Archive for October 1st, 2008
Inverted Bookshelf
Your friends will do a double take when they see this upside-down bookshelf. And then they will freak out again when you pull a book out! No books were damaged in the making of this bookshelf. Instructables will show you how it’s done, and how you can make one of your own. Link -Thanks, Ed!
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The 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes
Criminal hackers can do a lot of damage and still end up famous among their peers.
But it’s the ones who go uncaught and unidentified (those who we didn’t highlight in our Cyber Crime Hall Fame that are actually the best. Attempting to cover your tracks is Law-Breaking 101; being able to effectively do so, that’s another story altogether.
When a major cyber crime remains unsolved, though, it probably also means that those of us outside the world of tech crime solving may never even know the crime occurred.
PC Magazine has a rundown on ten of the biggest still-unsolved cyber crimes. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!
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Urinary Tract Wallpaper
Shannon Wright created this wallpaper design depicting the body’s urinary system. Perfect for any bathroom or urology clinic. Link -via LA Weekly -Thanks, Erin Broadley!
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Meet The Never Greens
Being "green" is popular these days, but did you know that about 10% of the population don’t care a whit about the environment?
Here’s an interesting article by Jim Edwards for Brandweek about the "Never Greens":
The Never Greens don’t buy green products, don’t remember green advertising when they see it and are irritated by it even if they do, according to Mintel.
Never Greens also showed up in a survey by Shelton Group, an ad agency for BP Solar, the oil giant’s renewable unit. About 26% of Americans are hardcore skeptics, according to Suzanne Shelton, the CEO of the Knoxville, Tenn., firm. They tend to be upper-income, middle-aged, conservative males, she said.
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Chimps Never Forget a Face ... or a Behind!
Modified from photo by Cyril Ruoso/Minden PIctures
Chimpanzees don’t forget a face – or for that matter, a behind as well. A new study by Frans de Waal of Emory University and colleagues showed that chimps have butt-recognition ability:
In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances’ rears and match them with the right faces.
The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.
Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another’s bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere’s owner and another face of the same gender.
Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone—but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.
Link – Thanks Jessica Wolf!
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Squirrel Underpants
Are you sick and tired of squirrels running in the buff? Have you had to cover your children’s eyes when the tiny streaker rears its naked butt? Want to help him hide his nuts for the winter?
Here’s something you can do to help promote small animal decency: buy some squirrel underpants (also good for hamster, frogs, and gerbils).
From Archie McPhee: Link – Thanks Tiffany
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Snake massage
Lookout, Thailand! Israel has just leapt ahead in the international competition to snag tourists seeking massages!
Israel’s contribution to the world of massage tourism is a spa in northern Israel called “Ada Barak’s Carnivorous Plant Farm.”
Among the shadows of Israel’s famous orange groves, Ada Barak has long opened her home to curious travelers to see her collection of carnivorous plants and other natural oddities. When snakes became part of the exhibition, she noticed the effect they had on visitors – and the snake massage was born. (Rats balanced on one’s feet during the massage are apparently optional.)
[YouTube & Time Magazine]
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Could You Pass the New US Citizenship Test?
It’s getting harder to become naturalized US citizens; the new civic component of the citizenship test now has conceptual questions rather than simple memorization ones:
The new civics list, a pool of 100 possible questions for a test of up to 10, omits the old "How many stars are there on our flag?" and "Name the amendments that guarantee or address voting rights." Taking their place are questions like: "There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote. Describe one of them," and "What is one responsibility that is only for United States citizens?"
"It’s more about really knowing something that you would get from living here … rather than just reading about it and being a bookworm," said Joey Hornbuckle, 17, of Newnan, Georgia.
Others, including Ethiopia native Anteneh Workneh, addressed an issue that immigrant advocates have raised: Conceptual questions and answers might require a higher level of education and greater English-language dexterity.
Photo: Jason Hanna/CNN
Link – Thanks Tiffany!
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Astonishingly Detailed Carved Model of Midtown Manhattan by Michael Chesko
Artist Michael Chesko has been lovingly carving a true-to-form model of Midtown Manhattan:
This scale miniature of Midtown took 2000 hours to complete. As reference, he used blueprints, old photographs, digital reproductions,
and satellite images. On a good day, he’d work his way through four city blocks. The entire model is 36" x 30"… a good deal smaller than most office desks. At the 1:3200 scale, the Empire State Building Chesko’s favorite skyscraper) roughly reaches the dizzying height of a Campbell’s Soup can.
