HOME |
RSS | 
A Japanese sewage plant has found a new way to make money. They reprocess their ash byproduct and reclaim the … gold?
On January 28, sewage plant operator Nagano Prefecture Suwa Construction Office announced that approximately 1.9 kilograms (4.2 lbs) of gold can be mined from each ton of molten fly ash generated when incinerating sludge at its facility in the town of Suwa.
Located in central Nagano prefecture, the Suwa Basin is home to numerous precision machining companies, metal plating facilities and hot springs, which may explain the high concentration of gold in the wastewater sludge.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
The Lamborghini Gallardo is actually done in sharpie markers on the paint and then finished with a clear coat for protection. The "Sharpie Lamborghini" is owned by Prestige Imports, a car dealership specializing in high-end models.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
It’s 2009 already, people! Where’s my jet pack? Well, this may not exactly be the jet pack we were promised, but it looks AWESOME!
You *must* take a look at this video clip of the water jet pack over at Geeks are Sexy: Link
From what I can gather, this is the invention of a guy named Raymond Li, who got a patent issued back in 2007.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
A woman gave birth to octuplets in California on Monday. Seven of the babies are breathing on their own, and all are expected to survive. The mother already had six children, the oldest only seven years old!
Although the successful births at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower have received worldwide attention, they also have prompted disapproval from some medical ethicists and fertility specialists, who argue that high-number multiple births endanger the mother and also frequently lead to long-term health and developmental problems for the children.
Under the guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, U.S. doctors normally would not implant more than two embryos at a time in a woman under the age of 35. After that age it is more difficult to become pregnant. The mother of the octuplets is believed to be 33, based on available public records.
Doctors were surprised by the eighth child, as they only knew about seven of them. Link
Comments Off
Has it really been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall? An architect in Leipzig, Germany opened an apartment to prepare for renovations and found it had been virtually untouched since at least 1989!
It appears the inhabitant of the humble flat fled in a hurry and shrivelled bread rolls still lay in a string bag.
Grocery brands from the Socialist state filled the kitchen.
“When we opened the door we felt like Howard Carter when he found the grave of Tutankhamun,” Mark Aretz told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
“Everything was a mess but it was like a historic treasure trove, a portal into an age long gone.”
Documents show the flat had been occupied by a 24-year-man who had been in some trouble with East German authorities, and must have fled before the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989. A wall calendar was turned to August 1988. Link -Thanks, Paul!
Built for the 2008 Jersey City Artists Studio Tour by Mark Dalzell, the Steampunk guitar, Organum Insolitus features a television with Fresnel lens magnifier, onboard phaser, an amplifier and uses clockwork gears, hand hammered brass, cloth wire and wood for its making. The freakin’ guitar can also be attached to an external amp via a standard ¼-inch cable, setting up the beastly guitar as game to steam some endless music.
Link -Thanks, Samiksha!
28-year-old Brett Kerr attempted to rob a home in Christchurch, New Zealand, but messed the job up in so many ways. The victim’s son, Greg Kitson, was amazed at the incompetence of the caper.
Mr Kitson sped over to his parents’ house after his wife noticed a fire in the kitchen. When he got there, he did not know who to call first. “We had a fire, we had a burglary and we had someone injured so it was like an all-play.”
He believes it all went wrong for Kerr when he tripped taking a drum set down a narrow spiral staircase, and apparently knocked himself out.
“This might be where he done himself in, then he thinks, ‘Ah! It’s a good time to get the plasma TV when I’m knocked out and totally out of it.’”
Bleeding profusely, it seems Kerr then set fire to the kitchen before deciding it was time for a lie-down.
The burglar’s actions puzzled Mr Kitson.
“Why would someone come in, light a fire, go upstairs and fall asleep?”
Looking back at it now it strikes me as remarkable how much changed so quickly over the ensuing years.
Does anyone have any 80s computing nostalgia to share? [YouTube - thanks, Tim!]
