Archive for June 5th, 2007

Vintage Soda Cans.

Pile of Photos users have uploaded a great set of vintage soda cans, including the cone top Pepsi can above. Many cans prior to the 70s were tin or steel, so rust was often a problem (as seen in some of the photos). Link

You can also read more about soda can history at the History of the Beverage Can site.

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Science fiction tunneling image

This piece of interactive art defies easy description. It came through my RSS feed from Digg as “The most awesome pic EVER” – hyperbole, to say the least. It is pretty damn clever, however. It is a science fiction mise en scene into which (or out of which) you can zoom seemingly “forever” (more hyperbole). It’s definitely worth clicking through to and taking a look. Link via Digg.

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Evolution According to North Koreans.

Here’s evolution, according to the North Koreans (as shown in a Japanese TV show):

Ever since humanity originated, it was centered around Pyongyang. The Korean people have lived for centuries around the Teh Don Gan Basin. Korean people did not migrate from other regions to the Peninsula. [...] Evolving through several anthropoids … Humanity finally reached the ancestors of modern Koreans: "The Black Mountain Grape Humanoids"

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via postpolitical

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Melting Ice Created New Island in Greenland.

Hooray for global warming! Melting ice had finally made a new island off the coast of Greenland:

Off the coast of Greenland lies an island resembling a bony claw.
Long connected to Greenland’s coast by ice, the island escaped recognition for what it was for nearly a century. The island might have been discovered when explorers such as Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe,
Duke of Orléans, mapped Greenland’s coast. Instead, this little island was only recognized as such in September 2005, by Dennis Schmitt, an explorer from Berkeley, California. Melting ice enabled Schmitt to detect the island while flying over northwestern Greenland.

Link – via digg

Here’s another benefit of global warming: Broken Ice Shelves Reveal New Antarctic Underwater Species

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World's Oldest Paperboy.

Meet 102-year-old Homer Plackmeyer, the world’s oldest paperboy:

At 5:30 in the morning, 102-year-old Homer Plackmeyer can’t just roll over in bed and sleep in.

The residents on the second floor of Building D at Parkside Meadows Retirement Community in St. Charles depend on him. They want their newspaper, and he’s their paperboy.

Actually, he doesn’t have to deliver the papers. He volunteers. When he moved to Parkside nearly three years ago, a woman delivered them, and he didn’t think that was right, he said.

Link – via Fark

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Funky Fluorescent Frog (Say That 3 Times Fast) Found in Suriname.

Photo: Paul Ouboter / Conservation International

Scientists from the Conservation International discovered 24 new species in Suriname, including this Atelopus frog with fluorescent purple markings, 3 other frog species, 12 dung beetles, an ant species, and 6 species of fish.

Link

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Moroccan Family Lived in Public Toilet for 7 Years, Got Evicted.

Here’s something strange and tragic: a family living in a public toilet for seven years in Morocco have been evicted.

In a narrow street of the old medina in Sale, the city across the river from the capital, Rabat, Mr Baja explained how he fell into poverty and ended living in the public lavatory, where he was the attendant. He worked at the toilet for 23 years, where he earned less than $1 a day. [...]

His troubles began several years ago when his daughter was kidnapped and he had to sell everything to try to find her. She was eventually found, but he could not afford to rent the place where he had been living and the family moved into the toilet as a temporary measure.

But with no help from the local government and no money to rent anywhere else they ended up staying.

Link – via eBaum’s World

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Real Life Hungry Hippos.

Here’s some footage of a Hungry Hippos Tournament, where real live humans imitate the popular board game.

Link [YouTube] – via Gorilla Mask

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Toenail Necklace.

Besides general laziness and physical ineptitude, here’s another reason why I’m not an ultra-runner: they regularly "lose" toenails.

So, what to do with those toenails? Why, make a necklace, of course! Link – via Boing Boing

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A Real Tree House.

This house is not to be built, it’s to be grown! Architects Mitchell Joachim and Javier Arbona and environmental engineer Lara Greden designed this “tree house” to be both eco-friendly and alive. Trees are planted and trained to grow in the shape of the finished home. The interior walls are made of clay and plaster, and will look like a normal house. Link -via Look at This

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Vincent Laforet Sports Photos.

