Discharging about 10 kV (15,000 joules!) from enormous 300 µF capacitors the team at Hackerbot Labs “Turn half dollars into quarters! Turn quarters into dimes! Turn dimes into little semi-molten balls of metal!” with their custom built apparatus through a process known as “Magnaforming”. We would love to get a hold of some of these but can’t really make them in bulk… SO you can head over there to purchase “small” change…
Interesting (personal+anecdotal) article about the value of an investment in American Eagle Silver Proof Dollars. It may or may not work out in the end unless you have a complete set or if you are looking to trade in buillion market values buying in on the lows and hoarding until you can make a standard market profit. Here’s to all things shiny none-the-less…
Can investing and collecting go hand-in-hand? Yes — especially if you are collecting coins, stock certificates, bank notes, or other rare items of value. Larry Schutts, an expert in investment-related collectibles, will periodically review items of interest from his collection and answer your questions here.
Every December, I send each of my brothers a package of Christmas gifts for the family. The boxes contain the usual assortment of presents one sends to sisters-in-law, nephews and nieces, but my brothers always get the new American Eagle Silver Proof dollar. The U.S. Mint has issued the coins every year since 1986 and I have been sending them just that long. It has been some time since the boys have been able to express any surprise about their gifts, but I have always told them to be of good cheer. Those silver dollars, I have said with emotional certainty, are bound to be worth rather more one day. Well, I got to thinking about that promise recently and I thought I would look at the prices folks are getting for the coins nowadays to see whether I was right… [ more ]
“Ten Thousand Cents”which has also been around the web quite a bit. For Ten Thousand Cents, 10,000 people were paid one cent to draw 1/10,000th of an image of a $100 bill. This digital artwork creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool.
There is something quite powerful about the idea of thousands of people creating a work of art in tiny, unrelated chunks, unaware of what they are contributing to – the military and skunk works call it Compartmentalization for national security reasons… Quite apart from the end result, it provides an engaging commentary on our networked society both in terms of online connections and the global economy and sustainability.
The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.
Real money as wallpaper and posterart… now you can update you Monopoly money with the real thing. The Zimbabwean newspaper posted billboards, flyers, and posters made from Zimbabwean dollars. From the Zimbabwean Newspaper’s Flickr stream:
Trillion dollar flyers and posters. A trillion dollar hand-out. To highlight the plight of Zimbabwe and the cause of the ‘Zimbabwean Newspaper’ we handed out trillions of dollars of worthless Zimbabwean money stamped with provocative messages and a call for support for the Zimbabwean newspaper, we also turned the money into giant posters, with trillion dollar tear-offs.
Core77 follows up their recent write-up on Production Methods with a quick overview on bi-metallic coins. If you’ve ever wondered how they make bimetallic coins, here’s the process. They start by punching a hole through a coin blank, or planchet. The core will be remelted for another batch, and the remaining part becomes the “ring,” or outer, planchet.
Next they take the “core” planchet, which is made from a different metal and sized to fit inside the ring, and they mill a groove all the way around the edge of it.
Why this method…So that when the press slams shut on the assembled parts, stamping a relief into it, the inside edge of the ring also deforms and spreads into the groove, locking it into place. Now that puppy’s not going anywhere, and you’ve got your purty two-tone coin.
You can get some cool-looking accidents. Below are photos of some defective coins where the hole in the ring blank was not perfectly centered, resulting in what you see here. Although these don’t quite meet the standards, coin collectors have a fondness for goofy oddities produced in the manufacturing process and there is quite a number of error collectors out there.
Here’s a cool set of self-promotion coins following the likeness of the designer but looking oddly familiar to those coins from Liberia… Dan “Minister of Industrial Design” Ballou’s business cards, which aren’t cards at all, but metal coins.Fresh! These new business “coins” have dropped and they’re getting a good reaction. The dollar might be a little rocky these days, but don’t worry, the dashdot currency is solid. Dan said that “Our business cards…. we wanted something fun and memorable. It turned out that we could actually get coins made and keep it in the budget. Super fun.”
Ballou runs a California-based product design studio called Dashdot with clients like simplehuman, Safety 1st, and Rock & Republic. Check out his portfolio on Coroflot.
In 1923 the German economy was devastated by World War I and reparations made for rampant inflation. Hyperinflation set in and, as prices rose exponentially, common currency became worthless. To meet the demand, paper notes were printed almost nightly in every region, jumping from thousands to millions to billions. These marks are known as notgeld, or “emergency money.” In a normal economy currency design says little about social climate and nothing about individual opinion, but notgeld gave designers a platform at a volatile time.
The design of most notgeld, particularly in rural areas, drew on historic messages and heraldic imagery, slipping quickly into romanticized nationalism, and ultimately the seeds of Blut und Boden (examples can be foundonflickr). The typography drew heavily on the past with blackletter and elaborate scripts. National iconography was rendered in any manner from delirious flourish to self-righteous idealizations in colors either dreary or fiery. The values of many of these bills — up to 100 trillion marks — were often written long-hand, sometimes without digits at all. [ Read More... ]
Strong demand remains for physical gold. Well selected gold coins will outperform common bullion products. The current high premiums for common gold Eagles, Maple Leafs, and Krugerrands allow astute collectors a buying opportunity.
Cottrell recently paid his employees a bonus in $2 bills to help local economy.
A small-town pharmacist intrigued by the government’s economic stimulus plan decided to launch his own version with $16,000 in $2 bills, and area stores have already felt the impact.
Danny Cottrell gave each of his full-time employees $700 and part-timers $300. He asked them to donate 15 percent to charity and spend the rest locally, particularly downtown, where store owners say that business has been lean.
“I wanted to do something for my employees, let them know our business is not in jeopardy, and for the local merchants,” said Danny Cottrell, owner of The Medical Center Pharmacy with its main store in Brewton and a second in Atmore. “This seemed like a good way to do it.”
Cottrell said he paid his employees with $2 bills so he and the rest of the Escambia County business community could see how the money circulates.
Before he explained the plan to his employees last week, Cottrell said, he couldn’t resist creating a little suspense.
“Times are hard,” he said, “and the downturn has hit us some. Employees start to worry if they will even have a job. So I called a meeting of the staff. One employee broke out in hives from the nerves. My partner, Tom Henderson, said he heard some employees talking about the meeting. They were scared to death.”
Cottrell said he began the meeting as usual, encouraging workers to answer phones faster and serve customers better. Then he began passing out envelopes.
Interesting (personal+anecdotal) article about the value of an investment in American Eagle Silver Proof Dollars. It may or may not work out in the end unless you have a complete set or if you are looking to trade in buillion market values buying in on the lows and hoarding until you can make a standard market profit. Here’s to all things shiny none-the-less…
