HOME |
RSS | 
(image credit: Smithsonian National Postal Museum)
Connie Culp of Ohio lost the middle part of her face in the fall of 2004, when her husband shot her and then himself. He survived with minor injuries and was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
Connie was left with a devastating and traumatic injury to the mid section of her face. She lost an eye, her nose, her upper jaw and lip, palate, and lower eyelids. She couldn’t eat solid food, smell, or taste, and could only breathe through a hole in her neck.
The Dec. 9 operation, considered the most complex face transplant to date, lasted nearly 23 hours. After doctors removed scar tissue, bone grafts, and metal from her previous surgeries, Culp received 80 percent of the face and underlying tissue of an organ donor.
Culp was released from the Clinic on Feb. 5th. Her name, age, and type of injury had been withheld to protect her privacy.
She spoke to the media briefly for the first time Tuesday at a news conference held at the Intercontinental Hotel on the Clinic campus.
Culp, who had been taunted and called names because of her appearance, asked that everyone think twice about judging people who look differently.
“When somebody has a disfigurement or doesn’t look as pretty as you, don’t judge them,” she said. “You never know what happened to them and you never know what might happen to you . . . . it might all be taken away.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
I guess this is one way to get rid of sunglasses lines from being out in the sun too long. But the future mom in me is saying, “You’re going to get those caught on something and rip them right out of your face.” They’re made by the Pierced Glasses company, if you’re looking to get a pair for yourself.
Link Original Link via Geekologie (who also put the photo montage together so you can see the before and after)
Update 5/5/09 by Alex – I’ve replaced the linkjacked article with the original link. Shame on you chooseurfun, you’re officially in my sh*tlist now – Thanks (and sorry) Shannon!
How cute are these? If you’re attending a graduation party (or throwing one), the lovely Bakerella shows you step-by-step how to make these mouthwatering mortarboards. Reese’s cups and Godiva squares? Yes, please! If you’re feeling particularly saucy, you can skip the peanut butter cups and make her cake bites instead. More work, definitely, but I can tell you from experience that the cake bites are delish. I don’t think you can really go wrong either way.
This would be the vehicle of my dreams: the Hover Scooter, a mix-up between a motorbike, a scooter and a hovercraft. Seen here on a test run in 1960. Tweed jacket and tie are optional.
– via diskursdisko
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Hi guys! Today’s the day for Neatorama’s much anticipated Mystery Sale. What will you get for $9.95? Well, we won’t tell you … that’s the whole point of the Mystery Sale!
What we can tell you is this: you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product, new, and definitely a lot of fun. If you buy more than one things, you’ll get different items.
We continue to listen to your feedback, and have worked hard to make this Mystery Sale the BEST one yet.
Like the last Mystery Sale, it’s only for a limited time. The last one didn’t last 24 hours. When it’s gone, it’s gone. So get yours today: Link
Update 5/5/09 #1 – If you don’t get in, please try again – the servers are overloaded with traffic right now
Update 5/5/09 #2 – let’s try that again, shall we? I’m crossing my fingers the servers will be okay
Update 5/6/09 – Time’s up! If you’ve participated in this Mystery Sale, thank you! For those of you who missed it – catch it next time. Be sure to visit Neatorama regularly as the Mystery Sale is not announced beforehand.
Comments Off
|
Surely you've used emoticons before, or at least encountered them while surfing the Intertubes, but did you know that they've been around since the 1800s? Or that a computer scientist came up with the smiley emoticon? Here are 10 Things You Didn't Know About Emoticons: 1. The Oldest Emoticons
The first emoticons were published on March 30, 1881 by (the now defunct) US satirical magazine Puck. If you want to read that edition, Wikimedia has the scan: Link 2. The Abraham Lincoln EmoticonIn 2004, a team from the digital archival company Proquest stumbled across what could be an even older example of an emoticon in print ... in the transcription of a 1862 speech by President Lincoln, no less!
A flurry of "yes, that's an emoticon" and "no, that's a typo, you dufus" by emoticon experts quickly ensued. NY Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee has the story: Link And if you were wondering, yes "8" is Jennifer's middle name. She was born without a middle name, and chose "8" as a teenager because of the ubiquity of her first name. 3. The First Internet Emoticon
Since then, Fahlman is known as the "father of the smiley." Links: Transcript of the posts (as retrieved from a backup tape by Jeff Baird in 2002) | The Smiley :-) Lore 4. Western vs. Eastern EmoticonsLike hip hop, emoticons have geographical styles; there are western emoticons and eastern emoticons. Western ones are read sideways (from left to right) whereas eastern style emoticons are read upright. It's easier to explain with examples:
5. Emoticon StatisticsIn 2007, a Yahoo! surveyed 40,000 Yahoo! Messenger users and found that 82% of them used emoticons in their IM conversations. 83% said that "happiness" and "flirting" are the two emotions (flirting is an emotion?) they expressed most by using emoticons. 57% said that they would rather tell a "crush" their true feelings with emoticons rather than - gasp - words. Yahoo! Messenger users are pretty dedicated to their emoticons: 66% of them had memorized the text characters for 3 or more emoticons. 19% of them had memorized more than 10. (Source) 6. Evolution of EmoticonsDriven by instant messaging programs like Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM and ICQ, emoticons quickly evolved from text smileys into more complex, animated graphics. Yahoo! Messenger even got a set of "hidden" emoticons that you won't find in the menu, but can be "activated" by typing the keyboard shortcuts:
Even Gmail got in the game - they added "emoji" (Japanese for graphical emoticons). If you want them for your Gmail account, simply go to Settings > Labs, then enable "Extra Emoji."
