Parking Squid / Susan Robb

Parking Squid by artist Susan Robb is a tentacular squid sculpture and bike rack. The squid is currently installed at theSeattle Centre. In October it will be moved to a permanent home on a Seattle street — via Laughing Squid

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U-Boat U-42 GMT Automatic

This is a limited edition Titanium piece to 300 pieces worldwide with a unique U-BOAT crown that pulls outwards at 90 degrees. The Crown locks into place with a level positioned at 5 o’clock. The strap is cordovan leather and the watch comes in a box with a magnifying glass — via Watchismo Times

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Vincent Black Lightning / Jeff Decker

For someone who doesn’t like stock Vincents, Jeff Decker builds a mighty fine Black Lightning. He’s a sculptor as well as a bike builder, and his eye for a line is evident with this beautiful salt racer. As these exclusive Horst Roesler shots reveal, Decker has managed to make the Vincent look fast even when it’s standing still on the Bonneville salt flats.

Decker has received some flak over this bike from Vincent purists. But his Black Lightning is not one of the 30-odd bona fide factory bikes. He assembled it using period-correct salvaged parts supplied by luminaries such as Marty Dickerson and Mel Helde, Jr, who was Rollie Free’s mechanic. And Decker has nothing to hide: this bike really is a cobbled-together Frankenstein that I’m not ashamed of — via Bike EXIF

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Suzuki DR650 Custom / Deus Bali

It’s surprising that we don’t see more DR650 customs around. This one is a new release fromDeus Bali, and their logic in choosing the bike is impeccable: The DR650 is a simple big motor and frame. It’s probably the biggest single-cylinder four stroke out there. The bike is very adaptable—once you strip off all the plastic, you find a frame and engine that is prime for customising. They have power. They look great when stripped back and done up, and they’re fun as hell to ride — via Bike EXIF

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South Kensington Apartment Refurbishment / Hogarth Architects

Before Hogarth Architects could renovate and transform this stunning South Kensington, London apartment, they had to rewind the space back to an earlier version. A false ceiling and add-on room partition had to be removed to open up the living area and reveal its original grand scale.

Due to the building being listed as historical, the cornices and fireplace surrounds could not be altered. But that small restriction would not stop an incredible transformation from taking place — via Dornob

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Uber Boston

The Hindenburg over Boston Common, 1936 — via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive

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Villa Benedetti / Mariano Benedetti

The Villa Benedetti space age six-bedroom house in Ascoli Piceno, Marche, southern Italy, is the future, as seen from the space age 1970s. It was a custom build for (and we think by) the artist Mariano Benedetti, located within an old estate dating back to the nineteenth century and, as you can see from the images on this page, hardly touched since it was built in those crazy times. This a a time tunnel.

If you want it, get in touch with the agent, You’ll need to find something approaching €900,000 to get ownership of this place — via WowHaus

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Space Octopus Cover / SKumpf

The project was to do a comic page and cover. I had doodled the original sketch for this page awhile ago during another comic page project and I love the connection between deep space and deep sea so i was excited to go about it — via deviantART

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Peer Gynt on the Metro / Copenhagen Phil

In April 2012 Copenhagen Phil (Sjællands Symfoniorkester) surprised the passengers in the Copenhagen Metro by playing Grieg’s Peer Gynt. The flash mob was created in collaboration with Radio Klassisk. All music was performed and recorded in the metro.

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House 11 x 11 / Titus Bernhard Architekten

The idea behind House 11 x 11 [Titus Bernhard Architekten] was to design an apparently compact house of homogeneous materials, with a low external surface but as large a usable area as possible, a house that serves a family as an inhabitable sculpture and shows its exterior as an image of the inner organisation — via ArchDaily

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Bulova Marine Star [96B125]

The Bulova Marine Star [96B125] has a dial that is primarily white with slashes of red and black subtly mixed in. It has a 44mm (11mm thick) Stainless steel or titanium case and 22mm bracelet. Quartz movement with date display and GMT hand, mineral crystal and 30m water resistance — via Wrist Watch Review

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Reverse Parthenogenesis

Reverse Parthenogenesis is a pitch-black comedy short written and directed by Javier Grillo-Marxuach and starring Amber Benson and Adam Busch

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2011 Triumph Bonneville / CMP Project

If there’s a surefire way to improve the looks of the average motorcycle, it’s by tidying up the back end. And this Bonneville, from the Argentinian builder CMP Project, is a textbook example. Careful fabrication and a custom-fitted seat have given Triumph’s mainstay roadster a new stance and a new look — one that’s retro and purposeful in equal measure — via Bike EXIF

