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Chao-hsien Kuo and Eero Hintsanen made some awesome rings that look like question mark, exclamation sign, and so on … There’s even a smiley 
Link | Home page
Dave Cockrum, a famous illustrator who popularized the X-Men comic in the 1970s, died on Sunday. True to his love of comics, he died in Superman pajamas and Batman blanket. He will be cremated in a Green Lantern shirt. Link
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Ridiculous Informercial Review does not review products – instead, it features the silly late-night infomercials themselves!
Link | Their blog – via Yahoo! Picks
Our Daily Bread shows us the behind-the-scenes look of how today’s food in Europe are prepared. It’s an eerie look at how industrial automation play a large role in preparing what we eat every day. Link
This is how they prepare fish [YouTube] (warning, graphic images):
Toy company Hasbro is rolling out a toothbrush that plays music through kid’s teeth as they brush:
When the user pushes a button on the manual toothbrush, it "plays" a song. As the bristles are brushed across the teeth, they send sound waves through them so that the user hears the song in his or her head.
Link – via Jasonspage
This clever ad for Gold’s Gym looks like a muscleman opening the elevator with his bare hands! Found at How Advertising Spoils Me …
Tired of nighttime public urination, Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, Canada, is considering installing this "Urilift" high-tech urinal that can be lowered down into the ground during the day (for a nice clean look) and popped back up at night.
John Chow has the scoop (and video):
By day, the Urilift is lowered below street level for a nice clean look. Then at night, an operator comes by with a remote and the Urilift hydraulically lifts to sidewalk level in about two minutes. Then the unit is ready to serve all the nighttime party animals who don’t mind peeing in a very exposed public urinal.
Because there are no doors, there is little danger of any unauthorized or illegal activities. San Francisco and Seattle’s auto-toilets have been derided as dens for drug dealers and prostitutes. In addition, the presence of an attendant nearby to lower the system in the morning means it’s unlikely a drunken reveler who slumps over the Urilift will wake up under the street.
Fleece Dog is a small stuffed dog that you can create yourself from the hair of your own real dog!
Comments Off This tunnel in Russia has got to be one of the most dangerous (it’s under a river and it leaks, so during winter there are patches of slippery ice on the road), … either that or Russian drivers are really, really bad… Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via digg
This ladybug is trying to fly, but she’s trapped by the ultrasound field in which she has been, yes, levitated:
[Materials physicist Wenjun] Xie and his colleagues employed an ultrasound emitter and reflector that generated a sound pressure field between them. The emitter produced roughly 20-millimeter-wavelength sounds, meaning it could in theory levitate objects half that wavelength or less. After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to a little more than a third of an inch long in midair. When they levitated the fish and tadpole, the researchers added water to the ultrasound field every minute via syringe.
Source: Live Science
If you remember the post “New Uses for Old Mac” you will like this aquariums made out of old Mac monitors.
Sometimes the best inventions are so obvious that you’d wonder why it wasn’t invented before. Here’s the HurriQuake nail, invented by civil engineer Ed "Dr. nail" Sutt after witnessing the devastating effect of Hurricane Marilyn in 1995:
The team tested hundreds of designs, looking for the best compromises. The late prototypes held fast, and Bostitch came out with a barbed nail with a larger head in 2005 called the Sheather Plus. But the solutions created problems of their own: As the barbs pierced the sheathing, they generated a hole that was slightly bigger than the shank, resulting in a loose, sloppy joint.
“We needed a way to lock the top of the shank into the sheathing,” says Sutt, who attacked the problem in a series of brainstorming sessions with his engineers. Their solution: a screw-shank, a slight twist at the top of the shaft that locks the nail in place. The combination of the screw-shank, barbed rings, fatter head, and high-strength alloy added up to an elegant solution to the failures that had plagued nails for more than two centuries. Sutt’s team had, in effect, reinvented the nail.
The HurriQuake nails add $15 to the final cost of a 2,000 square feet house, a remarkably cheap price for added hurricane-resistance. Link – Thank you DJ!
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Newsflash! Zombies sue Minneapolis:
The six adults and one juvenile who were arrested while impersonating the undead in July filed their lawsuit Thursday.
The ragged group were arrested for "simulating weapons of mass destruction" during a dance party near the Minneapolis entertainment district.
Police alleged that wires protruding from the zombie’s backpacks could have been bombs or were meant to imitate bombs. It was later learned the wires were actually radios.
The adult zombies were jailed for two days before police and city attorneys said there was not enough evidence to charge them.
The lawsuit claims the zombie event was intended to "satirize contemporary commercial culture" and the arrests violated the partygoers rights to free speech.
The three "irresistible sirens of American politics," as drawn by Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle, are intimately related to (you can even argue that they’re the by-product of) one thing: pork-barrel projects [wiki].
