PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • The Speed Project, a secret ultramarathon

    The Speed Project is a secret ultra-marathon, starting in Los Angeles and ending in Las Vegas.

    This, he explained, was a welcome to the Speed Project, a 340-mile relay race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with no designated route, no specific rules and only one goal: to get there as fast as possible.

    Arend, the founder of the race, didn’t want video to leak out, because the underground lore was why most of the runners were here. Many of them considered the Speed Project a cult that gathered once a year; not only were there no rules, but there were no spectators and no prize money for the winners. There wasn’t even a website or an entry form. The only way in was through Arend’s WhatsApp.

    It’s like Cannonball Run in footrace form.

  • Introducing the Slate truck

    Two segments of the U.S. car market that are non-existent: an affordable truck and a basic electric vehicle that isn’t $35,000+. The Slate truck aims to do both for approximately $20,000. Open sourced specifications allow for customization. If the build quality is good and the aftermarket accessories create a healthy modding community, this thing will sell. And it’s not ugly!

  • Import Immature

    Spencer Wright muses on how the world changes, there are things that never mature, namely, imports.

    I bring all of this up because the weird thing, and stick with me here, is that the world around us doesn’t mature. It keeps changing, even as we mostly stop doing so. The world doesn’t care that we’re not up for changing as much anymore, and actually maybe it seems to change more quickly the older we get, whether because culture actually accelerates over time or because of how we perceive the world as we age. Either way, to some extent each of us wakes up one day, and we’re forty-one, and we’ve shifted down like three gears. Life still feels crazy but we really have trimmed a lot of the extraneous stuff, we’re streamlined, we’ve chosen some kind of course, and maybe we’re even following it a bit. And for some reason, without really realizing it, we kind of expect the world to have chosen a course too. But the world, god bless it, is changing directions all the time, being immature as ever.

  • A sofa in the woods brought a town together

    A fun story where someone dumped a fly tipped sofa in the woods, and it became a spontaneous photography studio.

  • A universal antivenom

    It sounds like a joke based on a basic misunderstanding of science, but a man who’s been slowly injecting himself with snake venom may now provide a source for a universal antivenom.

    Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.

    This bit of daredevilry (one name for it) may now help to solve a dire global health problem. More than 600 species of venomous snakes roam the earth, biting as many as 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and maiming 400,000 others — numbers thought to be vast underestimates.

  • Cats bringing dead gifts

    My mother feeds a local feral cat named, Rigby. While the cat has never left dead gifts, he has been seen carrying dead animals. Most recently, a squirrel.

    There are a couple of hypotheses for why cats bring their catch home, Emmanuelle Baudry, an urban ecologist at Paris-Saclay University, told Live Science. The main hypothesis is that this behavior is maternal. In the wild, mother cats go out and hunt and then bring the food back for their kittens. This not only feeds the young cats but also provides something for them to play, practice how to hunt and recognize prey. So, in the context of human pet owners, our cats may see us as “not so efficient kittens,” Baudry said.

    But that doesn’t mean your pet is insulting you. To the contrary: “It’s somewhat of a compliment,” Liff told Live Science. “They feel comfortable in their home. They consider you part of their family.

  • FAFAnomics

    Recent economic policy has turned into FAFAnomics – Fuck Around and Find Out Economics,

    F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.

  • Trading card game where local Japanese men are the stars

    The small town of Kawara in Fukuoka Prefecture created a Pokemon like card game featuring local middle-aged men as the stars.

    The creator of the game is Eri Miyahara, the Secretary General of the Saidosho Community Council. 

    “We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” she said in an interview with Fuji News Network (FNN). “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.” 

    The plan worked. Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched. 

  • Making music after death

    Popular Mechanics with an interesting art installation involving posthumous brain matter to make music.

    American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn’t the end of his lifelong musical odyssey.

    Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier’s “brain matter”—hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates—to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier’s white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains.

  • The S Thing clock

    There’s a very good chance you learned how to draw the diamond S in your younger days. Someone turned it into a clock.