tech@vedella

Jessica sez, "The 20th annual Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden features dozens of NYC landmarks carefully recreated using millions of plant parts, like twigs, bark, berries, leaves, and much more. Some highlights are the Brooklyn Bridge (which trains actually run on!), the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Radio City [...]

From Maria Popova: Astonishing rare 17th-century Indian Tantric paintings that look like 20th-century Western art.

The Bughouse Future Fossils series are a set of highly detailed, weathered concrete castings of near-contemporary technology, from DJ turntables to film cameras to Atari joysticks. They're a nice memento mori -- a weighty-but-whimsical reminder of our own technosphere's doomed frailty. bughouse :: Future Fossils (via DVICE)

Submitted by studentrevolt, this video depicts computer delivery al fresco in Beijing. Video Link [youtube.com]

Amazon Encore has kindly given Boing Boing an exclusive excerpt of Tune in Tokyo, a true story by Tim Anderson. Tune in Tokyo is the true story of what happened when a tall, white, gay Southerner decided to move out of the country to escape a rut. Although he didn't speak a lick of Japanese, [...]

For the second year running, AT&T has taken top honors in the list of America's worst phone companies -- a hotly contested spot! While AT&T's satisfaction score in 2011 wasn't as bad as its score from 2010, the Dallas-based cell phone provider, which recently discontinued its bid to acquire its better rival T-Mobile, still ranked [...]

Ed "Brain Rot" Piskor says: We have a decent cartoonist scene here in Pittsburgh and it seems that the hub of a lot of activity is our very own Toonseum. As a fundraising measure they, along with a local brewery, created "Illustration Ale" and asked a handful of us to design beer labels. I decided [...]

[Video Link] Amy Seidenwurm says: "Miguel Endara used over 3 million dots (and only 1 Micron pen!) to make a beautiful ink on paper portrait of his dad.

I am very pleased to announce that two BoingBoing posts made it into The Open Laboratory 2012, an anthology of the best science writing on the Internet. The first was written by Lee Billings, an excellent guest blogger we hosted back in February. Lee wrote a lot of great posts about Kepler and the hunt [...]

My favorite band of the 1990s (one of my favorite bands ever, in fact), the Afghan Whigs, will perform for the first time in more than a decade next year at the All Tomorrow's Parties festivals in London and Asbury Park, New Jersey. Greg Dulli is curating the Asbury Park lineup. The Afghan Whigs mean [...]

H&M has admitted that the bikini models in its ads are just real models' heads pasted onto a computer-generated "ideal" body. As Jezebel notes, "But man, isn't looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny?" The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and "completely virtual," [...]

This is the space suit worn by Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last human being to set foot on the Moon. Side note: I knew these suits were heavy. I had not realized how heavy. With 26 layers of material in the suit, a portable life-support system strapped on, and other mechanical systems attached, [...]

Kevin Kelly at Cool Tools gave a thumb's up to MAKE magazine's Ultimate Kit Guide. Here is a fantastic collection of 175 of the best kits available today. Each one selected, tested, and reviewed by the folks at Make magazine. Each kit is rated on five criteria. Kits offer many of the benefits (fun, thriftiness, [...]

A good soul named Chris Nelson has taken the time to catalog some of history's greatest end-of-the-world predictions and arrange them in a handy timeline format. Use A Brief History of the Apocalypse as a fascinating way to explain why you are pretty certain the world won't end on x date. Or, use it to [...]

The US Army has developed a sandwich that doesn't rot even after a few years. It doesn't need refrigeration and isn't freeze-dried. Here's the video clip, from the BBC Four program, "After Life: The Strange Science of Decay."

Art Lebedev is taking pre-orders for the Optimus Mini Six, Popularis and Aux keyboards. If you have to ask, you can't afford them. Previously: World’s *est: Art Lebedev Pultius Cudgel-like Remote; Optimus Tactus touchscreen keyboard concept art

If you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, you might find daily doses of classic (i.e., old) Super-Fun-Pak Comix. Or, if you're a certain kind of person, you could follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.

Those who pirate Croteam's Serious Sam 3 are in for a surprise. Instead of shutting you down with DRM, the game forces you to do battle with an invincible giant scorpion, dual-wielding assault rifles.

Intel and Micron's latest puts 128 gigabits of storage in a tiny chip designed for use in cellphones, solid-state drives and tablet PCs. By stacking 8 dies, the company says, it'll be able to put a terabit (128GB) of data in an area the size of a fingertip. As the marketing photo reveals, however, it [...]

Back in September, Discover Magazine blogger Sean Carroll assembled "Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time" pulled from Setting Time Aright, a scholarly/scientific conference on the nature of time. 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to [...]