Came across this priceless video of the current Macau SAR’s chief executive, Mr. Fernando Chui, being sworn in. His Mandarin is unbearably bad, so some prankster had taken the liberty and subtitled it with just about the worse words one can use, given his mispronunciations. So he’s shown essentially in the video talking about fecal matter, pants not fitting, and a sick Dad frying cheese – to the Chinese President Hu Jin Tao.

My mandarin isn’t perfect, but if I’m the chief executive, I’d at least learn how to say my own name, the place I’m running, and the place I report to correctly.

And on the note of good Mandarin speaker, here’s a clip of the Australian PM Kevin Rudd at APEC2007.

Boys with Toys

Came across Vrogy’s photo stream on Flickr. What do you do when you mix a CAD guy, a CNC mill and a cosplaying geek? A website where you can download Solidworks model of the Halo3 sniper rifle, among other things.

And speaking of boys and projectile weapons, here’s an old video of a Rufus Hussey, the “Bean Shooter Man”. Mr. Hussey passed away in the 1990s, so this must be (judging from the Pepsi cans) quite an old video.

And here’s a modern day German guy by the name of Joerg Sprave that designs some really out of this world slingshots, complete with compound ball bearings and load balancing yokes.

Mujahid Abdulrahim at the University of Florida has an SAE white paper on the sports of drifting:

Same dude also has 1000fps footage from a Phantom High Speed camera of Mini-Z racers crashing on YouTube. What a cool guy.

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TechRestore has a cool series of stop-motion photography of various gadgets being unboxed, disassembled and reassembled. Here’s one of the iPhone 3GS going under the knife. They have a behind the scenes look at how these are done here.

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Tormach CNC has a really innovative tool in beta – combining a USB microscope with a CNC mill. It’s part vision based CMM, part machine setup tool. The last part is key – you can reverse engineer a part, and machine a new part using the same tool to setup / reference features already on an existing part.

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Food:

Garett Kern, of Garett’s Table, has a totally out of this world take on the classic Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.

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Food Pairing is an awesome website for exploring different food pairing options.

They belong to a class of flying machines called quadcopters – made only possible with recent advances in MEMS electronics (specifically, accelerometers, electronic gyros, and microprocessors). These are classic examples of fly-by-wire machines where a computer evaluates the flying conditions thousands of times per second and provides mid-course corrections, while a human pilot tells the computer where he or she wants to go.

http://aeroquad.info/bin/view
- an Arduino-based quad-copter, built from Align 600-series helicopter tail booms, brushless motors and propellers. An Align T-Rex600′s landing skid provides lander support.

http://quaduino.org/
- Another Arduino quad copter. Looks like a custom airframe.