After years of fetching water, Jason gets the chance to play a game…
Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips, one of the largest and neatest blog about blogging on the blogosphere (say that three times fast!), did a nice write-up on Neatorama’s new Upcoming Queue.
And right off the bat he gave you one good reason to submit your blog (if you’ve got original content) to the Upcoming Queue:
Neatorama is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. They cover all sorts of neat, weird and interesting things. A great part of their stories is also sent by the readers themselves. I have been linked from them in the past, and it sent over 3,000 visitors my way in matter of 24 hours, just to give you an idea of their traffic levels.
Thanks for the kind words, Daniel! Learn more about the Upcoming Queue here
Photo: lalachan [Flickr]
When ordinary No Parking sign fails, somebody clever tacked on this tongue-in-cheek sign in Mobile, Alabama.
While using Google Earth, Swiss police discovered that not all green masses on their screen are trees and jungles. In fact, they discovered a huge marijuana plantation hidden inside a corn field!
I don't know what I'm more suprised with: the weed farm or the police using rudimentary software available to any internet user to crack the case.
Officers discovered the hemp field in the northeastern canton (state) of Thurgau last year while investigating an alleged drug ring, said the head of Zurich police's specialist narcotics unit Norbert Klossner.
The plantation, measuring almost two acres (7,500 square meters), was hidden inside a field of corn. But officers using Google Earth to locate the address of two farmers suspected of involvement in the drug operation quickly spotted the illegal crop.
"It was an interesting chance discovery," said Klossner.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
Here is a really funny "outtake" clip of the eTrade Baby ads that you won’t see on TV!
– via stratoblogster
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Stratoblogster.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
British physician Harold Shipman may have killed as many as 400 of his patients during his medical career, which would make him the most prolific serial killer of all time. An official audit estimates the number of victims at 236 over 24 years, but the exact number will probably never be known.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
Diabolic Acid
Diabolic acids are actually a class of compounds where the m and n chains can have different lengths and can contain unsaturation. They were named after the Greek diabollo, meaning to mislead, since they were particularly difficult to isolate using standard gas chromatography techniques. One of the inventors, Prof Klein, also thought that they had 'horns like the devil'.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
Humans like to measure things - distance, mass, time, you name it, we've measured it. And along the way, people have come up with some interesting and unusual units of measurements:
Apgar Score - If you were born in the past 50 years or so, chances are you have an Apgar Score. Indeed, it is the very first test all of us took. The Apgar Score was devised in 1952 by Dr. Virginia Apgar to evaluate the health of newborns immediately after birth, based on the Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity and Respiration criteria. It ranges from 0 to 10. (Source)
atomus - In medieval time, the Latin Atomus meant "a twinkling of the eye," the smallest amount of time imagineable. Nowadays, it's defined as 1/376 minute or about 160 milliseconds.
Avogadro's
number - Us common folks say a couple to mean 2, a dozen to mean
12, a gross to mean 144, and so on. Well, chemists have got us beat: they
use Avogadro's number to mean 6.0221417930 x 1023, the number
of atoms or molecules in one mole. It was named after Italian scientist
Amedeo Avogadro, who looked a little like a Hobbit.
baker's dozen - If you buy a dozen loaves of bread, bakers usually throw one in for free, so baker's dozen means 13. They didn't do this out of the goodness of their heart: the practice came to be in the 13th century, when a medieval English law made it so a baker could be punished by chopping his hand off with an axe if he was found to be shortchanging a customer. Tossing in an extra loaf of bread seemed to be a prudent way of keeping one's hand. (Source)
barn - Those nuclear physicists are a funny bunch. They define a "barn" (yes, from the saying "as big as a barn") as a cross section of an atomic nucleus. It is 10-28 m2. This unit of measurement is used when these physicists/comedians need to quantify the scattering cross-section of particles. An outhouse is defined as 10-6 barn and a shed is 10-24 barns.
baud (Bd) - With broadband Internet and all, we thankfully don't use this anymore, but anyone who's old enough to remember modems should know that baud (later supplanted by bit/second) is the measure of the rate of data transmission over telephone lines. The baud rate is the number of distinct symbols that can be transmitted per second. It is named after Emile Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot code used in telegraphy.
