Jump Dreams

Forty years ago, when Tahira Reid Smith was in third grade, her teacher had the class make posters of something they wish existed. Smith thought it would be nice to have a Double Dutch machine that could turn jump ropes at a steady pace without having to find two volunteers. After all, she was an only child and knew what it was like to try to reign in people to turn the ropes. Her idea won the poster competition. 

Smith grew up and became a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University. And an inventor! As an undergraduate, she worked with her mentor Professor Burt Swersey to develop the Double Dutch machine. Smith received the first patent for it in 1999. It took quite a few years to get it perfected and manufactured, but now the machine called Jump Dreams is making Double Dutch accessible to more people than ever. (via Metafilter) 

Coding

From Married to the Sea.

Making Oxygen on the ISS

Have you ever wondered how the International Space Station gets enough oxygen to  keep its crews breathing? It's not shipped in, at least not often. The same goes for water, although humans use a lot of oxygen and water every day. The floating laboratory is equipped with hi-tech appliances for renewing its own supplies. Water is recycled into fresh water, and some of it is used to make new oxygen. Humans also expel a lot of carbon dioxide, which is not expelled from the station, but is converted into water and methane. New water is always welcome, but this video does not go into detail on what they do with the methane. One would like to think it's expelled, because a space station fart is amusing to think about. Maybe someday it will be used as fuel. 

These conversions require separating molecules into atoms, which is amazing enough, but they've also found a way to do it with no moving parts that could break down. I'm impressed.  

Pocket Phone

Wish I could read the date- is it the 60s or the 80s? (Thanks, WTM!)

Using GPS in Brazil

Warning: infectious laughter. These guys were trying to find their way around what I think might be the city of Fortaleza in Brazil. Commenters believe the trouble may be because they didn't switch the language of their app to Portuguese. They have stories of using map apps in languages that don't work well in the location they are driving through. At any rate, what came out was not only the road they should turn on, but all the other roads and shopping plazas it leads to. InappropriateSurname jotted them all down.

Turn left onto Avenida Almirante Barroso / Avenida Antonio Justa / Avenida da Abolição / Avenida Desembargador Moreira / Rua Frei Mansueto / Avenida Pessoa Anta / Rua Ana Bilhar / Rua Barbalha / Rua Barbosa de Freitas / Rua José Napoleão / Rua Juazeiro do Norte / Rua Júlio Ibiapina / Av. Senador Virgílio Távora

Then turn right onto Rua José Napoleão

The video was uploaded years ago. You have to wonder if they're still driving around, trying to find their destination. (via reddit)

Sometimes Old School is Better

When older people talk about how certain technologies were better in the past, young people roll their eyes. In some ways, the youngsters are right. It's really nice to have a phone, camera, flashlight, and clock all in one small gadget. However, there's a reason I have two vacuum cleaners. My modern 10-year-old vacuum is easy to use and picks up dirt quite well. But I also have a 75-year-old Kirby that's very heavy and not quite as efficient. Why? Because when the lighter vacuum breaks, I'll still have the Kirby. It refuses to break. 

I have a mental image of Chill Dude Explains as a young guy, from his voice and the way he pronounces some words. But even he has discovered that fancy modern features are not always the miracles they seem to be. Newer gadgets are fancy, lightweight, and convenient, but they don't last as long as they should and are expensive to repair or replace. In this video, he looks at ten things that are old school but will still do the job when modern innovations don't, and often better.  

A Song Made With No Musical Instruments

Andy Brewer is an audio engineer and composer. He was playing around with pink noise, what we lay people would call static, on an equalizer and found he could extract musical notes from it with a little work. Could he play a song using just those notes? It would be a song without a voice or musical instrument. Yes, he could, although it was a lot of work. You wouldn't be able to do this if you didn't know a lot about music already. This song is technically "electronic music," and it's what a synthesizer (which is a musical instrument) does, although Brewer didn't use a synthesizer; just an equalizer. 

Music buffs in the comments said this is an additive synthesizer or a subtractive synthesizer. I don't know which is correct, but it took many people many years to develop the music synthesizer, while Brewer started from almost nothing and figured it out on his own. I'm impressed. The song is quite pleasant, too. (via kottke) 

Freezing 200,000 Tons of Lethal Arsenic Dust

Giant Mine near Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, extracted a lot of gold in its time. Then the gold ran out, and the company went bankrupt in 2004. They left behind 237,000 metric tons of arsenic trioxide as a side effect of the mining operation, although that amount does not include the arsenic that has escaped into the environment. You can read more about Giant Mine's history here. The Canadian government was left to deal with the arsenic. Tom Scott introduces us to the technology that won't destroy the arsenic, but will keep the dust from seeping into the air and water. Read more about the Giant Mine Remediation Project at its website. (via Digg)

Drone Light Show Sets Record

Drones have many uses, but let's not talk about war right now. For aerial entertainment, they are much safer than fireworks, and can light up the sky with intricate 3-dimensional images that are just breathtaking. The biggest show yet happened in Hefei, Anhui, China, on February 3rd, 2026. The Chinese company Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. launched 22,580 and set a new world record for the "most multirotor/drones airborne simultaneously from a single computer (outdoors)." Since they qualified that, you have to wonder how many more were ever launched inside a structure. 

