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I found him on a busy road. He had either fallen out of the nest or had been forced out by dead parents, either way his was in a pretty bad way when I found him. Weak, bewildered, staggering around and on a busy road.
Figured to leave him meant death within hours, and he was just too damn cute for that!
Initially we rehydrated him, and that had a big effect. Then we started feeding him dilute fructose solution… and he loved that. After that we found him a new home at the animal sanctuary.
Beware the cuteness! -via I Am Bored
A new material developed by Arch Therapeutics can stop bleeding almost instantly.
The material consists of naturally occurring amino acids that have been engineered to form peptides that spontaneously cluster together to create long fibers when exposed to salty, aqueous environments, such as those found in the body. The fibers form a mesh that serves as a physical barrier to blood and other fluids.
The first application will be for surgery. When bleeding occurs during an operation, time can be saved by pouring the material on instead of searching through the blood to cauterize vessels. Emergency personnel may also be able to use it for accident and battlefield wounds. The body will break it down eventually, so it doesn’t have to be removed after use. Clinical trials will begin soon. Link -via Engadget
(image credit: Asia Kepka)
George W. Bush has plenty of nicknames, including some for whether you are a supporter or not. Dubya/W., of course, Bushie, Shrub. And obviously Bill Clinton didn’t escape his two terms un-nicknamed – Slick Willie, Bubba, Teflon Bill. But Presidential nicknames go all the way back to George Washington. Some of them you might be familiar with; others might surprise you. Either way, you will at least be entertained.
Ouch. Poor John Adams didn’t have many fans. His nicknames included His Rotundity, which was made up after Adams suggested that George Washington be referred to as “His Majesty”. And Ben Franklin liked to refer to Adams as “Your Superfluous Excellency”. He did have a couple of more flattering nicknames, though, such as “Father of the Navy” and “The Colossus of Debate”. The latter was given to him by Thomas Jefferson because of his stellar argumentative skills.
“Little Jemmy” was only 5’4″, the smallest president ever. It’s perhaps for this reason that Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) called Madison “Withered Little Apple-John”. Madison was also called “The Fugitive President” because he and celebrated wife Dolley had to flee the White House during the War of 1812.
After Tyler was named president, he pretty much abandoned his former party, the Whigs. Because of this, the nicknames “The President Without a Party” and “Traitor Tyler” were coined. He was also called “His Accidency” because he was the first Vice President to take over when the previous President (William Henry Harrison) died in office.
As the first president to be impeached, Johnson didn’t really inspire any friendly monikers. When he was sworn in as Lincoln’s V.P., he was rather drunk, apparently to try to numb the pain of his raging typhoid fever. This earned him the nickname “Andy the Sot” before he even became president. He was also called the Tennessee Tailor, after his previous profession, and Sir Veto, because he was notorious for nixing just about everything that crossed his path.
Because his party “stole” the election from Democrat Samuel Tilden, Hayes was called “Rutherfraud”, “His Fraudulency” and “The Usurper”. An investigation was done of the whole affair and the committee found in his favor – a close vote of eight to seven, thus garnering him the name “Old Eight-to-Seven”.
After that drama died down, he earned the names “Granny Hayes” and “Queen Victoria in Riding Breeches” because of his extremely straight-laced ways: no smoking, drinking or gambling combined with lots of prayer and family togetherness. Nothing wrong with that, maybe, but it irritated some members of D.C. society.
As the largest president we’ve ever had, you would think that his nicknames would call more attention to Taft’s size. And “Big Bill” was, but “Old Bill”, “Peaceful Bill” and “Godknows Taft” were not. Godknows Taft originated when a member of the press asked the President what a man who is out of work or starving should do to rectify the situation. Taft replied, “God knows. I don’t.”
Old “Tricky Dick”, of course, and “The Trickster”, but did you know Nixon was also called “Iron Butt”? Apparently his law school buddies called him that because he studied so hard. Also, “Richard the Chicken-Hearted” for refusing to debate opponent Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 campaign.
Neatoramanaut T-Shirt, now available at Neatorama’s Online Store
W00t! I’m excited and happy to announce that Neatorama’s online T-shirt store is open for business!
Get Neatorama T-shirts, including the Neatoramanaut design by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford that was voted Reader’s favorite a while ago, awesome cartoons by Mike Jacobsen of See Mike Draw, as well as funny Web Lingo shirts done exclusively for Neatorama.
We’ll be rolling out more shirts as we go, and some quantities are limited, so support the blog and buy your Neatorama T-shirt today! Thank you!