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MB&F MOONMACHINE / Stepan Sarpaneva

MOONMACHINE by Finnish watchmaker Stepan Sarpaneva is both the first of the MB&F Performance Art pieces by a watchmaker and the first to endow a Machine with a new complication. With MOONMACHINE, Stepan has taken a specially configured HM3 Frog and transformed it with his iconic moon-face moon-phase indicator set in a scintillating firmament of northern stars — via A Parallel World

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Scratchboard Octopus / Tierra Connor

Scratchboard Octopus
Scratchboard Octopus, originally uploaded by Tierra Connor.

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Stellalpina / Roberto Rossi

Roberto Rossi is one of Italy’s best-known Harley-Davidson concessionarias. He’s also got petrol coursing through his veins. His dealership includes a museum: a showcase for a personal collection of classic motorcycles bolstered by an authentic Mille Miglia Alfa Romeo 1750 GS Zagato (once owned by Tazio Nuvolari) and vintage tractors.

Rossi often turns his hand to custom motorcycles, and this is his latest. He describes it as An unconventional Sportster modified for mountain joyrides, — hence the name Stellalpina (Alpine star) — via Bike EXIF

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Manufacture Rodolphe Cattin Witness One

The Manufacture Rodolphe Cattin Witness One is an openworked tourbillon with bevelled and diamond-polished hands, finely sandblasted surfaces and black gold-treated bridges. A 60-second tourbillon displays the seconds at 6 o’clock. A three-arm octopus spring operates the pull-out piece. A click and lever govern the movement, which is visible through the caseback — via Professional Watches

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Gir / Meg Lyman

A spoof on Gir from Invader Zim. I haven’t really watched the show, but someone requested him and he’s super adorable — via CrashOctopus Blog

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Honda FT500 / Sideburn Magazine

The starting point was a £370 ($600) Honda FT500C, and Sideburn Magazine didn’t want to spend a lot on it. Luckily, they had Carl of CFM in Lincolnshire, England, on their side. He’s a local one-man do-it-all bike builder/fabricator, and he sorted the bike out — via Bike EXIF

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Clouded Leopards / Point Defiance Zoo

Point Defiance Zoo’s Clouded Leopard cubs have names: The female, is now Suksn (pronounced Sook-Son); her brother, is Chan sung (pronounced Chan-Soon). Her new name means mischievous; his means noble — via ZooBorns

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Calamari Master / Joe Havasy

16×20″ Acrylic on Panel — via Joe Havasy Illustration

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Triton / Freddie Cooper

The definition of a cafe racer gets looser as the years go by. But this Triton, which will go on sale at the Wheels & Waves event in France in June, is as authentic as they come. Built in 1960, it’s a truly original English cafe racer—and one with a particularly interesting history. It’s the work of motorcycle racer Freddie Cooper, the first man to exceed 200 mph on English soil — via Bike EXIF

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I shot the serif (But I did not shoot the sans-serif)

Typography lovers, here’s a Flash game for you: I shot the serif (But I did not shoot the sans-serif) by London-based creative agency To the Point — via Neatorama

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Squid Pint Glasses / Bread and Badger

Sean and Amanda Siska of Portland-based Bread and Badger have created these great etched Squid Pint Glasses. They are available to purchase at their Etsy shop — via Laughing Squid

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Mill Hill House / Hal Higgins

If you want a distinctive property, they don’t come much more distinctive than this 1960s Professor Hal Higgins-designed five-bedroom modernist property in Mill Hill, London NW7. But be warned, it’s certainly not cheap.

Harold Cassius Higgins, aka Professor Hal Higgins, sadly died earlier this year, But he leaves behind a wealth of interesting architecture, building both public and private housing from the ’50s to the ’70s. We suspect this is one of his late ’60s designs, although the agent doesn’t confirm this.

