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"Box" is a fantastic yet slightly creepy short film about carton boxes and how they’re going to take over the world …
Great special effects! Hit play or go to Link [Dailymotion] – via Modulator
Artist and musician Ken Butler makes hybrid musical instrument sculptures out of boots, weapons, tools, furniture. He has even staged performances where he played his eccentric instruments: Link | String Hybrid Instrument Gallery – via Jaf Project
Spam has been the inspiration of many art projects, and turning spam headlines into art is nothing new.
But still, I’m quite taken by the wonderful illustrations by Kipling West at Fresh Spam Blog. Her interpretation of email spam subject lines ("You won’t need to furtively put socks into your trunks anymore," "Is this is?" and "That’s a light schedule") are thoroughly enjoyable!
Link – via The Seven Deadly Sinners
Previously on Neatorama: Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Art (and another one) | Linzie Hunter’s Spam One-Liners Art
I’d tell you that the Mobius Climber, a playground set inspired by the Möbius strip, is like every kid’s dream come true and every parents worry that they’d fall and conk their heads, but you’d say I’m being one-sided: Link – via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
The ZIP code 12345 belongs to the world headquarters of General Electric in Schenectady, New York.
Every year, GE gets thousands of mails from children who believed that it’s only logical that Santa Claus has the ZIP code 12345.
The folks at Mythbusters are at it again. This time Kari Byron tested to see how long it would take for a M-134 Minigun to fell a tree. This neat clip demonstrates the gun’s amazing rapid rate of fire. Oh! and yes…it took 45 seconds to bring down the tree!!
Links: Liveleak
Hooray! It’s time for our collaboration with What is it? blog. If you can guess what today’s strange object is, you’ll win a Free Neatorama T-shirt (old design).
Place your guess in the comment. One guess per comment, please, but you can submit as many as you can think of. Post no URL – let others play, please. First one to guess right will win the T-shirt. If no one guessed right, then the funniest guess will get it instead.
For more clues, check out What is it? Blog.
Update 2/29/08 – the answer is:
A battery date marker, some old batteries had a lead bar on the top into which the date was stamped with this piece. The numbers on it represent the 12 months of 1956, and the first three months of 1957.
I suppose “stamp tool” is right, so Marcin Petruszka #3 got that right first. But since no one specifically said “stamp tool for battery” I’ve decided I’ll give TWO winning shirts. One to Marcin, and another one to Louise #25 for the funniest entry (Iron Man’s wedding ring) – congrats, guys!
I’ve been sick as a dog the past few days, but now I feel a little bit better now that I find out that I’m not alone:
Packed emergency rooms, empty classrooms, and bustling college infirmaries are all signs that the vaccine just isn’t working as well as it has in past years.
The Centers For Disease Control says the flu is now tearing through 49 out of 50 states. That’s up from 44 states last week.
"We do have a strain that is not covered in this year’s flu vaccine," explained E.R. nurse Christina Miller.
Did you get sick? If so, I can commiserate – it’s a nasty bug: Link – via AQFL
The clip above is Flowers and Trees, a 1932 Silly Symphonies cartoon directed by Burt Gillett and produced by Walt Disney. It was the first film ever released in full color (three-strip Technicolor process) and the first to win the Oscars for Best Short Subjects: Cartoons.
You can see the complete YouTube link list of Oscar-winning animated shorts from 1932 to 2007 at porphyre: what I do when I can’t sleep blog – via NeedCoffee
Those clever pranksters at Improv Everywhere have done it again! This time, they went into a Starbucks with their giant desktop computers and CRT monitors, bought coffee, and worked at their computer as if they were laptops. Soon, unsuspecting customers waited in line to use the computers thinking that these were the coffee shop’s!
Link (with videos) – via Laughing Squid
Previously on Neatorama:
- Frozen in Grand Central
- Meet a Black Guy in Aspen, Co.
- The Best Buy Prank
The New York Times has an interesting graph depicting the movie box office receipts from 1986 to 2007:
Summer blockbusters and holiday hits make up the bulk of box office revenue each year, while contenders for the top Oscar awards tend to attract smaller audiences that build over time.
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Photographer Thomas Laupstad took this amazing photo of a sunset in Northern Norway … at midnight!
Scenes like this one above is why Northern Norway is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun. Being north of the Arctic circle, the sun doesn’t set from May to July and doesn’t rise from November to January.
See more of Thomas’ amazing photos here: Link
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When Jonathan McCullum left last summer to spend a school year as an exchange student in Egypt, little did he knew that he’d also undergo an extreme weight loss / starvation diet too!
