As the Papal Conclave happens in Rome, the cardinals spend their days in the Sistine Chapel. Here is a very cool VR of the inside of the chapel.

io9:

The relatively cheap shipping container is a good foundation for a strong, mobile, and post-apocalyptic home. In the last two decades, architects have been incorporating shipping containers into everything from schools to houses — for aesthetic reasons, but also out of economic necessity. Here are some of their most eye-catching creations.

You’d think living in a shipping container means your life couldn’t get much worse but take a look at some of these beautiful and innovative homes and tell me you wouldn’t want to live in any one of them.

Boing Boing:

Imagine my delight when I happened to discover Netflix had added the legendary ‘50s TV show, “You Bet Your Life” to its streaming service. The reason for my delight? The host of “You Bet Your Life” was none other than my grandfather, the one and only Groucho Marx.

But I also couldn’t stop thinking about how close every one of those classic episodes of “You Bet Your Life” came to being destroyed many years ago and how my grandfather and I managed to stop that from happening.

I’ve always been a huge Marx Brothers’ fan and especially of Groucho Marx. I’ve only ever seen short clips of “You Bet Your Life” but I’m happy to hear they were saved and are on Netflix!

The Wirecutter:

If I wanted to spend less than $700, the Canon Rebel T4i…would be my pick — but first I’d have to decide if I’d even want a DSLR to begin with.

Here’s the rub: if you’re newly making the switch to a lens-based system, and don’t plan on going pro, it’s really debatable if you even want a DSLR. While the format has some advantages, there’s very little that an entry-level DSLR can do that a new Mirrorless camera can’t do just as well while taking up much less space.

I would agree with this reviewer. If you’re looking at a budget DSLR, make sure you take a long hard look at the crop of (very good) Mirrorless cameras on the market today.

Gadling:

If I ruled the world, I would issue a decree commanding every hotel to install minibars stocked with $2 bottles of beer. But since that’s never going to happen, you might have to go to Nicaragua to experience such an enlightened minibar alcohol policy.

Two dollars is actually a pretty high price for a beer in Nicaragua, where most places charge $1 for a 12-ounce bottle of local beer. The Hotel Plaza Colon is an outstanding hotel and room rates there hover around $100 a night.

I might look at Nicaragua for my next big boy vacation! Any Loopers ever vacationed in the country?

NPR:

It says a lot about SXSW’s size and scope that this “sampler” of the annual music festival spans six and a half hours, but here we are: 100 songs by 100 artists worth discovering at this year’s big event.

Handpicked from among thousands of artists, this genre-traversing playlist picks highlights, discoveries and future thrills from this year’s festival — and, for the next 30 days, it’s available for free download in its entirety, as one 813 MB zip file, right here.

As much as many of us hate the hype surrounding the SXSW conference, there is often some very good “undiscovered” bands and music at the show. Thanks to Dan Frakes for the heads up.

Gadling:

we’re all familiar with the rampant theft of towels and linen from hotel rooms – in fact, the problem is so widespread that some hotels have resorted to inserting tracking devices in their linens to stop the thievery.

However, it seems some hotel guests will steal just about anything that’s not nailed down (and some things that are). A poll of Britons uncovered a surprising array of goods pilfered regularly from hotel rooms.

I get the occasional towel and certainly the toiletries but the curtains? And who the hell steals the Bible!? Which part of the Commandment “Though shalt not steal” is unclear to these people?

The Guardian:

The sky-high price of printer ink – measure for measure more expensive than vintage champagne – has been well documented. Less well-known is the fact that the amount of ink in the average cartridge has shrunk dramatically.

A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for about £20. Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13.

Cut open a HP inkjet cartridge and you’ll find what is going on.

This is a European report but there’s no reason to believe it’s not the same for cartridges sold here in North America.

The Wirecutter:

Google just announced its first premium Chromebook, the Chromebook Pixel. It’s gorgeous. Unfortunately, it’s so expensive that I can’t think of a single person who should get one.

If you have the money to spend on the Pixel and you need the kind of hardware it’s packing, you have so many other better options.

This may be the future of “cloud based” laptops but in the here and now, this is an extravagant machine.

Esquire:

What happened to the America that once was? What happened to the America where kids could spend their snow-days at the local sledding hill, without cell phones in their snow-pants, laughing at their friends’ face-plants, throwing snowballs, and making the same yellow-snow jokes that their grandfathers made when they too were a bunch of rapscallions running through the slush?

