Archive for March 5th, 2007
Help the police!
I must confess that I am a young father who raised his daughter – now a teen – on “Gangsta Rap,” and I didn’t even have the wisdom to put a positive spin on it like the dad in this video. “Havin’ fun cause I’m a teenager with a little bit of gold and a pager!” Word. Link [YouTube]
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| Neatorama Shop » Toy & Games » Science Toys | |
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BuckyBalls Magnetic Toys are 216 rare earth magnet balls that can be shaped and molded into virtually any shape. Tear 'em apart and snap 'em back together in unlimited ways for hours of fun! Watch the video for a quick demo of what BuckyBalls can do. Remember to get two for twice the fun! Link |
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Polar Ice Sheet's Giant Zipper.
Scientists discovered a giant zipper running through the polar ice sheets! No, seriously: it’s a pattern of interlace when ice sheets meet each other.
"A surprising pattern, much like the meshed teeth of a zipper, is frequently seen when floating ice sheets collide," said John Wettlaufer, professor of geology & geophysics and of physics at Yale. He and his colleague Dominic Vella of Cambridge University in England demonstrated the underlying principle for the observation. Further, they suggest that the process can work for any materials that share particular physical characteristics of thickness and flexibility.
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AP's Experimental Blackout of All Paris Hilton "News"
Last week the Associated Press did an experiment: it had a blackout on all news about Paris Hilton, just to see if anyone cared.
Turns out, people noticed:
The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. "I vote we do the same for North Korea," one AP writer said facetiously.
… an internal AP memo about the ban had found its way to the outside world. The New York Observer quoted it on Wednesday, and the Gawker.com gossip site linked to it. Howard Stern was heard mentioning the ban on his radio show, and calls came in from various news outlets asking us about it. On Editor and Publisher magazine’s Web site, a reader wrote: "This is INCREDIBLE, finally a news organization that can see through this evil woman." And another: "You guys are my heroes!"
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Man Persuades New Wife to Get Plastic Surgery to Look Like His Old Wife.
He must have been very, very convincing:
A Chinese man has persuaded his new wife to have plastic surgery to make her look like his first wife. Zhao Gang’s new wife has agreed to have plastic surgery to look like his first wife.
… About six months ago, under pressure from his parents, Zhao Gang got married to his new wife, Cai. "I got married only because she looks a bit like her and I want to have a chance to make up for my mistakes," says Zhao. Cai agreed to plastic surgery, after a lot of persuading.
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When Voodoo Priests Fight.
Neatorama reader Jeff Simmermon wrote:
I recently discovered that two Santeros (Latin voodoo priests) are waging war on each other right next to my building — found evidence of one of their blood sacrifices in the road the other day. The story and photos are pretty fascinating to me, anyway.
Links: Discovering dead piegons pigeon spell [warning: gruesome images] | The fight is on – Thanks Jeff!
Update 3/4/07: Jeff clarifies:
I found one animal sacrifice in the road the other day, the result of an attack on my friend/neighbor. It’s important to my friend that that be clarified in all posts. Sorry for the confusion.Also, you have misspelled ‘pigeons.’
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| Neatorama Shop » Home & Garden » Kitchen Gadgets | ||
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Visualizing DNA Sequences from Different Species.
Dr. Eamonn Keogh at UC Riverside developed a method to visualize and compare the similarity of DNA sequences of different species, like human and chimp:
You often hear that Human DNA and Chimp DNA are 96% the same, but what does that really mean? This video shows a way to actually visualize the similarity (Note, it is two minute long, you really need to see it to the end).
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Dr. Keogh’s website: Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA – Thanks Dr. Keogh!
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The Japanese Bruce Willis.
This is a competition of celebrity impersonators. The Japanese Bruce Willis faces off against a Yon-sama impersonator and wins. His re-enactment of the final scene from Die Hard 1 is hilarious.
Click Play or go to Link [YouTube].
As seen on Japan Probe.
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Best Halloween Costume Ever.