Photos: Richard Carpenter
xoxoxoBruce, a regular at the Cellar Image of the Day forum, posted a series of fascinating photos of this pine needle bear sculpture by Richard Carpenter. The pine needles were gathered off the ground, sorted, washed, trimmed, and hand woven over the period of 8 months to make a life-sized bear.
Link (for more pics, scroll down) – via Scribal Terror
Marc Lipton was riding his motorcycle when he lost control and slid about 50 feet along the road. He believed that he lived to tell the tale because The Virgin Mary protected him from further injury.
And he’s got the wound to prove it: a bloody scrape in the shape of the Virgin Mary.
Link – via Cabinet of Wonders (Photo: Marc Lipton)
Previously on Neatorama: August: a Busy Month for Religious Sightings!
Look down at the man’s feet: that was a not a child, but a grown woman named Pauline Musters. At 1 foot 11.2 inches, Pauline is the smallest mature woman ever recorded:
Born on February 26, 1876 in Ossendrecht in the Netherlands Pauline Munster’s was almost half of her final height straight from her mother’s womb. At birth, she was just over 12 inches. At age nine, the tiny dynamo weighed only three pounds and in adulthood Pauline Munster weighed less than nine pounds. Her measurements at age 19 were 181/2 -19-17, meaning she had curvy little figure and in truth she had no shortage of male suitors.
The Human Marvel has more on the story of "Princess Pauline": Link
Here’s a really strange tale of one really stupid criminal: a group of three women were partying at a Bensalem bar when 31-year-old Andre Smith kept on interrupting and even jumping in their photos.
When the women left, Smith robbed them with a fake gun, stealing cash and other valuables … but not the women’s cameras with his photos in it! So all the women had to do was show the cops the photo of the guy who robbed them.
Link – via Say No to Crack
Photo: glennkarlsen [Flickr]
Glenn Karlsen brought the image on a 500 Kroner bill of Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novelist and Nobel Laureate, to life through the magic of photoshoppery. Fantastic work!
Embiggen the photo here: Link – via Super Punch.
Craftster member fluffypants put together this awesome lamp using a Nintendo light gun and an old Nintendo’s Duck Hunt cartridge.
Ah, I remember the precious hours I wasted on that game (and I quite remember the snickering dog when I missed … Good times.)
Link – via GeekAlerts
What? There’s a new X-Files movie coming out? I must be living under a rock. The title is X-Files: I Want To Believe, though I think what they meant was X-Files: I Want You To Spend $10.50 On Tickets, $15 on Crappy Popcorns and Soda And $75 On Babysitter To Watch This Movie.
Anyhoo, it’s coming out this July, and you can whet your appetite by watching this trailer over at Always Watching: Link
Previously on Neatorama: Caption Monkey 22: X-Files, the Intersection
photo: peter.macdonald [Flickr]
Behold the Skybridge in Langkawi, Malaysia, which is held up by one thin support column set at an angle! Deputy Dog blog has the story and more pics: Link – via Miss Cellania
78-year-old Dale Davis lost his sight due to macular degeneration 11 years ago. He only has a sliver of peripheral vision left. He fell in love with bowling for a second time after his sister dragged him back to the bowling alley three years ago. Davis once scored as high as 299, before he went blind. This past season, he has averaged a score of 180. IN several games, he had bowled a string of four or five strikes. On May 3rd, Davis found himself with a string of 11 strikes and one frame left.
Century Lanes had pretty much shut down at that point. No one else was bowling. And everyone had left the bar. They all stood behind Lanes 3 and 4, waiting and watching to see whether Davis could bowl the alley’s first perfect game in its 24-year history.
A second later, Davis’ ball crashed into the pins, unleashing a crackle that echoed through the four-lane alley. He knew all the pins had fallen because of the response of everyone who had been watching.
A perfect 300.
“Everybody starting hugging me, shaking my hand, hitting my hand,” Davis said. “It was great.”
Link -via J-Walk Blog
(image credit: Dolores Cullen, The Storm Lake Times)
Last Friday evening, the news editor of The Gadsden (Alabama) Times, Greg Bailey heard a noise behind the stove in his house. The whole family heard the noises, which his wife Helen identified as a cat. The noises were there the next morning, so after investigating every other possibility, Helen knocked a hole in the wall. Then another.
She stuck her hand in and felt around, then drew back in horror.
“I grabbed a tail,” she said, as both of us conjured up visions of a very large rat.
