bottles
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iPhones smuggled into China in beer bottles
It's pretty easy to understand most of this story. Someone in Hong Kong wanted to get a bunch of iPhones into Shenzen, China, so they decided to smuggle them across the border. That's illegal, but it makes sense. China charges heavy taxes on importing goods like these, and whoever ran this scheme wanted to avoid the tax. What doesn't make sense, however, is how they did it. The culprit cut open empty beer bottles, placing iPhones inside three at a time, and then resealed the bottles with tape. You can see the full Chinese news report below. Over 200 iPhones were being smuggled in beer bottles. I guess the best explanation is that people often bring empty bottles into China for recycling, and the hope was that these would just get lost in the mix. But it's definitely an unusual scheme. [via OBP]
Friday Video: Dun dun dun dun TETRIS SONG
If there's anything that our gaming brethren have taught us, it's that bottles make for great musical instruments when performing video game songs. Even if the video doesn't involve an RC car, we still love this rendition of everyone's favorite Tetris song. You know, the one that goes like this.Even better is that while performing "Korobeiniki," these folks are clearly having fun with it. That's enough to make us want to drink a few gallons worth of wine ... uh, just to get enough bottles to try this out for ourselves, of course. We also appreciate the stop-motion effect, because it just makes the whole stunt all the more impressive.Can we request a track from Mega Man 2 for their next bit?[Via Geekologie]
RC car and bottles become elaborate musical instrument for Mario tribute
Just when we thought we were tired of seeing videos of people playing the Super Mario Bros. theme with wacky, nontraditional instruments (including bottles!), here comes this brilliant piece of video to completely change our worldview. We cannot even imagine the time and effort required to arrange every bottle at just the right distance, with just the right amount of liquid, to accurately reproduce the Super Mario Bros. theme when hit in sequence by a passing RC car.It must have been a lot less jovial in there for the guys doing this than it looked, and a lot more tense. Each note was another opportunity for the car to veer off course a bit and set off a domino-style chain reaction. Or even just to knock one bottle over and force the musicians to refill it to just the right level. The end result is transcendant enough to be worth it.[Via Boing Boing]
Mario theme done by a group with bottles
We may have seen the theme played on 15 different instruments, however we never imagined a group would get together and do the theme with bottles. The theme is impressively correct and the video demonstrates an equally-impressive coordination from all participants involved. As usual, we've embedded the video past the post break and suggest you check it out post-haste.[via 1P Start]
NEC's winebot detects fraudulent bottles
Apparently wine fraud is big business, with certain less-than-reputable vineyards watering down their Cabernet with a little Merlot, for instance, or even filling their supposedly boutique bottles with some off-the-shelf Manischewitz. Well the engineers / wine connoisseurs over at NEC have had enough, so they've invented a wine-tasting "robot" that can distinguish between 30 distinct varieties using only a five-milliliter sample. We've already seen NEC use infrared light in a food-tasting bot, and now they've taken a similar approach with this new device -- about twice the size of a three-liter wine box (mmm...box o' wine) -- which uses LEDs to fire infrared light at a sample and an array of photodiodes to interpret the resulting reflection. Until they can boost its recognition abilities to include many more varieties of wine (about 1,000, in fact), though, this project is little more than an academic exercise -- meaning you'll still need to bring your corkscrew to the liquor store if you want to ensure that you're getting a quality product.
