Followed some links about papercraft. Apparently a guy in Japan has spent four years assembling a papercraft castle, complete with electric lighting and a train.

I told myself I wasn’t going to post a link to today’s post on 8bit today, but as usual, some of these are really good, and it takes all of twenty seconds to flip through them.

—Felipe Cama

—Tomby

Seen on Planet Debian: ‘Can you get cp to give a progress bar like wget?’ The solution starts:

#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
{
   strace -q -ewrite cp -- "${1}" "${2}" 2>&1 \
...

The author notes in the comments:

If you feel the need to point out an alternative solution, then you have missed the entire point by a wide margin.

—lamby

Seen via True Chip Till Death: asciimeo is awesome. Like Vimeo, only.. ascii.

No embed URLs. Instead, check this video.

Seen via True Chip Till Death: poster for the upcoming 8 Bit Alliance tour!

First show is this Friday. I’m super excited!

Seen on pixelstyle: this poster.

Be sure to come to Pulsewave this Saturday! Ha ha..

Via Tayeb, some cool pictures of snow.

Snow being cleared from the Trans-Labrador Highway in northeastern Canada:

Thanks Suzanne — this Boing Boing article about Matthew Albanese’s miniature photography.

"Matthew Albanese [is] a photographer who builds meticulously detailed landscape models and then lights and shoots them to achieve amazing realism. My personal favorite is the Martian landscape made from paprika and charcoal." Also show here: Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss.

Via Suzanne, this article on the sculpture of Ron Mueck.

Gus mentioned to me that the USGS collects earthquake data. Among other things, they will tell you the last earthquake in New York (or any other state) and show you a seismic hazard map of New York (or any other state if you follow the link from their by-state index). However, in trying to find a "last five or ten earthquakes in New York" feed, I stumbled on the Earthquake Facts and Statistics page, which contains this gem:

We detect, but generally do not locate, about 50 mine blasts (explosions) throughout the United States on any given business day. These blasts typically occur between noon and 6 PM local time Monday through Saturday. Of these, about one event every two days is large enough that we compute a location for the blast and post it to a separate explosions listing.

(See a map here.)

You guys! You bunch of crazy scientists.