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The New BMW Concept Thinks Motorcyclists Shouldn't Need Helmets

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BMW recently rolled out the Motorrad Vision Next 100, an aggressively futuristic concept motorcycle that aims to "digitize", "simplify" and "totally free" us from the traditional riding experience. The design's biggest claim to fame isn't its high efficiency electric power, self-balancing gyros, or even the wacky Tron uniframe. Its creators propose that in a few decades, motorcycles will be so effortlessly intelligent that all need for thick protective gear will be gone.

The bike self-balances even while parked, making operation in even extreme conditions feasible for a wider range of riders. Simply don the smart glasses to display road conditions and traffic data, and hop on. While the wearer looks straight forward the glasses will clear, except to display necessary alerts. But look in a particular direction, and the glasses can gather and deliver more specific information. The smart glasses and bike are intended to be used in conjunction with a full bodysuit, which also monitors environmental information to aid the quality of the ride. Assuming we can still breathe the air in 100 years, it's an attractively minimal setup.

With all that immersive tech as the backdrop, the designers still emphasized the lack of distractions as integral to the project. Holger Hampf, head of design/customer experience at Motorrad, noted "It was important to us that the analogue riding experience would remain undisturbed. The display and operating concept acts so discreetly that it creates a natural and familiar movement." Certainly a reasonable goal for a vehicle with no protective exoskeleton.

Edgar Heinrich, Head of Design, describes the far future motorcycle as a "Great escape" from daily life, and a better way to connect with the ride than the body-plus-machine collaboration we use today. I'd guess the future that Motorrad envisions is a smoother and more efficient landscape than the one I foresee. To say nothing of the user-error accidents that endlessly creative humans manage to create in even idiot proof systems. I bet you could roll this thing dangerously, particularly if you thought you couldn't and wanted to test it. Hotdogs are going to hotdog. I also anticipate that in 100 years we'll have come up with a better looking pair of goggles than those things glasses-havers had to wear in chemistry class. For all the slick linework there are some decidedly retro nods throughout this project.

By plotting this futuristic tech at least 30 years ahead of where we are today, BMW gets to lean into the product design fun and let us bother with imagining how the world will have become that much safer and more predictable in the meantime. 

BMW CEO Harald Krüger, via

In the age old tradition of concept cars having it both ways, this concept's cool design may predict real world tech within a few decades, but its grand safety claims could only possibly bear out if it and all the other vehicles around it played by the same behavioral rules (pointedly not the appeal of motorcycles), and if the environmental sensing were so advanced that it could anticipate subtle dangers faced by even veteran riders. 

So let's enjoy the eye candy, with an eye on our rear view mirrors and our helmets firmly on.


A Spare-Change-Sorting Wallet

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Of all the wallet designs out there, I've never seen one that could do this: The Kin wallet has been designed so that the user dumps their change into it, and it magically gets routed to a pocket that it can't fall out of.

The Kin was created by a trio of Singapore-based industrial designers "to make your life easier and more convenient." While change storage is not an issue for me, it apparently is for the nearly 3,000 backers who've turned the Kin into a wild success on Kickstarter: The designers were seeking just $2,802, but at press time had received a staggering $122,769 in pledges.

What I'm really curious about is how the mechanism works. But as the designers report:

Kin's design team
Within KIN's wallet is a really simple but smart mechanism that helps to prevents coins from sliding out! The inner mechanism is crafted and sewn in a manner so as to prevent the backflow of coins once they have been dumped into the wallet.
We've deliberately kept the secret behind KIN under wraps to prevent the idea from being distributed before we can have it produced. We want to ensure our backers are the privileged first few people to get a hold of KIN so as not to do them a disservice. We hope for your understanding on the matter!


How Globes were Made in 1955 London

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In the mid-1950s, this "famous north London firm of geographers" was cranking out 60,000 globes a year, about 200-something per day. The narrator of this video is almost certainly incorrect about what the globes' cores are made out of; "a solid ball of wood" sounds unlikely, as the thing would weigh a ton and no grain lines are visible. Still, the process is interesting to see, and surprisingly contains a lot of old newspapers and plaster:

I always get a kick out of the anachronistic gender division of labor in these old "making of" videos, and the implied perceptions of each gender's ability. We can see that the precision work of pasting is left to women while the molding and varnishing are done by men. 

