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Update: Just a couple hours later, the population has soared to 99, unemployment is at a staggering 49%, but there is still no crime.
You can start your own city, too. Link -via Dump Trumpet (who has a new URL)
A vacant mausoleum can be a place for relaxation or entertainment. Residents in this area can come to this one and drop five pesos to sing karaoke.
Bahag of Vice Magazine wrote a fascinating article titled "Living, Dead" about a graveyard in Manila that has been "appropriated" by the living as their homes!
10,000 Filipino families live in this massive graveyard in Manila. I recently spent five days walking among its residents taking photos and hearing stories of struggle and survival.
Some families ended up here almost accidentally. Some inherited the mausoleums that they now live in from their great-grandparents. Others came from the provinces and couldn’t make enough money to live in the big city. In all cases, they’re basically families with nowhere else to go.
The people who live here manage to extract livelihoods from the dead. Teenagers carry coffins for 50 Filipino pesos—about 50 American cents. Children collect scrap metal, plastic, and other garbage to sell. Their fathers are employed to repair and maintain tombs while their mothers maintain the house, which could be the family mausoleum or the mausoleum of their employers. Rent-free shanties are wedged between or on top of crypts.
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anArchitecture blog calculated how much surface area one gets for every 50,000 Euros (about USD $73,400) in various cities in the world.
For your convenience, here are the conversion:
|
m2
|
Sq. foot
|
|
| New York |
4.1
|
44.1
|
| Tokyo |
6.7
|
72.1
|
| Sydney |
8.9
|
95.8
|
| Shanghai |
21.5
|
231.4
|
| Berlin |
22.6
|
243.3
|
| Beijing |
30.4
|
327.2
|
| Dubai |
59.8
|
643.7
|
In New York, the most expensive city, this translates to about $1664 per square foot or $11.6 per square inch!
Link | Source: Trend 10/2007 (Austrian business magazine)
Here’s a neat infographical opening title sequence of Peter Berg’s movie "The Kingdom," which explains the history of the US involvement in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since 1932 in just four minutes.
An oversimplification of a complex history, no doubt, but the essence is all there.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via information aesthetics
To find out if danger makes people experience time in slow motion, David Eagleman and colleagues sent volunteers tumbling down on a free-fall from great heights:
To see if danger makes people experience time in slow motion, scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston tried scaring volunteers. However, roller coasters and other frightening amusement park rides did not cause enough fear to make time warp.
Instead, the researchers dropped volunteers from great heights. Scientists had volunteers dive backward with no ropes attached, into a special net that helped break their fall. They reached 70 mph during the roughly three-second, 150-foot drop.
"It’s the scariest thing I have ever done," said researcher David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine. "I knew it was perfectly safe, and I also knew that it would be the perfect way to make people feel as though an event took much longer than it actually did."
Indeed, volunteers estimated their own fall lasted about a third longer than dives they saw other volunteers take.
Sure enough, people perceived time to slow down, but it wasn’t because they became hyper aware. Rather, it was an illusion of memory:
When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.
"In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories," Eagleman explained. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."
Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you’re a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."
Link (Photo: David Eagleman)
Artist Tom Dukich (remember him from the WunderKat experiment we featured a while ago?) has created another work of art: an umbrella with an embedded iPod! Perfect for singing-along in the rain!
Link [Flickr]
This, and other fantastic one-of-a-kind umbrellas were created by artists for Design Commission’s exhibit Chance of Showers, to benefit a nonprofit center 826 Seattle.
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David Featherstone and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a gene in fruit flies that control their sexual orientation!
The team led by University of Illinois at Chicago researcher David Featherstone has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies’ homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
Featherstone, associate professor of biological sciences at UIC, and his coworkers discovered a gene in fruit flies they called "genderblind," or GB. A mutation in GB turns flies bisexual.
Link – via Differenceblog
Brooklyn artist Emily Barletta crocheted a series of artwork, titled My Biology, that takes inspiration from cells, fibers, veins as well as other microscopic biological structures!
Link – via Philadelphia Weekly
Gideontech user Filimon and Russian website modding.ru’s admin spent nearly 8 months to create this awesome stainless steel mouse out of a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical mouse.
Link – via Gizmo Watch, thanks Naveen!
