Hobbit Home

Simon & Jasmine Dale have built a fantastic Low Impact Woodland Home in the Wales. It took him (and friends) four months to build and a total of 3k in cash! Fantastic job, and wonderful place (I only wonder how the site will age over time. Things like rotting, sagging walls/ceiling, etc.) His site is fantastic with a very good writeup on how he put everything together.

MSM

Mechanically separated meat!

(That's chicken parts by the way.) Kind of Gross. ... maybe...
Snopes has a nice write up on how it's made, and the truths and (not) that is being told about it.

Best part is that Jamie Oliver (a TV Sheff) did a great show for kids on how it's made.



More hype from this topic, as it's now got the better label of "Pink Slime". (Why would you ever call it MSM when you could call it pink slime?!?!)

Media Consolidation

Frugal Dad has a great infographic on how bad things have gotten in the media world.

Note the following sites that are attempting to fix this:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• RootStrikers
  
• FreePress.net

VI Hart

"VI" produces these great stop motion videos that explain all sorts of math stuff in a really fun way!

Cool Lego

When folks with legos go nuts. (to be continued...)

• Crawler Town (by DeGobbi)
• Seven foot long Serenity Model (by Jeff Stevens)
• Lego Mindstorms model of the Mars Curiosity Rover (by Doug Moran and Will Gorman) 
• Star Blazers Yamato  
• Great Ball Contraption: Also see some of the details of the pieces at his website.   
• WW2 Tanks: And Stijn Oom's other fantastic creations!
• HMS Hood: What a ship!

How Computer Animation is Done

BBC Nature Video Collections explains how they have been producing their "One Planet Dinosaur" show.

Can You Crack It?

BBC notes that GCHQ (the UK intelligence agency) has setup an unbranded website called canyoucrackit.co.uk challenging people to crack the cipher code they post on their website. (hint: it's probably a LOT easier to crack the website and figure out the answer then cracking it brute force.)

Conflict History Map

akg1330 tweets about the Conflict History Map. It's a google map that lets you scan to a specific time and see where all the conflicts were during that time.

Printrbot

PCWorld (and Kickstarter) has a nice brief on Brook Drumm's Printrbot, a low cost ($200), DIY 3d printer.