Helen reached in one more time … and drew out, by its back this time, a tiny (as in fitting into the palm of your hand) cream-colored male tabby kitten. It was dirty, flea-bitten, hungry, scared … and I wished I had a camera handy to record the look on Helen’s face. I knew at that instant we had another member of the family.
They had the kitten checked out by a vet and patched the hole with duct tape.
I was out shopping a couple of hours later, when my cell phone rang. It was Ryan. “Dad, Mom just pulled another cat out of the wall. “Welcome to the family,” I thought.
The kittens, estimated to be around three weeks old, are being fed formula and kitten food. They have been named Boo and Waldo. Helen Bailey says she doesn’t need anything else for Mothers Day. Link -via Fark
(image credit: Gadsden Times/Marc Golden)
"Eureka!" Archimedes screamed, then he ran outside naked ...
Every high school physics student knows about Fourier’s Law of Heat Conduction and Hooke’s Law of Elasticity. But not many know that Joseph Fourier lived inside a wooden box in his old age. Or that Robert Hooke’s arch-nemesis, Isaac Newton, hated him so much that he had Hooke’s portrait removed from the Royal Society and tried to have his papers burned. Imagine how much fun science class would’ve been, had these been taught along side all those equations and formulas.
Well, now you can read about the interesting stuff that your school textbooks didn‘t bother to include. In his latest book, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them, Cliff Pickover takes some 40 eponymous laws of physics and explains the life of the scientists whom these laws are named after. The book is far from a dry listing of scientific formulas - actually, it’s full of quirky trivia and nifty facts about some of the world’s greatest scientists.
Cliff has graciously allowed us to take samples from the book for this article and generously offer personalized copies of the book to 3 lucky Neatorama readers (see below for details).
So, if you didn’t know that Archimedes sometimes sent his colleagues false theorems in order to trap them when they stole his ideas, or that Daniel Bernoulli‘s father threw him out for winning a science competition, then this Neatorama post is for you. Behold, the 5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them (no complicated math, we promise!)
The Law: According to Archimedes’ principle, a body wholly or partially submerged in liquid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced liquid. This buoyant force depends on the density of the liquid and the volume of the object, but not its shape.
The law seems simple, but it is actually not intuitive that objects with equal volume experience the same buoyant force when held under water: cubes made of cork and lead would experience the same buoyant force, yet would have completely different behavior. This is because the different ratios of buoyant force to object weights.
Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy has many applications, including determining the pressure of a liquid as a function of depth. It helps us understand how floatation works and is one of the founding principles of hydrostatics.
The Famous Legend Behind the Law: One day, King Hieron II of Syracuse, Sicily, wanted to find out whether his wreath-shaped crown was actually made from pure gold. He called upon Archimedes to find out (without damaging the crown, say by melting it down). Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius wrote:
While Archimedes was turning the problem over, he chanced to come to the place of bathing, and there, as he was sitting down in the tub, he noticed that the amount of water which flowed over the tub was equal to the amount by which his body was immersed. This showed him means of solving the problem … In his joy, he leapt out of the tub and, rushing naked toward his home, he cried out with a loud voice that he had found what he sought.
Archimedes was able to obtain the exact volume of the crown by dunking it in water and measuring the displaced water. He then took the weight of the crown and divided it by its volume to get the density of the crown, which turned out to be between that of gold and silver. Archimedes was thus able to show that the wreath was not made out of pure gold (and the royal goldsmith was executed).
Modern scholars suggest that this story was bogus, as it would be unlikely that Archimedes had measuring equipment with sufficient accuracy to detect the difference (plus, he hated to bathe - see below).
The
Man Behind the Law: Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.), was
a Greek geometer and is often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians
and scientists who ever lived.
Here are a few things about Archimedes you may not know:
- Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was so obsessed with math that his servants had to force him to bathe, and that while they scrubbed him, he continued to draw geometrical figures on his body!
- Archimedes invented a machine called the Archimedean screw to pump water.
- He also invented a “death ray” weapon using a set of mirrors that focused sunlight on Roman ships, setting them on fire. After many scientists discounted the story as false, David Wallace of MIT actually did the experiment: He had his students build an oak replica of a Roman ship and focused sunlight on it using 127 mirrored tiles from a distance of 30 meters. After ten minutes of exposure, the ship burst into flames!
- When the Romans captured Syracuse in 212 B.C., a Roman soldier came upon the mathematician who was studying a mathematical diagram drawn in the sand. Archimedes was annoyed by the soldier’s interruption, and said “Don’t disturb my circles” before he was killed. Moral of the story: don’t piss off a Roman soldier!