That America exists no more in Paxton, Illinois. Because the Paxton Park District’s insurance provider ruled that its sledding hill is too risky. “The insurance would have skyrocketed if someone was hurt,” a parks board member told The Champaign News-Gazette.

One of the commenters said, “The park board ought to be able to erect a sign at the hill that says “Sled at your own risk.” How about NOT suing people because your kid got hurt horsing around, as kids will do? When I was a kid in Canada, I broke my leg playing on a local hill. There was never any discussion of a lawsuit.

NPR:

Check out this video of Brooklyn-based songwriter-producer-artist extraordinaire Jonathan Dagan, better known as J.Viewz, playing a beautiful — and just plain awesome — cover of Massive Attack’s 1998 hit “Teardrop” on a variety of fruits and vegetables.

MIND. BLOWN. (thanks to Moeskido for the link!)

The Lumio Illuminated Book:

The name Lumio is inspired by the idea of an illuminated book. The light turns on when you open the cover and turns off when it’s closed. Lumio illuminates when you need light and stows away compactly when unused, ideal for modern living.

I’m not a fan of Kickstarter projects but this is one I’d support if I had the money!

WiseGEEK:

Some foods have significantly more calories than others but what does the difference actually look like? When you consider that an entire plate of broccoli contains the same number of calories as a small spoonful of peanut butter, you might think twice the next time you decide what to eat.

As a guy on a diet, this is an interesting series of photographs.

CNET:

The magic of physics can turn the mundane into something marvelous. Mark French, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, designed a supersonic air-powered ping-pong ball cannon.

A ping-pong ball reportedly blasts out of the special cannon at speeds equivalent to Mach 1.23 — nearly as fast as an F-16 fighter jet. As evidenced in the video below, the high-speed ball can put a clean hole through a plywood paddle, a VHS tape, and other objects.

How to make science cool – destroy stuff!

TreeHugger:

The recent death of John E Karlin of Bell Labs, the father of the push-button phone and other innovations, has sparked a lot of reminiscing about land line phones. According to the New York Times, Karlin was also “the most hated man in America” for killing the named exchanges (like Butterfield 8). However the story of how our phone numbers got to be the way they are is a much longer and more interesting one.

Fascinating story of the history of phone numbers.

Co.Exist:

San Francisco’s Bay Bridge is the dollar store version of the famed Golden Gate Bridge. Before the Bay Bridge closes down this summer for final touches on the new, safer eastern span, the bridge is getting gussied up by artist Leo Villareal, who is individually programming 25,000 white LED lights to generate an endless series of sparkling patterns across the structure.

“Bay Lights”…will be the world’s largest light sculpture upon its completion in March.

The utilitarian Bay Bridge is the ugly stepchild of San Francisco bridges, always coming up short in comparison to the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. Hopefully this project isn’t just putting lipstick on a pig.

USAToday:

PepsiCo on Monday announced it is rolling out “a new way to do mornings” with Kickstart, a fruit-flavored Mountain Dew beverage.

“Our consumers told us they are looking for an alternative to traditional morning beverages – one that tastes great, includes real fruit juice and has just the right amount of kick to help them start their days,” said Greg Lyons, Mountain Dew’s vice president of marketing.

Kickstart has far less caffeine than energy drinks — 92 milligrams for a 16-ounce can. By comparison, a 16-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee has 330 milligrams of caffeine.

Does anyone really want a “morning beverage” that tastes like “Mountain Dew and fruit juice” that has even less caffeine than their coffee?

Gadling:

Chinese New Year is the one time of year when everyone returns to their home villages to see family members and it’s been called the largest annual human migration in the world.

Some Chinese who can’t get train or plane tickets find creative ways to get home for the holiday. China Daily reports that one adventurous soul took a scenic route home, using “48 buses, a ferry, a free ride and his own feet to carry him 660km to his home town.”

You think traveling around the US is hard at Thanksgiving? It’s a cakewalk compared to the insanity in China this time of year.

Laughing Squid:

In the Brazilian town of Santo Antônio da Platina, spiders known as Anelosimus eximius were shot by Erick Reis as they showered the sky. Marta Fischer, a local biologist, is quoted at G1 as saying (translated), “…They are usually in trees during the day and in the late afternoon and early evening construct a sort of sheet webs, each makes his and then they come together. The goal is to capture insects.” She also says this phenomenon is normal.

