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These soaps are really cool, in a disturbing, nursing home kinda way. Apparently, they even have a nice minty scent.
How often in class or in a boring meeting or on the bus or waiting for a flight have you wanted to lay your head down for a few minutes, but all you have to cushion your skull is a hard-edged laptop? Designer Hafsteinn Juliusson of Reykjavik came up with the napBook to solve this problem in a comfortable and colorful way with a laptop cover that doubles as a cushion, and it comes with its own shoulder strap for nappers on the go.
What we now take for granted many people once took for granted could never work.
The lightbulb. The telephone. Email. If you’re a specialist in your field, there are two ways to become a household name: create something new…or claim it can never be done. If you want to be remembered on the Internet, choose the second one. Here are 9 examples of breakthroughs, inventions and innovations the experts were completely wrong about.
I could waste a lot of time at TotallyLooksLike.com. No, wait, I already have. Some of the comparisons are astute (Billy Mays really does look like Al from Home Improvement!), some of them are funny, and some of them are just plain mean. You can make your own by using their archive of pictures, or upload your own finds. A couple that I thought were funny: Suge Knight totally looks like Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rod Blagojevich totally looks like Lego Man, and Axl Rose totally looks like Pickles.
Note that the audio has been removed to protect the innocent.
[YouTube]
Our movie trivia posts have been so popular, we decided to make them a regular feature. When I talked to our fearless leader about this, he said it sounded like a great idea and nominated The Princess Bride for our first post. Please – like I needed an excuse to watch The Princess Bride. It’s great on so many levels. Enjoy!
Anyway, that’s it for The Princess Bride. If you have a movie you’d like to see covered, leave it in the comments, or head to the forums and see what others have suggested.
VideoSift, one of our favorite-est websites on the Net, dug up this gem of a video clip: a young Yehudi Menuhin playing Habanera by Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate on the violin, with Adolph Baller at the piano.
Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Operas You Didn’t Know You Already Like (yes, there’s a Habanera there, but it’s an aria by Georges Bizet)
Wow – Neatorama made it to the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire … wait a minute … HEY! Actually, it’s a rather clever generator by Remixito, where you can generate your own set of question and answers: Link – via MRod
How much CO2 does a google search produce if a google search produces CO2? Well, Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross did the math:
… a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Robert Lount of Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business found out why first impressions are so important: people are more forgiving of a
breach of trust later in the relationship as opposed as early on.
Here’s the experiment:
Lount and his colleagues had college students play a computer game in which their partners (actually a computer, unbeknownst to the participants) betrayed their trust either right off the bat or somewhere in the middle of the game.
A betrayal of trust occurred when a player defected rather than cooperated in a round of the game. A cooperative play resulted in more money rewarded to both players, while a defector would get a lot more money than the partner.
After the computer partner made two defector moves, it would follow with 30 rounds of pure cooperation. Turned out that cooperation wasn’t enough to gain back a participant’s trust. Those who experienced a breach of trust at the game’s start were the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game, cooperating less than 70 percent of the final 10 rounds.
Meanwhile, participants who experienced a betrayal later in the game, after 10 rounds of cooperation, showed the most cooperation at the end of the game, choosing to cooperate more than 90 percent of the time.
And in fact, those who were betrayed in rounds 11 and 12 were, on average, nearly 40 percent more cooperative in the last 10 rounds compared with participants who experienced an immediate betrayal.
When asked to evaluate their partners, participants gave more negative assessments of those early betrayers compared with the late ones.
"When the partner started off by defecting, and they were taken advantage of, they really formed these negative impressions — ‘That person is immoral,’ ‘They’re a jerk,’ ‘That’s not the type of person I would like,’" Lount said.
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the story: Link | Photo from Fisher College of Business
From the awesomeness that is Japanese television, here is Freddie Mercury singing I Was Born to Love You (complete with chest hair!) It’s part of Monomane Battle, a show where Japanese celebrities impersonate other celebrities …
Watch and cry: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Weird Asia News (who has more)
Julian Partridge of Bristol University found something peculiar about the brownsnout spookfish: they have mirrors for eyes!
Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.
"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes – how to make an image – using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.
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You’ve got to admire Graham Parker’s persistence: after 26 year’s worth of attempts, he has finally solved his Rubik’s cube:
Delighted Graham, 45, from Portchester, Hants, has been tirelessly trying to solve the riddle of the Cube since he bought the toy in 1983.
Married dad-of-one Graham has endured endless sleepless nights and after more than 27,400 hours he finally managed to conquer his personal Everest.
Builder Graham said: "I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it. It has driven me mad over the years – it felt like it had taken over my life. I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lay awake at night thinking about it. Friends have offered to solve it for me and I know that you can find solutions on the web but I just had to do it myself. I have had wrist and back problems from spending hours on it but it was all worth it. When I clicked that last bit into place and each face was a solid colour I wept."
Someone dubbed the "Byker Romeo" turned a 15-foot letter on top of a carpet factory into a romantic message for a sweetheart:
Staff at Storey’s Carpets in Cut Bank, Byker, Newcastle, were surprised to find that the giant white ‘CARPETS’ lettering which has been on top of their red roof for years had been replaced with ‘I LOVE U’.
The 15ft letters have been manipulated to send out a city-wide message to a sweetheart. The enormous love message is visible for miles and is causing a stir with motorists passing over Byker Bridge and has even been spotted by low flying aircraft.
Now Storey’s staff are desperate for the person to come forward, and the old romantics have promised not to take police action. Natalie Raine, marketing manager for Storey’s Carpets in the North East, said: “We’re all really curious as to who the Byker Romeo is. They must have spent hours painting out the existing sign. Some of our staff who drive into work across Byker Bridge couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it. We all think it’s wonderful and there’s no way we want to take any action against the person who did it.
Rob Lammle has a new article at Mental Floss describing currently ongoing alternate reality games. I hadn’t heard of almost any of them, including this site, which is related to the new Dreamworks movie Monsters vs. Aliens. The article also lists some ARG resources, which you might want to familiarize yourself with before The Watchmen ARG begins.
A 20-pound lobster named George will be returned to the sea after a stay in a New York restaurant. From his size, the lobster is estimated to be around 140 years old. George was caught off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada and was on bought by City Crab and Seafood for $100. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent the restaurant a request to set George free.
Restaurant manager Keith Valenti said there was never any intent to harm the lobster, and the decision to keep it in the tank was made to offer customers a little something extra.
“We bought a big lobster, started taking pictures with kids and it worked out real well,” Mr Valenti told Reuters news agency.
But it was a “no brainer”, he added, to agree to the request to return George to the ocean.
“We never intended him to be sold, just draw attention to the restaurant, and he did.”
George was scheduled to be released in the waters off Kennebunkport, where lobster trapping is prohibited. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!
A group of tough-looking tattooed tattoo enthusiasts rescued 180 abandoned cats and kittens from a foreclosed home last week. They say it will take about a week to rescue and rehabilitate the cats found in Moriches, New York. The group Rescue Ink is dedicated to the welfare of animals. Link -via Fark
Just what the internet needs: more bacon! You can add a strip of bacon to any website at Bacolicio.us. Just add a URL to the end of theirs, Neatorama for example, and make any page more delicious. Link -Thanks, Nestor!
(image credit: Flickr user tillwe)
