Archive for December, 2008

Woman Gives Birth on Trans-Atlantic Flight

On a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Boston, a Ugandan woman gave birth to a healthy baby girl.  They were both fortunate that there were two doctors on board.  As the child was born while in Canadian airspace, she automatically became a Canadian citizen.

Link

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Neatorama Shop » Home & Garden » Ice Trays
Bone Chillers Ice Tray	Gin & Titonic Ice Tray	Fossiliced Ice Tray
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Origami Hamburger Kit

Giving up fast food for your New Year’s Resolution? You can still have it – since it’s made out of paper, it’s much healthier for you. I probably wouldn’t recommend eating it, though. For $6, you get 16 pieces of paper that will allow you to make two burgers, fries, a soda and a tray to put it all on.

Link

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Terry Pratchett Knighted

You may now refer to the Discworld author as “Sir Terry”, although he regrets that the honor did not come with a sword.

Link via Wired

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UN satellite presentation of current Gaza conflict

While war most certainly isn’t “neat,” those following the Israel/Hamas conflict in Gaza at the moment might appreciate the United Nation’s UNOSAT division’s excellent marked and annotated satellite image that illustrates current information about the conflict.

If you find the Gaza image useful, you can sign up for notifications or an RSS feed from the site. They provide similar timely annotated imagery of many natural disasters, conflicts and other newsworthy geographically relevant events throughout the year.

[UNOSAT]

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Smiley Masks for Thai Highway Patrol

Thailand, nicknamed "The Land of Smiles" by countless tourist books, are living up to its name: the highway policemen in Thailand will be wearing smiley masks to "lift the mood of motorists":

The new cloth masks, which hook behind the ears and cover the mouth and nose, will help "reduce the stress from drivers when they see the police," said Somyos, the Highway Police commander.

To that end, he said, some 200 police booths would also distribute holy water, chewing gum and mints.

He defended his force when asked why drivers needed smiley masks and gum and holy water to calm down when approached by a patrolman.

"The police are not that scary," he said. "When I was in the United States, their highway police seemed to be more fierce than Thai police. I was scared of them."

Link

Photo: Sarot Meksophawannakul/Bangkok Post

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Neatorama Shop » Food & Drink » Offbeat Mints & Candies
Bacon Mints	Chum Bucket Candy	Family Guy Stewie's Death Defying Mints
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Movie Mistakes of 2008

Despite costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, Hollywood movies are filled with "mistakes" (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero even parodied these mistakes by purposely incorporating them in the film).

But one man’s mistake is another man’s bread. To wit, here’s MovieMistakes, a website dedicated to documenting the glaring, silly, and obscure mistakes that occur in some of Hollywood’s greatest hits. Here are their list of 2008 Movies with the Most Mistakes:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – 67 mistakes
2. The Dark Knight – 46 mistakes
3. Mamma Mia! – 45 mistakes
4. Twilight – 42 mistakes
5. High School Musical 3: Senior Year – 40 mistakes

… and the list for the Best Movie Mistakes of 2008:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
   At the beginning when Indy is talking to Spalko, his hands keep alternating from being in his pockets to just resting at his sides between shots.
2. Iron Man
   When Iron Man and Iron Monger are fighting, Iron Man catches the SUV, and you can see the family inside the car. Although the car is completely vertical, the hair of the people in the car seem to defy gravity.
3. Solstice
   The moon is full every night the highschoolers are at the lake house.
4. 10,000 B.C.
   After Evolet got hit by the arrow and presumably dies, D’leh is staring at a mammoth. Behind the mammoth, you can see that the background is a picture.
5. Meet the Spartans
   When Britney Spears gets pushed into the Pit of Death, you hear her talk and scream but her lips are not moving.
6. The Dark Knight
   At around an hour and a half into the movie, during Batman’s interrogation of Joker, when he picks him up and slams him against the wall, for a very brief moment you can see the camera and the cameraman in the reflection of the mirror on the right.

Link

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Depressed, Sick, and Fat? Blame Your Friends!