Vincent Laforet took a series of sports photographs and used the tilt-shift effect to make them more natural and accessible. In this New York Times slideshow, he explains why. Slideshow opens in autoplay mode. Link -via Metafilter

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Baby Stingray.

This picture of a baby stingray is just too cute not to post! Link -via Look at This

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New Natural Cure for Upset Stomach: Live Frogs.

Upset stomach? Forget that peptobismol! Try this strange, "natural" cure:

Jiang Musheng, a 66-year-old resident of Jiangxi province, suffered from frequent abdominal pains and coughing from the age of 26, until an old man called Yang Dingcai suggested tree frogs as a remedy, the Beijing News said on Tuesday.

"At first, Jiang Musheng did not dare to eat a live, wriggling frog, but after seeing Yang Dingcai swallow one, he ate … two without a thought," the paper said.

"After a month of eating live frogs, his stomach pains and coughing were completely gone."

Link

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Giant Wiimote Plushie Pillow.

If you’re tired of getting beat by your younger brother at Wii, get yourself giant Wiimote plushie and start a pillow fight instead!

Here’s a 26" tall and 5.5" wide hand-made giant Wiimote plushie pillow (too bad it’s sold out for now): Link – via Gizmodo

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Mysterious Moss Pattern Baffles Scientists.

This mysterious circular pattern on moss-covered logs is baffling scientists:

Last winter, researchers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park discovered the symmetrical bull’s-eye pattern on patches of liverwort (a close relative of moss) growing on pine trees that had died and fallen on the ground.

At this point, biologists aren’t sure what causes the circles. Some have suggested snails, while others have speculated millipedes.

"Immediately, we thought of snails," said Keith Langdon, chief biologist with the Smokies. "But snails graze in a zigzag pattern. We can’t find records of anything like this in the park. It appears to be a rare phenomenon."

Link – via Fortean Times

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Diet Water.

When all other weight loss schemes fail, try this one: Diet Water! Found at i-am-bored.

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Star Wars' Max Rebo Birthday Cake.

Now that’s a Star Wars Cake: a birthday cake shaped like Max Rebo [wiki], who performed for Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi (1983). Link – via Blue’s News

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Turning Beer Bottles to Solar-Powered Water Heater.

Chinese farmer Ma Yanjun wanted his mother to shower with hot water, so he invented a solar-powered water heater out of … beer bottles!

Ma’s invention features 66 beer bottles attached to a board. The bottles are connected to each other so that water flows through them.

Sunlight heats the water as is passes slowly through the bottles before flowing into the bathroom as hot water, reports China Economy Network.

Ma says it provides enough hot water for all three members of his family to have a shower every day.

Link

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The crabs of Rome.

According to the National Geographic, an ancient species of freshwater crab has been found living in canals dug by the Etruscans:

The Roman crabs—of the species Potamon fluviatile—were discovered in in 1997. Recent findings from an ongoing genetic study suggest the animals may have been around for more than a thousand years before the ancient complex was completed, around A.D. 112.

Researchers came to that conclusion after the discovery that the crabs’ genes are remarkably similar to those of Greek crabs.

"So it’s very likely that they were introduced by the Greeks 2,500 or 3,000 years ago, which means they were here even before Rome was founded in 753 B.C.," zoologist Massimiliano Scalici, of the University of Rome III, told the AFP news service. . . .

The crustaceans—which inhabit canals built by the Etruscans, a civilization that came before the Romans—are believed to be the only known freshwater crabs thriving in a major city.

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Computer History Museum

Photos from the the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

“The mission of the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. As such, the Museum plays a unique role in the history of the computing revolution and its worldwide impact on the human experience.”

Link [Flickr] – via techyum

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Blufr - Addictive Trivia Game

Blufr is quite an addictive game that you can add on your own website.

Powered by Answers.com:
free online dictionary and more

Link – via BB-Blog

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Chicken Polynesian.

Chickens are not native to the Americas, and until quite recently, scientists assumed that they arrived with the Spanish. Now it appears that Polynesian chickens beat the Spanish chickens to the Amerindian cook pot by a hundred years or more. Chicken bones found by archaeologists in Chile have been radiocarbon dated to between 1304 and 1424. As Live Science reports:

DNA extracted from the bones also matched closely with a Polynesian breed of chicken, rather than any chickens found in Europe. . . .

The chicken DNA suggests at least one group did make the harrowing journey across the remaining stretch of Pacific, Matisoo-Smith said.

