You may have heard of the SawStop; it’s a safety device for table saws that can instantly stop the blade if it comes in contact with a finger, preventing injury. Until now the videos I’ve seen have involved hot dogs being saved from grievous injury. But in this Discovery channel clip, SawStop’s inventor puts his actual finger where his mouth is.

Madness. He’s gotta have quite a bit of confidence in his engineering, but also whoever does his manufacturing and QA. Remind me never to invent anything that guarantees you can fall into a wood chipper and come out the other side unscathed. I doubt they’d be able to air that on the Discovery Channel.

(via core77)

Neil Gaiman’s Coraline gets the Henry Selick treatment. Could be a very, very nice pairing of author and director.

Interesting take on Jim Carrey’s body of work:

Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? “There’s another man within me, that’s angry with me,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, three and a half centuries before the scene in Liar Liar where the hero stuffs his own head into the toilet bowl.

The Truman Show was released 10 years ago. I’m due for a rewatch.

Roger Ebert, accused of not reviewing Ben Stein’s movie Expelled because he (Ebert) believes in evolution, responds by crushing Stein like a bug. Love his take on “Premise” Media.

Check out Dabble DB folks' new tool, Magic/Replace. Be sure to watch the video. Magic is just about right. I need to find some data to clean up.

Here’s my internal monologue upon reviewing the cool new Mathematica Image Processing features:

“Wow, that’s really cool, I can’t believe only a few lines of code can take a"goose video”:http://blog.wolfram.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/geese.mov and"animate it":http://blog.wolfram.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/geesecolored.mov. Very impressive. I’d like to play with that. I wonder how much it costs… Oof. $2,500. Let me see, I don’t have Mathematica, but lets calculate what percentage of my salary that is… Rats."

Looks like I’ll stick with SpeedCrunch for now.

Al Franken is closing the gap in MN, he may even be ahead. With this back on my radar, it reminds me of this great MPR series on challenged ballots. Not to pick on Franken (I hope he wins), but check this one out:

The Franken campaign challenged this ballot. Even though the voter filled in the bubble next to Barkley’s name, a Franken representative said what appear to be eraser marks over Franken’s bubble indicated the voter intended to vote for Franken. (MPR Photo/Curtis Gilbert)

That one might be the most egregious, but there’s plenty of shame to go around.

Ridiculously good: the trailer for Quantum of Wallace. (via andrew sullivan)

Andrew Sullivan aptly likens the ton-of-bricks-on-the-head trick to the work Obama has ahead of him. No doubt, especially doing it in bare feet. The price of failure is high.

Marvel at the H.O. Studley Tool Chest. Studly, indeed:

Considering how many tools it holds, the famous chest is really quite small; when closed, it is just 9 in. deep, 39 in. high, and just more than 18 in. wide. Yet it houses so many tools — some 300 — so densely packed that three strong men strain to lift it.

For every tool, Studley fashioned a holder to keep it in place and to showcase it. Miniature wrenches, handmade saws, and some still unidentified piano-making tools each have intricate inlaid holders. Tiny clasps rotate out of the way so a tool can be removed. In places the clearances are so tight that the tools nearly touch. The chest, which hangs on ledgers secured to a wall, folds closed like a book. And as the chest is closed, tools protruding from the left side nestle into spaces between tools on the right side. Amazingly, despite being so densely packed, the tools are all easily accessible.

There’s a poster.

Two gift guides I look forward to are up: Hackszine and Core77.

Joseph Sullivan at The Book Design Review picks his favorite book covers of 2008. The Obsession cover needs a closer look to fully appreciate.