Hasta La Ideas

The few times I’d played paintball, what made it not-so-fun were the large-capacity hoppers we all had on our guns. Isolated from the rest of my team, I spent a good ten minutes pinned down, as the virtually unlimited firepower each gun possesses means your opponent can lay down suppressing fire indefinitely; it’s not like in the movies where you can wait for him to reload while you sprint to a better position. (On the flip side, when I finally succeeded in flanking someone, I admit I kind of spazzed out and put a few more rounds onto them than was decent.)

The Airow Gun Combo would make things more interesting. Combining a Diamond Archery compound bow with a paintball-firing barrel, the Airow is a CO2-free way to launch paintballs at 260 to 300 feet per second. And even though the gravity tube up top looks like it’ll hold a dozen rounds or so, at least your opponent will have to draw for each shot, giving you a fighting chance of getting out of trouble.

If you’ve already got a compound bow, you can buy just the paintball-firing portion and knock it all together.

What they ought to make next: A crossbow version for Walking Dead fans with Daryl aspirations.

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Well, now we know where some of the motors being made in Dyson’s new factory will be going: into sink taps! Dyson has designed a sink faucet that integrates their Airblade technology, blowing 28 liters of air per second out of two wings on either side. The Dyson Airblade Tap allows the user to wash their hands and immediately dry them at the same spot, rather than traipsing over to the wall-mounted dispenser/blower (inevitably leaving a trail of droplets on the way). There are no controls; sensors detect when your hands are in a washing vs. drying position, and the tap dispenses water or air accordingly.

My first thought was, won’t washing and drying in the same spot hold up lines at crowded bathrooms? Dyson’s angle is that the Airblade Tap is faster than a regular dryer, getting the job done in 14 seconds versus what they say “can take up to 43 seconds” with a conventional air dryer.

The HEPA filter in the Airblade Tap’s motor is another selling point:

Most other hand dryers are unhygienic. They don’t filter bacteria from the restroom air. They suck in dirty air then blow it back onto hands. The Dyson Airblade Tap hand dryer uses a HEPA filter removing 99.97% of bacteria at 0.3 microns from the air used to dry hands. So hands are dried using cleaner air, not dirty air.

Perhaps the strongest pro-Airblade-Tap argument is the long-term cost. They’re claiming a 69% cost savings in electricity over a regular hand dryer, to the tune of just $48 per year. (Disposable paper towels look like the real cost loser here, costing a projected $1,460 annually.) And to reassure buyers that they’ll use the product long enough to see the savings, they’re offering a five-year warranty.

See also: Dyson Airblade Tap on Discussion Boards

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Here’s an amazing feat of ad-hoc modelmaking and creative resourcefulness: Filmmaker/animator Dustin McLean and his crew decided they’d reproduce the trailer for Iron Man 3, shot-for-shot, preserving visual fidelity without using any special effects. First off, let’s look at the original trailer:

Now ask yourself, how would you reproduce some of those scenes—the exploding gallery of suits, the building crashing into the ocean, the underwater footage—using commonly-available goods? Let’s look at how McLean and co. pulled it off, entirely in-camera, without dipping into the CG well. (And you have to love how they reproduced the soundtrack.)

It’s even more impressive when you view the trailers side by side:

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With power tools and ready access to wood, there’s plenty of things you can build for home use. Plain desks, tables and cabinets are the most straightforward, with beds, chairs and seating pushing into more challenging territory. But there are a host of domestic objects I’d never dream of trying to build—like a bathtub. And that’s why I’m no Mitja Narobe.

Narobe is a woodworker who hails from Slovenia, and maniac that he is, he decided to build a bathtub out of beech with mahogany inserts.

The joinery is done via waterproof wood glue and half-inch dowels, meaning “The whole bathtub has not a single screw or nail,” as he told Woodgears.

Building something this massive out of wood raises the question of how you’d straighten the edges. Narobe rigged up a router sled and removed material one pass at a time. (Presumably not at the angle shown in the photos, he’s clearly got it propped up for break time.)

One of the things I like about looking at photos from overseas woodworkers is checking out what brands of tools they’ve got. I’d never heard of the Iskra Ero brand stamped on his router, though Slovenia’s proximity to Germany makes the Bosch drill unsurprising.

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In an earlier post I’d made reference to idiots who step off of crowded escalators and just stop. Apparently I’m not alone in this observation: As part of a workshop at Geneva’s recent Lift Conference, participants even brainstormed the above solution to keep escalator-stoppers moving.

It was called the Unpleasant Design Workshop and it was held by Gordan Savicic and Selena Savic, who run the amusing Unpleasant Design blog. While the workshop was intended to quickly brainstorm “a map of behaviours and social groups unpleasant design could discriminate against,” their website does that and more, cataloging photographs of urban phenomena vis-à-vis design and highlighting fanciful design proposals intended to curb rude, idiotic or antisocial behavior.

We’ve all seen anti-skating measures added to “street furniture,” like this:

But you may not have seen anti-sticker traffic poles like this one in South Korea:

Or a plane cleverly placed at an angle to prevent people from peeing in a particular corner. Hit this thing with a stream of pee, and it simply angles the pee onto your own feet:

And you’ve probably never conceived of adding an extra-complicated outside lock to a bathroom door, purely to keep drunks out of it at night:

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