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The Chiang Mai Yi Peng Festival is an Buddhist holy day in Thailand. That evening, celebrants send send burning lanterns aloft, floating on hot air. According to YouTube user bugzila:
[...]it is the great festival of Lanna duly succeeded from ancient age. “Yi Peng” or full-moon day of second lunar month of Lanna villagers is corresponding to the full-moon day of 12th month of central region during the end of raining season and beginning of cold season when the climate is very nice and fair. One tradition of Lanna other than Loi Kra Thong on the river is to light up the lantern and float up in the sky based on their belief that to pay worship to Phra Ket Kaew Julamanee in the heaven or to relief one’ bad luck for more auspicious life.
Via Urlesque
The Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah has created an interactive feature that allows you to see the relative size of small objects, starting with a coffee bean and magnifying down to a carbon atom. Click on the link and use the sliding bar at the bottom of the application to zoom in.
Link via Radley Balko | Image: U.S. Department of Energy
Newsweek presents a pictorial history of birth control methods. We’ve come a long way since the Greek philosopher Aristotle recommended olive oil as a spermicide! Link -Thanks, Steadyburn!
A Dutch medical magazine asked its readers to send in their stories of strange medical cases. One respondent told the tale of Margaret Daalman, who came in to the hospital 30 years ago complaining of a stomach ache. An x-ray found 78 forks and spoons inside her!
When she went in for her surgery, Ms Daalman, a secretary in a local estate agents, told doctors: ‘I don’t know why but I felt an urge to eat the silverware – I could not help myself.’
Medics also revealed it was not the first time that she had been treated for eating the cutlery.
They said she had been diagnosed as suffering from a borderline personality disorder that left her with an urge to eat forks and spoons.
She never ate knives, however – and could not explain why not.
The photos and x-rays were not made public until now. Daalman went into therapy after the surgery and is said to be doing well today. Link -via Unique Daily
Geologists: Experts in the Art of Subduction – $11.95, modeled by Zac.
Ever been seduced by a geologist? No? Well, you can’t blame them – though they’re not well versed in seduction, they are experts in the art of subduction. Y’know, tectonic plate movements and such. And in case you’re going to get it on with a geologist, remember that subduction zones can result in absolutely volcanic … er, eruptions.
Design by Chris Murphy.
Available from the Neatorama Shop: Link – Don’t forget to check out our wide selection of Science T-Shirts and Scientists Do It T-Shirts
Remember Dave Carroll of the group Sons of Maxwell who wrote the song United Breaks Guitars after seeing his guitar abused? He flew United Airline again on Sunday on his way to speak to a group of customer service executives. Then he spent an hour at the baggage claim because United lost his luggage!
In an interview, Mr. Carroll said that for more than an hour on Sunday, he was told he could not leave the international baggage claim area at Denver International Airport, where he had flown from Saskatchewan. He said he had been told to stay because his bag was delayed, not lost, and he had to be there to claim it when it came down the conveyor belt.
“I’m the only person pacing around this room,” Mr. Carroll said, recalling how he was caught between an order from United staff members to stay and collect his bag, and a federal customs official telling him he had to leave the baggage claim area. The bag never showed.
Carroll got his bag back on Wednesday. Link -via YesButNoButYes
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Painfully Honest and Epic Mobile Home Commercial
Come on down and buy yourself a home. Or don’t. I don’t care. |
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Keanu Reeves is Immortal
Is Keanu Reeves an immortal? In the words of the great one: Whoa. |
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Neil DeGrasse Tyson On The Day He Met Carl Sagan
The now famous astrophysicist DeGrasse tells a story about meeting Carl Sagan as a high school student. |
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Old School Oldsmobile Car Jump
Like a scene from a Starsky and Hutch episode- this big 80s sedan goes for a long jump. |
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Are you Afraid of Bats?
Much beloved by Neatorama, Remi Gaillard is a bat this time- scaring unsuspecting people and making us laugh. Happy Halloween to Neatorama from VideoSift. |
This week’s collaboration with the What is it? Blog brings us this strange looking device – can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, however, you can guess as many times as you’d like. Post no URL or links – let others play.
No prize this week – you’re playing for bragging rights only. For more clues, check out that What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 10/30/09 – the answer: A policeman’s blackjack or sap, for striking miscreants on the head, this was on display with a pair of handcuffs and a different type of blackjack that looked like a small club. Congrats to Tim Giachetti who got it right first!
How do starfish keep cool when lying on the sand during low tide? Dr Sylvain Pincebourde and colleagues at the University of California, Davis and Bodega Marine Laboratory, Bodega Bay, California, studied starfish (okay, sea stars) in an aquarium, replicating tides and environmental conditions.
They discovered that a starfish will ingest cold seawater to lower its body temperature before a hot day on the beach. Sucking up water large amounts of water increases a starfish’s body mass, which means its body temperature increases more slowly. Pretty cool!