Oh yeah, and unlike fireworks, these drones can be used again. (via Geeks Are Sexy) 

A Common Scenario

(via Pleated-Jeans)

The Secrets of Silk

Up until 552 AD, Europe paid dearly for a luxurious fabric from China called silk. It was lightweight but strangely strong, felt good against the skin, and came in amazing colors and patterns. What was it made of? How did they produce such beautiful fabric with it? That was a mystery that China was careful not to reveal, because they were making a ton of money sending silk along a trade route that became known as the Silk Road. They kept the existence of the silk worm, and the food it ate. But they also had some really advanced technology for fabric production that worked on principles that eventually made their way into our modern computers. 

This simple video of the silk making process is more interesting than it has any right to be. There's a 70-second skippable ad at 4:07. (via Damn Interesting) 

Microwave

Inventor of the microwave: This machine will cook dinner faster than a stove or oven. Consumer: How hot does the food get? I: Very hot, like the surface of the sun. C: Oh wow, that’s incre– I: But only some of it. C: Come again? I: The rest stays frozen.

— kottke.org (@kottke.org) February 17, 2026 at 8:18 PM

Why Do Cameras Do This?

 

Now that panoramic photos are widely available on phones, you see weird camera effects more and more often. Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains the rolling shutter effect and why it happens. Wait until you see what the effect does to a fidget spinner, a guitar, and a spinning coin! (via Everlasting Blort)

O Printer! My Printer!

Mr. T-blog sent me a poem (Thanks!). It was inspired by the loss of TWO printers in a span of only two months. I can relate to the magnitude of this disaster. Apologies to Walt Whitman. 

 

          O Printer! my Printer! our fearful trip is done,

The laserjet has weather’d every rack, the PPM we sought is won,

The USB port is near, the drum roller I hear, the users all expletiving,

While follow eyes the DPI, the copy jam grim and daring;

                         But O heart! heart! heart!

                            O the bleeding drops of ink,

                               Where on the desk my Printer lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

 

My Printer does not answer, his papertrays are pale and still,

My HP does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The laserjet is recycled safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From Staples trip the victor ship comes in with replacement won;

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

                            But I with mournful tread,

                               Watch the desk my Printer lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

-Mr T-blog

The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera mechanism dates from the first or second century BC. It is an ancient Greek analog computer that calculated time and events such as the appearances of stars and planets and how they coordinated with years and even Greek festivals. In this TED-Ed lesson, we get an explanation of what a computer is and how analog computing works as compared to digital computing. (via Damn Interesting) 

Can You Make a Jetpack Out of a Rifle?

  
The recoil of a rifle can leave quite a bruise if you aren't properly braced. Most people only have to learn this lesson once. A young man named Rob noticed this force and imagined making a jetpack out of the recoil force of a rifle. Is this at all plausible? He submitted it to What If? as a theoretical question. They tackle those questions seriously, no matter how dumb they sound. The answer is "sort of," meaning that you could do it, but it would be difficult, ridiculous, and not worth the effort. 

But there are guns that have more powerful recoils than a mere rifle. And that's where this theory gets interesting. Not that we're ever going to try making a jetpack from a gun, but the existence of a gun that could do it is both interesting and unnerving.     

Turning a Car Into a Computer Mouse

 

Simone Giertz teamed up with William Osman to modify her tiny electric car, Cheese Louise. They turned it into a computer mouse. The aim is to draw a picture on a computer screen by driving the car. What you might need to know is that Giertz had only recently earned her driver's license, and the car is around 30 years old. So the picture isn't all that much, but the project was a success and the video is entertaining. Osman's video about the project goes into more detail about how they did it, and it's funny, too, but longer. 



The story of how Giertz came to own such a ridiculous car is here. (via The Awesomer)

Radio Face

From 1925. Now I know why I look so old. (via Undine)

The Magic Piano

A piano can produce beautiful music if you know how to play it, but what if you could see the music as well as hear it? This idea presented a challenge for the guys at HTX Studio, and they spent three years making it happen. In this video, we get to see the many ideas that didn't work, which are all pretty cool anyway. With every failure, the challenge became more important, and that's why they persevered to the end. 

We also have to admire this guy's dedication to learning to play piano in those three years, in order to do the magic piano justice. The result is not only a fascinating musical instrument, but also beautiful music and an astonishingly high-quality DIY video. (via Metafilter) 

How a TV Works, in Slow Motion

Gavin Free, one of the Slow Mo Guys has an 85-inch TV in his house! That implies that he has a large TV room, and from there you can imagine how well viral videos pay. Anyway, he and Dan are going to show us how television sets work, using different kinds of TVs and their mega-fast cameras so we can see thousands of frames for every video frame on the television device, whether its the big LCD set, a CRT, or an iPhone. You're not hallucinating- Gav and Dan borrowed a camera to film at 380,000 frames per second to make this video. Oh yeah, it turns out that the TV was given to him for this project. Nice perks with that job! (via Geeks Are Sexy)