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David Friedman of Ironic Sans got the best collection of Valentine’s Day cards EVAR: the Scientists Valentines featuring Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Carl Sagan, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.
See the whole collection here: Link – Thanks Allen
Neatorama reader Jared Thornburg recently had a birthday, and his girlfriend got a cake made for him that combined the two best things in the world: beer and cake.
I’m not sure about his choice of Helleman’s Heileman’s Old Style Beer 
but the cake is awesome! Thanks Jared!
Jeff Simmermon went to the "Robotopia Rising" exhibit at the Kennedy Center, Washington. D.C. and wrote a neat blog post about it.
There was a particularly interesting robot called the Wakamaru:
The Wakamaru robot is apparently the closest thing to an actual home-use, elder-care robot in Japan. According to the marketing brochure, this little yellow friend can
1. gather information about your interests and keep you up to date
2. remember your appointments and give you reminders
3. send and receive e-mail for you and relay the message to the correct family member by recognizing that person’s face
4. see you off when you leave the house
5. constantly check the surroundings at home using the omni-directional camera and welcome you home when you return.This little guy is the closest thing to an actual R2-D2-style robot butler than mankind has, and it’s pretty incredible. I couldn’t get through to interact with the one on display — it was surrounded by throngs of thrilled and nervous kids — but just watching it play with kids, exercising, chanting, and waving was utterly breathtaking.
One day, kids will be as comfortable with robots as they are with IM. To kids, they’ll be the bridge between toys and friends, and the thought just makes the mind twitch.
Link – Thanks Jeff!
The cast of Spongebob Squarepants made a neat little video clip for last week’s Annie Awards for animated movies. In the clip, Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence and Rodger Bumpass dub over scenes from classic movies Casablanca, Singin’ in the Rain,and The Godfather.
Link [embedded YouTube] – Thanks Widgett!
Researchers at the deCODE Genetics company in Iceland combed through more than 150 years of data and found that "kissing cousins" produce more children and grandchildren than unrelated couples:
For women born between 1925 and 1949, with mates related at the degree of third cousins, the average number of children and grandchildren were 3.27 and 6.64, compared with 2.45 and 4.86 for those with mates who were eighth cousins, or more distantly related.
"These are counterintuitive, almost dislikable results," said Dr. Kari Stefansson, senior author of the paper on the study.
Dislikable, because our intuition is that the more closely related you are to your mate, the higher the chances of passing along the unfortunate traits so often associated with inbreeding.
Scientists are surmising that marrying your third cousin may actually be the best biological strategy for reproduction:
Now, many gene experts are scratching their heads while trying to explain the biological mechanism behind these results.
According to Stefansson, the reason that related couples were more biologically successful may be because these couples have "just right" genes when combined — not too similar, but not too dissimilar, either. [...]
"The take-home message is that … we, as a society of [the] 21st century, have basically ruled against the marriages of closely related couples, because we do not look at it as desirable that closely related people have children," Stefansson said. "But in spite of the fact that bringing together two alleles of a recessive trait may be bad, there is clearly some biological wisdom in the union of relatively closely related people."
Link | Scientific American article – via 3quarksdaily, thanks Marilyn Terrell!
I see Miss Cellania’s Valentine pig born with a heart-shaped mark and raise her this heart-shaped tumor.
Link (warning: gross factor is HIGH) – Thanks carl!
I’m going to Disneyland in two weeks! I’ve been there before; my husband hasn’t. We’re both Disney freaks – especially anything Haunted Mansion-related.
Some Disneyland attractions are classics and have been around forever – Dumbo, for instance, has been around almost since the beginning (the park opened on July 17, 1955 and Dumbo followed about a month later). Peter Pan’s Flight has been around since the beginning, and so has the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (the teacups!) and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Other rides haven’t really stood up to the test of time, unfortunately, and those are the ones we’re going to take a look at.