“We cannot say exactly which island the voyage came from. The DNA sequence is found in chickens from Tonga, Samoa, Niue, Easter Island and Hawaii,” Matisoo-Smith said. “If we had to guess, we would say it was unlikely to have come from West Polynesia and most likely to have come from Easter Island or some other East Polynesian source that we have not yet sampled.”

The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The chicken in the photo is a plain old Rhode Island Red. When I did an image search for Polynesian Chicken, the only ones I found were already cooked!

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Eyemaker.

In this video post, ocularist Kim Erickson describes his job of making artificial eyes. It’s a a fascinating occupation you never think of, but those who have responded to this post say he’s the best. Link -via Metafilter

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Journey of Mankind.

The Bradshaw Foundation presents an interactive timeline/map combination that traces the migration of humans over the past 150,000 years. It shows how climate change and events such as volcanic eruptions caused the isolation of groups from their ancestors. Link -via Reddit

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Apple II’s 30th Anniversary.

It was on June 5, 1977 that the Apple II, the world’s first “practical” personal computer, went on sale.

Featuring an integrated keyboard, built-in BASIC programming languages, expandable memory, a monitor capable of color graphics, a sound card and expansion slots, the Apple II resembles today’s modern desktops in the way a ‘38 Plymouth resembles a Cadillac Escalade. Cruder, perhaps, with fewer bells and whistles, but a smoothly functioning machine nevertheless.

A few years later I upgraded from a TRS-80 to a second-hand Apple II. I was amazed at the ease of a computer that you didn’t have to program yourself! Link

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Inflated Hedgehog.

A woman in Leatherhead, England took a hedgehog to the vet because it was so big it couldn’t move. The animal was suffering from “ballooning”, a condition in which air escapes from the lungs and is trapped under the skin. Vets inserted a tube into the hedgehog to release the air, essentially deflating him. Link -via Arbroath

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Bigger is Better: 7 Insane Soviet Projects.

