The Grass Scanner is a product (hypothetical, I believe) dreamed up by designer Alice Wang. She offers this description:
In wealthier neighbourhoods, the size of the house and how well maintained the garden is, often represents status. The Grass Scanner is a device designed to measure how green the grass is. It takes reading from 3 random patches of the grass and outputs a Pantone* colour code for one to reference and compare. With the codes, one can then refer to the PARKTONE** cards which contains true grass colours of Royal Parks and other green areas in the UK for people to match up with their own garden.
Where it might fail is on fake lawns, which are becoming increasingly popular here in Southern California. Though fake lawns aren't cheap, so having one might indicate a moderate level of status. (via
We Make Money Not Art)
If only you had been reading
Popular Mechanics magazine for February 1929! Then you could have purchased the same
Purple Ray healing device that Wonder Woman uses! Okay, so it was a "Violet Ray." Same difference, right?
Alex's Jesus Toilet post reminded me of this great
WIRED article from a few years ago, about toilet technology.
It so happens that toilet engineers need to simulate excrement for testing purposes. Here's just a couple of the things they use:
I came across two unusual photographs of gas masks while browsing in the library recently. The first is from 1939 (from the collection
Photohistory of the 20th Century). The caption reads:
This bizarre photograph of a scantily clad London chorus girl wearing her gas mask was used as part of the official campaign to take the terror out of wearing gas masks. One of the great British fears at the beginning of World War II was that the country would be attacked from the air, with poison gas. Gas masks -- 38 million of them -- were distributed to all civilians, men, women, children and babies. Government propaganda stressed the importance of becoming familiar with their use.
I doubt the image did much to take the terror out of gas masks, but I'm sure it made the fetish crowd happy.
The second photo is from
Scientific American (October, 1922). The caption reads:
This mask enables its wearer to work for half an hour in atmospheres laden with noxious gas.
Coincidentally, this very much resembles the uniform worn by the staff of Weird Universe while we work.
When I first saw the ad for this device in the pages of
Scientific American, I thought it was a joke. But it's true. For only 1.5 times the price of a 2008 Hyundai Accent--a whopping $14,615--you can buy a machine that does everything you can do with a jump rope, two cinder blocks, the branch of a tree and a bicycle tire inner tube.
If you can't wait to purchase it, visit
Fast Exercise now.