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Just in time for Mother’s Day, TIME magazine has the list of the Best and Worst (Fictional) Moms Ever. Of course, the "Best Mom" list is filled with all sort of wonderful (booring!) mothers, so let’s focus on the 10 Worst Moms Ever. For example, take the Mom from Futurama:
She’s the richest person on earth, so really, how nice could she be? At the dawn of the 31st century, Mom is the head of Momcorp — the massive industrial corporation that includes such highly successful subsidiaries as Mom’s Friendly Robot Co., Mom’s Friendly Drug Factories
and Mom’s Friendly Advanced Weapon & Munition Co. She maintains a friendly, nurturing public persona — she even does charity work for (in her words) "knocked-up teenage sluts" — but don’t be fooled. She’s not even really pleasantly plump! Under her fat suit she’s whippet-thin.Mom’s business tactics are ruthless — she holds trademarks on the words "Mom," "Love," and "Screen Door" — and her private life isn’t much better. She constantly abuses her three sons, Walt, Larry and Ignar, verbally and physically, who respond with fanatical adoration. And if you accept the Futurama comic books as part of the official Futurama canon, she even dated The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns. Ugh.
Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there’s one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can’t sleep a wink.
Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.
After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.
"The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system," Savard said.
We go from the boy who can’t sleep to the woman who can’t forget. Here’s the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything (and not just all the bad things her husband did!):
McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events.
If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she’ll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.
The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.
Gary Robbins of The OC Register has the interview with Dr. Jim McGaugh, who has been studying AJ for the past 6 years: Link
Illustration: Robert Zavala / The Orange County Register
Image: Geoeye/CRISP-Singapore, Caption by Holli Riebeek.
The two images, taken by the Ikonos satellite, showed how a village in Burma (Myanmar) was completely wiped out by the Cyclone Nargis:
This tiny village was located about 27 kilometers (16 miles) south of Yangon, the country’s largest city. In the lower image, taken on May 3, 2002, trees and buildings line a single street, which is surrounded by fields of crops, probably rice. After the disaster, the trees and buildings are completely gone, replaced by messy piles of rubble.
If robots suddenly develop a taste for human flesh, you can blame Gaëlle Arvisenet and his team of ENITIAA in Nantes, France. They’re developing a robotic mouth:
The artificial mouth comprises a 600mL container, a notched plunger, and variable-speed motors to control the speed of compression and rotation movements. The container is kept at 37°C (98.6°F), and as the food is broken down, helium flows through the device to reproduce breathing.
The researchers compared Golden Delicous apple slices chewed by people told to spit their mouthfuls when they were ready to swallow with slices chewed by the apparatus. The resulting pulp was analyzed for color, texture and aroma.
Consider when a person eating next to you rudely opens their food-stuffed mouth, what you are witnessing is, while completely disgusting, a marvel of nature not easily reproduced.
"Using a previous artificial mouth, we showed that the amounts of extracted volatile compounds were not the same when apples were crushed, cut into slices, or reduced to a puree state. It follows that to study the aroma compounds responsible for global aroma perception, it is necessary to reproduce the changes that the foodstuffs undergo in the human mouth."
Waitaminute! Something ain’t right here Well, Brazilian graphic artist Mario Amaya created a bunch of mashed-up logos of the world’s largest corporations that look just
as great (and in some cases better) than the original things.
Take a look: Link – via Comunicadores, thanks Haendel Dantas!
Previously on Neatorama: Evolution of Tech and Car Logos
Our pal Carl of the Warehouse was digging in his backyard early one morning, and found this a mystery buried
Soon I realize it’s not a simple concrete paver. It looks almost like brick. Then like a brick wall. What’s that doing here? I trace it across a foot, discovering a pattern. It looks like "NNNNNN" and I think nothing of it, just wondering what on earth the previous owners were thinking. Suddenly I realize it’s not an abstract pattern. They’re letters.
It’s a man’s name.
Oh please tell me there isn’t a casket running up under the hedgerow, next to the deck, next to the great room of my house. I picture a silent Puritan funeral, heavy black robes, and a guy with a concrete mixer.
Our house was the first house on this entire tract of land…but it’s only 35ish years old.
What *is* that thing? What should Carl do? Dig it up or leave it buried? Link – Thanks Carl!
Update 5/10/08: Carl has found a second object next to the one he dug up recently.
It’s long been known that an attractive face is highly symmetric – but now, Anthony Little of the University of Stirling, Scotland, and colleagues have gone one step further: they are attractive because they advertise genetic quality or fertility.