7.Assicons & BoobieconsSince emoticons are so great, why limit oneself to faces? Thus assicons* and boobiecons were born. Examples, my friends, are warranted - strictly in the name of science, mind you (source).
There is also the elusive penicon. You can guess what that is all about. If you're interested (naughty!) you can Google that yourself, mmkay? *Indian readers beware: the salacious assicon above is not to be confused with ASSICON, or the unfortunately named Annual Conference of Association of Spine Surgeons of India (ASSI). 8. Trademarking the EmoticonIn 2000, Despair Inc., the company that came up with the witty "de-motivational" products, trademarked :-( or the frowny emoticon. Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of the mock press release (Despair's COO Dr. E.L. Kersten threatened to sue 7 million individual Internet users who have used the frowny emoticon in emails), the company got a lot of real flack. Not to be outdone, Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin decided to trademark ;-) or the wink emoticon in Russia. In an television interview, Oleg said:
9. Driving LED EMoticon
Think that you can only use emoticons on the Intertubes? Think again!
Here's a battery powered LED emoticon for your car, so you can tell the
people stuck behind you how you really feel: Link
10. Emoticonman
This one to the left is his impression of the wink emoticon. You can see a whole lot more at his website: Link Bonus: LOLcat EmoticonsWhat do you get when you combine emoticons with the LOLcat meme? This awesomeness below, of course!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A little-known leaflet by Upton Uxbridge Underwood circulated in 1913 judges men in a different way, not by their works, but by their fabulous facial hair.
His masterpiece, The Language of the Beard, an epicurean treat confected for the delectation of fellow bon vivants, vaunts the premise that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man’s beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and strengths and weaknesses of character. A spade beard, according to Underwood’s theories, may denote audacity and resolution, for example, while a forked, finely-downed beard signifies creativity and the gift of intuition, a bushy beard suggests generosity, and so on.
See 15 poets and their beards described and rated. Pictured is the highly-rated beard of Sidney Lanier. Link -Thanks, peacay!
In 1914, Austrian watchmaker Georg Grabner created the Kolibri — the “Hummingbird” pistol. The smallest autoloading pistol ever made, it fires a .11 caliber bullet. He marketed it as a self-defense firearm for women to carry in their purses. More pictures and history at the link.
The following is a reprint from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe. A while ago, we
posted "10
Things That Science Fiction Got Wrong" but believe it or not,
there are many things that sci-fi got right as well. From communication
satellites to robotic pets, here are a few of the things that science
fiction nailed before they happened.
Science fiction is supposed to predict future events - and to be entirely
honest, some of us are getting impatient waiting for our own rocket cars
to the Moon, which we understood we'd have by now. Be that as it may,
here are some things dreamed up by science fiction writers that are part
of our real world.
1. Moon Visits Lots
of science fiction writers had this one covered, but the question is:
Who got closest to the real thing first?
The best candidate is good ol' Jules
Verne ,
whose 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and the 1870 follow-up,
Around the Moon, nailed a lot of the minutiae of a moon visit,
including weightlessness, the basic size of the space capsule, the size
of the crew (three men), and even the concept of splashdown into the ocean
on return to Earth. In one of those fun coincidences, the fictional splashdown
in Around the Moon was just a few miles from where the actual
Apollo 8 capsule splashed down (and, interestingly enough, the
fictional launch pad was just a few miles from Cape Canaveral).
Verne was tremendously prolific, writing two novels a year for much of
his creative life and dying with quite a few novels unpublished. It's
not entirely surprising that he's credited with a number of other predictions,
including trips by balloon, helicopters, tanks, and electrical engines.
One "discovery" he's famously credited for, the submarine, is
inaccurate, since submarines existed prior to the 1870 publication of
20,000
Leagues Under the Sea .
2. Robots (and Robot Pets!) "Robot"
comes from the Czech word robota, which means "drudgery";
robotnik is a word for "serf." Since today's robots
are typically found in industrial setting doing mindlessly repetitive
work, this is a strangely appropriate term.
The word "robot" was popularized in Karel Capek's 1920 play
R.U.R. ,
which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. In the play, robots were manufactured
humans who were used as cheap labor. One day they got fed up with this
and decided to have a revolution and kill all the humans, proving once
again that good help really is hard to find.
One thing people don't seem to know about Capek's "robots"
is that they're not actually mechanical - they're made out of synthetic
flesh, although that flesh was then put into a stamping mill to make the
bodies.
