The new Tumblelog Context Free Patent Art confirms what we always thought: there is a lot of weird stuff lurking in archives of the patent office. And sometimes, you just don’t need/want an explanation.

Here are some of our favorites. Take your best guess at the context for these images—or at least some legitimate excuse/explanation—in the comments!

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If you thought the Kinect was just for things like controlling flying quadrocopters and getting in touch with your inner Han Solo, get ready to stick your tongue out. That’s right, scientists in Japan have created a Kinect game for your tongue. You wiggle it around to shoot at circles.

You’re not running out of your house to buy the game right this second? Well, you probably weren’t the target audience anyway. Japanese researchers created the game to help in diagnosis and treatment of oral motor disorders. People who have trouble speaking or swallowing could play the game to train their tongues. For the rest of us, how about a game that teaches French kissing?

The Principality of Sealand and data haven? 

Seven miles off the English coast and just 24 feet above the roiling waves of the North Sea is the Principality of Sealand. The nation’s total area amounts to just 120 x 50 feet, but its occupier and “ruler” since 1966, Major Paddy Royal Bates, has had outsized dreams for his former military platform out in the sea. Once, it was the home of HavenCo, that company that billed itself as a “data haven,” the Switzerland of data centers.

HavenCo was supposedly to be the home of businesses who didn’t want governments minding their business: porn, anonymous currencies, governments in exile. When Fox News reported that WikiLeaks was moving its servers to Sealand, it certainly seemed fitting but, alas, turned out to be just speculation. That led us to Ars Technica, where law professor James Grimmelmann has written what is probably the definitive history of Sealand and HavenCo, and it is a thrilling read. A few snippets from nation’s short history include a pirate radio broadcaster hurling Molotov cocktails, press wars over “marooned children,” and coup led by a former diamond dealer (possibly staged).

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Who hasn’t suffered a fool who won’t shut up? Suffer no more—Japanese scientists have invented a portable SpeechJammer that they say can get someone to stop talking mid-sentence.

The device described in a paper on arXiv is nothin’ fancy. It’s basically a speaker and a mic that work together to exploit a neat psychological trick: if your speech is played back with a slight delay, it becomes really hard to keep talking. The SpeechJammer works with a delay of 0.2 seconds but anything up to 1.4 seconds (pdf) also works. Because your brain relies on auditory feedback when you speak, the slight, very unnatural delayed feedback screws with the cognitive process.

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One is a father of the Internet. The other is the father of psychoanalysis. They both rocked shiny-bald heads, classy three-piece gray suits, and full, lovingly manicured, white-gray beards. They were born nearly a century apart, but the similarities are simply too striking to overlook.

Clearly, Sigmund Freud and Vint Cerf were created in a cloning lab, in what may well have been an experiment run by the Nobel-bestowing Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to create super-smart scientists with a penchant for fine haberdashery. Is it not obvious to everyone upon looking at photographic evidence?

If you have any leads about other scientists, engineers, or doctors who were separated in the cloning lab, let us know in the comments, @DiscoverMag, or at azeeberg <at> discovermagazine <dot> com.

As North America enjoys a startlingly balmy winter, Europe is in the midst of a cripplingly frigid cold snap, with snow in Rome that damaged the Colosseum and hundreds dead from the cold. In Hungary, charities are getting heating fuel from the government…in the form of piles of money.

The moolah—Hungarian forints—that people feed into their stoves is paper currency so tattered and worn that is has to be retired from circulation. To make it truly burnable, the authorities tatter it even more, in special factories where old forint bills are shredded and then pressed with fragments of wood into combustible bricks, by workers who must wear special clothes with no pockets.

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Sorry to tell you this, US Navy, but in our opinion, you’ve been had. This new app you’ve funded, dubbed Caffeine Zone, is not the best way to schedule your caffeine intake so as to maximize awesome and minimize double vision and crazy manic behavior.  Not by a long shot.

True, Caffeine Zone, developed by researchers at Penn State, does draw on studies that suggest that between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in the blood is the sweet spot, the level at which that glorious productive high kicks in. Likewise, studies also say that having about 100 milligrams in the blood around bedtime puts you in the danger zone of insomnia. But when users type in when they plan to drink their caffeine, how much of it they’ll drink, and how fast they’ll drink it, the readout they get of their projected caffeine levels throughout the day sounds like a pretty basic chart that reflects how long caffeine hangs around in the average Joe, at least in this press release. It doesn’t take into account individuals’ metabolism, whether they’ve eaten recently, and all the other things that even the most dilletante-ish coffee addict can tell you affect the high.

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HElloo0OO0! I will show you the way.

Imagine yourself in a department store. You’re lost—alone and stranded somewhere in hosiery. What will you do?! How will you ever find your way to the shoe department? Take a deep breath. Look around you. Are those LED light bulbs on the ceiling? Take out your smart phone, raise the camera so it can see the bulb, and pray that you’re right.

Yes! The LEDs are sending location information to your phone, which, via a newly developed indoor navigation app called ByteLight, provides you with detailed instructions: “Go the the end of the aisle. Turn left. Walk until you can see the escalators. Go up one floor. You are in footwear.” Weeping with relief, you accept ByteLight’s offer to give you detailed step-by-step directions to a pair of shoes that is on sale (in addition to providing navigational information to particular items or areas, it also beams you information about nearby deals).

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When it gets cold out, staying warm usually means either cranking up the heat—and, thus, the heating bill—or piling on the sweaters and straying from the radiator’s immediate vicinity only when absolutely necessary. But your days of dashing between warm spots, or paying extra for the privilege of not, may soon be at an end. A new robot can keep you warm by saving up the heat you’ve already got until you need it.

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