Infrared photo above by B. Helmuth and S. Pincebourde shows cool areas in purple and warm areas in red, via BBC News.
Lauren McCarthy created the Happiness Hat – a gadget that detects whether or not you’re smiling. If you’re not, it drives a small metal spike into the back of your head to encourage to you resolve that problem quickly:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
Link via Geekologie
UPDATE 10/29: The YouTube video’s status was switched to private, so I swapped it out for a Vimeo version.
Natania had already planned to make slime and ectoplasm for Halloween when she came up with an idea for crystal-encrusted Halloween decorations. Get some pipe cleaners and some borax and make your own with her recipe. Link
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What if all our favorite pop culture vampires got together in the same room? Pretty much what you’d expect.
The Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt isn’t just a t-shirt. You can actually play music on it. Use a magnetic pick over the string markings and press down on the frets with your other hand. There’s also a volume nob and an amplifier that fits on your belt.
It has long been suspected that there are underground tunnels and caverns on the moon, presumably the residua of lava tubes. Now a group of scientists led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency are reporting the discovery of a “skylight” leading into an underground cavern.
The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across… Since the tubes may be hundreds of metres wide, they could provide plenty of space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation, meteoroid impacts and wild temperature fluctuations…
This is reminiscent of the “doorway” found on Mars several years ago, but this discovery seems to be more clearly defined. More details at New Scientist, via NAACAL.
Have you seen this old man? He’s the "Geezer Bandit," a serial bank robber than has robbed three banks so far (once while carrying an oxygen tank!):
Authorities say he walked in to a Bank of America branch in Rancho Santa Fe Monday, handed the teller a demand note, and showed a black handgun. It happened at the beginning of the business day around 10 a.m. at 17008 Avenida De Acacias. FBI agent April Langwell said investigators believe he’s hit up three other banks in the last two months. He’s suspected of robbing the U.S. Bank branch inside the Von’s grocery store in Santee on Aug, 28.
Two weeks later, on Sept. 12, he walked in the National Bank branch in La Jolla and got away with an undisclosed amount of cash. Surveillance video showed him carrying an oxygen tank with tubes running up to his nose.
Then two and a half weeks ago, on Oct. 9, he targeted another U.S. Bank inside a Von’s grocery store in Carmel Valley.
A legal secretary at PepsiCo forgot to deal with a lawsuit notice that came across her desk. Consequently, PepsiCo’s lawyers did not show up to court when expected. The presiding judge summarily handed down a $1.26 billion judgment against the corporation. Lynne Marek writes in The National Law Journal:
In court papers, PepsiCo claims it first received a legal document related to the case from the North Carolina agent on Sept. 15 when a copy of a co-defendant’s letter was forwarded to Deputy General Counsel Tom Tamoney in PepsiCo’s law department. Tamoney’s secretary, Kathy Henry, put the letter aside and didn’t tell anyone about it because she was “so busy preparing for a board meeting,” PepsiCo said in its Oct. 13 motion to vacate.
Link | Image: FBI
Vadim Ryazanov built a robot that rolls away from you as you reach for it. He calls it “Mr. Wake.” As soon as the alarm goes off, an IR sensor on the robot turns on. The robot is programmed to move in the opposite direction of any object moving toward it:
Now, to give you idea how Wake works: Alarm clock mechanism I used has 3 contacts, Plus, Ground, and Alarm, which goes high when alarm goes off. This was really fortune for me, as I had only to connect the grounds and use this Alarm pin as analog input (Could not use it as digital as clock runs on 1.5V) and it workes just fine. So, whenever Alarm pin goes high, my code picks this up and switches Mr. Wake from “standby” to “alarm” mode, which makes him switch on IR leds and red LED in Magic Button on, read ambient reading from IR transistors and wait till the reading inceased above ambiant one, which means something is aproaching from above (I have the detection only from above, where clock and Magic Button are.
Swiss artist Felice Varini is known for his massive art installations that show different images depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Recently, he created an optical illusion that covered the entire Swiss town of Vercorin. In the picture above, it looks like rings have been drawn over an image, but what Varini has done is painted walls and roofs at particular angels to give this impression. Click on the link for pictures that show how Varini crated this illusion.
Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Previously on Neatorama: Felice Varini’s Ellipse Anamorphic Art
Horrace Burgess of Crossville, Tennessee built a treehouse 97 feet tall. Its 8,000 square feet of floor space is spread over 11 stories. The house is built around a tree 80 feet high and 12 feet wide at the base, so much of the structure extends well beyond the tree itself.
A building of over 11 floors would be expected to have some extra amenities – and the treehouse Horrace has established is no exception. This particular one comes complete with a mini basketball court – if you thought playing you would never live to see guys playing basketball on top of a tree!