Found here.
(Previous Neatorama post here.)
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Don't Flash Your Cash.
This is a PSA segment known as C.O.P.S. For Kids from the late 80’s C.O.P.S. animated series. Big Boss and Squeeky Kleen show viewers how one must never flash his/her cash in front of the crowd with Squeeky showing off an example of this the hard way – by getting mugged and whipped by thugs when he flashes some wad of cash in front of them.
Click Play or go to Link [YouTube].
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Shave with the power of Gundam!
For only 980 yen you can be the owner of the Tetra K-4 MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM razor. Not only is it created in the color scheme of a mobile suit, it also has 4 high quality blades that deliver a “new type†of shaving experience:
For more info, check out the official website of the K-4 TETRA GUNDAM.
Found at Japan Probe.
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| Neatorama Shop » Computer & Office » Road Mice | |
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Why settle for a boring computer mouse when you can surft in style with Road Mice, a cool wireless computer mouse that looks just like the car of your dreams? Road Mice is available in various Chevy, Chrysler, Dodge, and Ford models including the popular Black Mustang with White Stripes shown to the left. It's the perfect gift for the auto-enthusiast in your life! |
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Alien Test Tube Baby.
Forget the Cabbage Patch Kids, here’s the coolest "birth" of a toy:
Each alien comes in a white egg, which is lodged in a clear plastic tube. Flushing the tube with water dissolves the egg in an exciting burst of fizz, revealing a weird little guy that looks either vaguely sinister or openly menacing, depending on whether he’s in good or evil mode.
Once you fill the tube with a mixture of water and powdered food called "Sloog," you’re officially the sole caretaker of an alien invader. That flashing light on its head is its heartbeat, powered by a lithium-ion battery that can’t be replaced or recharged. Like every one of us, this creature is destined to die.
Link | 4Kidz Test Tube Alien website
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Crime of the Century, a Top 25 List.
Time Magazine lists the Top 25 notorious crimes of the century, like the stealing of the Mona Lisa in 1911:
… on Aug. 20, 1911, the space she occupied on the walls of the Louvre was discovered bare. The theft shook France: the country’s borders were closed, administrators at the museum were dismissed, enemies of traditional art were suspected of evil intentions. (The avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested as a suspect; he implicated Pablo Picasso. Both were eventually dropped as possible culprits). …
Link – via GorillaMask
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Giant Gundam Lantern.
This giant 1:1 Gundam lantern is part of the Lantern Festival celebration in Taiwan! Link – via Blue’s News
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Strange Billboards.
Say No to Crack has a neat list of the top 10 strangest billboard ads, like this one for a Manhattan self-storage company: Link
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192 Nations in Ten Minutes.
You had a lot of fun naming the fifty nifty Unites States in ten minutes. Now for the real challenge: how many of the 192 countries who are members of the United Nations can you name in ten minutes? I got nearly half of them. The nerve-rattling clock and my typing skills betrayed me. Link -via the Presurfer
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Super Mario Bros. 2 Prototype: Doki Doki Panic.
A screengrab from the iconic video game Super Mario Bros. 2? No, that’s actually from its prototype Doki Doki Panic.
The Mushroom Kingdom has the comparison between the prototypes and the final version: Link – via digg
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Volker Steger's Photography of Squashed Bugs.
Here’s this week’s Cellar Image of the Day and Neatorama collaboration:
Spiegel magazine has a feature on photographer Volker Steger’s fantastic microscopic photography of squashed insects: Link [in German, for more photos, click on the thumbnails in the middle of the article] | Volker’s website
Check out Cellar Image of the Day for more amazing photos (and an even more amazing 6 year archives!)
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Twinkies Fun Facts.
Twinkies [wiki], and American icon, and for some, the symbol of junk food, is the snack food that people love (or love to hate). Today, the "golden sponge cake with creamy filling" snack is ubiquitous: it’s virtually in every supermarket, gas station, and snack vending machine – but how much do you really know about Twinkies?