Previously on Neatorama: Ultimate Case Mod Page
An 80-year-old man in India claimed to have a "holy leg" that could heal people of spiritual and physical problems if they touched it. But not anymore:
Police say that the self-styled ‘Godman’ – who lives in a village near the city of Tirupati – was approached a few days ago by two strangers who came to seek his advice over a medical problem.
They say that the pair returned to the old man on Tuesday ostensibly to thank him for his help.
"As the old man had the weakness of drinking, he accepted their invitation to have drinks with them," said local police Sub-Inspector Pendakanti Dastgiri.
"They took him to a deserted spot in the outskirts of the village.
"After the old man had passed out under the influence of liquor, they cut off his right leg from the knee," he said.
Mr Dastgiri said that the amputation was carried out in a very "brutal manner" and that police are still looking for the leg and the men who so cruelly took it.
He said that the assailants used a sharp hunting knife, and left the old man alone and bleeding slowly to death.
Gruesome! Link – Thanks Emperor! (No, that photo wasn’t of the guy who got his leg cut off)
Comments Off Check out this powerful Snow Plow Train get stuck. At first I thought it would keep going but as massive as they are, mother nature has her way.
Link: Youtube
The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe may look just like any other tall buildings around the world, but it is quite different: it was modeled after termite mound!
The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, typifies the best of green architecture and ecologically sensitive adaptation. The country’s largest office and shopping complex is an architectural marvel in its use of biomimicry principles. The mid-rise building, designed by architect Mick Pearce in conjunction with engineers at Arup Associates, has no conventional air-conditioning or heating, yet stays regulated year round with dramatically less energy consumption using design methods inspired by indigenous Zimbabwean masonry and the self-cooling mounds of African termites!
Inhabitat blog explains how this building stays cool year round without AC: Link
I hope this ain’t fake, because it is soooo awesome! These guys created an 8-legged, gas-powered spider mech "because they could!"
A: Three months to design … six months to build. $15,000 budget and probably 3 times that in man hour….
Q: Why did you do this?
A: It was art … we did it because we could.
Q: Does a history of mental illness run in your family?
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks wade7!
Update 12/13/07: It’s called the Mondo Spider, created by Charlie Brinson, Dillard Brinson, Alex Mossman, Leigh Christie and Jonathan Tippett – Thanks Anonymous!
I originally saw this on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and found the original New York Times article (from November 11, 2007) to re-post:
(Photo by Misha Erwitt for the NY Times)
In 1999, Bonnie Brown answered an ad in the paper for a new company called “Google,” and became the new company masseuse.
She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.
The stock touched an all-time high of $747.24 on Tuesday before falling more than $83 a share during the week to close at $663.97 on Friday. But even after that sell-off, the stock has risen more than 44 percent, or $203 a share, this year.
The days are long gone when people like Ms. Brown were handed thousands of Google options with the exercise price, or the pre-determined price that employees would pay to buy the stock, set in pennies.
At Google, the sensibility is more nuanced, they say. “It isn’t considered ‘Googley’ to check the stock price,” said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company’s culture. As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter, said the engineer, who did not want to be named because it is considered unseemly to discuss the price.
When Ms. Brown left Google, the stock price had merely doubled from its initial offering price of $85. So Ms. Brown is glad she ignored the advice of her financial advisers and held onto a cache of stock.
As the stock continues to defy gravity, Ms. Brown, whose foundation has its assets in Google stock, can be more generous with her charity. “It seems that every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she said. “It’s like an overflowing pot.”
The wealth generated by options is giving a lot of people like Ms. Brown the freedom to leave and do whatever they like.
I especially like that she’s naming her book “Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.”
Enjoy!
Are these people crazy? Apparently, there are a small group of "hardy, fossil fuel-eschewing cold warriors" in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, that brave snow and sub-zero temperature to commute to work on their bikes every day!
Link | Tips on "winter biking" (that’s a euphimism if I ever saw one!) – Thanks Jeff Shaw!
We’ve posted a LEGO creation by Brickshelf Gallery user Arvo a while ago, but he has uploaded a new creation: this awesome Iron Man LEGO figure!
Too bad there are no other pictures beside this one: Link | Arvo’s creations – via The Brothers Brick
Photo: thee artful dodger [Flickr]
Ben McCorkle of A Bubbling Cauldron of Rank Miscellany blog sent us this photo of his tattoo, inspired by the 80s Centipede arcade game by Atari! It was inked by artist f14hellkat. Thanks Ben!