I wonder what they think would have happened had the roles been switched; would we have had lumpy globes with skewed continents?

In any case, if that globemaking factory lasted until 1966, I know what was playing on the radio in the plastering room:

Now check out how globes are made in 21st Century America.

Reader Submitted: The VIKKII Collection by THESYS Design Uses Simple Units to Create Smart Assemblies

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The VIKKII Collection, by Los Angeles based studio THESYS Design, is an exercise in creating a series of house wares and design objects from a single "smart" unit that can be informed by simple parts that are interchanged.

The collection is based around the sheet metal VIKKII joint, fabricated just 10 miles down the road from the THESYS studio. Through the exploration of bending and subtracting volumes through the V shaped form, a reveal is made in the joint which creates a slip-joint connection. This connection easily allows simple units to be added and interchanged, such as the dowels and glassware that comprise the family of products.

View the full project here

How Globes are Made in 21st Century America

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Replogle Globes is the world's largest manufacturer of globes, and I was shocked to see that they still manufacture them in the United States. The production processes, as you can imagine, are a tad more sophisticated than what we saw in the 1950s British factory.

Manufacturing the hemispheres separately seems a lot less labor-intensive than the, er, "one world" approach we saw in the older video.

By the bye, if you own a modern-day globe and one of the hemispheres becomes damaged, do not throw the whole thing out; there's a perfectly good way to upcycle it. As tinkerer Ben Porter writes, "[My] neighbor was throwing away a perfectly good globe that only had a collapsed southern hemisphere. I looked at the northern hemisphere and, naturally, the first thing I thought was 'Hey, that looks like R2-D2's head!'"

Porter's next course of action:

Images/work by Ben Porter

Read how he did it here.


Estwing AL-Pro Hammer

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Say the word "Estwing" on a construction site and every person within earshot will know you are referring to a single-piece steel hammer based on a nearly century-old design. Invented by Earnest Estwing, this type of hammer has been produced since 1923 by the company he founded. The grips on early models made from stacked leather disks—and you can still get them with that feature—but most Estwings now have nylon rubber grips.

My old Estwings: 16-ounce curved claw model with leather handle on left; 20-ounce rip hammer on right.

The idea behind single-piece construction was to eliminate wood handles (which can break) and the connection between head and handle (which can come loose). The downside to this design is that it seems to transmit more vibration to the arm of the user than hammers with handles made from wood, composites, or advanced materials such as titanium.

The Weight Forward Hammer

About 10 years ago the company introduced the Weight Forward Hammer, a steel headed model with a square face and a curved fiberglass handle. A stunningly beautiful tool, it went out of production several years back—in my view because the unconventional shape of the head and handle, and the square Euro-style striking face were off-putting to traditionalists.

AL-Pro

Estwing's newest offering, the AL-Pro, is a multi-piece model with a steel claw and striking face permanently attached to a single-piece aluminum head and handle. The head is hollow and contains shot to provide added weight while dampening vibration and provide a dead blow. The hammer has a magnetic nail starter and like most other Estwings, a thick nylon-rubber grip to eliminate shock. The look is unconventional, as is the 14-ounce weight, which is light for a framing hammer.

The head contains lead shot—to add weight, reduce vibration, and produce a deader blow.

Traditionally framers used 22- to 28-ounce hammers to produce the requisite driving power, and paid the price with repetitive motion injuries to their arms and shoulders. The current thinking is that lighter is more ergonomic, which is where E=1/2MV² comes in. In classic mechanics, kinetic energy (which for hammers equates to driving force) for non-rotating objects is equal to 1/2 mass (the weight of the head) times velocity (speed of the swing) squared. Simply put, swing faster and you can generate the same nail driving force with a lighter hammer.

Stiletto Tibone—a one-piece titanium hammer with a rubber grip and steel striking face.