Normal? NORMAL!? There’s nothing “normal” about thousands of spiders just hanging around in the evening sky!

io9:

Like so many couples, the husband and wife in Timothy Reckart’s Oscar-nominated animated short Head Over Heels have drifted apart, not just emotionally, but gravitationally as well. They roam their flying house, one living on the ceiling, one living on the floor, each barely acknowledging the other’s existence. Then, one day, the husband tries to reconnect with his ceiling-dwelling wife, setting in motion a chain of events that radically alter their existence.

Have some tissues handy. Your eyes are going to leak.

Esquire:

Beer is made by way of science. So it makes sense that a beer’s vessel should be constructed through science, too. And it makes perfect sense that the top craft pale-ale seller in the nation Sierra Nevada, and cultish extreme-beer fiends Dogfish Head — two companies that have gone to great lengths to make science improve their brews — collaborated with German glassmakers Spiegelau to engineer a glass specifically for the drinking of IPAs.

Serious beer drinkers know the shape and style of glass you drink your beer from can affect the taste of the beer itself.

DudeFoods:

What if I were to make a grilled cheese sandwich that used this cheese in place of bread? A grilled cheese sandwich that was 100% cheese!

I like cheese more than any mouse but even I think this “sandwich” is a heart attack starter kit.

The University of Queensland:

The first Professor of Physics at the University of Queensland, Professor Thomas Parnell, began an experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties. The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar once used for waterproofing boats. At room temperature pitch feels solid – even brittle – and can easily be shattered with a blow from a hammer. It’s quite amazing then, to see that pitch at room temperature is actually fluid!

You’ve heard the term “slower than molasses”? Apparently, pitch is even slower. (thanks to @JennS79 for the link)

Mental Floss:

Every country has place names that make you scratch your head and say, “What were they thinking?” So I looked up what they may have been thinking when these places in Canada got their names.

Wired:

In 1947, Chuck Yeager strapped himself into the experimental Bell X-1 “bullet with wings” and broke the sound barrier 8 miles above the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Paul Larsen sees himself as following squarely in Yeager’s footsteps. To become the fastest sailor in the world, he’s going to have to break through the nautical equivalent of the sound barrier—the so-called 50-knot barrier (about 57 miles per hour).

“(The SailRocket Mark 2) is 50 percent plane, 50 percent boat,” Larsen explains. “If for some reason she lost the keel at speed,” Larsen explains, “than she really would be a plane, wouldn’t she?” The prototype version of SailRocket, Mark 1, actually did take off into the air, and Larsen survived what may be the most spectacular crash in sailing history.

I love sailing and sailboats but I don’t think there’s enough money in the world to get me into this fragile looking thing as it does 60 knots.

This is such a wonderfully weird video. It’s a pretty common thing to see on DVD – a blooper reel of actors messing up. What’s weird about it is that the bloopers are from the video game, L.A. Noire, and are motion captured.

Lifehacker:

For the extremely willpower-impaired (or the super-serious about exercise), this hack uses a FitBit activity tracker and a Belkin WeMo internet-controlled power outlet to make sure you exercise every day. If you don’t meet your daily activity goals, the system cuts the power to anything plugged into it, offering some serious incentive to get off the couch.

Charalampos, writing at Building Internet of Things came up with this idea as a way to combine the activity tracking capabilities of the FitBit with an severe punishment for not exercising. He chose his fridge as his “workout hostage,” so if he didn’t exercise, his food might spoil.

This is brilliant. We could hook it up to The Publisher’s Heineken fridge – he’d dropped 50lbs in 6 months.

Wired:

If you’re not a hockey fan, you may not know the red light’s iconic flashing, spinning glow and horn sound that accompany every goal.

The Budweiser Red Light works by connecting to your Wi-Fi network. After configuring the device with an Android or iPhone app to tell it what teams you are rooting for, it sits sleeping in your rec room. When a game is on, it wakes up and starts listening over the network for a score. When the puck goes in the net, the light goes crazy.

“We are not joking: It’s real, it works and you can buy it,” says the Budweiser Canada homepage.

Yes, it’s real – and every Canadian wants one!

Normann Szkop:

The tulip has come to be a loved symbol of the Netherlands. Many tourists visit the country just to see the bright coloured flower and the astonishing view over the bulb fields. The season begins in March with crocuses, followed by the daffodil and the yellow narcissi.

This is a great photographic example of the idea of taking something we are familiar with and looking at it from different angle.