The Soviet Union decided the best way to show up the West was through building the biggest version of any given object. The following are just seven of the largest examples. 1. Magnitogorsk In Magnitogorsk, fishermen often sell their catch from the polluted Ural River to market rather than consume it themselves (Image Credit: Gerd Ludwig Photography) Whether it was for guns, tanks, ships, railroads, or bridges, Stalin, whose name means "Man of Steel," knew he needed one thing above all else for his 1920s Soviet Union: steel. He also knew that to the east, in the southern Ural Mountains, there was a unique geologic oddity named Magnitka – an entire mountain of pure iron ore, the key ingredient for steel. In 1929, Stalin decreed that a city, "Magnitogorsk" [wiki] (see what he did there?), be built from scratch around said mountain to mine the ore and turn it into steel. So began one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken. With expertise provided by Communist sympathizer from the West, a ready-made city for 450,000 inhabitants was constructed in about five years. Of course, Stalin saved on labor costs by having the heavy lifting done by political prisoners. In fact, 30,000 people died in the effort. Steel production began in 1934, but shortly after World War II the iron ore ran out and the city’s economy collapsed. 2. The Baltic – White Sea Canal Political prisoners from the gulags digging for the canal. (Image Credit: Memorial Italia) Though forced, workers at the canal was serenaded by an orchestra. (Image Credit: Alexander Rodchenko [Wikipedia]) Ever the optimist, this time Stalin wanted connect the Baltic Sea, with its key port of Leningrad, to the White Sea’s port of Archangelsk. The idea was that he could move the Soviet navy back and forth. So Stalin had more political prisoners sent to work on the canal – there was a seemingly endless supply from the gulags – and after a few brutal years it was completed in 1933. Disease, poor nutrition, and brutal conditions took a huge toll, though, with as many as 250,000 of the slave laborers dead by the end of it. Portions of canal is too shallow for anything larger than a small barge. (Image Credit: Thomasz Kizny, Forced Labor Camps) The icing on the cake? The canal was completely useless when finished. For most of its length it was too shallow to admit anything larger than a small barge. Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot. 3. The World’s Largest Hydrofoil Ekranoplan [wiki], named the Caspian Sea Monster by CIA analysts (Image Credit: Wikipedia) The world’s largest hydrofoil wasn’t really a hydrofoil at all. In fact, it was one of a series of unique machines called "ground effect" vehicles [wiki] built by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s. The Soviets had a monopoly on this fascinating technology, relying on a little-known principle of physics – the "ground effect" – in which a dense cushion of air hugging the ground can provide more lift to a vehicle than air at higher altitudes. Hovering about 3 – 12 feet above the ground, these vehicles resemble Luke Skywalker’s levitating craft from Star Wars, and far more fuel-efficient than airplanes, helicopters, hydrofoil, or cars. And at 58 feet, the largest of these, the "Caspian Sea Monster" was given its distinctive name after CIA analyst saw it at the Caspian port of Baku in photos taken by spy satellites. The craft traveled at speeds of up to 240 mph, had a swiveling nose cone for cargo loading, and could carry up to as many as 150 passengers. 4. Avant-garde Design for a Funkier Parliament Tatlin’s Monument (Image Credit: Plates from the A.V. Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture, in Cooke, C. et al (1990) Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde [Wikipedia]) Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (1885 – 1953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International [wiki] was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller assembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance. Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party’s executives. The third level – a sphere rotating once daily – would house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built. 5. A Palace for the People In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered that the largest Orthodox Christian cathedral in the world – 335 feet high, the product of 44 years of backbreaking labor by Russian peasants – be dynamited so he could build an enormous "Palace of the Soviets [wiki]," to celebrate the Communist Party. Palace of the Soviets, a 1934 concept by Iofan, Schuko, and Gelreikh Stalin wished to replace the church with a new structure taller than the Empire State Building, and capped with a gilded statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty, but the "Man of Steel’s" mad scheme never came to fruition. Although the first phase was completed (the dynamiting was the easy bit), the construction never took place as necessary resources were diverted to fighting World War II. After Stalin died, his successor – Nikita Khrushchev – ordered a large swimming pool built where the cathedral had stood. Old women who remembered the original cathedral could be seen standing at the edge of the swimming pool, praying to forgotten icons. Recently Yury Luzhkov, Moscow’s autocratic mayor, tried to make up for Stalin’s mess by ordering the construction of a tacky reproduction of the original cathedral using precast concrete. 6. The World’s Largest Hydrogen Bomb Tsar Bomba-type casing on display. Truth is always stranger than fiction, so it’s no wonder that Stanley Kubrick’s absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove is actually premised on fact. The strange truth here was that Nikita Khrushchev and company had actually been plotting to build a "doomsday" device. The plan called for a large cargo ship anchored off the Soviet Union’s east coast to be loaded with hundreds of hydrogen bombs. If at any point the radiation detectors aboard the ship measured a certain amount of atmospheric radiation, indicating that the Soviet Union had been attacked, the bombs would detonate. Mushroom cloud of the Tsar Bomba test detonation. Soviet scientists persuaded Khrushchev to drop this mad scheme. He did, however, order the construction of the world’s largest nuclear bomb in 1961, the so-called "Tsar Bomba [wiki]" ("King of Bombs"), which weighed in at about 100 megatons – equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. The largest nuclear test involved a smaller version of "Tsar Bomba" that measured somewhere between 50 and 57 megatons – the Soviets weren’t sure themselves. 7. World’s Largest Icebreaker, the Yamal And it’s the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker at that! Confronted with the world’s largest piece of ice – the Arctic Ocean – the Soviet had no intention of letting nature stand in their way. So, they came up with a simple solution: the world’s largest icebreakers. The first included the Lenin and Arktika class of nuclear-powered icebreakers, introduced in 1959 and 1975, respectively. The arktika icebreakers had not one but two nuclear reactors, powering 75,000-horsepower engines. Yamal, world’s largest icebreaker (Image Credit: ikzm-d.de) None compare with the newest vessel, however – the Yamal [wiki] – launched in 1993. Also powered by two nuclear reactors, it measures in at 490 feet long, displacing 23,000 tons of water, with a crew of 150 and an armored steel hull 4.8 centimeters thick. Recently re-outfitted for tourist operations, it has 50 luxury cabins, a library, lounge, theater, bar, volleyball court, gymnasium, heated indoor swimming pool, and saunas. A helicopter is stationed on the ship to conduct reconnaissance of ice formations.

From mental_floss’ book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History’s Naughtiest Bits, published in Neatorama with permission. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!

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