The practice of using lighter hammers for framing is not completely new; I once worked with a carpenter who put an extra-long wooden handle on a 20-ounce head and claimed it drove as well as a much heavier hammer. He spoke of it in terms of leverage but I think it worked because with the same speed of swing the extra-long handle meant the head moved faster through space. Years later, Stiletto popularized the idea of lighter is better by introducing titanium hammers. Lighter than steel and more resistant to the transfer of vibration, titanium is too soft to drive nails so Stiletto's hammers are equipped with hardened steel striking faces. In designing the AL-Pro, Estwing went with aluminum because it's lighter and easier to work with than titanium and not subject to the patents held by Stiletto.

Singularity Watch: This AI Taught Itself to Read Lips Better Than Humans

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A team of researchers at Oxford University have coaxed an artificial intelligence program into an impressive leap forward and towards our own obsolescence. The program, known as LipNet, is showing particularly promising ability to read lips in video clips, thanks to machine learning and a novel way of approaching the data. The key difference is that rather than try to teach the AI the mouth shapes of single words and phonemes, the LipNet is asked to interpret whole sentences. Using GRID, a huge bank of 3 second videos featuring brightly lit forward facing speakers, LipNet has learned to translate speech to text with a 93.4% accuracy rate. Compare that to humans' 52.3%. It doesn't look good.

To accomplish this, the team ran over 28,000 videos of actors speaking syntactically similar sentences through a neural network. Each contained a command, color, letter, number, preposition, and adverb, in the same order. When tested using 300 of the same sentence types, human lip reading translators had an error rate of 47.7%, whereas LipNet netted just 6.6%. 

With this kind of accuracy, we might see better automation of closed captioning on news and entertainment videos, and some speculate it may be a feature in more personal communication as well. Imagine realtime translation of a Skype or FaceTime conversation with poor audio quality. I want that already. 

Detractors are quick to point out the structural limitations of the data set used, since apparently most movies, news and YouTube videos don't only feature well lit actors speaking directly into a camera in short sentences. However, given incrementally useful data sets, the LipNet framework appears capable of learning enough to do good, even if it won't be stealing jobs any time soon.

Check out the testing data and paper here.

Design Job: You Dirt Devil You! TTI Floor Care- North America is Seeking an Art Director in Charlotte, NC

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As part of the Creative team, the Art Director will be will be assigned a brand with the responsibility for creative strategy development and execution of brand/product design and marketing materials in alignment with overall brand identity, messaging and strategy.

View the full design job here

Overnight Time-Lapses of Mushrooms Growing Freakishly Fast

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Interest in mushrooms is, well, mushrooming. In recent years the utility of mycelium has made these pages numerous times, from the production of infinite-sized mushroom-based leather sheets to word that Dell and even Ikea are looking at it for packaging. Earlier this year we even grew our own mushroom mycelium planter in less than a week.

One of the reasons mushrooms are looking like a good sustainable bet is that, like bamboo, the stuff grows quickly. A mushroom's mycelium roots can absorb water so rapidly that, viewed in time-lapse photography, they don't seem to be growing so much as inflating:

Those time lapses were shot for the UK's new Planet Earth IIseries, which is currently only viewable by Britons. We yanks will have to wait until January before we'll get to hear David Attenborough narrate the on-screen wonders on American TV.

If you've not heard of the show, the eye-opening trailer is below:

Via Colossal


Sketching a Five-Spoke Wheel

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Sketching a wheel in perspective can really make or break your car sketch. In this video, I explain the way I simply indicate a five-spoke wheel. Whether you love to draw cars or not, this is a great practice exercise for two reasons: First, you always need to practice eclipses. Second, you practice the simple act of iterating on a known object. Taking something simple and defined like a five-spoke wheel and quickly giving it a unique twist is a great mental exercise.

As you go through this video, I want you to notice how much contrast I'm giving this sketch through both line weight and choice of drawing tool. It can be scary to add this much contrast to your sketch—I remember when the fear of messing up a sketch held me back from adding this much contrast. Try to remember that the worst that can happen is you screw it up and you have to put a clean sheet of paper over top and start over. It's no biggie, I screw up all the time. 