Here’re some fun facts to ponder while you munch on one of America’s favorite snacks:
The History of Twinkies
Twinkies were invented in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression by James A. Dewar, a plant manager at Continental Baking Company (Hostess’ parent company). At the time, Continental was a relatively new company and Dewar was worried that the company might not survive the hard economic times. He noticed that the company had lots of expensive equipments dedicated to baking “Little Short Cake Fingers,” which was baked for only six weeks a year during the strawberry season. During the rest of the year, the equipment laid idle. Dewar thought that the company can make, and sell, shortcake fingers all year long if they only use a different kind of filling. So he mixed a banana-flavored crème and injected it into the shortcake using three syringe-like injection tubes. And so, a new snack was born.
But what to name it? Dewar was having trouble coming up with a name until he drove past a billboard for the Twinkle Toes Shoes factory in St. Louis. A friend suggested the name “Twinkle Fingers” for the snack, and Dewar shortened it to Twinkies.
Remember that banana-flavored filling? During World War II, there was a shortage of banana, so the filling was switched to vanilla.
Twinkies were first sold in packs of two for 5 cents. Now, they still sell ‘em in packs of two, but for more money.
Twinkies Production
There are 17 Hostess bakeries across the countries cranking out 500 million Twinkies every year. It takes 40,000 miles of plastic wrap a year to package them. At 150 Calorie a piece, all those Twinkies have the energy equivalent to nearly 51,500 barrels of crude oil.
If you want to know, that comes out to be about 1,000 Twinkies a minute or 16 a second.
There are 39 ingredients in a Twinkie: yes, there are flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, water, and "trace" of egg. The rest of the ingredient list is, shall we say, less natural.
Twinkies and the Law
In 1986, Twinkies were a central figure in a political scandal known as “Twinkiegate“. 71-year-old George Belair, a Minneapolis City Council candidate was indicted for serving coffee, Kool-Aid, Twinkies and other sweets to court the senior citizen votes. This led to the passage of the Minnesota Campaign Act, more commonly known as Twinkies Law. Belair lost the election, and the charges against him were later dropped.
After San Francisco supervisor Dan White killed the city’s mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in 1978, he argued during his trial of diminished capacity after eating too much junk food. This strategy, dubbed the “Twinkie defense [wiki],” apparently didn’t work – he was found to be guilty.
Twinkies and Science
Twinkie with Digital Multimeter, at the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. website
In 1995 a now legendary project called Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes in Extreme Situations (or T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S.), Rice University scientists Christopher Scott Gouge and Todd William Stadler conducted a series of experiments to determine the physical properties of a Twinkie.
Gouge and Stadler subjected the snack food to the forces of gravity (Gravitational Response Test), electricity (Resistivity Test), water (Solubility test), flame (Rapid Oxidation Test), and radiation. There was even a Turing test, which concluded that “Twinkies are not sentient in any way we can understand.”
Roger Bennatti, a teacher at the George Stevens Academy, wanted to find out the shelf life of a Twinkie, so he hung a pack on the edge of his blackboard (later on joined by a pack of Fig Newtons). That was some 30 years ago "It’s rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it’s probably still edible," Bennatti said. "It never spoiled."
The actual shelf life of a Twinkie is 25 days, which is still long for a "baked" product (baked is in quotation marks because Hostess actually never revealed how Twinkies are made 
).
It takes 45 seconds to explode a Twinkie in a microwave. It takes only a second for your mom to get mad over the mess you’re making by doing so. In cases where the Twinkie doesn’t explode, it will emit a burnt plastic smell instead. Either way, your mom will get mad for sure.
Twinkies: an American Icon.
In 1947, Hostess introduced Twinkie the Kid, a Western cowboy cartoon to sell the snack.
Archie Bunker, a character of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, loved Twinkies. He even called it “the white man’s soul food.” Twinkies have also made appearances in countless Hollywood movies, like Ghostbusters, Grease, and Die Hard.