"Pork" projects, also often called "earmarks" in the federal budget, are provisions stuck in bills by members of Congress to direct federal money, without going through established budgetary procedures, to their districts.
Pork-barrel politics is anything but new: one of the earliest example of pork as the construction of highways introduced by John C. Calhoun [wiki] in 1817. Today, both Democrats and Republicans alike engage in pork-barrel politics.
Every year, the Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer’s watchdog organization, publishes The Congressional Pig Book detailing pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. According to the 2006 Pig Book:
This year’s list includes: $13,500,000 for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped finance the World Toilet Summit; $6,435,000 for wood utilization research; $1,000,000 for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative; and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C.
This year, there was good news and bad news. For fiscal 2006, appropriators stuffed 9,963 projects into the 11 appropriations bills, a 29 percent decrease over last year’s total of 13,997. Despite the reduction in the number of earmarks, Congress porked out at record dollar levels with $29 billion in pork for 2006, or 6.2 percent more than last year’s total of $27.3 billion. In fact, the total cost of pork has increased by 29 percent since fiscal 2003. Total pork identified by CAGW since 1991 adds up to $241 billion.
Here’s the 375 of the juiciest pork projects, summarized by the 2006 Pig Book: Link
Tired of the top 10 coolest whatever list? (Neatorama’s guilty of many
of these things).
Well, then head on to Something Awful forum’s fantastic thread aptly called The Most Insignificant Moments in Gaming. Here, users submit screenshot of the most forgettable moments in video games.
This one is from NES game Nightshade, and if you recognize it … well, let’s just say that’s sad. Link – via Blue’s News.
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Japanese company Sohgo Security Services unveiled a new robot called Reborg-Q to patrol shopping malls in Tokyo. Pink Tentacle has the story:
While on patrol, four cameras mounted in the robot’s head and shoulders record video, and its sensors detect the presence of humans, water leaks and fire. When the robot encounters something suspicious, it alerts a computer in the security room and sends video. Human security guards view the video footage sent by the robot and determine how to respond.
Links: Pink Tentacle Article | Robot Watch [in Japanese]
A couple of months ago, we wrote a "miracle" newborn white buffalo, in Dave Heider’s Wisconsin farm (which makes it a hallowed ground for Native Americans).
Now, it seemed the story gets weirder and weirder: the miracle white buffalo was struck dead by lightning!
Art historian Christian Heck discovered a drawing of Stonehenge in 15th century text, which gave credit to Merlin for building the mysterious stone structure:
In the Scala Mundi, the Chronicle of the World, Merlin is given credit for building Stonehenge between 480 and 486, when the Latin text says he "not by force, but by art, brought and erected the giant’s ring from Ireland". Modern science suggests that the stones went up from 2,500 BC, with the bluestone outer circle somehow transported from west Wales, and the double decker bus-size sarsen stones dragged 30 miles across Salisbury plain.
Lucid dreaming [wiki] happens when a person, who is asleep and dreaming, realizes that he (or she) is dreaming and continues to control the content of the dream.
Apparently, it’s possible to buy devices that induce lucid dreaming. Or you can make one, just like Nate True did:
Enter the current incarnation of the Mask. It’s dead simple – a battery pile, a power switch, a button (which currently does nothing), a PIC microcontroller (16LF628), and two lights aimed right into the eyes.
Add to that a piece of foam (available at Wal-mart in 0.6 cubic-foot bags) which has been expertly sculpted to fit the bridge of the nose and a portion of the forehead.
Note also that I used white LEDs off of eBay here. You can use any color (red gets through eyelids the best), but be mindful of what the color means to you. You don’t want to be giving yourself the wrong idea – imagine a dream filling up with blood just because you used the wrong color!
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See more of Adam Orzechowski’s whimsically (photoshop-ically?) fantastic photo art. I love this one of an iguana chinese water dragon playing a guitar! Link – via Ursi’s Blog
This little boy sure can breakdance (just don’t let your kids do it – they’ll break something for sure). And, notice that the parents put in a dance floor in the middle of their living room?
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] via Say No to Crack
This Christmas, hang monster stockings for your cute little monsters, er kids: Link
From the website:
Want fries with that? A security guard watches over a pair of crystal-encrusted Mrs. and Mr. Potato Head figures on display at the opening of the U.S. Potato Board’s “Healthy Mr. Potato Head Quarters” in New York, November 20, 2006.
For a larger pic, visit: Reuter’s Oddly Enough blog
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The page shows a bunch of themed toys and merchandising about monster movies, comics and the like.
