HOME |
Amanda Greene of Woman’s Day found fifteen odd perks offered to guests for free at different hotels. At the Heatherman Hotel in Kirkland, WA, for example, guests receive a mattress menu:
The boutique property lets you “order” your mattress off their Art of Sleep menu. Choose from European featherbeds, European pillow-tops and Tempur-Pedic mattresses. And you’re not the only one who gets the royal treatment: The hotel also offers an Art of Sleep for Paws menu, featuring pillow-top beds, heated beds and organic bumper beds for dogs.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Robert Pisano
Did you do anything productive over the past month? I ask because YouTube user JoshuasCorner blew up 5 watermelons with powerful electrical discharges. How many did you explode?
via DVICE
 NeatoBambino has the neatest stories about kids and parenting  RSS |
 If you love sci-fi and all things geek, you'll love NeatoGeek! RSS |
Photographer Sergey Larenkov takes photos from the same perspectives of historical photos and juxtaposes them. Pictured above is modern Berlin with the Soviet Army marching through it. You can view more examples at the link.
Link via Geekosystem
YouTube user PvtGermanWagz and his friends emptied the contents of 32 glowsticks into a toilet’s reservoir and flushed it to see the results. The results are simultaneously asinine and cool. Warning: foul language.
via Geekologie
Leave it to Mad Magazine to craft a rejection letter that doesn’t leave you feel too rejected:
There’s nothing like a helping of light-hearted humour to ease the pain of rejection, as evidenced by this form letter from the offices of Mad magazine, one of the most influential humour publications ever released. The letter was sent to all unsuccessful submitters of material during the much-lauded reign of Al Feldstein.
From the always awesome Letters of Note – via Nerdcore
Are those lolcat pranksters at it again? There can’t be no other explanation for this, folks:
The 30-year-old told police she noticed her car was running “rugged” late last week, according to a Rock Hill police report. The car would stop running, and let her start it again only to cut off a few minutes later.
Why?
A mechanic found a cheeseburger and a pickle inside the car’s gas tank, the report said. The lunch caused about $1,000 in damages to the car. It is not known how the sandwich got inside the vehicle’s tank.
When his son entered high school in Warner Robins, Georgia, little did pastor Donald Crosby know that he would soon be involved in fighting Satan himself, in the form of the high school’s mascot:
The devil is at the center of a fight that seems to start every few years when someone new to Warner Robins realizes that the city’s oldest high school, which has one of the most successful football programs in Georgia, rallies around a green-eyed, pitchfork-carrying demon.
The Warner Robins High School Demons.
A pastor at Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ was shocked when he realized his own son could be among the hundreds of students shouting ‘Go Demons!’ to cheer on the school’s sports teams, but particularly in football, where the Demons have won four state championships over the years.
Link – via Fark (photo: Football Friday Night)
Estonian designer Pavel Sidorenko created fantastic wall clocks out of used vinyl records. This one above is my favorite, but don’t miss the one cut to look like a pipe-smoking penguin: Link – via Core 77
Fourteen-year-old Kora Wira was fishing in Florida with her parents when a barracuda jumped out of the water and bit her arm! The 42-inch fish landed in the boat and was killed by Wira’s father. Between docking the boat and driving to the hospital, there was one more chore to be done.
Wira and her dad stopped for a quick picture before jumping in the car and heading to the hospital. Wira said she wasn’t in pain at the moment, but she was still creeped out by the fish. Her arm needed 51 stitches, and doctors told her they had never treated a barracuda bite. Her stitches are out now, and she said her arm is healing.
The complete story is a slide show of photographs that include Wira’s wounds, which may be disturbing. Link -via Buzzfeed
Gen Y Neatoramanauts probably don’t know what this is, but the rest of us could chuckle in nostalgia at these retro mouse pads over at the NeatoShop. They’re made to look like obsolete test patterns for televisions.
Have you ever been told that the reason giraffes have such long neck is that they evolved to eat leaves on tall trees? Well, you’ve been lied to. The real reason (surprise, surprise) is sex and mating:
The latest theory – and it’s a surprise this hasn’t come up before, given biologists’ fixation with it – is that the long necks are the result of sexual selection: that is, they evolved in males as a way of competing for females.
Male giraffes fight for females by "necking". They stand side by side and swing the backs of their heads into each others’ ribs and legs. To help with this, their skulls are unusually thick and they have horn-like growths called ossicones on the tops of their heads. Their heads, in short, are battering rams, and are quite capable of breaking their opponents’ bones.