The Law: Hooke’s Law of Elasticity states that if an object, such a spring, is elongated by some distance x, then the restoring force F exerted by the object is proportional to x:
The k is a constant called the spring constant if the object is a spring.
The
Man Behind the Law: Robert Hooke (1635 - 1702) was an English
physicist and polymath. As you can see, Hooke was an ugly man (he was
severely disfigured by smallpox). (Photo: Molecular
Expressions: Science, Optics and You)
Here are a few things about Hooke you may not know:
- Robert Hooke was a sickly child and wasn’t expected to reach adulthood, so his parents didn’t bother educating him. Left to his own devices, Hooke made mechanical models and clocks.
- He was the first to coin the word “cell” to describe the basic unit of life (he thought that plant cells, when magnified through a microscope, looked like “cellula,” the living quarters of monks).
- Hooke was a busy man: he was the Surveyor to the City of London, helped rebuild the city after the Great Fire in 1666, and even designed the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”) and the Royal College of Physicians.
- In 1672, Hooke criticized Isaac Newton who used a prism to split white light into its various components. Furious at Hooke, Newton had his portraits removed from the Royal Society and even attempted to burn his papers. Hooke mentioned to Newton about a possible inverse-square principle of gravitation, but Newton didn’t credit Hooke when he published Principia Mathematica, saying "Merely because one says something might be so, it does not follow that it has been proved that it is."
- Hooke was interested in the science of respiration, so he had himself placed in a sealed vessel from which air was gradually pumped out. As you can imagine, the experiment was detrimental to Hooke’s health: he damaged his ears and experienced deafness in the process.
- In 2006, the Royal Society purchased a manuscript by Hooke for $1.75 million, in which he wrote 500 pages of notes recorded during Royal Society meetings. In the notes, Hooke castigated Newton and Robert Boyle for stealing his ideas. He also wrote that Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek found "a vast number of small animals in his Excrements which were most abounding when he was troubled with a Looseness and very few or none when he was well."
The Law: Imagine fluid flowing steadily through a pipe that carries it from the top to the bottom of a hillside. The pressure of the liquid changes along the pipe, and Daniel Bernoulli discovered the law that relates the pressure, flow speed, and height for a fluid flowing in a pipe. Today, this law is written as:
You may not be aware of Bernoulli's Law, but it has numerous applications in real life: Bernoulli's Law is used when designing the Venturi throat, a constricted region in the air passage of a car motor's carburetor that causes a reduction in pressure, and in turn causes fuel vapor to be drawn out of the carburetor bowl.
The design of airplane wings take advantage of the knowledge we gleaned from Bernoulli's Law: these wings are designed to create an area of fast flowing air on its upper surface, which cause pressure near this area to drop and thus pull the wing upward.
Finally, we've all experienced Bernoulli's Law in action: the shower curtain is pulled inward when water first comes out of the shower because the increase in water and air velocity inside the shower causes pressure to drop. The pressure difference between the outside and inside of the curtain causes it to be sucked inward.
The
Man Behind the Law: Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) was polymath
that came from a family of extraordinary Swiss mathematicians. In fact,
his father, Johann Bernoulli, and his uncle, Jacob, were famous mathematicians.
Interestingly, both Daniel and his father Johann secretly studied mathematics against the wishes of their respective fathers. Just as Johann's father tried to force him into becoming a merchant, Johann did the same to Daniel. Indeed, Johann had his son's future all mapped out, including whom to marry!
Finally, Daniel told his father that he'd had enough, and both of them came to a truce: Daniel would become a doctor and Johann would personally teach him math.
Here are a few things about Daniel Bernoulli you may not know:
- Johann had always been jealous of Daniel's success. In 1735, after both the father and son tied for first place in a science competition held by the Paris Academy of Sciences, Johann was unable to bear the “shame" of being comparable to his son and threw Daniel out of his house for winning the prize that he felt should've been his alone!
- Daniel published his work on fluid physics in a book titled Hydrodynamica (where we get the word "hydrodynamics" from) in 1734. Johann became jealous of Daniel's work and published his own plagiarized version, Hydraulica … and predated it to 1732 to make it seem that his work appeared before his son's!
- Daniel was a prolific author and wrote on whatever subjects struck his fancy. One of his papers discussed the formula for computing the relationship between the number of oarsmen on a ship and the ship's velocity. In another paper, Daniel wrote what would become the basis of the economic theory of risk aversion and overall happiness gained from goods or services.