About this in the image, Frankenstein Soaky:
During the 1960s, Colgate Palmolive sold liquid buble bath in plastic containers shaped like popular cartoon characters. Colgate called the product a “Soaky,” as indicated on the bottom of each 11-ounce container. In 1963 the company produced a line of four licensed Universal monster characters – Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Mummy and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Today, these Soakies are usually found empty, missing the cardboard box around their base and a tag that extended from their neck.
Georg Cantor’s (1845 – 1918) brilliance is such that other mathematicians talk about him in reverent, almost mystical tones. The German mathematician David Hilbert (1862 – 1943) once said, "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created." We’d try to explain that paradise, except we don’t even remotely understand it.
Cantor [wiki] basically invented set theory [wiki], which allowed him to solve Zeno’s Achilles paradox [wiki] by proving that some infinities are – get this – bigger than other infinities. (Ergo, we are able to walk through a door because all the infinities involved in getting halfway to the door are, relatively speaking, small.) Such massively abstract thinking can make you feel a little bonkers, and Cantor was no exception – he suffered several nervous breakdowns and spent the last years of his life trying to prove that God was a kind of infinite number and that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Although he lives in hiding and communicates only via occasional, thousands-of-pages-long letters to colleagues, Alexandre Grothendieck [wiki] is widely considered one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. A radical environmentalist and Communist, Grothendieck has, since the 1980s, communicated his mathematical concepts primarily in very long, handwritten letters that circulate among mathematicians. The 1,600-page Long Walk Through Galois Theory, for instance, doesn’t strike us as a very compelling beach read, but Grothendieck’s colleagues have been poring over it for 25 years.
In his 30s, British engineer and mathematician Oliver Heaviside [wiki] (1950 1850 – 1925) made important discoveries in how to transform [wiki] differential equations [wiki] into relatively simple algebra, a discovery that had a profound impact on the lives of advanced calculus students and absolutely no one else. In the last decades of his life, Heaviside’s lifelong eccentricity morphed into madness. He started painting his fingernails pink – which while perfectly acceptable now was weird in the 1920s – and he moved all the furniture out of his house, replacing everything with granite blocks of varying sizes.
Shortly after the publication of his book on nonlinear functions in 1996, Ukrainian-American mathematician Walter Petryshyn discovered the book contained an error. Terrified that he would be the laughing stock of the nonlinear function community, he went mad – in both senses of the word. His depression and paranoia culminated with the murder of his wife. All of which just goes to prove what we told our parents when they saw our grades in calculus: Chill out, man. It’s just math.
One of the inarguable facts of the human condition is that mathematicians, as a class, do not excel at dueling. But apparently no one ever told this to Evariste Galois [wiki], the 19th-century Frenchman whose contributions to algebra got a theory named after him [wiki]. Galois didn’t live to see himself get famous, though, because he died in a duel at the ripe old age of 20. Here’s the crazy part, though: Some believe that Galois staged the duel to look like a police ambush, in hopes that his death might incite a democratic revolution. (Talk about delusions of grandeur.)
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From mental_floss’ book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!
Karen created the world’s smallest logo with a size of only ~2 microns for his friend Kevin, the Digg founder.
“The microscope is a dual-beam focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope. So I milled the word using the beam of gallium ions, but the pictures are all taken with the electron beam. The sample was tilted a bit so that you can see that the words are actually milled into the material.â€
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Meet Anshe Chung, a real-estate tycoon in the online game Second Life, and the first virtual millionaire (her holdings in the game are legally convertible into $1 million in real US currency!)
In Second Life, subscribers get a tool kit that enables them to build and create an avatar (a character in the world). They also get a small quantity of Linden dollars to start out with, enabling the participant to buy additional tools and objects within the world itself. Linden Lab converts currency at a floating rate that, at the moment, is about 257 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar.
Though you can buy additional Linden dollars from Linden Lab by paying U.S. currency, Chung says she has made all her additional Linden dollars via in-world buying, building, trading, and selling. The lion’s share of it, she says, has been made by buying, developing, and then renting or reselling "land"–i.e., control over the virtual real estate simulated by Linden’s servers. Each of Linden Lab’s servers simulates about 16 acres of in-world property. At the time I wrote my article in November 2005, Chung was developing private islands and setting up communities restricted to, for instance, East Asian, Victorian, or Gothic architecture, or to French-speakers, or to gays and lesbians, or to fuzzy avatars known as "furries." Because Linden Lab has added simulation servers more slowly than it has accumulated subscribers, virtual property values have soared.
Neatorama reader Tony Medeiros wrote about Sandbox, his blog that’s dedicated to everything-related to comics.
I particularly like the interview with one of my favorite cartoonists, Dan Piraro who draws the famous Bizarro comic.
Links: Sandbox, Dan Piraro Interview – Thanks Tony!
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