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THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST and corresponding book by Klara Hobza is a multifaceted artwork inspired by a historic paper airplane contest that took place in 1967 at the Great Hall in what is now the New York Hall of Science. Built by Wallace K. Harrison to display rockets in the 1964 World’s Fair, the Great Hall is a secular cathedral of concrete and colored glass; for Hobza’s one-day event, this unique location will harbor aircraft of a different scale.

The competition is open to the public, and participants are invited to fly their planes in any and all of the judging categories listed below:

• Distance flown (measured in a straight line from start point to finish point)

• Duration aloft (measured from time released to time it lands on any surface)
• Beauty (subjective measurement based on judges’ assessment of both the plane’s physical qualities and the beauty of the flight itself; this category does not depend on distance flown or duration aloft)
• Spectacular Failure (subjective measurement based on the audience’s assessment of both the plane’s physical qualities and the most spectacular crashes)
• Children’s division (competition for participants under ages 13)
• Surprise category

Airplanes may be folded from letter-size paper, up to 8.5″ x 11″ / A4, or smaller; larger sizes are not allowed. The paper should be an average office paper (20-24 lb weight). Cutting and minor gluing of your airplane is permitted; stapling is not.

Visit the Public Art Fund site for preregistration and additional info – New Millenium Paper Airplane Contest

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When I was working for Wired, we coined the term jitteratti (what the digerati become after too many cups of coffee). Caffeine and tech journalism (all journalism, for that matter) seem to go hand-in-hand. So it’s sort of fitting that Wired is doing a Starbucks art contest. The idea is to make something cool and interesting exclusively out of Starbucks junk (cups, stirrers, drink holders, etc). Tape, glue, and string are allowed. There doesn’t appear to be any prize for the winner, except coverage on the site. C’mon Wired, pony up something decent.

To inspire you, Wired posted this incredible TIE Fighter, made by Wired photographer Dan Winters.

Contest: Make Art From Starbuck’s Junk [via Bonnie Burton's Twitter feed]

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At Maker Faire Austin, Evil Mad Scientist Labs was demonstrating some really simple and useful circuits powered by solar cells. Today, they’ve posted the details on their site.

Interruption-resistant direct drive:
The “direct drive” circuits work well for their design function, but are rather basic. They provide no energy storage, and so are quite vulnerable to blinking out when a bird or cloud passes overhead. For some applications, like running a small fan or pump, that may be perfectly acceptable. For other cases, like powering a microcontroller or other computer, a brief power interruption can be disruptive. Our next circuit design adds a supercapacitor as a “flywheel” to provide continued power during brief interruptions.

Adding a microcontroller:
Our last circuit examples extend the previous designs by adding a small AVR microcontroller. We use the voltage output from the solar panel again to perform darkness detection, but instead take it to an analog input of the microcontroller. The microcontroller is potentially a very low current, efficient device that lets you save power by not running the LED all the time, but (for example) waiting until an hour or two after darkness and/or fading the LEDs on or off, or even intermittently blinking for very low average power consumption.

Simple Solar Circuits

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This is a really cool project posted by our friends over at instructables.com. Learn how to make it here.

Of course if you have the skills to make something like this be sure to enter our huge Halloween DIY Contest when you have the chance. Time is running out!

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“A U.S. entrepreneur takes tropical tourists down deep – in an uninsured submarine he built himself”… I’m posting this because the sub looks pretty cool, but the rest of the story sounds pretty dangerous to me – it seems like it’s just going to end in legal action and/or death.

Many who admire Stanley’s entrepreneurial pluck are turned off by his cavalier attitude toward risk. “The guy’s amazing – he’s really cool,” says Richard Boggs, technical superintendent at yacht brokerage firm Camper & Nicholsons International. “What disturbs me is that he’s taking down people who don’t fully understand the risk. That’s just wrong, morally and ethically. It’s illegal everywhere but the Third World, and for very good reason.”

In the course of nearly 1,000 dives, Stanley has managed to amass an enthusiastic clientele. At the end of one ride, a customer was so wowed that he told Stanley that he owned a machine-tool plant in the rural town of Idabel, Okla., and that Stanley could use it free if he ever wanted to build another submarine. Stanley took him up on his offer and spent a year and a half there building a new sub that could carry three people instead of two. It cost him less than $200,000. In gratitude, he dubbed his new vessel Idabel.

Even when carrying one extra paying passenger, Stanley is hardly making a killing. He charges $1,500 per person for a shark dive, which can take more than five hours – not including the time it takes to prep the sub or haul a horse ahead as bait. Stanley conducts about 100 dives a year and posts annual revenues of slightly more than $100,000. He has only a single part-time employee.

To keep himself afloat, Stanley says, “I’ve had to exploit numerous niches.” One is collecting a rare type of mollusk called a slit shell, or Pleurotomariidae, which lives below 300 feet. Stanley figured out how to rig a net on the end of a pole and snag the creatures, earning him up to $3,000 each. “Without them,” he says, “I wouldn’t have been able to stay in business.” Pleurotomariidae are not on any conservationist’s list of endangered species – yet.

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