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Don’t ask me how Allen and Patty Eckman did it, but they have a special process that lets you create detailed sculptures out of cast paper:
Cast paper sculpture has been around since the 1950′s but should not be confused with papier-mache’. The two mediums are completely different. The artists first mix an acid free paper pulp in the studio hydro-pulper
from two raw stocks, cotton and abica. Then the pulp is cast into molds which were made from original clay sculptures. The paper is then pressed under vacuum pressure or by hand in the mold where most of the water is extracted at the same time. The drying process is completed by evaporation while the paper is still in the mold. After the dry and hard casts are removed from the molds the exclusive process of chasing, cast additions, cast alterations, sculpting in paper and detailing begins. It takes a great amount of time and experience to create each piece. Some works are so painstakingly detailed they can take many months to complete.
Suffice it to say, their artwork are fantastic: Link – via CrookedBrains
Graphic: Oliver Uberti / National Geographic, source: World Press Freedom Committee
Biggify here: Link
Most Americans take our freedom of speech for granted – after all, such an idea seems like a basic and universal human rights. But be careful what you say in other countries: saying insulting things may just get you fined, land you in jail, or worse.
Recession schmecession. Hipsters never let a little global financial tsunami interefere with fashion! Here’s the "Spin Jean" by Daniel Hirst, in collaboration with Levi’s.
Bold and brash, he teams up with Levi’s on the release of a new denim style. Hardly wearable, the jeans seen here should be considered much more a re-appropriated piece of art than fashion. A multi-colored splatter pattern covers every square inch of a pair of iconic Levi’s denim. The Spin Jeans comprise of only 8 instances worldwide with a suggested retail price of ¥2,625,000 JPY (approximately $27,000 USD).
There are dogs … then there are dogs looking like people. And of course, there are blogs that blog about dogs looking like people: Link
Say what you will, but I think this Wild Jewel Crochet Love Goddess Rainbow Sparkle Jumper by Etsy seller kyecrow is fantastic. Nay, fantastic is too tame a word. What is it that I’m looking for – oh yeah, supercalafragelisticexpialadocious !
At $610, it’s a steal: Link
Humans! is a short animation by Reza Rasoli, Greg Gunn and Casey Hunt of Three Legged Legs. It’s done in the style of a PSA – and while you may not agree with the gloom and doom depiction of humans as parasites, it’s still a very interesting (though a bit gory) animation.
Hit play or go to Link [aniboom] – via Cool Infographics
Here is a really neat PSA from the “International Fund for Animal Welfare” from Germany concerning the trafficking and buying of products made from protected and endangered animals such as the Elephant. Air Dumbo now landing!
Melissa Sue Stanley’s Etsy shop is full of creepy plush creations like this armless monster.
A 73 pound loggerhead sea turtle seemed to know exactly where to go for a bacterial infection. The turtle was suffering from a bacterial infection and swam to the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys, the only such licensed facility in the world that treats sea turtles. The staff originally thought the turtle was lost and waited for a few hours, but after the turtle stuck around, it was taken in and treated.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
These are a great idea and are certain to get children to play with their food -of course, that may not really help get them to eat their veggies. They will be availible on April 10th and are a reasonable $10.
You don’t need a hamster ball to take your hamster out for a "wok" … Is this video clip funny or cruel? You decide …
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.
After being dug up from hibernation by a burrowing dog, thereby shattering his leg, "Brullie" the frog underwent surgery and was fitted with a tiny steel rod to repair his broken lower leg bone.
Doting owner Anne Mearns, 62, said: ‘People think I’m mad to care so much about a frog but I couldn’t bear to see him in so much pain.
‘Frogs are famous for their legs, so the thought of Brullie being left lame broke my heart. I knew without surgery he would never move again, so I to rushed to the vet and begged him to operate.
The vet was more used to saving cats and dogs and couldn’t understand why I was so worried about a frog, but he eventually agreed.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by see_you_@_de_pawty_Richter.
German researchers have used the latest scanning technology to reveal a second face underneath one of Egypt’s most famous artistical pieces. Though the inner stone carving indicates that the outer layer was only modestly changed, it does bring into question what the motives were of the original sculptors.
The differences between the faces, though slight – creases at the corners of the mouth, a bump on the nose of the stone version – suggest to Huppertz that someone expressly ordered the adjustments between stone and stucco when royal sculptors immortalized the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten 3,300 years ago.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Archaeology is a religion for illuminated individuals, however if you cross the Gods you will suffer the consequences. Many men have risked their lives in pursuit of historical relics, many have never returned.