If you want it, that’s very simple. The seller is looking for offers around £2,500,000 — via WowHaus

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Fennec Foxes / Palm Beach Zoo

Palm Beach Zoo’s newest arrivals are five Fennec Fox kits. The kits are approximately seven weeks old, though their exact age isn’t known, since they were safely tucked away in an underground burrow until earlier this month when they began to venture out to meet their adoring public — via ZooBorns

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RESCO Red Circle

RESCO is a California company founded in a 2009. The Red Circle has a 42mm DLC steel case (14mm thick) with 20mm lugs, ETA 2893-2 with GMT Complication and 300m water resistance — via Wrist Watch Review

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Add a Right-Click Count Option in OSX

Want a simple way to count characters, words, and paragraphs in any Mac program? Mac OS X Hints shares an Automator script that adds a right-click option to selected text so you can get a word count in any program you want — via Lifehacker

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Rare bacteria kills lab researcher in San Francisco

A researcher at an infectious disease lab died over the weekend after being exposed to a rare bacteria strain that he was working with, said health officials

Richard Din, 25, worked at San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, reported the San Jose Mercury News.

California health authorities said that the victim had worked with the rare Neisseria meningitis bacterial strain for months before his death.

The Contra Costa Times reported that the recent UC-Berkeley biology grad left the lab last Friday and became ill during the evening with fever, chills and a headache.

By Saturday morning his symptoms had grown worse and he developed a body rash.

He called his friends to drive him to the hospital but died shortly after — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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US archive thief foiled by collector David Goldin

A US recording enthusiast unmasked a thief after finding a one-of-a-kind Babe Ruth recording on eBay — that he had donated to the National Archives.

J David Goldin, 69, bought another record from the seller and tracked the return address to a Maryland home.

The thief turned out to be the employee he handed the recording of the baseball legend to 30 years earlier.

Leslie Charles Waffen has admitted stealing thousands of sound recordings from the Archives.

He was sentenced on Thursday to 18 months in prison — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Catching paedophiles using image-processing technology

Lists of hashes help the sorting process but their usefulness is limited by the changes regularly made to images.

An image-processing tool that can ignore those tiny changes and work out what other images it resembles has been developed by Microsoft researchers.

Instead of a hash, this creates what its creators call a signature for each image. Unlike a hash this signature does not change when an image is altered or manipulated.

No matter how much it’s changed, the underlying properties of the image’s signature remain the same, said Stuart Aston, chief security officer at Microsoft UK.

Called PhotoDNA, the tool was developed to keep an eye on images uploaded to other Microsoft services and Facebook and now, with the help of Swedish firm NetClean, is being given to police forces to help them categorise images — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Under Pohutukawa House / Herbst Architects

Herbst Architects designed the Under Pohutukawa house in Piha, New Zealand — via CONTEMPORIST

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Bigger on the inside / Kate Atherley

Bigger on the inside. A sophisticated, grown-up take on the Doctor Who scarf. No matter how conservative your office, you won’t be out of place with this draped tastefully around your shoulders — via Knitty Spring Summer 2012

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Hedgehogs / Happy Hollow Park and Zoo

Happy Hollow Park and Zoo, in San Jose, California, is now home to 3 baby Hedgehogs. The trio, born in late March, is part of the zoo’s education outreach program. When they get a bit older they will visit local school children. The three baby hedgehogs, also known as hoglets, turned four weeks old on Thursday — via ZooBorns

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Shuffle

This is the trailer for Shuffle, a new feature film starring TJ Thyne (Bones, Validation), written and directed by Kurt Kuenne (Dear Zachary, Validation).

Shuffle is the story of a man who begins experiencing his life out of order; every day he wakes up at a different age, in a different year, on a different day of his life.

He wants it to stop.

The film also features TJ Thyne’s Bones co-stars Tamara Taylor and Patricia Belcher, acclaimed actress Michelle Krusiec and the film’s old age prosthetic make-up is by Barney Burman, winner of the 2010 Academy Award® for Best Make-up for Star Trek

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Penthouse PPDG / Hernandez Silva

The glass floor in the bathroom of this house [Hernandez Silva] in Guadalajara, Mexico looks down an unused 15-floor elevator shaft — via Boing Boing

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The Countdown Thing / PeepholeCircus

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For a Good Time / Rob and Elliot

– via Rob and Elliot

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Instantly Send Any Gmail Attachment to Google Drive

Now that Google Drive has built file storage into your Google account, it’s only natural that you’d like it to play nicely with your other Google apps. With a few tricks, it can — at least with your Gmail account. Tech blogger Amit Agarwal details how to set up a system in which applying a GoogleDrive label to any email in your Gmail inbox will automatically save its attachment to Google Drive — syncing those files directly to your desktop — via Lifehacker

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Bionic eye patient tests planned for 2013

Bionic vision researchers intend to test a functional bionic eye on patients next year.

Our primary aim is to complete the first prototypes of the bionic eye so they can be tested in human recipients in 2013, said Gregg Suaning, a professor from the University of New South Wales Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, in a statement.