Holidayland
photo from A History of Disney Theme Parks
You’re probably familiar with the different sections of Disneyland these days – Tomorrowland, Frontierland and Fantasyland, to name a few. But Holidayland? Yep. It opened on June 16, 1957, and was a nine-acre picnic area that was for… well… frolicking, basically. There were playgrounds, horseshoes, a baseball field, volleyball and the “world’s largest candy-striped circus tent” which stood where the Haunted Mansion is today. Pirates of the Caribbean takes up the spot where the baseball field used to be. It only lasted a few years – Holidayland closed in 1961 because it just didn’t fit in with the rest of the park (among other things like lack of shade).
The Viewliner
This miniature train has the dubious honor of being one of the shortest-lived rides to ever exist at Disneyland. It opened in June of 1957 and promptly closed in September 1958 when construction started on the Matterhorn and Submarine Voyage. There were two trains – one for Fantasyland and one for Tomorrowland – and the track ran a figure-eight through both of those areas. The tiny, sleek (for that time) train was supposed to represent the future of train travel. Eventually the monorail filled the void left by the Viewliner.
Monsanto House of the Future
picture from Apartment Therapy
I love those old ads from the 1950s that show “futuristic” kitchens cooking the meals all by themselves with “space-age” technology. That’s kind of what the Monsanto House of the Future was like. It was in operation from 1957 to 1967 and was a tour of a house in the year 1986. It’s laughable now, but the MIT-built house featured technology such as microwaves, which obviously did end up being invented. Just about everything about the house – including the exterior – was made out of plastic. You can still see the support pillars of Monsanto’s House of the Future in Neptune’s Grotto – they were rated for earthquakes and proved to be so sturdy that they were just about impossible to remove. Monsanto, by the way, is an agricultural biotechnology company (meaning they make herbicides and pesticides and the like).
Captain EO
picture from AlteredDreams
In the more recent past, we have Captain EO, which I vaguely remember from EPCOT. Captain EO was a 3-D movie starring, of course, Michael Jackson. And if you’re looking for more credentials than that (keep in mind MJ was HUGE at this point in time), it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and executive produced by George Lucas. They also co-wrote the script with Rusty Lemorande.
Here’s the plot: Captain EO and his team are piloting a spaceship to deliver a gift to the evil Supreme Leader (Anjelica Huston). One of his shipmates is named Hooter, which seems like a huge oversight to me. Hooter is an elephant, not an owl as you might suspect. Well, the Supreme Leader isn’t exactly thrilled with the crew and orders them to be tortured. EO charms the Queen by singing her a song, but as soon as the music stops the spell breaks and she orders the crew to be captured again. EO uses his music to transform the evil guards into dancers who line up to dance behind him Thriller-zombie-style. EO eventually uses his powers to turn the Supreme Leader and her entire planet into things of beauty.
The 17-minute film cost somewhere between $17 and $30 million to make. Sounds like a lot, but when you consider than it ran for more than 10 years at Disneyland (1986 to 1997), maybe it’s not so bad. Then MJ went weird and Disney decided to pull the attraction and replace it with “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience”.
America Sings!
picture from Yesterland
Looking for a collection of animatronic swamp critters singing old Dixieland favorites and old folk tunes? Too bad you missed America Sings! Had you been at Disneyland sometime between June of 1974 and April of 1988, you could have witnessed geese singing “Camptown Races”, a dog singing “Home on the Range” a pink singing “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey?” and a crane and a rooster singing “Shake, Rattle and Roll”. A decent number of the characters appeared to be either quite intoxicated or at least trying their hardest to get there. It’s one of the few Disney attractions with characters actually drinking alcohol (Pirates of the Caribbean also comes to mind… rum anyone?). The building was used for offices for a while and eventually became home to Innoventions, which I believe is still there today. The swamp creatures, however, befriended Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear and now reside happily at Splash Mountain.
Flying Saucers
Picture from Yesterland
High school physics students who participated in Hovercraft competitions, this one is for you. Basically, the Flying Saucers ride was Disney’s answer to bumper cars. When the ride starts, air would shoot up under the saucer and lift it up off the floor (just a little… we’re not talking feet here). Riders would have to tilt their bodies the way they wanted the saucer to go and were encouraged to bump into other guests. Alas, the saucers only lasted about five years in the mid 60s.