The Valley of the Kings in Egypt is located on the West bank of the Nile River within “the heart of the Theban Necropolis”. This illuminated place is said to hold the wealth of Egypt where Kings and Queens were laid to rest and their treasure was buried with them. Many men have died risking their lives to discover the mysteries of this sacred place, some have never returned.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
It looks like another day in the park until … snap, the turtle has the pigeon, drags it underwater, and a few token feathers float back to the surface. Turtles might looks slow, but beware.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
Continuing today’s special theme: Expedia has announced affordable trips to mars. It’s now cheaper to vacation on Mars than to visit Las Vegas!
That’s right! Expedia has dropped all booking fees—including fees on flights to Mars. Right now you can save over $3 trillion on a Mars vacation—and in this economy, you can’t afford NOT to go!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MatthewInman.
This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and glowing lightsaber zipper pull. Now when your kids tell you their favorite Star Wars movie is “Attack of the Clones” you can nestle the wee-ones snug in simulated Tauntaun fur while regaling them with the amazing tale of “Empire Strikes Back”.
Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don’t change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.
Why has no one thought of this before? I, of course, clicked the “buy now” button. Color me disappointed. Like the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt from last year, this will be the in-demand product Think Geek will actually have to produce sooner or later. Link -via Unique Daily
Now, as part of the planned upgrade of the International Space Station, an Expedition 18 astronaut has upgraded her own head. The Human Extended Analog Device 9000 was attached with only minor delays, making the astronaut’s remaining spacewalks over 40 percent more efficient. With the HEAD 9000 attached, an astronaut can now directly access 4 Gigabytes of computer flash memory with their own brain, perform complex mathematics by “directed thinking”, and play a pre-installed game of Tetris at no additional charge.
| Hey, Michael Jordan, just because you're good at basketball doesn't mean you can swing a bat. And a syrupy sweet voice doesn't make you a poet, Jewel. Oh, and Paul Newman, you're a fine actor, but your salsa is ... well, it's really good, actually, but you're the exception. Sometimes, the talented and famous begin to experience delusions of multi-famed grandeur. For all those tilting at windmills, mental_floss is here to provide the ridicule and reality check. Prose and Cons: Mussolini's Writer's Block
Curiously, Mussolini isn't the only dictator with a weakness for romance novels. Saddam Hussein has anonymously published three, and another is purportedly on the way. None of them have been translated into English, though we hear they make Mussolini's stuff read like Proust. Cantor Battles Shakespeare: Left Brain Takes a Right
But even before then, he wasn't exactly a picture of mental health. Toward the end of his life, he became obsessed with proving that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays via complicated schema and hidden codes the likes of which haven't been seen outside "A Beautiful Mind." Cantor's extensive writings on the subject aside, nearly all Shakespearean scholars agree on two things: William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays attributed to him, and Cantor should have stuck to math. Isaac Newton: Putting the Pseudo in Science
[Note - See previously on Neatorama: 10 Strange Facts About Newton] Mark Twain Gets Business-Schooled
A massive typesetting machine with 18,000 moving parts, the Compositor was a complete commercial failure. Twain invested at least $190,000 and 14 years worth of anxiety into the invention and came away with two prototypes, neither of which worked for very long. All was not lost, though. One of those prototypes was willed to Columbia University, which donated it to a scrap metal drive during World War I. That means the Compositor became bullets ... and finally served a purpose. |
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The article above appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the Sept - Oct 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
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While
noted fascist Benito Mussolini eventually found a fulfilling career as
a tyrannical dictator, his earlier ambitions were literary. Fourteen years
before taking power in Italy, Mussolini penned a serial novel titled The
Cardinal's Mistress for a weekly supplement in an Italian newspaper.
Apparently, it was quite the bodice-ripping romance. You know, the kind
filled with lines such as, "The common brutes of the market-place
satiate their idle lusts on your sinful body." It goes without saying,
but the book didn't do much to secure Mussolini's reputation as a writer.
Georg
Cantor is widely regarded as the most important mathematician of the 19th
century. He invented "set theory," which - in addition to making
life miserable for Calculus II students everywhere - proved that some
infinities are (prepare to have your mind blown) bigger than others. That's
the sort of realization that can make your head hurt. And sure enough,
Cantor eventually went bonkers. 
Forget
Isaac Newton's famous falling apple. (For starters, that story was quite
possibly made up by Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire.) Many scholars argue
that Newton's theory of gravity was the product of his obsessive fascination
with what was, at the time, the decidedly unenlightened science of alchemy.
Newton spent more of his life studying alchemy than "real" math
and science. And without his beliefs about occult forces operating in
a vacuum, he might never have understood gravity. So when Newton famously
said, "If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on
the shoulders of giants," many of the giants to whom he was referring
were probably cranks, pseudo-scientists, and alchemists.
Mark
Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel composed
on a typewriter. Yet, ironically enough, the author formerly known as
Samuel Clemens was nearly driven into bankruptcy by the Paige Compositor.
