Once you get over the design of the site - one big page with more Comic Sans than has been legal for 12 years in the EU - this is fascinating and puzzling. Jean-Louis Naudin has been examining all the tech data put out by perpetual motion dreamers Steorn have released and built his own Steorn Orbo motor, and - puzzlingly - seems to have favourable results for them.

Obviously the laws of thermodynamics say this can’t be the case and I’d love to see someone with a much deeper understanding than me - with a bunch of oscilloscopes - take a really good look and point out where the calculations are going wrong, but Monsieur Naudin seems to be approaching that criteria.

Troubling and puzzling. I like to know what’s going on!

I actually have a couple of big gauges like the ones you can see here. I shun the idea of Steampunk; I prefer Dieselpunk myself. Anything that looks like lab equipment from the 60s is full of win for me.

Hydroelectric Power Plant, Mirejovice - Control Room Gigapixel in Czech Republic

Impossibly impressive short film styled entirely with various company/entity logos. Somewhat sweary in places

Logorama on Vimeo (via @bobbyllew)

I have no idea where this picture came from - I found it on an SD card that was in my Eee back last year as an extra drive - but before I use the SD card for something else I wanted to share it with the wirble-wirble-world.

It’s awesome.

Another day, another fantastic vintage nuclear attack poster… via BoingBoing et al.

Awesome.

from mappeal, via Make and Geekologie and OhGizmo and BookOfJoe (phew!)

Two things involving Javascript that I didn’t know about this time last week:

Node

Node is a standalone Javascript engine for running on servers. Lets you deal with things on a socket level, interact with the file system and so on. This means you can write all your code for both a client and a server in the same language; something you can do with haXe as well, but without the compiling down to Neko bytecode step, and in a somewhat more commonly used language.

Gordon

Gordon is a (currently very simple) SWF player written in pure Javascript, which gets the file running using SVG and HTML5. The only way to get Flash to run on an iPhone, at the moment - an impressive feat! Being clean Javascript, the sourcecode is all there for the taking, but that’s okay - it’s licensed under an MIT open source license!

I love me a bit of chilled out noise, and this video is full of the most wonderfully bizarre sources for such things. Found on the Make blog a while ago, and finally experienced properly today…

What did you do with your lunchtime today? I made a Christmas shitty ditty out of samples from Freesound.org and a loop appropriated from Radiohead’s National Anthem.

Samples:

• Sleigh bells
• The Winstons’ Amen Brother break beat (history)
• Jingle Bells musical box
• Sabian crash cymbal
• The National Anthem

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

via @Nermal: catsforgold.com