Archive for July 3rd, 2007
Google Moon.
If you thought Google Maps was everywhere already, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing.
Link -via Bits and Pieces
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Sweden recycles contraband alcohol.
Sweden has found another way to recycle. Almost all alcoholic drinks smuggled into Sweden illegally that the government seizes are now turned into biogas to run public vehicles. Last year 700,000 liters (184,000 US gallons or 154,000 UK gallons) were converted to biogas for buses, trucks, and one train. Link -via Arbroath
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FuelVapor Alé.
The FuelVapor alé is a sportscar with three wheels, but two of them are in the front! It runs on fuel vapor instead of liquid gas, so it uses about one-third the normal amount of fuel for a car of its kind, supposedly 92 mpg. And the emissions are very low. Top Gear says the FuelVapor alé will be on sale in 2008. No word yet on how much it will cost. Link
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Industrial Design Fun: Enlargements of Everyday Objects.
"Enlarged" Game & Watch (Image Credit: benklinger [Flickr])
This is definitely the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time! Flickr user benklinger has a neat set of photos of "enlargements" – basically taking regular objects like the Game & Watch "Fire" (I actually remember playing that as a kid!) and making them huge!
Apparently, this is what industrial designers do when they’re bored! Link (don’t miss the giant Bluetooth earpiece, sunglasses, and minifig! – Thanks Roni!
Artist’s name: Shay Carmon – Thanks Roni!
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Star Trek Motivational Poster Parody.
We’ve had a post on the Star Trek parody of those ubiquitous motivational posters before – here’s another one: Link – Thanks Gary! (Or you can make your own.)
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Dracula's Castle For Sale.
"Dracula’s Castle" in Transylvania is up for sale:
The Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, "Dracula."
Legend has it that Vlad, who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies, spent one night in the 1400s at the castle.
Link – Thanks Tiffany and David R!
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Color Legends: Green with Envy.
From COLOURlovers, here’s a neat article on 13 color legends. For instance, take the origin of envy as a green monster:
Color associations vary greatly from culture to culture, just as each language or dialect has unique colloquialisms that are often misunderstood or lost in translation. In many Western cultures the feelings of envy or jealousy are commonly associated with the color green. [...]
This association first appeared in the seventh century B.C., according to etymologists Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver, as the poet Sappho described a stricken lover’s appearance as “green.” At that time the words “green” and “pale” were often used interchangeably.
Other literary figures followed suit. The familiar expression “green-eyed monster” was adopted from a line in Shakespeare’s play Othello:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.Similarly, in his play Anthony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare described envy as “the green sickness.”
Link – Thanks Darius A Monsef IV!
Previously on Neatorama: Reasons for the Colors of Everyday Things
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Sark at the Crossroads.
Sark, the smallest of the Channel Islands, is the last bastion of feudalism in Europe. Rob Crossan of the Guardian writes:
Nobody has tried to change things on Sark for some time. Its arcane
system dates back to Elizabethan times, with the head of the feudal
government, or seigneur, owning everything, including anything that
gets washed up on the island’s shores. The present incumbent, Michael
Beaumont, has held the position for more than 30 years. Sark’s tenants
are required to own a musket – a relic of the time Elizabeth I sent 40
Jersey men there to quell debauchery and piracy in the 16th century.
There are no paved roads or cars, and bucolic harmony has reigned
pretty much unchallenged (bar occupation by the Nazis) for more than
500 years.
Now Sark has fallen afoul of the EU because, as Seigneur Beaumont so disarmingly puts it, "Nothing much is human-rights compliant here." So,
The tenants have three options. They can vote to retain the status quo
and risk the wrath of Strasbourg, decide to bring in democracy straight
away, or adopt a transition phase, which would mean a parliament of 28
people, of whom 16 would be elected.
And, very probably, we will have to bid godspeed to Elizabethan Sark. The ruffs, the stomachers, and even the codpieces will have to go into mothballs, all for the sake of modernization.
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Plymouth Rock: America's Saddest Monument.
You’ve heard of Plymouth Rock, right? It is the site where the Mayflower Pilgrims landed to establish a colony which later led to the formation of the United States.