Having a long and powerful neck would be an advantage in these duels, and it’s been found that males with long necks tend to win, and also that females prefer them.
The "necks for sex" idea also helps explain why giraffes have extended their necks so much more than their legs. If giraffes evolved to reach higher branches, we might expect their legs to have lengthened as fast as their necks, but they haven’t.
Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
Are you unhappy? Maybe it’s because of all that money you have. Jonah Lehrer of Wired’s The Frontal Cortex blog explains:
Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)
Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.
But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. [...]
The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.
Link – via Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish
The solution, of course, is simple: get rid of your money by shopping in the NeatoShop 
Provenance unknown – via Geekosystem and The Daily What
How are you feeling today? If your emotional state doesn’t lend itself easily to words, how about this handy dandy Internet Chart of Emotions?
See also: The Daily Mood Flipchart
At first site these amazing hills on the island of Bohol look as if Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompas have upped sticks and relocated. However, although local people have their own legends as to the presence of the conical shaped hills, reality is somewhat different.
The limestone of the hills is actually called karst. This topography is caused when layers of bedrock made up of a soluble substance such as dolomite or in this case limestone. The landscape has been slowly eroded through a process called solvation. The hills are that which is left behind.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
1. Henry Ford’s Bumpy Road
Henry Ford probably wouldn’t be too judgmental about about his company’s recent financial troubles. Particularly because he was no stranger to debt himself. When Ford first started the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899, the young engineer was a little too obsessed with perfection. In two years, the plant produced just twenty cars. The poor output, combined with exorbitant costs, wasn’t a recipe for success. By 1901, his enterprise had gone bankrupt. Not one to wallow in self-pity, Ford reorganized his talent under a new name, the Henry Ford Company, but soon left to start yet another group-the Ford Motor Company. And that’s where he finally started to make the real money.
Whatever happened to the Henry Ford Company? It did alright for itself. The group changed its name to the Cadillac Automobile Company.
2. Hershey’s Bitter-to-Sweet Success
Milton Heshey knew he could make great candy, but running a great business was more daunting. Hershey, who didn’t have a formal education, spent four years apprenticing in a Philadelphia candy shop before striking out on his own in 1876. Six years later, his business went under. This wasn’t the last time Hershey would go broke. A subsequent attempt to peddle sweets in New York City met the same fate, and the penniless Hershey returned home to Lancaster, Penn. There, he started tinkering with the use of fresh milk in caramel production. And out of nowhere, sweet success! In 1900, Heshey sold his Lancaster Caramel Company for an eye-popping $1 million. But the restless entrepreneur wasn’t done yet. He immediately began work on a new idea-manufacturing a Swiss luxury import known as “milk chocolate”.
3. The Burt Reynolds Bachelor Pad
Back in the 1970s, Burt Reynolds owned mansions on both coasts, a helicopter, and a lavish ranch. But the next decade was harder on the Hollywood star. Thanks to a pricey divorce and some poor career choices, Reynolds ended up owing creditors almost $10 million. In 1996, he filed for Chapter 11.
But instead of hawking his valuables and putting his trademark mustache up for auction, Reynolds found a loophole to protect his wealth. In states such as Florida and Texas, there’s a homestead exemption that protects debtors from losing their primary residence. The problem was, Burt Reynolds’ shelter happened to be a sprawling $2.5 million Florida mansion. The issue caused such a stink that when Congress passed measures tightening the loopholes in 2001, Reynolds was one of the examples Senators used to show that bankruptcy rules went too easy on the wealthy.
_______________________
The above article was written by Ethan Trex. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
What a thrill it would be to turn over a page every month and find a new picture of a goat in a tree! You could have that delightful experience in 2011 with the Goats in Trees calendar. Link -via Breakfast Links
Famous men in history sometimes had a special place they went to think, create, or unwind in which they could block out the rest of the world. Almost every man would like to have a “man cave” like these, if he doesn’t already! The Art of Manliness shows us what the private or men-only rooms of Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and quite a few others looked like. Shown here is Theodore Roosevelt’s trophy room. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Summer 2010 is not over yet, and some among us are still making plans to head to the woods. We cannot wait to sleep out under the stars on a cabin deck or rocky slope above timberline. Even now in late July, backpackers among us are spreading out provisions on the bedroom or living room floor, pondering which items are essential, and which must be left behind. To save on weight, should I leave the ultra-light, self-inflating sleeping pad at home? Should I follow the advice of best-selling backpacker-author Colin Fletcher (1922-2007) and cut my toothbrush in half as he advised in The Complete Walker? Lots to think about! Though the need for reducing weight on back country trips cannot be regarded lightly, it is unfortunate that backpacking equipment has tended as a result to favor minimalist, spare, and humorless equipment designs.