Using mug shots of Europeans, the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last hunter gatherer cultures, and macaque monkeys, measurements were made and people were asked to judge the masculinity of the most and least symmetric pictures.
Whether a member of a troop or a tribe, symmetric males had more masculine facial proportions and symmetric females had more feminine facial proportions.
"In humans, if you look at female models, for example, they tend to be pretty symmetric and at the extremes of femininity," Dr Little says.
He adds "One good face trait deserves another – symmetric men and women appear to have other good face traits".
The findings back the claim that the masculinity/femininity of faces is linked with symmetry and hence advertise quality, that is good genes.
Biological quality can mean many things but as symmetry and femininity/masculinity arise during development then one explanation for the findings is that "both traits could advertise quality in terms of resistance to disease, or environmental stresses and that might mean people with these traits are healthier and live longer," says Dr Little.
Ann Hodges was the only human ever struck by a meteorite and lived to tell about it.
Ann was napping on her couch one fateful day in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized meterorite crashed through the roof of her house, bounced off a large wooden console radio and struck her in the arm and hip.
The story didn’t end there: the Air Force confiscated the it (actually, they were under orders to confiscate any items from space for fears of a Soviet attack). Then a lawsuit by the landlord followed (everyone wanted to make money by selling it afterwards, including the Hodges). By the time possession of the meteorite was legally settled, people had lost interest and Ann was so fed up with the whole thing that she donated the meteorite – against the wishes of her husband – to the University of Alabama. (Source)
Juneau County sheriff’s deputy arrested Tammy D. Lewis and Alan Bushey of Necedah, Wisconsin, for two felony counts of causing mental harm to a child. See, the two left the body of a 90-year-old woman decomposing on the bathroom toilet!
The sheriff’s office was asked on Wednesday to check on Middlesworth’s welfare by the woman’s sister, Bernice Metz, because Metz had not heard from her in "some time."
When a deputy arrived at the home, Lewis initially claimed Middlesworth was on vacation, but after her body was discovered told the deputy that she had been dead for about two months.
Lewis said she had been helping Middlesworth put on an undergarment when she passed out in her arms and she had left her propped on the toilet after Bushey, whom she referred to as her "superior," said to leave her on the toilet and pray.
Lewis told the deputy that "God told her Alvina would come back to life if she prayed hard enough." Bushey told the deputy that "Lewis was obedient and served the Lord just as she should."
The 12-year-old boy later told investigators that after Middlesworth died, Bushey told him her appearance "was the result of demons attempting to make it appear that Alvina would not come back to life." The boy also reportedly said that Bushey told him that if Middlesworth’s death was discovered, he and his sister would have to go to public school and get jobs because the woman, whom the boy referred to as his "grandmother," was paying the bills.
Link – via Pharyngula
Remember the know-it-all who ruined your Sunday morning cartoons by over-analyzing it? Well, he now got a blog:
Are there existential dilemmas in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends? Does Brad Bird’s oeuvre contain creepy Objectivist subtext? Is there a Lorenzo Music/Bill Murray Ghostbusters-Garfield conspiracy? Were Paw Paw Bears simply evolved Snorks with a totemic religion? Or maybe Scooby and Shaggy, like, totally smoked weed, man. These and other questions require more than careful analysis. They demand over-analyzation.
With mind-boggling posts like A Freudian Analysis of Beavis and Butt-Head, The Secret Identity of Dr. Claw (I’d never have guessed!) and my favorite: Alchemical Symbolism in Smurfs, the Journal of Cartoon Over-analyzations makes for some awesome reading!
Link – via MetaFilter
Belgian designer Jens Praet created this little cabinet called "One Day Paper Waste" from shredded paper waste:
I was so shocked about the enormous office waste and amount of shredded documents, that I wanted to react to this by reusing those documents and to transform them into a usefull object with a new dignity.
One day paper waste is a little cabinet. Obtained by taking shredded confidential documents, mixing them with resin and compressing them into a strong mould… End result: a new interesting object that has the strength of wood.
Talk about recycling! Link – via Make
Kyle Downes of Ultra Awesome blog made a giant NES controller coffee table/storage place. What’s so neat about it is that the controller actually works! (Imagine hitting a 3.5 inch / 90 mm wide A and B buttons repeatedly, you can get wrist cramps for that …) Link – via Boing Boing
"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read."
– Groucho Marx, comedian and actor