Americans love Twinkies, too. In 2005 alone, they spent $47 million on the stuff. Actually, most of ‘em probably live in Chicago: they eat more Twinkies per capita than anywhere else, earning Chicago the title of “Twinkie Capital of the World.”
The White House put a Twinkie in their time capsule for the new millennium, as “an object of enduring American symbolism.”
Twinkies: a Healthy Food?
Before he died in 1985, Dewar said that Twinkies was “the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.” He said that the key to 
his long life (Dewar lived to a ripe old age of 88) is to “eat Twinkies every day and smoke a pack of cigarettes.”
Maybe eating Twinkies does lead to a long life: another guy that really likes Twinkies is Lewis Browning. The 89-year-old retired milk-truck driver is the undisputed "Twinkie King of the World" for eating at least one Twinkie every day for 64 years! By rough calculation, he has eaten more than 22,000 Twinkies so far. He now has a lifetime supply of Twinkies from Hostess.
Deep fried Twinkies, invented by Christopher Sell and popularized by Chris Mullen, on the other hand, is definitely not healthy. It is made by freezing a Twinkie, then dipping it into a batter and deep frying it.
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Boo!
It’s not nice to scare people. Funny, but not nice. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Random Good Stuff. (My favorite is the policeman and the corpse!)
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World's Smallest Book.
MIT professor Pawan Sinha got the idea for writing the world’s smallest book from a dream while taking a nap during a boring session at a scientific conference:
The New Testament of the King James Bible reproduced on a five-millimeter tablet by MIT Professor Pawan Sinha and two colleagues is listed as the smallest printed book reproduction in the 2003 Guinness Book of World Records. By comparison, "Lincoln," smallest book in the MIT Archives, contains four speeches by Abraham Lincoln in 160 pages of 2-point type (1/36th of an inch high).
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| Neatorama Shop » Custom Bobble Heads & Cake Toppers | |
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Denise Duhamel's Hamster Wheel Poem.
Denise Duhamel wrote a poem about bureaucracy written on paper attached to a hamster wheel, which can be read in a loop without a beginning nor an ending.
See what the poem reads: Link – via Miss Cellania
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Snails Re-Use Mucus Trail to Save Energy.
To save energy, snails re-use mucus trails laid down by other snails:
Snails create trails of mucus to that help them glide across the ground, mainly in search of food or a partner, but making all that mucus uses up a lot of energy.
“Snails expend a lot of energy, probably a third, creating mucus,” said Mark Davies of the University of Sunderland, lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “This process is very taxing indeed—much more so than walking, swimming or flying.”
Davies and his colleagues studied marine snails off the coast of Britain and discovered that to save some of this vital energy, the snails sometimes follow the existing mucus trails laid down by other snails to get around and so only have to create a fraction of the mucus needed to make a new trail.
Link – via Scribal Terror
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Nintendo Famicom Guitar.
Someone made this Nintendo Famicom [wiki] guitar! Check out the build log Link [in Japanese] – via TokyoMango and Eduyayo
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Skydiving Into a Falling Airplane.
I really don’t know what motivates someone to jump out of one plane and freefalls into another falling plane – then jump out of that one and skydive to the ground!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Spluch
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Smoking Through Your Eye Socket.
This Chinese guy from Shanghai has mastered the art of inhaling smoke through his ears or eye-sockets and breathing it out of his mouth.
Link – via A Welsh View
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The Inflatable Pub.
We’ve seen the inflatable church before on Neatorama, so it’s only fair to showcase the opposite – a portable, inflatable pub that can hold up about 50 guests and fits in the back of a van!: Link – via Say No to Crack.
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Chocolate Dalek.
Chocablog has the recipe for making 15 in tall chocolate Dalek:
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Charting the Path of the Sun.
If you were to combine pictures of the sun taken every 10 days, from the same location and at the same time, you would end up with a picture similar to the one above. The astronomical term for this shape is an analemma, and is caused by “the Earth’s motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth’s rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter.”
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