Following right on the heels of yesterday’s grisly post comes another neodymium link, but this one replaces “grisly” with cool Cool Tools on the NeoCube. I want one.

P.S. NOT for little kids. Having one in one part of your intestine and another in another part, and having them lodged because they attract each other through the intestinal walls would not be good. See, couldn’t quite avoid the “grisly” when dealing with these suckers.

Just yesterday I was talking to my dad and brother about how painful it can be to catch your finger between two neodymium (rare earth) magnets, and that was just talking about little ones. Then, today, what should cross my aggregator but these very graphic images of Dirk’s accident. He had his fingertip crushed off when two of his large magnets slammed together. He thought he was safe because they were almost two feet apart before it happened. (via waxy)

Twitch has the trailer for Thai movie Fireball. Oh my. “Full contact basketball to the death.” That has the potential to be gleefully bad.

The Big Picture has a fantastic set up, Scenes from Pakistan. The great photography is offset by the grim news:

The government of Pakistan announced on Monday that it would accept Islamic Sharia Law to be implemented in its Swat Valley region, as part of a truce with local Taliban leaders. Militants had been demanding Sharia law, attacking opponents, burning scores of girls' schools and banning many forms of entertainment. Gun battles between Pakistani security forces and militants have killed hundreds, while up to a third of the valley’s 1.5 million people have fled.

3D printers, “machines that use inkjet print-heads to spray layer after layer of a UV curable liquid that hardens into a solid”, were used for some of the model making in Coraline. So Coraline ended up having 200,000 facial expressions at her disposal, while Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas only had around 800. Here’s a featurette on the subject on YouTube (also embedded in the article).

I confess, I usually skip the fiction in The New Yorker, but how could I pass up a mere 1,500-word alien invasion

The NYTimes just rolled out a prototype of an alternative skimmer interface for browsing their headlines. Very clean.

Two quick hits in defense of Michael Phelps: What Michael Phelps Should Have Said and Boycott Kellogg’s.

I just watched James Howard Kunstler’s TED Talk on suburbia. Grade A rant. I remember my architecture professors decrying the same stuff. Bad architecture is insidious.

Michael Lewis is one of those guys I’ll always read. He has a new piece out on Shane Battier. I haven’t read it yet because I want to print it out and my printer isn’t available at the moment, but such is my confidence in him that I’ll link it up now anyway.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Inglourious Basterds has a trailer. I have misgivings, but QT rarely lets me down.

I saw Coraline with Amelia yesterday, and it was excellent. We agreed, not scary per se, but it had creepiness to burn. Anyway, via neilhimself, the “making of” featurettes that will be on the DVD have been released on YouTube, including a bit on the remarkable microknitting.

P.S. I wonder if Pixar can hold off on releasing Up until 2010 so they can both win best animated feature?