Here’s a great, simple Make project that teaches you how to make an intercom from a pair of old, corded phones, a 9V battery and a resistor. I loved walkie-talkies and intercoms when I was a kid — the idea of setting up your own house-wide wireline intercom is super-cool, and the project is dead-simple. * At its most basic level, a telephone network is just two microphones, two speakers and a power source. In this project we are reducing the phone to these basic elements. The handset of the phone contains the speaker, the microphone and any necessary processing circuitry. All we need to add is the power source. * A regular corded telephone doesn’t require much electricity to operate. It just needs about 9 volts and less than 30mA. It normally gets this from the phone line itself. This is why many phones can still work even during a blackout. However in this project, we are using a single 9 volt battery to power our phones. * The battery is wired in series with a 300 ohm resistor and connected to either the red wire or the green wire in a phone cord. The phone cord is then plugged into both phones. The battery is able to supply enough electricity to power the speaker and microphone circuits of both phones. This allows you to use them to talk back and forth. Simple Intercom From a Pair of Old Corded Phones [Jason Poel Smith/Make]
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HOWTO make an intercom out of obsolete corded phones
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Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “USA Today reports that Arthur Chu, an insurance compliance analyst and aspiring actor, has won $102, 800 in four Jeopardy! appearances using a strategy — jumping around the board instead of running categories straight down, betting odd amounts on Daily Doubles and doing a final wager to tie — that has fans calling him a ‘villain’ and ‘smug.’ Arthur’s in-game strategy of searching for the Daily Double that has made him such a target. Typically, contestants choose a single category and progressively move from the lowest amount up to the highest, giving viewers an easy-to-understand escalation of difficulty. But Arthur has his sights solely set on finding those hidden Daily Doubles, which are usually located on the three highest-paying rungs in the categories (the category itself is random). That means, rather than building up in difficulty, he begins at the most difficult questions. Once the two most difficult questions have been taken off the board in one column, he quickly jumps to another category. It’s a grating experience for the viewer, who isn’t given enough to time to get in a rhythm or fully comprehend the new subject area. ‘The more unpredictable you are, the more you put your opponents off-balance, the longer you can keep an initial advantage, ‘ says Chu. ‘It greatly increases your chance of winning the game if you can pull it off, and I saw no reason not to do it.’ Another contra-intuitive move Chu has made is playing for a tie rather than to win in ‘Final Jeopardy’ because that allows you advance to the next round which is the most important thing, not the amount of money you win in one game. ‘In terms of influence on the game, Arthur looks like a trendsetter of things to come, ‘ says Eric Levenson. ‘Hopefully that has more to do with his game theory than with his aggressive button-pressing.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Please enjoy this awesome GIF of an octopus oozing through a small hole.