the rest

Wooden fractal curve puzzles

Martin Raynsford makes beautiful and intricate wooden puzzles with space-filling fractal curves and is kickstartering a set of four.

The pattern is a single line that crosses all of the two dimensional space without ever repeating. The puzzles follow these simple rules to break the line into multiple pieces that are almost identical but are actually unique.

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Poland rejects the EU's copyright censorship plans, calls it #ACTA2

In 2011, Europeans rose up over ACTA, the misleadingly named "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," which created broad surveillance and censorship regimes for the internet. They were successful in large part thanks to the Polish activists who thronged the streets to reject the plan, which had been hatched and exported by the US Trade Representative.