Only in Japan: Bubble Wrap Toy

via Gizmodo…

“…the pocket device simulates the feel of popping bubble wrap while using a tiny speaker to make that ever so satisfying popping noise. What bubble wrap aficionados will find disturbing, however, is that every 100 pops bestows the user with a fart, barking dog, door chime or sexy voice.”

Get it here.

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MobiTV in Time Magazine!

Despite my general policy of separating this blog from my day job, I can’t resist a plug for MobiTV’s latest public relations home run. Everyone should run out and get a copy of Time Magazine’s latest issue.

Jason and Nicole from our PR department scored us a 5 page gate-fold spread on why people work at MobiTV. You can see the online version here, but do check out the hardcopy to get the full page photo-impressions of many of the awesome people who make MobiTV such a fantastic place to work.

Here are a couple links from the Time online site:

Programming Provocateurs

Thursday, Mar. 08, 2007 By COCO MASTERS

What draws workers to MobiTV? A hot technology, a cool company and maybe even a big payoff.

Portrait of Jason Mikami inside the network operations
closet of MobiTV, in Emeryville, Calif., February 2007.

TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD for TIME

Pining for a White Christmas? More on Snowflakes

Over the course of the last few months, it turns out that one of the most popular posts here on All the Best Bits was the one entitled: A Snowflake Closeup. So in honor of the season, here is some more on snowflake science.

Some folks from Caltech have posted Snowcrystals.com, a great site to learn all things snow related, including a great taxonomy of ice and snow crystals and more snowflake photos than you can shake a candy-cane at.

Rube-Goldberg Honda Ad

If you didn’t happen to catch this when it was live on television, YouTube has come to the rescue. Check out this amazing Rube-Goldberg machine from a couple-year-old Honda ad:

“This Advertisement for the new Honda Accord was shot in real time with no CGI involved in the sequence. It required 606 takes and cost $6 million to shoot and took 3 months to complete.

The equipment was so precisely set up that the crew literally had to tip toe around the set for fear of disturbing things, which led to some unexpected problems. “As the day went on, the studio would get hotter,” says Steiner. “It meant that the wood would expand and the cog or exhaust that spins around would move slightly faster.” These tiny changes made big differences to the precision set-up of the equipment……

…..The sequence where the tires roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. Steiner says that there is a weight in each tire and when the tire is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tire rolls up the slope.”

source: steelcitysfinest.com

Colliding Galaxies: The heart of the Antennae

From NASA:

The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

Mars Orbiter Images Mars Rover From Orbit

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of Victoria Crater. Victoria is an impact crater about 800m (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity is the dot at the centre of the zoomed image. (Nasa/JPL/UA)

Rocketbelt Convention 2006

Wow.

More photos and links here.