For his new video series, David Friedman of Ironic Sans finds out the secret behind an unusual object that Joe Biden has placed in the Oval Office: an empty picture frame. The object turns out to be….well, I won’t spoil it, but a few other presidents have had this thing in their Oval Offices as well.
Joe Biden put an empty picture frame in the Oval Office and it’s got a lot of people asking questions. Has a photo been removed? Is something being censored and hidden from the public? I have the answer! And it takes us down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Friedman also uploaded a copy of the White House tour brochure for Biden’s White House.
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If you, like me, grew up semi-obsessively watching game shows from the 70s and 80s, you will get a big kick out of this. Photographer Steven Rosenow makes incredibly accurate digital renderings of the sets of old game shows like Jeopardy!, The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Match Game, and Family Feud, which he shares with a Facebook group called Eyes of a Generation. David Friedman shared some of these recreations in his newsletter. Here’s Rosenow’s notes on the Price Is Right set:
This was a fairly difficult set to model in 3D even though I had blueprints of the set to work with, as well as blueprints of CBS Studio 33… Assistance in this project was provided by the current owner of Door No. 2, who bought it from CBS when it was auctioned off.
I might have a new aspiration in life: to be “the current owner of Door No. 2”. (via waxy)
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In 2009, mechanical engineer Donald Scruggs received a patent for a hermetically sealed coffin that can be screwed into the ground. David Friedman made a short documentary about Scruggs and his screw-in coffin.
I was with some friends having a couple of drinks and one of them mentioned he had to go talk to some people about an automatic grave digger, which meant a huge amount of dirt removal. And I said, “Why don’t we just make a big large carrot shaped thing with threads around it and screw it into the ground?”
Scruggs says that burying someone in his coffin is “no more trouble than putting a fencepost in”.
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Chris Donovan loved designing women’s shoes, so he quit his job as a telephone repairman and followed his fashion design dreams all the way to Florence. What a great video from AARP, filmed by David Friedman. You can see more of Donovan’s work on his Instagram account. (via @mathowie)
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One man invented both the Aerobie Flying Disc and the AeroPress coffee maker. In this short video documentary by David Friedman, inventor Alan Adler tells the story of how those products came to be.
I still remember the first time I threw an Aerobie. The week-long science camp 1 I attended in northern Wisconsin the summer after middle school had one, and I was astounded at how far it flew compared to a Frisbee. As Adler notes in the video, an Aerobie was once thrown 1333 feet (that’s over a quarter of a mile) and stayed aloft for 30 seconds. (No word on far an AeroPress can be thrown.)
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Poignant video profile of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console gaming system. He’s still inventing at age 90.
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David Friedman profiles Martin Goetz, who received the very first software patent granted by the US Patent Office in 1968.
Goetz’s patent is here.
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As part of his inventor portrait series, David Friedman profiled Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera.
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