The owner of the edifice is a 56 years old landscape architect by the way, and he say an upwards of $12,000 has gone into building thetreehouse . Asked about where he got the inspiration to build the edifice, he cites a prayer vision he got in the early 90s – going further to say that he built it ‘for God.’ Nobody is arguing with him – and nobody is contesting the assertion that it is the world’s greatesttreehouse either. Meanwhile, building work has not stopped at the 11th floor…the building is still a ‘work in progress!’
There are many pictures of the treehouse at the link.
Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema created a typeface out of e. coli bacteria. Cliff Kuang wrote in Fast Company about how he did it:
Van Abbema created the font by stamping bacteria into paper, and then placing the paper in a jury-rigged incubator, which provided the right humdity and warmth for the organisms. As they multiplied and died, the resulting fonts changed color and shape. As van Abbema says, bacteria “transforms the image to something new,” creating something that is literally alive, changing every minute without ever being tended.
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Perfect for Halloween, this dish is a regular meatloaf made into the shape of a hand! Not Martha has the instructions for several different versions, depending on how badly you want to creep out your dinner guests. Link -via reddit
If you took a look at the larger version of this sculpture (left), you’d immediately conclude that it was made out of Styrofoam. As impressive as that would be, the real mind-blower here is that it’s actually marble.
All of Fabio Viale’s creations from marble have a deceptive quality to them, prompting the beholder to utter “No way,” with each new sculpture. From paper airplanes, to actual working boats, to classic renderings of the human form, they all inspire.
For instance, these seemingly impossible tires linked together? Black marble.
The Haunted Mansion attraction at Walt Disney World features tombstones inscribed with the names of real people. This series of posts called 13 Tombstones tracks down who those people are -mostly Disney employees whose names are now enshrined in the parks for posterity. Link -via Boing Boing
A church group staged a murder mystery dinner theater in Yeovil, England on Saturday night. They spent the evening looking for crime clues, but failed to notice that thieves had taken a large TV, laptop computer and the contents of a safe the night before. Elim Pentecostal Church was the victim of a break-in that went unnoticed until Sunday, despite the crime-solving party. The crime was finally noticed by Reverend Howard Davenport, whose car had been vandalized at the church earlier in the week.
Revd Howard Davenport said: “In situations like this you have to laugh really!
“We were obviously disappointed that the church had been targeted twice in a week, but when I heard that it hadn’t even been noticed I had to smile.
“You’d have thought that eight wannabe detectives might have noticed a real crime a few metres from them only hours earlier!”
The 7th Annual Asana Yoga Competition was recently held in New York. New York Magazine has a glimpse at the extreme poses competitors used to impress the judges. Link -via Buzzfeed
IFC compiled a list – unlike everybody else’s list this year – regarding scary movies. Sometimes, as you’re watching a comedy, science fiction, or drama flick, they pull a fast one on you, and the next thing you know you’re jumping out of your seat. For instance, the “Large Marge” scene from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
“When they finally pulled the driver’s body from the twisted, burning wreckage,” she groans. “It looked… like THIS!” Suddenly, Nunn’s face is replaced by a ghoulish claymation head, which howls at Pee-Wee with bulbous bug eyes, serpentine tongue, and enormous, snaggle-toothed maw. An understandably frightened Pee-wee asks to be let out at the next truck stop, where he learns that he couldn’t have gotten a ride from Large Marge; she died in the very accident she described, ten years earlier.
See all 25 examples at IFC. (Photo: Warner Bros.)
Here’s a nicely done audio remix using sound elements from the movie, Pulp Fiction. It incorporates beats using sounds like soap being slapped into the hands of Jules and Vincent, the smoke alarm, the Wolf hanging up the phone, and lots more. No credits…anyone know who made this? Enjoy.
With new users joining every day, many people either don’t know Facebook etiquette or they don’t care. The Golden Rule, and treating people as you would treat them offline is a good start, but just in case, here are some guidelines for how not to act on Facebook, and other social networking sites. For example, why would you post (and tag) unflattering or embarrassing pictures of your friends?
“I feel obligated to point out some of the obvious Facebook etiquette rules that people continue to break, in the hopes that one day, they think twice before posting.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by mrmunchies.
List of cool bandage designs including bacon, beef, comics, duct tape and more.
Next time you have to dress a wound why not dress it up? They say that laughter is the best medicine so why not cheer yourself up with a cool band-aid design the next time you get a cut or scrape? Besides, we can’t think of a better conversation starter than bacon bandages. Check out these incredible bandages designs that will help you cover up your pain with a smile.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tj241.
An artist from MAC Cosmetics painted a woman as a comic book character for Halloween — right down to the dot printing style of old comics books. Or, alternatively, as a figure from a Roy Lichtenstein painting.
The pictures were taken by publicist and photographer Tasha Marie. You can view more at the link.
Link via Geekologie | Artist’s/Company Website
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