Well, their homes exist anyway. WTFsrsly reports that a family in Wales has built their house out of natural materials, and it closely resembles a home for hobbits! The house was built to keep the visual impact on the land minimal, so it is built into a hill. Check out the article and photos.

Andrew Lipson has created a number of models of M. C. Escher’s illustrations using Legos. My favorite is “Relativity”, but he has also done “Balcony”, “Belvedere”, “Ascending and Descending”, and “Waterfall”. Many of these are physically impossible, strictly speaking, so the use of perspective is required to “trick” the viewer into seeing the impossible as possible. Not only does Andrew show photos of the finished models, but he also shows progress photos and explains how he constructed each one. They are quite amazing!

In case you were wondering what to do in an emergency (such as a terrorist attack), just follow these signs. My favorite:

Try to absorb as much of the radiation as possible with your groin region. The current world record is 5 minutes, 12 seconds.

Other emergency situations include fire, terrorist attacks and nuclear warfare. More Emergency Signs

This happens about once every couple of years in Texas, but we have a snow day today! It’s really more of an ice day… it has been raining and got cold enough to freeze over. Today we’re getting some icy rain/snow and all the businesses and schools are closed because here in Texas we can’t handle a little bit of ice. Woohoo!

On April 13th, 2029, an asteroid is on course to come within 18,600 miles of hitting Earth, according to NASA. That’s closer than the orbit of satellites. The asteroid is about 320 meters in diameter, large enough to go through the Earth’s atmosphere, “devastating a region the size of, say, Texas”. I love how asteroids are often compared to the size of Texas if they were to hit there. Since I live in Texas, I’d rather not have the mental image of it being destroyed. Regardless, this does sound like a pretty close call, and may end up being a cool light show.

It is just sad how little the people over at Verizon understand math. They don’t see a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. It just boggles the mind how much some people in the US need real education. A person should not be in the position of quoting prices for services when they don’t understand the simple concept of units.

To see what I’m talking about, check out this blog. The initial experience and phone call is here. It describes the experience of a person who was quoted 0.002 cents per kb for the data rate in Canada. When his bill came, it was instead 0.002 dollars per kb. He goes on to call customer service and cannot get anyone at Verizon to understand that there is a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. Read the first post and listen to the audio to see what I’m talking about. The person was surprisingly patient enough to try to explain to multiple people the difference between the two prices.

Will it Blend? is the best viral marketing I’ve seen. There have been a series of videos posted on YouTube which basically throw different objects into a blender by BlendTec and see if it will blend them. Here is one of the impressive ones… 50 marbles. Watch the video to see what happens:

After seeing a few of these videos, my husband and I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a blender like that. Our blender had a hard time blending ice for smoothies. So we decided to pay the high price for a BlendTec blender. I don’t regret buying it at all! We tried blending just ice by itself, and it came out like a snow cone! It is great for smoothies, but it also acts like a food processor. I can only imagine how many sales the company has gained from posting those videos.

Update: Check out more ‘Will it Blend?’ videos on WillItBlend.com. Recent videos include blending an iPod and a nutcracker.