Those are just a few of the rides that are now defunct – things at all of the Disney parks are always changing. Even the old favorites get little updates every now and then. Do you have a favorite ride that is no longer in operation? I know a lot of people were upset when the Magic Kingdom’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea met its maker.
We already have the Easter bunny and the Thanksgiving turkey, why not a Valentine pig? Valentine the Gloucester Old Spot piglet was born ten days ago at Byford’s Farm in Taynton, Gloucestershire. Farmer Eric Freeman said:
“I’ve bred thousands of Old Spot piglets over the years but this is the first ever to have such a clear heart-shaped mark.
“It couldn’t be more appropriate with Valentine’s Day just around the corner.”
Featured in a previous post, artist Brandon McConnell uses cans of spray paint along with a cooking pot’s lid and a few pages torn from a magazine to create this breathtaking piece of art. More from him on his website.
Link: Spacepaintings
Video: Youtube
During World War II, Nazi scientists worked at a secret lab in Hillersleben to develop weapons of mass destruction. One of these proposed weapons was the Sun Gun, a space station that would focus the sun’s rays on the enemies of the Third Reich! Read the story at Damn Interesting. Link
Edison with his phonograph (1877). To "hear" Edison bit into his phonograph so the sound vibration traveled through his teeth to his inner ear.
You only have to look around you to see things that Thomas Alva Edison invented or made better. The prolific inventor (in his 84 years, Edison had 1,093 patents to his name) contributed to the incandescent light bulb, phonograph, electrical systems, motion picture camera, telegraph, telephone, X-ray and so on.
Most people think of the light bulb when they think of Edison, but did you know that the "Wizard of Menlo Park" actually didn’t invent the thing? Did you know about his idea of using cement to build homes, furniture, refrigerators and even pianos? Or, how about his role in the execution of a rogue elephant by electrocution?
In honor of his birthday (he was born in February 11, 1847), Neatorama has cobbled up 10 fascinating facts about Thomas Edison, the world’s most famous and prolific inventor:
Edison was an inquisitive child but a poor student as his mind often wandered. The youngest of 7 siblings, "Al" as he was called in his youth, was deemed "addled" by his school teacher.
When she found out, Edison’s mother was angry and pulled him out of school after only three months of formal education. She home schooled him instead. Edison later recounted "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had some one to live for, some one I must not disappoint."
When Edison turned 9, his mother gave him an elementary science book on how to do chemistry experiments at home. Edison was hooked: he did every experiments in the book and soon spent all his spare money buying chemicals.
At the tender age of 10, Edison built his first science laboratory in the basement of his family’s home. His father tried to bribe him with a penny if only Edison would get out of the basement and go read a book. This he did, but he also used the penny to buy more chemicals for experiments. And to make sure no one took his prized chemicals, he labeled all his bottles "poison."
At around the age of 12, Edison started to lose his hearing. One legend has it that a train conductor smacked him in the ears after he started a fire in a boxcar by doing experiments. Edison himself said that he was injured when the conductor picked him up by the ears onto a moving train. Others had said that it caused by a bout of scarlet fever during childhood. In all likelihood it was a genetic condition as both Edison’s father and one of his brothers also suffered from hearing loss.
But one thing’s for sure: Edison actually liked being deaf (technically, he was hard of hearing, not completely deaf). He said that it made it easier for him to concentrate on his experiments.
Oh, one more thing: Edison actually did have a laboratory in a boxcar that caught on fire! Then 12-year-old Edison took a job selling newspaper and candies on the Grand Trunk Railroad from Port Huron to Detroit. He set up a lab for chemistry experiments and a printing press in the baggage car, where he published the Grand Trunk Herald, the first newspaper published on a train.
At the Grand Trunk Railroad, 14-year-old Edison saved 3-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from a runaway boxcar. Jimmie’s father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie was so grateful that he taught Edison how to operate the telegraph machine.
Later, Edison became a telegraph operator for Western Union. He requested the night shift so he could have more time for his experiments. One day he accidentally spilled sulphuric acid while experimenting on a battery. The acid ran between the floorboards and onto his boss’ desk below. Needless to say, Edison was fired the next morning.