BB - Ever owned a BB gun? Well, BB doesn't stand for ball bearing or bullet ball, it actually referred to the size of the pellet. A BB pellet (0.180 inch or 4.57 mm) is between B and BBB size.
Big
Mac Index - a measure of exchange rates (actually purchasing
power parity) between two currencies. It was defined by Economist's editor
Pam Woodall to measure whether a currency is under- or overvalued. She
used a Big Mac because the burger is produced in about 120 countries.
(Source)
The easiest way to explain this is by an example: say you want to know
whether the exchange rate between the dollar and the British pound, say
$2 = £1, is fair. You take the price of a Big Mac in the US ($3.57)
and in Britain (£2.29). The idea is the price of a Big Mac should
be equal in both countries, relative to their currencies - the implied
purchasing power parity is 3.57/2.29 = 1.56. But the exchange rate is
2/1 - so this means that the pound is overvalued against the dollar by
28% (2 divided by 1.56).
blink - Oh, every few decades somebody proposed that instead of using 24 pesky hours, why not divide the day into units of 10. Basically 1 day is divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 metric seconds or blinks. A blink works out to be 0.864 second, which ironically is twice the time it takes for you to blink your eye.
carat - A measure of how big a diamond is. The unit carat came from the Greek word keration meaning a carob bean, which was used as a standard weight in ancient Greece. It's now defined as 200 milligram.
cubit - A biblical unit of distance. It is the distance
between a man's middle finger and his elbow. It is about 18 inches or
45 centimeters. A cubit is divided into 6 palms or 24 digits.
In Ezekiel 48: 34 it was written that the size of the New Jerusalem or
heaven is 4500 cubits on each side. That translates to about 1,046 acres
or 1.63 square mile - about 3/100th the size of San Francisco.
Needs more donkey power
donkey power - A third of a horsepower, about 250 watts.
farthing - An old English word for quarter. A farthing means 1/4 of a penny.
flock - Ever wonder how many birds are in a flock of seagulls? A flock means 2 score or 40.
fortnight - A fortnight is two weeks or 14 days. The 12th century word comes from "fourteen nights." Geeks have adopted this in a humorous way: instead of saying seconds, they say microfortnight (which comes out to be about 1.21 seconds).
Gillette - American physicists Ted Maiman, who made the first working laser, used to compare laser output power by how many Gillette razor blades it can burn a hole through. A 2 Gillette laser can only through 2 stacked razor blades.
googol - The googol was invented in 1938 by mathematician
Edward Kasner, who asked his then 8-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta what
he would name a really, really, really large number. A googol
is a large number indeed: it is 1 followed by 100 zeroes or 10100.
A year later, Kasner defined another number: the googolplex or 10googol(1010^100).
How big is a googolplex? Carl Sagan estimated that it would be impossible
to write out all the zeroes of the number, because it would take more
space than the known universe.
If googol sounds familiar, that's because Larry Page and Sergey Brin named
their company Google based on this word. They even called the Google headquarters
in Mountain View, California, the Googleplex.
From the incomparable Adam "Ape
Lad" Koford [Flickr]
Hobo Power - Radio personality Adam Carolla came up with this one: a measure of how bad something smells. It ranges from 0 (not stinky at all) to 100 (lethal). A "robust fart" is about 13 hobo. At 50 hobo, the person doing the smelling would projectile vomit.
jerk - Ever feel a jerk of the car when you accelerate fast? Well, engineers define a jerk as a unit of the rate of change of acceleration. 1 jerk is equal to 0.3048 m/sec3.