Trivia: did you know that it was the first arcade game created by a woman? Her name is Dona Bailey (she programmed the game along with Ed Logg, who co-developed Asteroids.)
We’ve posted about Nicholas Gurewitch’s excellent Perry Bible Fellowship comics a while ago, but this particular strip reminded me of an article we had on Neatorama: The Lassie Experiment: Will Fido Save You in an Emergency Or Just Let You Die?
See more of Nicholas’ twisted (but very funny) comics here: Link – Thanks Pork!
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Rick Klein of ABC World News Webcast spent hours going through countless political ads for the 2008 US Presidential Election to pick out the gems.
Here are his picks: the best (and the worst) campaign ads in the categories of the best use of celebrity, best presidential hair, worst actor, and a really weird one: best use of a rock and a pond!
Link – Thanks Zach and Natalie!
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Reading this HoustonPress article by Linda Leseman, titled the Top Ten Worst Song Lyrics of 2007, really made me feel like an old fuddy-duddy. I didn’t even know half these people!
Trill Fam? That’s the first time I’ve even heard of ‘em – but Linda’s description made me snicker:
9. Trill Fam, “Watch My Shoes” Trill Fam has violated what should be an unspoken rule: songs about not stepping on shoes are best left to Elvis and Carl Perkins. The intro of “Watch My Shoes” contains more f-words than the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, the song expands its vocabulary with the chorus, which warns, “Do what ya do, but watch my shoes, dance wit ya boo, but watch my shoes…you can get loose, but watch my shoes, ‘cause you’ll get blues, you don’t watch my shoes.” One wonders why these particular shoes merit watching. According to Trill Fam, “They fresh out the box, and if you scuff ‘em I’m gonna have to knock you clean out your socks.” Point taken, but Perkins and the King are rolling in their graves.
See if you agree with her pick of the top 10 worst song lyrics of the year: Link – Thanks Keith Plocek!
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Ah, Dan Piraro really got me goin’ with his Bizarro comic making fun of the political correctness-gone mad this Christmas.
In the United Kingdom, there were reports of school scrapping nativity plays and local community councils renaming Christmas "Winterval". The secularization of Christmas had gotten so ridiculous that recently, even the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and the Human Rights Commission in United Kingdom said enough is enough:
Muslim leaders joined Britain’s equality watchdog Monday in urging Britons to enjoy Christmas without worrying about offending non-Christians.
"It’s time to stop being daft about Christmas. It’s fine to celebrate and it’s fine for Christ to be star of the show," said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Mr. Phillips, reflecting on media reports of schools scrapping nativity plays and local councils celebrating "Winterval" instead of Christmas, worried the unintended consequences of secularizing the holiday would "fuel community tension."
So he joined forces with minority religious leaders to put out a blunt message to the politically correct: leave Christmas alone.
Links: Christian Science Monitor article | Dan Piraro’s website: Bizarro
(In other news, it is rumored that Britney Spears is starring as Mary in a bizarre satire film called "Sweet Baby Jesus." Not as Mary Magdalene, but as the Virgin Mary. Sigh.)
"If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check."
– Dan Quayle, US Vice President (1947 – )
The problem to be solved was simple: "what are the prime factors of the number 15." But it was the method that was neat: physicists did it with quantum calculation!
Professor Andrew White, from UQ’s Centre for Quantum Computer Technology together with colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada, said by manipulating quantum mechanically entangled photons – the fundamental particles of light – the prime factors of the number 15 were calculated.
“Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and one, so the prime factors of 15 are three and five,” Professor White said.
“Although the answer to this problem could have been obtained much more quickly by querying a bright eight-year-old, as the number becomes bigger and bigger the problem becomes more and more difficult.
“What is difficult for your brain is also difficult for conventional computers. This is not just a problem of interest to pure mathematicians: the computational difficulty of factoring very large numbers forms the basis of widely used internet encryption systems.”
Ben Lanyon, UQ doctoral student and the research paper’s first author, said calculating the prime factors of 15 was a crucial step towards calculating much larger numbers, which could be used to crack cryptographic codes that are unbreakable using conventional computers.
Link | Wikipedia article about quantum computer