In 1869, when Edison was just 22 years old, he got his first patent for a telegraphic vote-recording machine for the legislature. Each legislator would move a switch on Edison’s machine that would record his vote on a particular bill.
When a business partner brought the invention to Washington D.C., this is what Congress had to say about it:
The chairman of the committee, unimpressed with the speed with which the instrument could record votes, told him that "if there is any invention on earth that we don’t want down here, that is it." The slow pace of roll call voting in Congress and other legislatures enabled members to filibuster legislation or convince others to change their votes. Edison’s vote recorder was never used. (Source: The Edison Papers)
From then on, Edison decided that he would only invent something if there was a market for it.
On Christmas Day in 1871, at the age of 24, Edison married his 16-year old employee Mary Stilwell, after meeting her just two months earlier. By February, Edison was exasperated at his wife’s inability to invent that he wrote in his diary "Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!!" and "My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent." Mary gave birth to three children, the first two Edison nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash."
Two years after Mary died, Edison met and married 20-year-old Mina Miller. The story of how the two met is quite interesting: After Mary’s death, Edison regularly went to Boston and stayed with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Gilliard. The Gilliards made sure that some eligible young lady was "visiting" at the same time. Edison, who was half-deaf, bug-eyed, plagued with halitosis and bad dandruff, would stick his face very close to the girl’s in order to hear her words. This naturally creeped them all out!
One day, the Gilliards introduced Edison to Mina Miller, to whom Edison was immediately smitten:
Edison found his own version of paradise in Fort Myers, then a small village, and apparently decided that he must do three things: build a winter home in Florida, marry Mina, and bring her to his tropical Eden. Once back in New York, Edison–normally a workaholic–was obsessed with his new love. He wrote in his diary at this time: "Saw a lady who looked like Mina. Got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a streetcar. If Mina interferes much more will have to take out an accident policy." (Source: Anatomy of Some Celebrated Marriages by D. Wallechinsky and I. Wallace, The People’s Almanac)
Edison taught Mina Morse code so they could communicate in secret by tapping into each other’s hands when her family was around. One day, Edison asked .– — ..- .-.. -.. -.– — ..- — .- .-. .-. -.– — . and Mina replied -.– . …
According to a 1911 policy with the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, Edison had five dots tattooed on his left forearm. No one knew what the dots meant.
Interestingly, Edison was credited for inventing the basic tattoo machine. In 1876, he patented the Stencil-Pens, an engraving device that many years later was modified by Samuel O’Reilly to make the world’s first tattoo machine.
Though it would’ve been a neat thing, there was simply no evidence that Edison used his invention to give himself a tattoo.
After Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, Edison directed his employee, a glassblower named Clarence Dally to develop a fluoroscope (then called the Edison X-ray focus tube). The device was a commercial success and ultimately became the basis of modern fluoroscopy used in hospitals today.
At the time, X-rays were not believed to be dangerous and Clarence had a habit of testing X-ray tubes on his hands. In 1900, he had developed lesion on his wrist that wouldn’t heal after several skin grafts and was so tenacious that his hand had to be amputated. Edison kept Dally on his payroll, even when he was so sick that he couldn’t work any more. Clarence’s condition worsened and even after the amputations of both of his arms, he died of cancer.
Shaken, Edison stopped all work on fluoroscopes as revealed in a New York World interview in 1903:
"Don’t talk to me about X-rays," he said. "I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms. I am afraid of radium and polonium too, and I don’t want to monkey with them." (Source: New York World)
In 1887, Edison embarked on a project that would later prove to be a huge fiasco. He proposed an idea of extracting iron from low-grade ore and was immediately ridiculed by an editorial who called the idea "Edison’s Folly." The stubborn Edison immediately invested his own money and built a huge plant and a town around it, only to find years later that it would be far cheaper to mine iron ores!
So, left with all of the heavy machineries from the failed ore project, Edison decided to get into the cement business. He noticed that one could mold concrete into a wide variety of shapes and thought that he could build a house by pouring concrete into a single, giant mold! And not only the house: "everything from bathtubs, windowsills, staircases, and picture frames to electrical conduits and reinforcing rods would be molded right in." (Source: American Heritage)
Edison and a model of his concrete house.