Tinselman blog has more: Link
Previously on Neatorama: Gargantuan Scale Model of Shanghai in 2020
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Wall Street's September Madness
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch blog posted a "March Madness" basketball-style bracket to help guide you through what have happened to some of the biggest names in Wall Street. It’s supposedly created by someone named Mark Slavonia, a general partner at investment firm Sansome Partners. Link (Full pic here)
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Thomas 2001: Space Oddity
Your organ has never looked so retro-chic … behold, the Thomas 2001 Electric Organ, on display at the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles. Link
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Life Clock
Artist Bertrand Planes slowed down a typical clock mechanism 61,320 times and re-numbered the clock face, so each minute represents a year, to show how many more years are left in a typical life. Link – via Swissmiss
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Bathing Machines
Photo: National Maritime Museum
Those curious tiny houses on wheels are bathing machines, a movable contraption popular in beach resorts in the 19th century:
… bathing machines allowed women to change their clothes in private, reach the waters without parading through open stretches of beach in their bathing suits, and then frolic about in relative privacy and without violating contemporary notions of modesty. Queen Victoria certainly had one, and like it, these caravans of propriety, of social mores too foreign for our contemporary eyes, were simple wooden structures. Lest they invite voyeurs, they were built without windows, otherwise there were little ones inaccessible to prying eyes. Some were made of canvas and still others were very luxurious affairs, but all of them were on wheels, pulled in and out of the surf by horses or brute human power.
Link (Compare that to King Alfonso XIII’s bathing machine …)
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Self Surveillance with Fitbit
Privacy schmrivacy. Self surveillance, now that is an idea! Fitbit, a start up in San Francisco has built a small sensor that tracks your movement 24 hours a day so you can record steps taken, distanced traveled, calories burned, and even how long you sleep!
The device uploads your data wirelessly over the web so you can compare your "movement record" with those of your friends. Link – via Technology Review
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Stir Fried Wikipedia
Last year, Jim of Evolving Web blog went to Beijing and ate at a restaurant there when he noticed some unusual menu choices: wikipedia!
So, after much discussion, here is what we think happened.
"Hey I’m making the new menu, what’s the english name for those flat crispy mushrooms?"
"Um, there isn’t one."
"Well what should I put down here?"
"I don’t know, look it up in wikipedia."
"What?"
"Wikipedia!"
Link – via Language Log
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Super Bowl Halftime Shows
Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your memory of halftime shows at the Super Bowl over the years. Even if you think you won’t do well, the questions will make you say, “Oh yeah! I remember that!” I scored 50%, which is the average so far. Link
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Whack-A-Bone
This is a game I’ll have to share with the kids! In stage one, you place bones in the proper spot on the body. In stage two, find those bones by name. Pass those (time counts), and you are challenged to beat each bone with a mallet. I did pretty well! Link -via Everlasting Blort
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Painted Pumpkins
It’s October, time for harvest and Halloween decorating! Some people prefer to paint pumpkins instead of carving them. See pages and pages of wonderful painted pumpkins submitted by readers at Tagyerit Presents. The pumpkins pictured were painted by Janet Lange. Link -via the Presurfer
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Snow Falls on Mars
The Phoenix Mars Lander was expected to work for three months, but has passed the four-month mark. That’s fortunate for us, because the lander has observed snow falling in the Martian atmosphere!
Using lidar (analogous to radar, with pulses of laser light standing in for radio waves), Phoenix picked up signs of snow drifting down from clouds some 2.5 miles (four kilometers) overhead. It has not been seen reaching the Martian surface; it appears to vaporize before landfall.
“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” James Whiteway of York University in Toronto said in a statement. Whiteway is lead scientist for Phoenix’s Meteorological Station (MET), the Canadian Space Agency’s contribution to the mission. He added that the MET team will now seek to discover “signs that the snow may even reach the ground.”
The Martian winter is approaching, and soon there will be inadequate sunlight to power the lander. Link
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World's First Wave Farm Opens
The world’s first commercial wave farm is operational three miles off the shores of Portugal. The three 140-meter generators were built by British company Pelamis. The “sea snakes” convert the kinetic energy of wave motion into electricity -enough to power 1,000 homes.