Image: J Fowler and N Christakis/New England Journal of Medicine/BMJ

Research by medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis and colleague at the Harvard Medical School in Boston revealed how oher people’s happiness, depression, and obesity can affect you:

Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.

Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.

At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 14 Habits That Make You Fat (which also noted the study above)

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Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp

Children of the ’70s might remember this Saturday morning show on ABC; apparently Nickelodeon also aired reruns of it in the ’80s. That’s my demographic, but I don’t remember it. Anyway, it’s a bunch of chimps (with dubbed human voices) running around solving mysteries and fighting crime. It’s strangely riveting. Lance Link sounds like Humphrey Bogart and his partner, Mata Hairi, sounds sort of like Fran Drescher mixed with Ruth Gordon.

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It's That Time of Year Again: Banned Words for 2009

Each year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released a list in late December of words that should never be used again based on their overuse in the 12 months prior. This year’s list largely revolves around the election and the economic crisis:

Maverick

From Wall Street to Main Street

Desperate search

monkey, when used as a suffix

game-changing

carbon footprint or carbon offsetting

green

bailout

“winner of five nominations.”

<3 - It's the first time an emoticon has made the list.

First Dude

icon or iconic

staycation

not so much

it’s that time of year again

Leave a comment and let us know what 2008 word you think should be banned forever.

Link via Yahoo

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Cheating Death

The final Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss for 2008 challenges you to cheat death -retroactively. Match the famous dead person with the object that might have prevented his or her death. Some are easy; other I had to guess, and I ended up with a score of 70%. Link

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Neatorama Shop » T-Shirts About The Economy
$700 Billion T-Shirt	See more T-Shirts About The Economy »

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Uncle Jay Explains 2008 in Song

(YouTube link)
Uncle Jay wraps up the entire year to the tunes of your favorite Christmas carols. -Thanks, Duke!

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Secret Agent Camcorder Watch

Even Dick Tracy would be amazed at a normal-sized watch that can record eight hours of color video with sound! Just plug your watch into your computer via USB and download your recordings. On sale for only $199.95. Link -Thanks, =RaZ34=- Ron!

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Rickrolling New Years Eve

Anyone who’s been around Neatorama for any length of time is familiar with the Rickroll. For New Year’s Eve, Randall Munroe of xkcd takes the Rickroll concept and stands it on its head to surprise a girl. Link -Thanks, mmat!

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The 12-cent Perpetual Calendar

You don’t need a new calendar for the new year, if you’ve got 12 cents and an understanding of binary numbers! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories posted instructions for making your own perpetual calendar.

It’s Wednesday, the fourth day of the week. The binary number for 4 is 100. We use “heads” for 1 and “tails” for 0. So the left hand column has (top to bottom) heads-tails-tails = 100 binary = 4th day of week = Wednesday. (If you don’t already speak binary, no biggie. Start here or here and join us in a minute.)

It’s December, month 12, and 12 in binary is 1100, so the middle column is heads-heads-tails-tails.

Finally, the last column is all heads, since it’s December 31, and 31 decimal = 11111 binary.

Got that? Me neither. Link

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Ode to Joy, Beaker-Style.

With a cameo by Statler and Waldorf. This made my morning.

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Scientists Set to Ignite a Tiny Man-Made Star

Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Scientist at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, are getting ready to do something spectacular: ignite a tiny man-made star inside a lab and trigger a thermonuclear reaction!

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.

Igniting a tiny man-made star, what could go wrong? Seriously though, this is pretty nifty: Link | National Ignition Facility website | video clip at Wired Science

Is it time for an I Survived the Tiny Man-Made Star T-shirt yet? (Much in the line of our I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt)

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Aviation Humor

After hitting pay dirt with his Military Truisms forum post, Neatorama reader SparkS did it again with this gem: Aviation Humor.

This one made me ROFL:

The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one’s gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them. So it was with some amusement that we (a Pan Am 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground
control and a British Airways 747, call sign Speedbird 206":

Speedbird 206: "Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway."

Ground: "Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven."

The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop.