jiffy - there are two definitions of a jiffy, both of which are units of time and mean very, very fast. In computer engineering, a jiffy is one cycle or one tick of the computer's system clock. It is 0.01 second. The second definition is the time required for light to travel one centimeter, as proposed by American chemisty Gilbert Lewis. This translates to 33.3564 picoseconds.
klick - It's military-talk for kilometer. The term became popular in the 1960s among American soliders in Vietnam, though some believed it had been used as early as the 1950s by soldiers stationed in Germany. It probably came from the "k" and the "l" in "kilometer," but I suspect the soldiers thought it was cooler to say klick than kil-o-meh-tur. (Source)
Man-Month - it doesn't exist, the Man-Month is a myth: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Mickey
- Named after Mickey Mouse, a mickey is the length of the "smallest
detectable movement" of the computer mouse. It's about 1/200 to 1/300
inch or about 0.1 mm.
Say it after me: Mickey Mouse moves the Mickey Mouse mouse a Mickey.
millihelen - If Helen of Troy had "the face that launched a thousand ship," then the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship is a millihellen. A negative hellen is the amount of ugliness that makes a thousand ships sail the other way.
MegaFonzie - A measure of coolness. In Futurama, Professor Farnsworth defined MegaFonzi as having 1000 times the coolness of Fonzie of the TV show Happy Days.
moment - If you ask someone to wait a moment, you're asking them to wait for a very short period of time. But how short? Turns out a moment is a medieval unit of time equals to 1/40th of an hour or 1.5 minutes.
nybble - A byte is a unit of measurement of information that can be stored in a computer (for example: a 1 gigabyte hard disk). So what is smaller than a byte? A nybble, of course - it is defined as half a byte.
Platonic year - a year without sexual relationships. Actually, no - it's an astronomical unit of time (also called Great year or Equinoctial cycle) basically measuring the period of time required for planets to align. It's about 26,000 years, which is exactly how long a year being platonic feels like.
Potrzebie
- In his first "scientific" article titled "Potrzebie
System of Weights and Measures", published in Mad Magazine,
Donald Knuth (yes,
the computer science legend) defined a potrzebie as the thickness of Mad
Magazine #26 or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. He also defined a unit of
force as whatmeworry and so on.
proof - You've seen this in a bottle of liquor: 100-proof,
80-proof, etc. In the 18th century, before hydrometer was a common instrument,
people used to "prove" that their alcoholic drink wasn't watered
down by using a "gunpowder proof." The alcohol and gunpowder
were mixed in equal proportion and then ignited. If the mixture burned,
then it is proof that the alcohol wasn't diluted.
Today, proof liquor is defined as containing 50% of alcohol by volume.
A 100-proof whiskey contains 50% alcohol.
Sagan
- Carl Sagan loved to say "billions and billions of stars,"
so in his honor, a Sagan is defined as at least 4 billion. So that you
know, there are nearly 100 Sagan (400,000,000,000) stars in the Milky
Way galaxy.
Scoville - Named after its creator, chemist Wilbur Scoville, this unit measures the hotness of a chili pepper. A scoville is the dilution factor of a solution of chili pepper extract until the "heat" (the amount of the chemical capsaicin) is no longer detectable to tasters.
A bell pepper has a Scoville rating of 0, whereas a habanero has a rating of 200,000 (meaning a solution of habanero extract needs to be diluted 1:200,000 before the heat goes away). The hottest pepper in the world is the Naga Jolokia, with 1.05 million Scoville. A pepper spray is rated between 2 and 5.3 million Scoville.
smidgen - Yes, it means "small" but how small? A smidgen is exactly 1/2 a pinch or 1/32 of a teaspoon.
smoot - one smoot is defined as 5 feet and 7 inches (1.7 m), the height of Oliver R. Smoot, then an MIT undergrad who during his fraternity pledge was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. They simply laid him down on the bridge and drew a mark where his head was, repeated the entire exercise along the bridge, and got a value of 364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear.