But did you know that Plymouth Rock is actually a piece of rock, supposedly located where the Pilgrims actually first set foot on land? In the 1700s, people carved "1620" – the year the Pilgrims came to America.
The rock had kind of a sad history:
During the Rock’s many journeys throughout the town of Plymouth numerous pieces of the Rock were taken, bought and sold. Today approximately 1/3 of the top portion remains. It is estimated that the original Rock weighed 20,000 lb. Although some documents indicate that tourists or souvenir hunters chipped it down, no pieces have been noticeably removed since 1880.
And as if that’s not bad enough, some people described it as "the most disappointing landmark in America" because of its small size and poor visitor access.
Link: Plymouth Rock [wiki]
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Nuclear Power Ad by H5.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Here’s a cutesy ad by H5 for Canadian French energy company Areva. Very similar to the famous Röyksopp’s Remind Me music video (why, produced by the same people!).
And of course, the ad was parodied:
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Via Pruned
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The Ultimate Satellite Dish for Your Mobile Home!
Mobile home of a guy who really, really like Dish TV? Nah, that’s TARA or Transportable Atmospheric Radar), which is used to get over 200 premium channels …. er, in weather research.
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An Earth Without People.
Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, wrote a book entitled The World Without Us, imagining a scenario where all the world’s people suddenly dissapeared. What would happen to the earth?
According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.
(While the Scientific American site is down, here’s the link to the Gothamist article.)
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Monkey to Human Testicle Transplants.
Dr. Serge Voronoff was a pioneer in the field of organ transplant who was lauded as a genius in the late 1800s. His experiments included grafting monkey testicles into men, monkey ovaries into women, and human ovaries into monkeys. The purpose of the testicle transplants was “rejuvenation†and to slow the aging process, which didn’t quite work out. Link -via Look at This
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Big Bird.
The prehistoric South American bird Argentavis magnificens had a wingspan of 23 feet! That makes this bird about the same size as a Cessna light aircraft. Scientists think Argentavis was too big and heavy to flap its wings, but could fly by taking advantage of thermals and updrafts. Link
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An important omission.
Read the fine print on the side of this condom package carefully. The folks who designed the box didn’t! -via Bits and Pieces
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Hemp Field Art.
A hemp field in Utting, Germany has been plowed with the image of a castle. It’s one of the many castles built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who obsessively built distinctive castles during his reign in the 19th century. If you look closely, you’ll also find a portrait of the king in the green field. Link -via Arbroath
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Susumu Ikegami's Stone Sculptures.
This fantastic figure 8 sculpture by Japanese artist Susumu Ikegami is a symbol of financial growth, so it’s fitting that it is displayed on the grounds of a tax office!
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Gene2Music: Translating the Genetic Code Into Music.
Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey Miller of UCLA have a project called gene2music, where they translate human genetic code into music!
I won’t go into the amino acid to musical note assignment – you can read it at the website or just listen to the examples.
This one above, by the way, is the "musical" aspect of Huntingtin [wiki], the protein associated with Huntington’s Disease. I worked on Huntingtin briefly during my grad school years oh-so-long-ago.
Link – via Discovery Channel
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Virga: Rain that Evaporates before Reaching the Ground.
Photo Credit: Charles Jackson
UFO? No, that’s a strange weather phenomenon called virga: rain that evaporates before reaching the ground.
Earth Science Picture of the Day has more info: Link
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Vintage Ad: TV Will Make You Smarter!
Here’s the headline from this 1950 Motorola ad touting how owning its TV will mean better grades at school for your children, keeping them out of mischief, and strengthen family ties.
Larger pic here: Link
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Smell Jars of the Stasi.
The Kircher Society blog has a neat article about a strange collection of the Stasi, the East German secret police:
One of the more bizarre activities the Stasi was found to have engaged in was the collection of Geruchsproben — smell samples — for the benefit of the East German smell hounds. The odors, collected during interrogations using a perforated metal “smell sample chair” or by breaking into people’s homes and stealing their dirty underwear, were stored in small glass jars.
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Open Shutter Light Effects
Photo effects made by playing with light toys in a dark room, while having the shutter open.
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