Photo: Edison National Historic Site – US National Park Service
Edison, who grew up poor, thought that he could solve New York’s housing problem and clear out the slums by mass producing affordable working man’s houses. But first, he needed a model: Edison hired a high-profile architecture firm to create a two-story, two-family house "in the style of Francis I." At Edison’s request (he didn’t want to be known as "the father of ugly houses"), the model came with a large front porch and intricate exterior moldings.
This, of course, turned out to be impractical – so Edison downscaled his plan and casted his first concrete house on Hixon Street in South Orange, New Jersey, in 1911 (it was later demolished to make way for a supermarket and a parking lot).
Edison’s cement houses. Photo: Edison National Historic Site – US National Park Service
In 1917, with Edison’s blessing, pocket-watch magnate (apparently there was such a person) Charles Ingersoll constructed 11 concrete houses and offered them at $1,200 each – roughly one third of the usual price – but not a single house was sold!
Some historians and Edison biographers blame the publicity and Edison’s grandiose predictions for the demise of his most altruistic endeavor. No one wanted to live in a house that had been described as “the salvation of the slum dweller.” People were too proud to be stigmatized as having been “rescued from squalor and poverty.”
But there may have been a more important reason for the Edison monoliths’ failure to catch on. The architect Ernest Flagg, writing in Collier’s Weekly seven years later, noted that “Mr. Edison was not an architect— it was not cheapness that wanted so much as relief from ugliness, and Mr. Edison’s early models entirely did not achieve that relief.” From looking at them, it is hard to disagree.
Wait, what about those concrete furniture and piano we talked about? Well, in 1911 Edison boasted that concrete furniture could be made just as attractive as wood but cheaper and more durable. He went on to use air-impregnated "foam" concrete to make a piano, bathtub, and cabinets for his phonographs. Like his concrete houses, however, the Edison concrete furniture just never caught on. (If you have a picture of Edison’s concrete piano, please let me know!)
Edison’s concrete phonograph cabinets.
Photo: Edison National Historic Site – US National Park Service
In the late 1880s, Edison was embroiled in the "War of Currents" with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Edison had promoted the use of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution, whereas Westinghouse and Tesla wanted to use alternating current (AC).
At the time, Edison had over one hundred power stations in the United States that delivered DC electricity to consumers. But because of a power loss due to resistance of the wire during transmission, the power station had to be located within a mile of the consumers. Edison’s then-employee, a brilliant Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla proposed that AC could solve this problem but Edison didn’t listen.
Indeed, Edison had previously asked Tesla to improve his electrical power stations with $50,000 ($1 million in 2006 US dollar, Tesla’s wages were just $18 a week back then) as a reward. After Tesla delivered, Edison reneged on his offer and thus created bad blood between the two.
Back to the War of Currents: to demonstrate that his DC system was better and "safer," Edison noted that AC had a lethal potential and could be used to electrocute. Though he was against capital punishment, Edison (and a hired employee named Harold P. Brown) developed the electric chair.
In 1903, a circus elephant named Topsy at Coney Island’s Luna Park went berserk and killed three people including an abusive trainer, who tried to feed her a lighted cigarette.
The elephant was considered a threat and the owners wanted it executed. When animal advocates protested the proposed method of hanging, Edison saw a publicity opportunity and suggested electrocution with AC.
Topsy was fed carrots laced with cyanide and then electrocuted with 6,000-volts AC. She died "without a trumpet or a groan" within seconds. (Source)
Topsy’s execution was a public spectacle: about 1,500 people attended and Edison even filmed the event:
[YouTube Link. Warning: gruesome]
Despite of Edison’s publicity campaign (he tried to popularize the term for being electrocuted as being "Westinghoused"), Tesla’s AC system won out in the end.
We didn’t talk about Edison’s main inventions, such the electric light bulb and phonograph (after all, this is an article about the weirder things about Edison) If you’re interested, two good links to check out are the wikipedia entry on Thomas Edison and the Edison National Historic Site website.
Previously on Neatorama:
- Ten Strange Facts About Einstein
- Ten Strange Facts About Newton