One thing that helps force me to add this much contrast is to switch drawing tools. Note that I switch from the Papermate Flair pen to the Sharpie. This forces me to go bold, and the sketch is better for it. Try switching drawing tools like that in your sketches, no matter what the subject is. Remember to turn your sound on to hear me explaining everything as I go. Give it a watch and comment below with any questions. I also love getting your requests in the comments.

Yo! C77 Sketch is a monthly video series from Core77 forum moderator and prolific designer, Michael DiTullo. In these tutorials, DiTullo walks you through step by step rapid visualization and ideation techniques to improve your everyday skills. Tired of that guy in the studio who always gets his ideas picked because of his hot sketches? Learn how to beat him at his own game, because the only thing worse than a bad idea sketched well is a great idea sketched poorly.

Sleep Well With Winx Sleep Therapy System

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Winx is an innovative medical device for treating obstructive sleep apnea, a common sleep-related breathing disorder. The system operates by applying a gentle negative pressure through a novel mouthpiece to urge airway-obstructing tissues (soft palate and tongue) forward, thereby keeping the airway open during sleep. Winx consists of a quiet bedside console connected to a fitted mouthpiece with small flexible tubing. The console generates the negative pressure, collects excess saliva, and provides operation and usage feedback. Winx is simple to use, comfortable, quiet, compact, and travel friendly, offering many advantages over the current standard of care (CPAP) by eliminating the need for a facemask, headgear, humidifier and pressurized air. Winx solves a serious problem in a brand new way, representing a good combination of disruptive technology, appropriately simple design, and highly effective clinically proven performance.

View the full content here

Build Your Own Hot Wire Cutter

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Here's a fun project for the long holiday weekend via our discussion boards! Core77er gmay3able recently shared a clever creation of his with our fellow readers much to our delight: a DIY hot wire foam cutter table. 

Check out his sketches and process photos below—

The original sketch
The wire is hooked up to a power supply, as gmay3able writes, "from those red and black terminals on the guitar tuners. Those are 'banana jacks' and I'm using banana leads that are connected to a variable bench top DC power supply."
Hot wire demo

gmay3able writes:

"I wanted to share the process because it's a really easy weekend project and it cut through 5 layers of glued together foam sheets like butter! You'll end up with a powerful tool that will help speed up your foam modeling. This version can cut make cuts up to 28" tall and 16" wide but you can adjust it to be as large as you want. You can cut horizontally or vertically, it's easily adjustable with the corner clamp on the arm that holds the wire, and the hole thing breaks down and fits in the base.

I hope the pictures give more detail on how it works but feel free to ask any questions!"

If you want to take a look at full documentation of the project or ask more questions about how it's made, write your questions below or on the original discussion board

From the Netherlands, a Drone-Supported Hammock (that Probably Isn't Real)

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We, like much of the world, have avoided learning to speak Dutch. To our own detriment. Not only do we only have secondhand access to clever Dutch problem-solving operations, but we can't quite gather what's going on in this commercial of a Netherlands-based tinkerer who has apparently created a drone-supported hammock:

From what we gather via Google Translate, the commercial is from Dutch financial firm Centraal Beheer, and seems to be a farce urging people to save for their retirement in order to realize their dreams. To our Dutch-speaking readers: Is that about the gist of it? Or is this in fact a documentary following a man who has invented very comfortable, flying Ubers?


Tools & Craft #23: All About Iron

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Let's talk about a super-durable material: Iron, the stuff we make our tools from. Here's an overview to make sense of the terms that are used to discuss iron as related to toolmaking.

Iron starts out as ore, which is basically a lump of rust (iron oxide) in one concentration or another. In order to transform this into something workable, you have to separate the iron from the oxygen in a furnace. In the real old days, the way you did this was in what was called a bloomer, where you chop up the ore, mix it with charcoal, set it on fire, and blow air through it to get it hot.

Bloomery iron doesn't get hot enough to really melt the ore, and you end up with a mass of iron and impurities. The mass can be beaten further to force the impurities out (forming wrought iron—see below). This practice hasn't been done on any large scale in the West for hundreds of years, although very small bloomeries operated in the U.S. in the 19th century as a local source of iron. In Japan, swordmaking steel produced from iron ore in the traditional way is made starting with a form of the bloomery process.