Each of semi-submerged Pelamis devices is 142m long, has a diameter of 3.5m and is made from 700 tonnes of carbon steel. A single wave converter is composed of four articulated sections that move up and down as the waves pass along it. At each of the hinges between the sections, hydraulic rams use the wave motion to drive generators to produce up to 750KW of power at peak output.
The electricity generated by the three Pelamis devices will be carried by undersea cable to a substation in Aguçadoura, which will then feed the power into the Portuguese national grid.
The wave farm will eventually add another 25 generators, enough to produce up to 21 megawatts of power, with no CO2 emissions. Link -Thanks, Jee!
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Patterned Diamonds
The major league baseball playoffs begin today. While you’re watching the games, check out the patterns cut into the grass. Red Sox groundskeeper David Mellor is considered the top grass artist in baseball. He has even written a book on the subject: “Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports”.
“Mowers have been making patterns since 1830, when the first mowers were built,” Mellor said.
He was an assistant groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1993 when a concert badly damaged the grass in the outfield. With the support of the head groundskeeper Gary Vanden Berg, Mellor mowed a busy pattern to serve as camouflage. The design, not the damage, was all anyone noticed.
“I still think that was the coolest pattern he ever made,” Vanden Berg said.
Mellor found himself with a niche, and others followed. The striping side effect of mowing has been creatively rearranged into pop art. With few exceptions — one is San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where all the grass is usually mowed in a single direction to keep the slate clean and old-fashioned looking — baseball is played atop an increasingly busy backdrop.
Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: J. Gunther/New York Times)
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Google Search 2001
In honor of the company’s tenth anniversary, Google has enabled its oldest search engine available, the 2001 version. The results are linked to the Internet Archive cache of the sites as they appeared in 2001. Using this, only 3 results came up for “Neatorama”, and they were all adjectives used to describe other sites. There were no results for “Miss Cellania”, so you can rest assured I am an original. Link to article. Link to search. -via J-Walk Blog
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Wonder How To Website: How To Hack Video Clips
One
of the neatest things on the Web is the plethora of "how-to"
videos that tell you how to do practically anything. Problem is, the videos
are everywhere: YouTube, metacafe, and so on.
Enter Wonder How To, a website that did for DIY video guides what Yahoo! did for the early Internet: it categorizes thousands of free how-to videos from over 1,700 websites into 35 categories (from arts & crafts to disaster preparation, magic & parlor tricks to pranks & cons).
I'm currently browsing the How to Hack section, which has over 600 videos on how to hack your gadgets, computers, and even video game consoles. Many of the videos are duds - which is why Wonder How To lets its viewers sort the clips by grade (from A to F).
For example (links open in a new browser/tab)
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Google Hacks |
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How to Hack An Elevator to Go Directly To Your Floor |
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How to Make A Blu-Ray Laser Phaser |
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How to Construct a WiFi Super Antenna |
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How to Make a USB Fan Out of Old CDs |
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Caption Monkey 45: Ommm!
Photo via Arbroath (who knows what it’s all about?)
Hooray! It’s time for this week’s Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey game. Funniest caption wins an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cat comic by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many as you can think of.
For inspiration, check out Adam’s blog. Good luck!
Update 10/2/08 – Adam has chosen the winner! Congrats to brad who won with this caption: Well…..I see that first spell didn’t work….let me try another.
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The Problem with the Bailout Plan: That Pesky B-Word!
Modified from this Bail Bonds photo by Lance McCord and the US Capitol photo from Wikipedia
The problem with the Bailout Plan, according to the White House, is that it has the word "bailout" in it! Here’s what White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto prefers us to use instead of the B-word:
To hear the White House tell it, one factor in the House vote yesterday against the administration’s bailout plan – was the word "bailout."
"It’s really unfortunate shorthand for a very complicated issue." says White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto. He says the administration plan to rescue the financial markets is "not a bailout for Wall Street" and "certainly not a bailout for Wall Street CEOs."
Okay then – what should we call it?
"It’s an effort to fix this problem of a frozen asset class that has implications over our entire economy," said Fratto at the daily White House press briefing. That certainly rolls off the tongue: "an effort to fix the problem of a frozen asset class."
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