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Ruth Butterworth of Brisbane fought a python to save her kitten’s life. She was calling Tuffy to come inside when the snake encircled the cat and started to crush it.
“I just started punching the thick part of the snake where it was about the size of my arm,” Ms Butterworth said. “I wasn’t looking, I just kept punching until it let go.”
The snake bit Ms Butterworth twice before it released Tuffy, who ran indoors. It wasn’t until Tuffy was safe and Ms Butterworth fell backwards to get away from the snake that she realised she had broken her wrist and been bitten.
The same python had killed her mother’s cat just days before. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Peter Wallis)
Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causality, but a new medical study reveals that cat owners have a lower incidence of heart attacks and strokes than do non-owners:
Non-cat owners appear to have a 40 percent higher risk of dying from myocardial infarction than those who do have a cat, according to a study presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference last month in New Orleans. Researchers examined the data of 4,435 people from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. (Dogs didn’t factor into the findings because fewer participants owned them.)
Picture via Flickr user avidpets
Traditional British cuisine is becoming increasingly rare in British households:
The survey by Tesco found that only five per cent of 18-40-year-olds had cooked a spotted dick, compared to 14 per cent of 41-55-year-olds.Simlarly, six per cent of the younger group had made a Beef Wellington compared to 15 per cent of the over-40s.
Tesco claims that the five above dishes – as well as coronation chicken, sherry trifle and Lancashire hot pot – are prepared so infrequently that they could disappear completely by 2021.
Foreign dishes, however, are thriving. For instance, 71 per cent and 62 per cent of under-40s had made spaghetti bolognese or curry, respectively.
Picture via Flickr user tednmiki.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Problem: your son is late for his tennis lesson, and the roads are so congested that you can’t possibly make it on time in a car.
Normal Dad Solution: Call and tell them you’ll be late or just reschedule the lesson.
Really Dedicated Dad Solution: Fly and land your airplane in a golf course next to the tennis club!
Guess which one Robert Kadera, 65, of Lake Villa, Illinois choose:
Police received worried calls about a plane circling twice, then touching down at the Crane’s Landing golf course at the Marriott Lincolnshire Resort. Officials thought they might have a crash, with victims to attend to.
Instead, they found Robert Kadera, 65, and his 14-year-old son trudging through the snow, Prince racket and a bag of tennis balls in hand. They had parked on the 7th fairway, just 20 feet south of the retaining wall for Illinois Highway 22.
"We’re all pretty dumbfounded," Lincolnshire Police Chief Randy Melvin said Monday. "I don’t have any idea what the guy was thinking. ….. He was going to park his plane across the street like nobody would notice."
Lisa Black and Emily S. Achenbaum of Chicago Tribune report: Link (Photo: David Trotman-Wilkins / Tribune)
FL Mershberger (1990) An interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam based on neuroanatomy: "God, in the process of creating Adam, gives him the gift of ‘intellect,’ symbolized by the brain."
In the Renaissance, artists studied anatomy almost by necessity in order to capture a more lifelike portrayal of the human body in their art. But did they go a step further and try to incorporate neuroscience (in form of anatomically correct brain) in their paintings?
Here’s a neat post from Street Anatomy exploring a recent article published by neuroscientists about brain imagery in Renaissance religious masterpieces:
During the Renaissance, scholars began to rely more on empirical evidence, especially in the anatomical sciences. The teachings of Galen, which were often based on studies of animals rather than humans, dominated for centuries. It wasn’t until Da Vinci and Vesalius came along that anatomy was jump-started once again. Artists were especially fascinated, but with most of their commissions coming from the religious clergy, how could they show off their deeper knowledge of the human body without being sacreligious? They had to hide it in their artwork.
Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for this one: an excellent font, called "Handwritten" by Björn Johansson of Solution.se, based on photographs of his hands.
Here’s the obligatory spelling of Neatorama in the font:
Link | Don’t miss the (sadly uncompleted) Typeface Anatomy – via bioephemera
Pink Tentacle has a fantastic post about monster paintings called youkai in feudal Japan (Edo period) by a relatively unknown artist called Sawaki Suushi.
This one to the left is Nurarihyon, the house guest from hell:
In the Edo period, Nurarihyon came to be known as a mysterious old man with the uncanny ability to sneak into homes and “take over.” When the residents of a home encounter him sitting around drinking tea, they are unable throw him out and cannot help but treat him as the head of the household. Nurarihyon is said to be a highly respected figure in the world of youkai.
One day, Michael Surtees of DesignNotes blog decided that he was going to take an image of the sky from his Manhattan, New York, apartment. This is the result:
It wasn’t until I started noticing that most mornings have a really unique colour to the sky that I thought there might be something to comparing the colour day to day. There isn’t any specific time for me to point my camera in the same direction though for the most part I’ve been taking the photograph somewhere between 7 and 9 am.
I counted more than 20 grey skies out of 36. New York is one gloomy city (or is it just winter?)
This is excellent: John Holland strings together bits of himself playing out single notes using "tin whistle in D, tabla, bongo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, triangluitar, ukulele, another ukulele, chair with ukulele, chair with tin whistle in D, violin, casio keyboard, erhu/chinese violin, piano, and chair with cellular telephone" to play an Irish reel.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Arbroath