Jonathan McCullum was in perfect health at 70kg (154 lb) when he left last summer to spend the school year as an exchange student in Egypt.
But when he returned home to Maine just four months later, the 1.75-metre teenager weighed a mere 44kg (97 lb) and was so weak that he struggled to carry his baggage or climb a flight of stairs. Doctors said he was at risk for a heart attack.
McCullum says he was denied sufficient food while staying with a family of Coptic Christians, who fast for more than 200 days a year, a regimen unmatched by other Christians.
The host family had a different take on what happened:
The host father, Shaker Hanna, rejected McCullum’s story as "a lie," suggesting that he made it up because his parents were hoping to recover some of the money they paid for his stay as compensation.
"The truth is, the boy we hosted for nearly six months was eating for an hour and a half at every meal. The amount of food he ate at each meal was equal to six people," Hanna said.
Whaaaat? Did Mary Poppins lie 40 years ago? Robert Krulwich of ABC World News with Charles Gibson’s webcast investigates in this hard hitting piece:
[The mystery] involves the world’s most beloved nanny, Marry Poppins, and you may recall in the movie … that Mary teaches the worlds to say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Forward and backward. But did she really?
I smell a Peabody Award: Link – Thanks Zach!
Garfield minus Garfield is a surprisingly funny fan-mod of the popular comic strip, where Garfield the cat is erased from every panel, leaving a flustered and somewhat crazy-looking Jon Arbuckle:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Bug Battle Combat by FineFin Games fulfills my two criteria for a fun Flash game: 1) it’s easy to play 2) it’s mindless fun!
In this game you’re a square swat paddle that squishes bugs on contact. You’ve got to protect your base from the swarm. If you think it’s easy, just wait till there’s a LOT of bugs comin’ at you.
Link (on Neatorama) – via ArcadeTown
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ZOMG! This sock zombie plushie by Etsy seller underroos is SO cute! This one is the Blue and Brown Toehorn Zombie:
You know what you need? A zombie made out of socks. It’s better than an ACTUAL zombie in so many ways! I mean, can you put an actual zombie in your backpack? Sure, but just that one time.
14-inches tall at his highest nubbin, the Toe Horned Zombie is perhaps my crowning zombie achievement. Machine and hand stitched from one new crew sock (body), and one new toe sock (horns and nubbins). So soft and cuddly you’ll think it was made from a polyester bunny rabbit. Button eyes, glittery puff paint blood drool. Keep an eye on your pets. Or… on your other socks.
And why would you need a zombie sock?
"Throwing a zombie at your enemy is just like throwing an apple, except that your enemy’s brains get eaten. And you don’t waste an apple."
Link – Thanks Annie Fischer!
Via Pink Tentacle. According to Wikipedia, cloud streets are
rows of cumulus or cumulus-type clouds aligned parallel to the low-level wind. The most favorable conditions for their formation occur when the lowermost layer of air is unstable, but is capped by an inversion -by a stable layer of air. This often occurs when upper air is subsiding, such as under anticyclonic conditions, and is also frequently found when radiation fog has formed overnight. Convection occurs below the inversion , with air rising in thermals below the clouds and sinking in the air between the streets.
Enturbulation.org (a website dedicated to expose Scientology) user dr3k just uploaded some scans of a 1934 German book "Scientologie" that appeared to be the inspiration of L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology.
Link – via Boing Boing
Scientists had uncovered a 150-million-year-old fossil "treasure trove" in an Arctic island chain of Svalbard.
Among the find is an immense sea creature 50 ft (15 m) long, a new species of pliosaur aptly nicknamed "The Monster":
"These animals were awesomely powerful predators," said plesiosaur palaeontologist Richard Forrest.
"If you compare the skull of a large pliosaur to a crocodile, it is very clear it is much better built for biting… by comparison with a crocodile, you have something like three or four times the cross-sectional space for muscles. So you have much bigger, more powerful muscles and huge, robust jaws.
"A large pliosaur was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half."
Link (Photo: Tor Sponga, BT) – Thanks Justin!
Previously on Neatorama: Strangest Dinosaur Names
Photo: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA
Researchers had developed a new nanoscale crystal called ZIF (zeolitic imidazolate framerwork) that can trap 80x its volume of carbon dioxide:
This particular crystal has excited proponents of carbon-capturetechnology for its ability to absorb CO2 and nothing else, but the process that head researcher Omar Yahgi and his lab used to develop the compound is potentially much more significant.