Car campers never have to worry about how much equipment to carry. They usually don’t need to search Google.com, looking for backpackers’ forums that discuss whether a mountain mummy bag should be filled with down or if synthetic stuffing is okay.
Though I have designed backpacking equipment since the early 1980s, neither Northface nor Coleman has phoned me asking for advice. Is it because my designs don’t seem serious?
Granted, the experience of lying on one’s back communing with the stars seems like an opportunity for feeling spiritual and transcendental, and for mulling over the path of one’s life. Do I really want to be lying in a silly-looking sleeping bag at that moment? Would my caterpillar bag and tent combination – which do not weigh an ounce more than similar, conventional-looking equipment, take all the seriousness out of my wilderness experience?
When I was a Boy Scout pup tents were the rage. Later in life I thought up a tent that would literally look pup-like. A matching sleeping bag would look like a spotted dog, and be sized for adults and children (child’s size is shown above).
Hot Hits Pot Holder – $7.95
From the turntable to your kitchen table, the Hot Hits Pot Holder (and a handy trivet) is there to protect your hands and table from your latest (culinary) hit. From the NeatoShop: Link | More Fun Kitchen Stuff
Do ugly people commit more crime? Yes, statistically speaking anyhow.
Before you chalk this one up as the discredited pseudoscience of physiognomy rearing its ugly head, consider the argument behind a paper by Georgia State University economist (and dashingly handsome guy) Erdal Tekin:
Ugly people are more likely to break the law. This is the statistically based conclusion in a paper published in The Review of Economics and Statistics entitled Ugly Criminals [...]
This takes us to the modern Ugly Criminals study, which is subtler than it might seem. It is based on an anonymous questionnaire combined with equally anonymous ratings of the subject’s attractiveness. It shows a small but significant correlation between attractiveness, or the lack of it, and criminality. The most unattractive segment are 1.5 per cent more likely to have committed robbery, 2.2 per cent more likely to have committed assault, and 3 per cent more likely to have sold drugs. Or to have been caught doing so, at any rate.
The authors note previous work showing how more attractive people are more successful in their careers and earn more. This puts less attractive people at a disadvantage in the world of work and nudges them towards criminal alternatives. In addition, less attract ive people suffer socially, make fewer friends and build less of what the authors call “human capital”. They are therefore not as sympathetic to others and have less of an investment in society. This effect is far more pronounced in females, suggesting that they are judged on their appearance to a much greater degree.
Links: Article at Fortean Times | The paper Ugly Criminals by H. Naci Mocan and Erdal Tekin [PDF]
Some of the best meals you can have are actually on airplanes – but not domestic flights. No siree! NBC Today’s travel expert Peter Greenberg shows us how international airplane passengers are still fed very well (yes, even in coach).
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Instead of asking "how much is that doggy in the window," you should be asking "how many years in jail?" if you live in San Francisco. See, the Bay Area city is weighing a ban on all pet sales, with exception of fish:
Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.
That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.
That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.
"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don’t know what they’re getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That’s what we’d like to stop."
What do you think? Is it a good idea to ban pet sales?
This certainly brings new meaning to the saying "the writing on the wall." Lori Weitzner created Newsworthy, a new wallpaper made from recycled newsprint: Link
The one thing I hated most about school was how early it started. I’ve always thought that my academic performance (and that of my friends) would improve tremendously had school just start at the crack of noon – and now, science has vindicated me!
Here’s a study by Brown University sleep researcher Judith Owens on how starting school just 30 minutes later could lead to huge improvements:
An eye-opening study says delaying high school starting times by just 30 minutes can reap big rewards for tired teens.
A small study at St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, says students there were more alert in class, expressed better moods, arrived to class on time, and even reported eating a healthier breakfast due to the later start."The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use," says Patricia Moss, academic dean at the boarding school where the study was done. Similar results have been found in some public schools that let teens start school late.
Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn – when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m.
So why do schools start so early in the morning? You can blame the parents and their pesky jobs: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
Explorer Bart Hogan stands at an entrance to the Cheve cave in Mexico. Author James M. Tabor writes about a 2004 expedition through the Cheve supercave in his new book Blind Descent. Photo: Frank Abbato
Add this to the list of why I’m afraid to go spelunking:
Drowning, poisonous gas inhalation and electrocution are perils of journeying through a supercave. Tabor says there are more than 50 ways for a person to die during these explorations.