Oliver Smoot being used as a yardstick for the Harvard Bridge - source:
Smoot 50th
The next time your on the Harvard Bridge, look out for the markings, which are actually used by the Cambridge police department to this day to identify the location of accidents on the bridge.
Twain
- "Twain" is actually an archaic term for "two." If
you're thinking of Mark Twain when you read this, you'd be right. Samuel
Clemens, who used to work as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River,
got his pen name because "mark twain" was what riverboatmen
would yell out when they measured the depth of the river. It meant that
the depth is two fathoms (about 12 feet), the minimum depth required by
boats.
Warhol - Andy Warhol once said that "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." So, warhol is a measure of fame. 1 kilowarhol is being famous for 15,000 minutes or approximately 10 days. Conversely, 1 milliwarhol is about nine-tenths of a second of fame, which is about how long it'll take my brain to forget a name. (Source)
Lilcrabe is a 17-year-old student from France who likes yoga and breakdancing. This video shows you his amazing contortionist feats.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Christophe.
If you’ve ever wondered what Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Ricardo Montalban, RIP) would look like if it were an Italian opera, you’re in luck. Here’s Le Wrath di Khan, by the genius folks at Robot Chicken: Link [embedded adult swim video] – Thanks John!
Comments Off 
Buyers for the U.S. Capital visitors center are in a bit of hot water today. They were warned not to buy goods made outside the US, but did it anyway. Now $100,000 worth of souvenirs are sitting in storage, blocked from being sold, and will probably have to be returned to the manufacturer in China.
Will the Chinese manufacturer take the goods back or will the government be out $100,00? Your guess is as good as mine. I'm all for US made products being sold, but in these finacial times is it really a good idea for the government to waste $100,000 worth of goods, that it is probably already stuck with, because of ideals?
Washington souvenirs worth $100,000 -- including images of the Capitol dome and printings of the U.S. Constitution -- are locked in storage, blocked from sale in the new U.S. Capitol Visitors Center because the items are made in China.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
Sometimes, you may find it difficult to look for some of the highest quality photoshop tutorials. In order to save your time, Photoshop Lady has been spending almost a whole year to search for the best photoshop tutorials for us.
Eventually, they have come up with The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials of 2008. These are selected from their published tutorials, with over 1 million votes and views from Photoshop users and readers. Most of the tutorials are high quality with detailed steps, they are suitable for both beginners and advanced Photoshop users.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
'Psycho' at first plays like the story of a woman of limited means who makes a bad decision, then tensely lives on the outside of the law. On the run after absconding with her boss' money, she slowly turns into a nervous wreck. Then she checks into a motel, meets a nice (though slightly nervous) young man, and comes to a decision: She will right her wrongs and return the money. But first, a nice shower…
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by
These pigmy marmoset monkeys are fantastic samples of animals rarely seen in the wild. Their bodies are about 5-6 inches tall and they have claws instead of nails.
I have to love this stripus africanis sample. When you purchase them, you even get a nice little biological info about the species. The strupus africanis enjoys grass, cereal and Snickers bars.
“This ideal stripus africanus specimen has been stuffed and retains all of its original features. This bust would be an excellent trophy to add to your collection. A small plate on the bottom identifies its genus and species. The wood plaque that it is mounted on measures 5×7″ (or 13x18cm for our continental friends) and is pre-drilled on the back for easy hanging.”
Link Via Cute Overload
As much as it pains me to see books damaged, this is pretty cool.
The link contains lots of other interesting things artists have done with literature… other than read it, of course.
Two New Zealand prisoners who were handcuffed together as they fled a courthouse foiled their own getaway when they ran to opposite sides of a light pole, slammed into each other and fell to the ground. Jailers nabbed them as they struggled to their feet. Their escape on Wednesday was captured by a CCTV camera at Hastings District Court on New Zealand's North Island. The footage shows the two men trying to make a break for it - but apparently forgetting they were joined at the wrist.
- via naacal
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