The usual method for making iron in the industrial age was using a blast furnace. This wasn't really a subtle process; let's just say that if you lived in a town that had a blast furnace, you were well aware of it.

Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801. Blast furnaces light the iron making town of Coalbrookdale.

To make a blast furnace you basically build a large chimney, fill it with charcoal, lime, and ore, set it on fire, and blow air in the bottom. The ore filters down, losing its oxygen atoms to carbon monoxide, and pure iron, which has a lower melting point, drifts to the bottom of the furnace and gets tapped off as a liquid. Except there is a problem: While the iron was drifting down the inside of the furnace it was collecting some carbon, as big weak flakes of graphite - about 4%. This makes the iron brittle, and we get pig iron from the furnace. 

Pig iron

Pig iron, also know as gray iron, is recast into good, solid, brittle cast iron which is great stuff for table saw tables, and anywhere else you want a big heavy chunk of stable material.

Except cast iron, as cast, isn't stable. As the liquid iron cools, depending on how it cools and depending on the shape of the mold, you can get all sorts of stresses in the iron. Meaning the second you start machining the iron, the stresses come out and your nice casting warps all over the place.

The solution is to age the castings. Basically, toss the casting out in the yard for a few months or years until it naturally stabilizes. This works, but takes too long, so another method needed to be found.

That method is to anneal the casting. You basically heat the casting up in an oven and let it cool very, very slowly so that all of the stresses in the steel can be worked out. Kind of like a spa treatment for metal. This works, and you get a pretty stable casting, which will machine nicely but remain brittle (that pesky 4% of carbon/graphite).

If you still want a cast shape and you need to get rid of the brittleness, there are two approaches you can use: The first is malleable iron. Lots of iron alloy has silicon in it, so when you smelt it the first time you get iron carbide instead of graphite in the iron (known as white iron). But if you stick the white iron in a sealed retort and keep it hot, the iron carbide turns from nasty flakes to little graphite spheres, and the soft iron can flow around the graphite. This type of iron won't break if dropped, but it will deform. This is how modern hand tool companies like Lie-Nielsen make plane bodies that will drop without breaking. Malleable iron has been around since the middle of the 19th century.

Lie-Nielsen handplane

Another way around the breakage problem is called Ductile Iron, a much more recent invention. There are a bunch of ways to do it but the most interesting is a slow continuous annealing of the iron in an oven. It's time consuming and expensive, takes two days in an oven and then the item has to be ground slowly to avoid heat which would change its characteristics. The advantage is that not only is the casting much stronger, it doesn't deform on impact. This is how manufacturer Clifton treats the casting in its planes.

Clifton handplanes. Hey, we sell these!

However, neither method turns iron into something that can be forged into horse shoes, tongs and other useful things. Up until 1855 when the Bessemer process was invented, the only way of getting iron in a form you could forge was to take the ball of iron and slag from the bloomery or blast furnace, heat it up, beat it with sledges until the slag and graphite crystals were squeezed out of it, and then you had wrought iron. 

Wrought iron
Wrought iron

In theory wrought iron is pure iron—which is why it is so soft and welds so easily, but in fact the process left a good many impurities in the iron.

By the middle of the 18th century (I think) you could buy rolled sheets and rods of wrought iron ready to make into whatever. The plane pictured below is by Christopher Gabriel and dates from about 1790. This is when infill planes first begin appearing in quantity in the UK. The sides of the plane are wrought iron and the sole (which you can't see) is blister steel. You can see in the striations of the wrought iron the "grain" that resulted from fragmented impurities left in the iron and it was heated, rolled, folded over, and re-rolled, to remove impurities.

In Japan, old iron from this period is forged into the upper layer of chisels and plane irons and then the impurities are eaten away with acid, leaving a "mokume" decorative texture that looks like wood grain.

In 1855 Bessemer (concurrently with the American Kelly) figured out that if you took melted iron and blew air into it you could get rid of all the impurities very quickly. Then by adding a controlled amount of carbon back in you could make wrought iron—which we now call mild steel.

Mokume chisel by Nishiki

The next topic will be how to take iron and convert it to steel with a cutting edge.