The Law: Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures states that the total pressure Pt exerted by a mixture of gases in a container is equal to the sum of the separate pressures that each gases would exert if just that single gas occupied the entire volume of the container.
That may seem trivial, but it's actually one of the more useful gas laws for scientists.
The
Man Behind the Law: John Dalton (1766 - 1844) grew in a poor
family, was a poor speaker, severely color-blind, and was even considered
a crude or simple experimentalist. Yet, he achieved significant professional
successes and made great contributions to chemistry, meteorology, and
physics.
In the early 19th century, Dalton developed the atomic theory, in which he proposed that each chemical element is composed of atoms of single, unique type and that though these atoms are indestructible, they can combine in simple ratios. For this, many consider Dalton to be the "Father of Chemistry".
Here are a few things about John Dalton you may not know:
- Legend has it that Dalton once bought his mother special stockings for her birthday. The mother, a Quaker woman, was shocked that he would buy her scarlet stockings. Dalton thought that they were blue, and asked his brother … who also saw them as blue! At that point, he realized that both he and his brother were color blind.
- Dalton did the first systematic study of color blindness and wrote the very first paper on the subject. In his honor, color blindness is sometimes called Daltonism.
- Since he was 21, Dalton kept a detailed diary of the weather, and continued to update it until the very day of his death. Dalton was so obsessed with records that he kept meticulous records of hits, misses, and other scores when he played the English game of lawn bowling!
- Dalton never married, saying "My head is too full of triangles, chymical process, and electrical experiments, etc., to think much of marriage."
- After his death, and according to his wishes, one of Dalton's eyes was cut open to determine the cause of his color blindness (Dalton had always thought that it was due to colored fluid inside his eyes - but that turned out not to be the case.) In the 1990s, cellular analysis revealed that the eye lacked the pigment that provides sensitivity to green.
The Law: Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction deals with the transmission of heat in materials. The law states that the heat flux, Q (the flow of heat per unit area and per unit of time), is proportional to the gradient of the temperature difference.
Fourier's Law is used in many diverse areas of science, and it explains why diamonds are cool to the touch (they have high thermal conductivity).
The
Man Behind the Law: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830)
was a French mathematicians and Egyptologist.
Here are a few things about Fourier you may not know:
- When he was only 16, Fourier discovered a new proof of Descartes’ rule of signs. His teenage achievement quickly became standard proof. By the age of 21, however, Fourier was in doubt whether he could ever make a significant contribution to mathematics. He wrote to his professor "Yesterday was my 21st birthday, at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired many claims to immortality." It’s a good thing Fourier carried on!
- Instead of a career in science, young Fourier seriously considered being a priest. Indeed, he arrived at the Benedictine abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Leoire to prepare for his vows, but left when he realized that he only had one true love: mathematics.
- During the French Revolution, Fourier tried to defend scientists like Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Appeals to spare Lavoisier’s life was cut short when the judge said “The Republic has no need for geniuses” and he was guillotined. Afterwards, Fourier was thrown in prison but managed to escape death when the political climate changed.
- In his work on heat propagation in thin sheets of material, Fourier invented a very useful mathematical tool that would later become known as the Fourier Series. Here, Fourier showed that any periodic function can be represented by a sum of simple sine and cosine oscillating functions.
- Fourier accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. When he returned, Fourier had a strange medical condition: he was always cold and had to wear several overcoats, even in the heat of summer. It’s ironic to think that though he was an expert in heat transfer, Fourier was not good at regulating his own body heat!
- Global warming? Blame Fourier - he came up with the idea that the atmosphere acts as a “translucent dome,” which like a lid of a pot, absorbs some of the heat of the Sun and reradiates it downward to Earth.
- During his last months, Fourier’s body was so frail that he would live inside a wooden box with holes cut out for his head and arms. This “living coffin” would keep his body upright and let him work on his correspondence!
The
article above is but a small selection of the amazing trivia and fascinating
stories about some of the greatest names in science. If you love science,
or would like to instill the love of science to your children, pick up
Cliff Pickover's Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great
Minds Behind Them. You won't be disappointed
Links: Archimedes to Hawking Amazon page | The book's website | Cliff's website
On a personal note, this article took way longer than I thought (and I didn't even get to Stephen Hawking!) ... because I ended up reading Cliff's book from cover to cover! It was definitely an interesting read.
Now, like I mentioned above, Cliff has generously offered free copies of Archimedes to Hawking to Neatorama readers with the most interesting experience with science or funny personal story about a science class ... Write yours in the comment section; the best three will win a free personalized copy of Cliff's book (so make it good!)
