Wild Mood Swings

Pick your mood, click the button and Wild Mood Swings
will open an appropriate website in a new window.

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The Web's best free stuff

There's a wealth of downloadable software and online services, but free doesn't necessarily mean good. Here's some of the best of the bunch

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Apophysis

Freeware fractal flame editor for Windows

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World's Worst Intersections & Traffic Jams

They should pay you to enter these interchanges

There is a difference between "going mental" and making mental calculations how to get out of this traffic mess... at least we hope there is.

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Link goes to a site that's well worth a look. I visit every week or so and always find something worthy.

16 Sweet (and Scary) Building Demolition

Nothing last forever and that includes the most grandiose skyscrapers, luxurious hotels and beloved sports stadiums. It seems amazing at times that so much money, energy and material is invested in structures that ultimately get torn down so quickly. Some of these demolitions are simply damned impressive while other implosions are downright frightening.

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Boomerang returns, even in space

In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back, much like on Earth.

Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station (ISS), a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Mr Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.

"I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.

The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.

Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the ISS.

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My Awesome Secure and Portable System

Many people have asked about how my incredibly complex, but awesome personal operating system works. It's so complicated that I can usually only explain it in little bits, and I always forget to mention one of the many things that make it awesome. Instead of coming up with everything on the fly, I'm writing this article to explain, in depth, how my system works, what makes it awesome, and provide the scripts and configurations I've written to make this system work.

For those who aren't as technically inclined, I'll start with a general overview and a neat-o feature list. This isn't something your grandmother will be able to read, it still requires some knowledge of the inner workings of computers. As for the one person who might be able to understand how the technical details work and want to attempt to replicate my system, everything will be laid out in detail after that.

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The Airborne Laser Cannon

Boeing's new laser cannon can melt a hole in a tank from five miles away and 10,000 feet up—and it’s ready to fly this year

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Electronic tattoo display runs on blood

Jim Mielke's wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.

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An Empty Revolution

Even critics of Hugo Chávez tend to concede that he has made helping the poor his top priority. But in fact, Chávez's government has not done any more to fight poverty than past Venezuelan governments, and his much-heralded social programs have had little effect. A close look at the evidence reveals just how much Chávez's "revolution" has hurt Venezuela's economy -- and that the poor are hurting most of all.

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The world's largest natural mirror

Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat at 10,582 km² (4,085 square miles). It is located in the Potosí and Oruro departments in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes, 3,650 meters high. When it is covered with water, the Salar de Uyuni reflects the sky.

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Check out the stunning photos.

35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online.

In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. The result: hundreds and hundreds of sets available almost everywhere, usually not that well executed and often duplicated from other sets. However, there are indeed free high-quality icon sets. And this post is supposed to prove exactly that.

Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons. Some of the listed icons can be used in web designs, some of them are supposed to be primarily for desktop. So hopefully everybody will find something useful.

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Some truly beautiful work in here.

The Remarkable Pneumatic People-Mover

On the eighth of February 1912, a small group of officials arrived at City Hall Park on Manhattan's Broadway street. The men gathered at one grassy corner of the park grounds, where a long-neglected iron grating protected the entrance to a seemingly unremarkable ventilation shaft. The heavy, rust-encrusted grille was pried from its resting place, and with lanterns in hand the men descended one by one into the cavity.

About twenty feet below the pavement the group emerged into an eight-foot-wide brickwork tube, the end of which was beyond the immediate reach of the lights. The sturdily-constructed tunnel was a relic from the years following the American Civil War, and it had remained virtually forgotten beneath the streets of New York since its main entrance was sealed sometime around 1880. As the men explored, they found the tunnel in remarkably good condition in spite of its age. When they reached the end of the tube, the men happened upon the wrecked remains of a unique mechanism for transport: a pair of carriages from America's first subway, the experimental and ill-fated Pneumatic Transit System.

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I believe they had one in Howth, Dublin.

Avalance on Mars

Cameras orbiting Mars have taken thousands of images that have enabled scientists to put together pieces of Mars’ geologic history. However, most of them reveal landscapes that haven’t changed much in millions of years. Some images taken at different times of year do show seasonal changes from one image to the next; however, it is extremely rare to catch such a dramatic event in action. (Another, unrelated, active process that has been captured by Mars cameras are dust devils.) Observing currently active processes is often a useful tool in unlocking puzzles of the past for scientists studying the Earth. Working from primarily still images, it is harder for scientists studying Mars to rely on this tool. The HiRISE image of avalanching debris is a very rare opportunity to directly do so.

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