Fight For Your Mind

Imagine you lived in a San Francisco home like the one below, on a downhill one-way street, and drove a stickshift. Assuming you pull into the garage head-on, that means every morning you need to back out in reverse and uphill, all while watching out for the oncoming cars that will require you hit the brake and the clutch mid-maneuver. I guarantee you're going to stall out at least a few times a month, not to mention ride the clutch a bit more than you ought.

Inside the same house we see the solution being built:

In this morning's car photography post, we caught a glimpse of the automotive turntables that we know from car dealerships, auto shows and the Batcave. Now we'll take a peek at the work of Carousel USA, one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of the devices, started by a mechanically-inclined guy named John Thomson.

I find this MRI cross section of leg muscles utterly fascinating (and sobering).

(via JayParkinson)

For many years, most of the Internet ran on ASCII, a character set that had a limited number of accents and diacriticals, and which didn't support non-Roman script at all. Unicode, a massive, sprawling replacement, has room for all sorts of characters and alphabets, and can be extended with "private use areas" that include support for Klingon.

But for all that, I never dreamt that Unicode was so vast as to contain a special character for a "pile of poo."

Name: PILE OF POO
Block: Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs
Category: Symbol, Other [So]
Index entries: POO, PILE OF
Comments: dog dirt
Version: Unicode 6.0.0 (October 2010)
HTML Entity: 💩

Here is "Pile of Poo" in whatever font your browser renders this page in: 💩

Unicode Character 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9)