Yahgi’s lab employs automation techniques frequently found in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to rapidly test crystal samples on a scale not previously possible, which has led to an avalanche of new discoveries. At one point, the technique was yielding so many potentially useful compounds that Yahgi had to ask his students to stop so they could publish their findings. Possible uses for crystals that can selectively absorb specific molecules are numerous, including military applications and hydrogen-fuel storage for green vehicles.
Link – Thanks Dave Bullock!
This is a intriguing yet creepy idea for a screensaver:
SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver which shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. Yep, when your computer is idle you’ll get to see a live feed of what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s quite fascinating because of the voyeuristic element involved but also surreal because it compresses time-space.
Something is happening right at the moment elsewhere and you are a witness to it. It is real but since it’s only an image, you tend to question its verity a little more than what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look away from the screen because I’m always expecting something to happen just that moment, maybe a car accident or a cute girl would enter into the frame.
Available for OS X and Windows version (but not Vista, supposedly): Link – Thanks Jon Jason!
Oooh, Pizza Hut USA so got nothin’ on this! Behold the whole shrimp cheese bite pizza, created by the pizza chain’s counterpart in Japan and south Korea:
For the pizza lover who also craves shrimp and cheese wrapped in dough, Pizza Hut has created the Whole Shrimp Cheese Bite. Because nothing gets the stomach juices flowing quite as well as a ring of shrimp with tails dangling in the air and heads swaddled in tubes of cheese-stuffed dough.
Just one of 10 crazy Asian Pizza Crusts, compiled lovingly over at Slice blog: Link – Thanks raphael!
WARNING: IF THE IMAGE BELOW MAKES YOU DIZZY, LEAVE THIS PAGE, SCROLL DOWN OR JUST LOOK AWAY.
The Purple Nurple Optical Illusion by Walter Anthony
Neatorama reader Walt Anthony shares with us his blog, geared to educate kids about optical illusions. Walt did a good job in explaining the illusions in the post:
Anomalous Motion Optical Illusion aka Peripheral Drift Optical Illusion is characterized by anomalous motion that can be observed in peripheral vision. [...]
Keep in mind that this is a static image. It is not animated in any way. but as your vision moves back and forth the center area seems to be moving toward the center (contracting) and the outer edges seem to be moving away (expanding) from the center. Also worth noting is that if you fixate on a point in the center and don’t move your eyes this anomalous motion will stop.
I also applaud him for giving credit where credits are due – most optical illusion blogs rip off images without giving any clue as of the artist.
Link to more examples of Anomalous Motion Optical Illusion | Optical Illusion 4 Kids – Thanks Walt!
Now this is something that tickled my inner geek (not that my outer geek is any less geeky): a dance competition for scientists called Dance Your Ph.D. contest.
Organized by Ph.D. studnet Nilay Yapici at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, the contest was all about how to showcase students’ thesis … in form of interpretive dance:
No one was surprised when he scooped the prize. For one thing, Stewart wore nothing but a shimmering, translucent loin cloth. (That’s worth a few bonus points in my book.) But the judges told me afterward that his dance stood out because it accomplished two things at once. Most importantly, "he connected with the audience," said Pastorini. "That is the purpose of dance: to create emotions." A big help was his choice of music—a jazz interpretation of African Pygmy tribal music by Herbie Hancock—which created an atmosphere of funky ancientness.
But like all the dancers, Stewart had a second job: to somehow convey his Ph.D. thesis. Before the show, each dancer had about 60 seconds to describe their research to the judges. So this was more than just a dance contest. Folded in was the ability to summarize your work succinctly. In Stewart’s case, that work is titled "Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa." His highly stylized chase of an antelope—played by fellow University of Oxford archaeologist Giulia Saltini-Semerari—followed by processing and sharing of the goods, was elegant. "What I most looked for was that scientific ideas came across," said Gschmeidler. "He did this perfectly."
Link (with videos) – Thanks Richard!
Nubrella, the hands free umbrella, looks like a giant transparent Pac-Man chomping down on your head. The company hailed it as "the umbrella of the 21st century" and "the ultimate weather protector."
The umbrella is worn with adjustable shoulder strap and can stops rain, wind, and snow while keeping your arms free to shoo away curious people.
Link – Thanks MH!
If you weren’t lucky enough to see the spectacular lunar eclipse last week, Regina Rickert of At Close Range Photography has a neat collage of the event.
Link – Thanks Regina and sorry I was a bit late in posting it (I’ve been sick)
More eclipse pictures at Flickr.
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