Ground: "Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?"

Speedbird 206: "Stand by, Ground, I’m looking up our gate location now."

Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): "Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?"

Speedbird 206 (coolly): "Yes, twice in 1944 — but I didn’t land."

Link

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Wall-E Wood Sculpture

We’ve featured incredibly cute Wall-E LEGO creations on Neatorama before (twice, actually), but this one takes the cake: an incredibly detailed Wall-E wooden sculpture by Morpheus Prototypes Morpheus Creative Form Development, commissioned by Disney as a gift for Pixar/Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter

Link – via Make

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Andreas Aronsson's Impossible Figures Optical Illusion

Andreas Aronsson is a professional IT technician by day and an awesome optical illusion artist at night: he made a series of cleverly drawn "impossible figures" that at a glance look perfectly fine, but upon closer inspection will give your mind some sort of a Twilight Zone moment.

These are awesome, trust me: Link

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Jen Stark's Paper Art

We posted about Jen Stark’s amazing construction paper art a while ago on Neatorama, but we’ve just run across her interview by ArtStreet on WLRN South Florida.

It’s definitely worth another look: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Jen Stark’s website

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Neatorama Shop » Computer & Office » Road Mice
	Why settle for a boring computer mouse when you can surft in style with Road Mice, a cool wireless computer mouse that looks just like the car of your dreams? Road Mice is available in various Chevy, Chrysler, Dodge, and Ford models including the popular Dodge Viper shown to the left. It's the perfect gift for the auto-enthusiast in your life!
See more Road Mice »

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Electroman Surge Protector

Behold the Electroman Surge Protector, that not only quadruples your electrical
outlet, but also has an indicator light where his heart is located that shows your electrical applicances are protected against evil electricity surges.

It takes a certain kind of mad genius to make a surge protector cool. Electroman doesn’t come cheap though, it’s $24.95, but what is the price of coolness?

(Plus, you can customize ‘im with a sharpie!) Link – via CraziestGadgets

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The Great Chess Doping Scandal

Sad as it is, doping is so prevalent in sports that it comes to no surprise when an athlete is busted … but chess? CHESS? Yes, folks, here’s the Great Chess Doping Scandal of grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk, ranked third of the world:

Who knows what was going through Ivanchuk’s head when, on Nov. 25 in Dresden, the last day of the Chess Olympiad, he lost to Gata Kamsky? What we do know, however, is that when the game against the American ended, a judge asked Ivanchuk to submit to a drug test. Instead, he stormed out of the room in the conference center, kicked a concrete pillar in the lobby, pounded a countertop in the cafeteria with his fists and then vanished into the coatroom. Throughout this performance, he was followed by a handful of officials.

No one could convince Ivanchuk to provide a small amount of urine for the test. And because refusal is treated as a positive test result, he is now considered guilty of doping and could be barred from professional chess for two years.

Link – via Znaniye

Photo: erral [Flickr]

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Cuddly Toys of Death

If you’re sick of all the cute, sweet plushies out there, then these great toys are for you. They’re by artist Patricia Waller who has a ton of other awesome designs as well. These specific toys belong to her “Accident” series and the “How to kill your first love” series. I love the teddy bear myself.

Link Via Craftzine

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Super Mario Mushroom Burgers - Delicious!

Yummy burgers made out of mushrooms that look like Mario mushrooms! 1 Up to nom town. For instructions to make your own, don’t miss this Instructables post. If you like that, don’t miss their Mario holiday guide here.

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Stitch Your Way Across the U.S.A.

…or Europe, or the whole world, actually. But those didn’t rhyme, so I went with “U.S.A.” Next time you go on vacation, take a few of these little beauties along, and with a tiny amount of sewing, you can show your besties back at home exactly what routes you have taken. Yeah, you could do the same thing with a Sharpie, but that’s not nearly as cute.

Link via Mighty Goods

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In a Public Space

In a Public Space is a website/collaborative art project where people are invited to leave strange objects in random public spaces (this bullhorn to the left was deposited in a library). Then people write in with a picture of their object and the location they left it. I think it’s pretty interesting – you know you’ve found things before and wondered, “How did that get there?” Next time that happens, I’ll wonder not only how it got there, but if it was part of a collaborative art project.

