This officially licensed desk lamp is not only Tetris themed, but each tetromino lights up when stacked on top of one that is already lit. That also means you can be a lunatic person and rearrange the pattern every single day you sit down at your desk, being the centerpiece of your boring office’s only fun. The desk lamp is slated to release toward the end of this year in September 2012 for $50, so you’ll have to wait around until then to intricately stack terominos on your desk, but have them light up instead of clear.

Prowling the streets of Israel, we find a pixelated Prince of Persia, imitating the 8-bit character’s movements spot on. It turns out Prince of Persia-style parkour skills don’t exactly help much in real life — probably because it’s a little rare when people need to get somewhere that stairs or an elevator don’t go. At least weirding people out on the street is a bonus, though.

Who knew that sand could be so beautiful? While we tend to think of sand as a collection of neutral-colored grains, when magnified 250 times, sand reveals its true assortment of colors, shapes, and sizes. Professor Gary Greenberg at the University College London, magnified individual grains of sand, showing that they really look like an assortment of gemstones and miniature shells.

Greenberg developed a new form of magnification photography to capture his images of the sand, to avoid the problems he was encountering before with the shallow depth of field. Copies of Greenberg’s coffee table book, featuring his sand photographs, are available on his website for $20. More of these amazing sand pictures after the jump.

Ever play so much Minecraft that you begin to see the world around you in terms of square, mineable blocks? It’s probably not a good idea to start mining your dog or bedroom wall, but luckily, Etsy user Laketide has created some pretty 2.5″ Minecraft grass blocks that you can buy for $10 per and it all that mining out of your system. They’re quite pretty, and if you have enough of them, you could build an entire landscape that you can subsequently mine and collect. You could also bring them to MinecraftCon 2011, if that’s a thing that ends up happening. Head on past the break to see some more pictures of Laketide’s Zen garden-esque desktop Minecraft blocks.

Last week on Parks and Recreation, polar opposites Rob Lowe’s Chris Traeger and Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson held a contest to see if a turkey or beef burger would taste better. Ron initially asked if by turkey burger, Chris meant a friend turkey leg stuffed inside a grilled hamburger. Chris didn’t mean that. Suffice it to say, Chris bought a bunch of fancy ingredients from an organic food store and whipped up some fancy turkey burgers, plated them beautifully and described them in detail to the panel of judges (their coworkers). Ron Swanson bought generic beef from his favorite grocery store, Food and Stuff, where he gets most of his food and stuff, and handily won the contest with plain beef hamburgers.

Of course, someone made Ron’s idea of what a turkey burger is, and posted the recipe so everyone could give it a whirl. It is supposedly fairly delicious even though it contains the bone, though one could easily modify the recipe to fry boneless turkey leg meat and put that into separate beef patties. Check out the recipe over on Eater.

(via Eater National)

Car manufacturer Renault brought the world of Facebook Likes to real life at the AutoRAI Amsterdam Motorshow. Renault handed out RFID-equipped cards to motorshow attendees, which were able to be connected to said attendees’ Facebook profiles. Once connected, if a cardholder liked a Renault car at the show, they could swipe their card against an adjacent card reader, which marks the car as Liked on their Facebook profile.

Though bringing Facebook Likes into real life could be an amusing distraction or hold terrible consequences, what is almost as interesting as having a “Like card,” is that Renault didn’t get too fancy with their card readers, as they seem to simply be iPads shoved into boxes with the screens facing out, which can be seen in the video posted after the break.

We tend to enjoy real life pixelated objects. Now, we have something to throw real life pixelated objects that we no longer like into. Created by Instructables user BrittLiv, this pixelated trash can is made of wood, and carved and painted to look it is graphically underpowered. Check out the creation process over at Instructables.

(Instructables via Neatorama)