There’s also a danger of developing an illness known as "the rapture" — an extreme reaction to darkness and depth. Those who have suffered from it describe it as being similar to an anxiety attack while on methamphetamines.
"At some level, everyone’s brain will start to say, ‘I don’t belong here. This is a very dangerous place.’ It’s an ancient primordial instinct and it just says, ‘You have to get me out of here, right now,’" Tabor explains.
Guy Raz of NPR’s All Things Considered has a fantastic interview with James Tabor about his new book Blind Descent
Forget Twilight vampires, the bloodsucking scourge that is spreading like wildfire in the United States is the bed bug:
The tiny, sneaky insects are spreading so rapidly across the United States that almost no region or area is unbitten, a new survey suggests. Calls to exterminators nationwide about bed bugs are up 57 percent nationwide in the last five years, according to a new survey by the National Pest Management Association and the University of Kentucky. More than 95 percent of 519 U.S. exterminators participating in the survey reported finding at least one bed bug infestation in the past year.
Previously on Neatorama: Bedbugs attack Hollister | What’s Eatin’ You?
We’ve featured the fantastic artwork of Kevin Van Aelst before on Neatorama, but I couldn’t resist this one: mitosis or cell division as explained with Krispy Kreme donuts (sprinkled, of course!) Link
John's
post about scientists measuring the shortest
interval of time ever inspired me to actually Google a question that
I've pondered for quite some time: is time quantized?
For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of quantization, one of the fundamental things ever discovered in physics occurred in 1900 when Max Planck worked out that energy is not infinitely divisible - there's a minimum unit of energy that is indivisible. That unit of energy (a "quantum") is so small that for us humans, it seems like energy (say, how hot something is) is a smooth gradient.
So, back to my original question: is there a fundamental unit of time, which is not further divisible into smaller units? In other words, is there a quantum of time?
Some physicists pegged the smallest unit of time that have any physical meaning as Planck time, the amount of time for a photon to travel the distance of 1 Planck length (a unit of length, equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m, where gravity, space time and "regular" physics cease to be valid and the effects of quantum mechanics dominate). 1 Planck time is about 10-43 seconds).
The closest answers that I found was provided by Scientific America circa 1999:
"The brief answer to this question is, 'Nobody knows.' Certainly there is no experimental evidence in favor of such a minimal unit. On the other hand, there is no evidence against it, except that we have not yet found it. There are no well-worked-out physics theories incorporating a fundamental unit of time, and there are substantial obstacles to doing so in a way that is compatible with the principles of General Relativity. Recent work on a theory of quantum gravity in which gravity is represented using loops in space suggests that there might be a way to do something roughly along these lines--not involving a minimum unit of time but rather a minimum amount of area for any two-dimensional surface, a minimum volume for any three-dimensional region in space and perhaps also a minimum 'hypervolume' for any four-dimensional region of space-time."
The article describes 3 more answers (tldr: "dunno") to the question: Link
Do we have any physicists in the audience that can provide a better answer? Say that there is a quantum of time - what does that mean to our understanding of reality?
Pomparkour is supposedly a new “sport” that is described as parkour with ladders. This ad for a sports drink is raising eyebrows because it has no warning that these are professional stunt people and this should never be tried at home. In fact, we get a glimpse of how they did it in another video.
Notice the safety ropes, which were apparently edited out of the finished ad. -via Metafilter
German scientists hit electrons with light and then measured how they soon they moved. The delay between the bombardment and the movement of those electrons is the shortest interval of time ever measured, which is 20 attoseconds. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second.
When light is absorbed by atoms, the electrons become excited. If the light particles, so-called photons, carry sufficient energy, the electrons can be ejected from the atom. This effect is known as photoemission and was explained by Einstein more than hundred years ago. Until now, it has been assumed that the electron start moving out of the atom immediately after the impact of the photon. This point in time can be detected and has so far been considered as coincident with the arrival time of the light pulse, i.e. with “time zero” in the interaction of light with matter.
The scientists tested the assumption, and this is what happened:
Their measurements revealed that electrons from different atomic orbitals, although excited simultaneously, leave the atom with a small but measurable time delay of about twenty attoseconds.
In the comments, provide practical illustrations of the shortest intervals of time.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: Thorsten Naeser / Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics
Got
a neat story? Share it with the world by writing your very own Neatorama
blog post with the Upcoming
Queue. Who knows, you might just win something ... 
neatorama.com
Dustin Timbrook
Lee Gainer
Rob Bridges