Link via Dark Roasted Blend

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Vintage Candy

Do you ever get a craving for a candy you know isn’t sold in stores these days? Mine is York Peppermint Patty Bites. They came in bags like the Reese’s Bites and Hershey’s Bites and other candy bars rolled up into a bite-sized ball form. They were soooo good in the freezer. Alas, they discontinued them, I think in favor of the York Mints. I enjoy those too, but they aren’t the same. Anyway, thanks to our own Neatoramanaut SparkS, we now have a link to CandyDirect, a place where you can possibly relive your childhood by purchasing that discontinued candy you haven’t seen in years. They have everything from bubble gum cigars and candy cigarettes (which have long been discontinued in that format since it pretty much encourages kids to smoke) to Violet mints, you’ll find almost anything you want. Except for York Peppermint Patty Bites.

Link via Neatorama Forum
Photo from Cardhouse.com

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Nastiest Kwanzaa Cake Ever

I love Cakewrecks. I’m totally addicted. This week, they’ve highlighted a totally hideous Kwanzaa cake by Sandra Lee made with pre-made angel food cake, store-bought icing, and, obviously, corn nuts. Well, Sandra calls them “acorns” but the recipe calls for corn nuts. It also calls for popcorn and pumpkin seeds. It would appear the hate mail about this cake was so numerous that Food Network pulled the recipe, but with a little digging you can still find it floating around. In case you have always dreamed of a corn nut-cake hybrid, the recipe is at the bottom of the post.

The hate sites are pretty numerous, too. Here are a couple:
The Kwanzaa Cake and Other Edible Hate Crimes
Nobody Does it Like Sandra Lee
Random Access Babble

And, the infamous recipe:

1 (10 to 12-ounce) purchased angel food cake
1 container (16 ounce) vanilla frosting
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 (21-ounce) container apple filling or topping
1 (1.7-ounce) package corn nuts
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, toasted
1/2 cup popped popcorn

Special Equipment:
Kwanzaa candles

Using a serrated knife, cut cake horizontally into 2 layers. Place bottom cake layer, cut side up, on a serving platter. Mix frosting, cocoa powder, vanilla, and cinnamon in large bowl until combined. Spread about 1/4 of the frosting over top of cake layer on platter. Top with second cake layer, cut side down. Spread remaining frosting evenly over top and sides of cake to coat completely. Spoon apple pie filling into hole in center of cake. Place candles atop cake. Sprinkle top of cake with some corn nuts, pumpkin seeds, and popcorn. Sprinkle remaining corn nuts and pumpkin seeds around base of cake.

Link

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Adjustable Glasses

British inventor Josh Silver began working on eyeglasses that can be tuned by the wearer in 1985. His goal is to bring better vision to a billion people worldwide who cannot afford, or don’t have access to, an optometrist.

Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

Silver’s goal is to distribute a billion pairs of his adaptive glasses to poor people by 2020 (the pun in the year is intended, I’m sure). Already, 30,000 pairs have been given out in 15 countries.

“The reaction is universal,” says Major Kevin White, formerly of the US military’s humanitarian programme, who organised the distribution of thousands of pairs around the world after discovering Silver’s glasses on Google. “People put them on, and smile. They all say, ‘Look, I can read those tiny little letters.’”

Silver hopes to get the cost of manufacturing each pair down to a dollar each. Link -Thanks, Cuimhne!

(image credit: Michael Lewis)

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20 Amazing Places to Bungee Jump

Imagine bungee jumping off the Bloukrans Bridge in South Africa -it’s 710 feet high! Fantastic view, but um, I think I’ll pass. But you can watch others do it, because 20 Amazing Places to Bungee Jump has videos to go with each venue. Link -Thanks, Grzegorz Paslawski!

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Lag Kills	Neighborhood Watch is Fun	I Have Multiple Personalities and None of Them Like You
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