The concept of robots as mechanical beings came later and was most famously
popularized in fiction by writer Isaac
Asimov
in his Robot
series .
It's probably not a coincidence that a humanoid robot manufactured by
Honda is called "Asimo."
 Robot
pets, like the Sony Aibo robot dog, have also been a staple of science
fiction. The most famous example of this is probably Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ,
the Philip
K. Dick
novel that was the source material for the movie Blade
Runner .
The main character in the book is saving up to buy a realistic electric
sheep for his lawn, so he'll be the envy of his neighbors (the movie had
none of this suburban one-upmanship going on).
Woody Allen, of all people, nailed the robot dog in 1973's Sleeper ,
in which we're introduced to Rags ("Hi! I'm Rags! Woof woof!").
Allen's reaction: "Is he housebroken? Or will he be leaving little
piles of batteries all over the place?"
3. Cloning and Genetic Engineering Humans
haven't been cloned yet (as far as we know), but sheep, cats, cow, and
rabbits have. And humans have used genetic engineering and gene therapy
to improve their bodies. In June 2002, for example, it was announced that
genetically modified cells helped to create functioning immune systems
in two "bubble boys" who were born without immune systems of
their own.
The most famous work of science fiction with cloning and genetic engineering
is also one of the earliest: 1932's Brave New World
, by Aldous
Huxley. In it, humans are "graded" into jobs and social classes
based on the number of clones that were made from their originating embryos;
the higher the number of clones, the less bright they are and the more
menial their jobs (this was backed by a social agenda that assured each
level of humanity that they were actually the best, so everyone went along
with it).
4. The Internet Okay,
now, who wants to be blamed for this one? There are so many culprits.
Author William Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace"
in his 1981 short story "Burning Chrome," and kick-started the
whole media fascination with computers and the Internet and all that geekiness
with his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer .
But even before Gibson, John Brunner's 1975 novel, The
Shockwave Rider ,
posited a continent-wide information net, "hackers" who broke
into the net, identity theft (when someone pretends to be someone else
online), and most famously, computer viruses and worms - the terminology
for these, in fact, comes from Brunner's book. Brunner imagined using
viruses and worms as part of warfare - something that worries today's
military quite a bit.
It should be noted that in 1975 a proto-form of the Internet did exist,
thought not in the scope and complexity imagined by Brunner. It existed
in the form of ARPANET, a decentralized computer system that the US Department
of Defense created and which by 1975 also included several research universities
as "nodes." Internet features created by 1975 include E-mail,
online chat, and mailing lists. The most popular mailing list in 1975?
One on science fiction, of course.
5. The World Wide Web ...
which, despite the propaganda of the 1990s, is not the whole Internet,
just a subsection of it - was created in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and hit
the big time with the creation of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993.
The dynamic of the Net had been described before then. In 1990's Earth ,
David Brin imagined a streaming audio and video and clickable hypertext
links. And in a 1989 short story, "The Originist," based in
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation "
universe, Orson Scott Card also created a linking system similar to today's
hyperlinking.
6. Webcams?Imagined (sort of) by every single science fiction author who ever wrote about a picture phone. There are too many of those to bother counting.7. Waterbeds Yes,
waterbeds. Robert Heinlein used them in 1961's Stranger
in a Strange Land
; the first modern waterbed was created in 1967 in San Francisco
by design student Charles Hall, who dubbed it the "pleasure pit"
(naughty boy).
Heinlein also thought up the idea of remotely controlled machines to
manipulate dangerous materials; he called them "waldoes," and
that's what they're called today.
8. Communications SatellitesScience fiction master Arthur C. Clarke is famous for having thought of these in 1945.9. Space Tourists When
millionaire Dennis Tito put down his $20 million and hitched a ride into
space with the Russians, he became the first tourist in space.
The idea of punting rich folks beyond the stratosphere is not new; in
1962's A
Fall of Moondust
, Arthur C. Clarke told the tale of some rich tourists who get stranded
in a moon crater.
More whimsically, author Roald Dahl imagined a "Space Hotel, USA"
in 1973's Charlie
and the Great Glass Elevator ,
complete with a staff of "managers, assistant managers, desk-clerks,
waitresses, bellboys, chambermaids, pastry chefs, and hall porters."
10. Miniaturized Surgery Doctors
these days use miniaturized tools to perform surgery that's less invasive
and more precise than traditional surgery, a practice suggested by Isaac
Asimov in his 1966 novel, Fantastic
Voyage .
It's worth noting, however, that along with miniaturized surgical tools,
Asimov also shrunk the doctors to fit into the patient's body. We haven't
managed that one yet. |
|
 |
The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
 |
On
September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Scott
Fahlman introduced the very first sideway smiley on an online message
board to distinguish serious posts from jokes. 
If
emoticons are expressions of emotions put in simple text format, what
is the reverse process? New Jersey-based multimedia artist Dan Wade takes
emoticons and "emote" them out ...