Note: Most of the iron information in this entry I learned form a pamphlet by Jack Chard called "Making Iron & Steel The Historic Processes: 1700-1900", published by the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, 1986.

________________________________________________________

This "Tools & Craft" section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.


Self Conscious of Your Thanksgiving Cooking Skills? You're Probably Better Than a Drone

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Thanksgiving is a time to prove your cooking skills to you friends and family—this can cause anxiety when you've either never cooked a Thanksgiving meal before or if you suffer from self doubt in the kitchen. Feeling like your cooking skills are a few tablespoons below average? Watch this drone struggle to cook a Thanksgiving meal. I promise you'll feel a spike in confidence and will be ready to get cookin' in no time.

This video is a clever promo video for Autel Robotics' X-Star Premium Drone. Instead of getting straight to the amazing aerial footage the drone is capable of shooting, they (naturally) warm you up with veggie prep and pie making. While the drone's propellers are surprisingly efficient at peeling potatoes and carrots, it lacks the precision to cut parsley and keep ingredients in one place while whipping together mashed potatoes—although, the four bowls to one drone ratio is quite amusing.

If you're any better at cooking than the X-Star Premium Drone, have the self confidence in the kitchen you deserve. If you find yourself watching this wondering why we're calling the drone out for struggling, you may want to invest in one before tomorrow...


Check Out OK Go's Spectacularly Chaotic 4.2-Second Music Video

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Happy Thanksgiving! Turn the parade off for a second and feast your eyes on this spectacle: OK Go's "The One Moment," which manages to wring a complete music video around roughly four seconds of meticulously choreographed chaos:

In the making-of video below, we see the crazy amount of planning that went into this, and also learn that no functional guitars were harmed during filming:

The video was funded by Morton Salt to promote their philanthropic "Walk Her Walk" initiative. Next Tuesday the 29th, they're participating in the #GivingTuesday movement, which urges consumers--after the shop-a-thons of Black Friday and Cyber Monday--to "raise money for local nonprofits, schools and arts organizations; run food and clothing drives; teach children about philanthropy; encourage acts of kindness; collaborate with their neighbors; and celebrate generosity." You can learn more here.


Design Job: That's a Wrap! Garven Design Group is Hiring a Senior Designer in Minneapolis, MN

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Looking for a Senior Designer who has experience working on products sold to mass retail that require a great eye for pattern, technique, and color designs that are trending with consumers and retailers. We are not looking for ad agency or web media experience. We are looking for

View the full design job here

Live in the Bubble: SNL's Bold Experiment in Conflict-Free Living

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Happy Thanksgiving! But let's face facts: Some of you are dreading today's dinner table conversations, which can quickly devolve into heated, alcohol-fueled political debates tinged with poisonous familial rancor. So the good folks at Saturday Night Live have partnered with Target to provide you with a way out:

Need more escape than that? Be the first to sign up for SNL's bold experiment in urban planning, The Bubble:


What to Do When Your Thanksgiving Turkey Bursts Into Flames

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As I write this it's 8:15am in Manhattan on Thanksgiving morning, and it's dead quiet. But I know what's coming: By mid-afternoon I'll start hearing fire truck sirens. Each Thanksgiving a subset of families take their eyes off of the ball and experience turkey fires like this one:

If it's a grease fire you cannot throw water on it, of course; that will simply cause it to spread. So in contrast to the two guys freaking out in the video above, watch how calmly the woman in the video below handles her grease fire:

Morton Salt sponsored that OK Go music video, and here's another reason to keep their product close at hand.


Reader Submitted: Keep Pet Bathing Under Control With Aquapaw

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Everyone that owns a pet knows first-hand that pet bathing is a struggle. Aquapaw was founded on the idea that there is an opportunity to eliminate much of the time and stress involved in this chore through great product design.

The Aquapaw Bathing Tool is a one-size-fits-all combination sprayer/scrubber that straps to the user's hand and is turned on and off by pressing the button in the palm or by making a fist. Because the tool is slim and flexible, it allows the user to have instantaneous control over the flow of water while also giving them the ability to use both their hands during the bath to keep control of their pet.

View the full project here
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