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Sent in by Neatorama reader Hojimoto, who wrote:
Since you’ve had a recurring theme of business signs with odd gaffes on them, I thought I’d share one of my local restaurant gaffes. The pics are taken by me, and not photoshopped. It’s from our local Rooster’s restaurant (beer/wings). Enjoy!
Indeed – just don’t enjoy the chicken: Link – Thanks Hojimoto!
Woodrow Landfair, 24 year old author, sold everything he owned to pursue his dream: to find stories of the real America by riding across the lower 48 states:
To support himself –and to gather material–Landfair does manual labor and odd jobs. He’s worked as a room service bell hop, a door-to-door salesman, a babysitter, a bartender, a waiter, and a food-runner. He’s built a fence in Florida, been a bouncer in New York City, changed oil in Virginia, and lifeguarded in Washington, D.C.
Landfair has lived in homeless shelters in New York City. He has stayed as a volunteer in the Katrina ravaged Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. He’s slept and dined in the mansions of millionaires, in trailer parks, in truck stops, and in roadside fields.
His journey through the 48 states is part of a curriculum in self-education. Landfair is learning as a writer, as an artist, as an American, and as a human.
Link – Thanks Andrew Leucht!
Ethan Crumlin, Andrew Hoy, Joseph Walish, Peter Weigele, John Craven, Gerardo Jose, and Jungik Kim of Team BioVolt
Team BioVolt from MIT has created a prototype device that generates cheap electricity from grass clippings. They won first place in the MIT and Dow Materials Engineering Contest (MADMEC) 2007:
The device the team invented for the competition generates electricity from cellulosic biomass. The device is intended to generate enough electricity to charge a cell phone in developing countries. Team members say that the current power output of the device would take about six months to recharge your cell phone.
However, BioVolt is quick to point out that the materials in the device only cost about $2 to obtain and the biomass "fuel" can be found everywhere in nature as leaves and grass clippings. The team members say that multiple units could be connected together to increase power output and that refinements in the design of the device could yield a 100 times increase in efficiency.
Link | More about MIT and Dow Materials Engineering Contest
In the past nine years, researchers had been painstakingly restoring a lost text by Archimedes discovered underneath an ancient prayer book. The result stunned everyone:
Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes’s work, so no one but Heiberg had studied them until now. One of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus.
Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes’ work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."
In The Method, Archimedes was working out a way to compute the areas and volumes of objects with curved surfaces, which was also one of the problems that motivated Newton and Leibniz. Ancient mathematicians had long struggled to "square the circle" by calculating its exact area. That problem turned out to be impossible using only a straightedge and compass, the only tools the ancient Greeks allowed themselves. Nevertheless, Archimedes worked out ways of computing the areas of many other curved regions.
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Plagued by a wave of bogong moth, Australians are trying to beat the infestation by … eating the bugs!
Each year at this time millions of the moths fly south from Queensland into New South Wales to avoid the summer heat. Once across the state border they head for the Snowy Mountains where they hibernate in caves. [...]
The "munch a moth" campaign is being led by Jean-Paul Bruneteau, 51, a French-born chef who is regarded as a worldwide pioneer of such delights as smoked emu, lemon myrtle and bunya nuts.
He first began eating the brown bogong moths 11 years ago while researching a book on "bush tucker" eaten by Aborigines. "They have a lovely popcorn flavour, like hazelnut," he said.
MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
Links for each winner and/or their winning research can be found at Improbable Research. Link -via J-Walk Blog
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Meet Li Tangyong, 3 ft 7 in (1.1 m) and Chen Guilan, 2 ft 4 in (0.7 m), a Chinese newly-weds who are vying to get in the record books as the world’s shortest couple! Link
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This has got to be one of the coolest case mod ever: the Incredible Hulk PC, where dangling cables aren’t something that needs to be hidden – heck, they’re a feature! It took 14 months to make. Link [Flash] – via TechEBlog
See also: Neatorama’s Ultimate Case Mods page
"Work is the curse of the drinking class."
– Oscar Wilde, author (1854-1900)
Got a hundred channel on your new plasma? Well, this is a remote control that lets you access channel 90 instantly … because it’s got 100 buttons!
Introducing the Pultius TV remote control, which is about half a meter (20 inches) long! Link
Here’s a funny slideshow at Guy Kawasaki’s blog, titled You Know You’re Old When …
… your bowel movements have more drama and excitement than your sex life
… you watch 5 minutes of the MTV video music awards, hardly recognize anyone, and wonder when popular music got so terrible?
It was created by Rowan Manahan of Fortify Your Oasis to help celebrate Guy’s 53rd birthday. Link (and Happy Belated Birthday, Guy!)
My alma mater, UC Berkeley, had just put over 300 hours of videos on YouTube covering lectures on biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. It says that it’s the first university to offer full courses available on YouTube.
Link | Here’s a good one: Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines – via Ars Technica
Spotted over at Cute Overload, one of my favorite blogs: a donkey carrying packs of lambs! Link
Comments Off In his exhibition Everyone is an Artist, Tattfoo Tan set up a blank canvas of thermal fax papers that people can "draw" on using heat guns, hot glue gun and soldering iron.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Installation at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina – Thanks Tattfoo!
Mecca-Cola is marketed to pro-Muslim consumers with an anti-Israel pitch, including that 10% of its profits will go to Palestine.
Its slogan is "No More Drinking Stupid, Drink with Commitment." It is made in France.
I’ve always heard the old story about kids pwning Burger King’s angus burger sign, but this is actually the first time I’ve seen the photo, sent in by Neatorama reader Becky:
This photo was taken in Huntington, WV, about 2 years ago, and is the Washington Ave. Burger king. I happened to have my camera in my bag and had to drive around the block twice to get this photo.
Even funnier is that after I got the picture, I went home and called them to let them know it was up, and the lady that answered the phone was nearly silent to the point I thought she’d hung up, and then she burst out and said “THOSE DAMN KIDS!!”
I nearly fell off my couch laughing, and this is one of the most commented on-photos on my page : ) Anyway, enjoy! (but I don’t recommend the burgers ; )
Now that’s out of my system, this concludes the stupid (and old) an(g)us burger joke – Thanks Becky !
Chris Harrison created this interesting map of the world’s Internet Map, a connection density that visually depicts the structure of the web (by router configuration):
The first rendering displays the relative densities of Internet connectivity across the globe. The stronger the contrast, the more connectivity there is. It is immediately obvious, for example, that North America and Europe are considerably more connected than Africa or South America. However, it is important to note that this only reflect density of connections, and not usage. Hundreds of people may utilize a single connection in an internet cafe, often the only form of connectivity people have access to in developing nations.
Link (larger pic) – Thanks kaiserandi!