Suaning is also the leader of Bionic Vision Australia’s wide-view device, the first of two prototypes designed to restore vision in people with degenerative retinal conditions.

It consists of 98 electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the retina, which is a tissue lining the back of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses necessary for sight, and allow users to better differentiate between light and dark — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Windmill Lane, Dorset

This five bedroom contemporary modernist property in Dorset is located in the highly desirable Avon Castle Estate and in a private plot with views across the Avon valley and surrounding countryside, the house offers 10,000sq.ft of accommodation — and not just any old accommodation. We’re talking luxury here, with pretty much everything you would demand in a house, should money be no object.

Originally on the market for that £3,000,000 asking price, the agent is now asking around £1,000,000. Not cheap, but a massive reduction, that’s for sure. More images at the agent’s website — via WowHaus

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Pattern for Voluptuous Octopus / jpolka

Make your own voluptuous octopus with powerful, undulating legs! Using worsted weight yarn and a G hook, the finished product will be about 3″ tall, with legs that can engulf prey up to 9″ in diameter — via Etsy

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Longines Heritage 1940

The Longines Heritage 1940, as its name suggests — it is based on a model from 1940. The round steel case is 38.5 mm in diameter with a lacquered dial (available in white or black) that features a railway-track minute ring and 11 Arabic numerals. The hands are of blued steel in the white-dial version and rhodium-plated in the black version — via Professional Watches

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Yamaha XS650 Cafe / La Corona Motorcycles

Spain is not an easy country to import a motorcycle into. But perseverance has paid off for the four guys at La Corona Motorcycles. After months of paperwork and weeks of wrenching, they have a sharp XS650 cafe to be proud of. It’s a classic commuter custom, stripped back and spruced up, rebuilt in the style becoming increasing popular in mainland Europe — via Bike EXIF

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Rozelle Terrace House / Carter Williamson Architects

Carter Williamson Architects have designed the Rozelle Terrace house in Sydney, Australia — via CONTEMPORIST

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Christian Science Monitor sees traffic, revenues rising after 3 years of Web-first strategy

Three years ago, the Christian Science Monitor began a jump-in-the-deep-end version of digital transformation. The Monitor killed its five-day-a-week print edition, started a weekly magazine version and shifted daily operations entirely to the Web.

A protracted period, most of the first year, followed where everyone was learning how to swim, editor John Yemma recalled in a phone interview last week. For news staff particularly, the break from the old industrial process of once-a-day deadlines was wrenching.

But over the last two years, a slightly reduced staff has hit its stride with big improvements in traffic and the news organisation’s finances — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Google Is Making A Huge And Annoying Mistake

I like Google Plus. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever read are on Google Plus, and the Hangout is amazing.

But Google is doing everything it can to force Google Plus on everyone, and it’s pissing me off.

Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube. I tried to like a video on YouTube. I wasn’’t signed in to my Google Plus account, and this is what I saw…

Where the thumbs up and thumbs down used to be, there is now a big G+ Like button. When you go anywhere near it, you get a little popup that tells you to upgrade to Google Plus for some reason that I don’t remember, because the instant I saw it, I made a rageface — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Wolf dog to patrol Angola

A state judge granted a reprieve Tuesday to a wolf dog hybrid he ordered destroyed for aggressive behaviour, instead sentencing the animal to serve a life term as a guard dog in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Judge James Best of 18th Judicial District Court signed an order releasing custody of Chief to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections at the request of prison officials who want to use the animal as a guard dog at Angola — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Tsunami survivor claims Harley-Davidson found in Canada

The owner has been found of a Harley-Davidson that drifted to Canada after being swept out to sea in the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

Details from the motorcycle’s licence plate helped to locate Ikuo Yokoyama.

According to CBC News, Mr Yokoyama lost his home and three family members in the tsunami.

The shop that sold the motorcycle to Mr Yokoyama is now hoping to ship the Harley-Davidson back to Japan and restore it.

The motorcycle is among the first items in a wave of debris heading to the west coast of North America. Most of the debris is expected to arrive in 2013 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Edvard Munch’s iconic artwork The Scream sold for $120m

Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream has sold at auction for $120m (£74m), making it one of the most valuable works of art ever sold.

The 1895 pastel was bought at Sotheby’s in New York City. Bidding began at some $50m, and lasted for just 12 minutes.

The work is one of four in a series by the Norwegian expressionist artist and was the only one still owned privately — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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