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Some of these videos have been on Neatorama already, but some haven’t. Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has compiled twelve of the worst and funniest parking accidents that can be found on YouTube. In the above video, a driver tries to pass over the undercarriage access space at an oil change business — but misses.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
For Halloween, blogger Sarah McPherson painted her face and shirt to resemble a low-resolution image. She writes “The shirt took forever to paint, and my face only took slightly forever.”
With the aid of onboard, fast-moving cameras, “Mr. Tomorrow” will most likely beat me in a game of volleyball. Created by the mad scientists at Toshiba.
via UniqueDaily
In the late 18th century, Carl Schildbach was manager of a German estate famous for its ornamental park. He had no formal academic or scientific training, but at the request of his employer began compiling a reference collection of the natural history of each type of tree and shrub in the estate, eventually totalling 546 items…
“The format… was that of a box or casket, the raw materials for which were provided by the specimen itself, made up in the form of a book – varying in size from folio to duodecimo – with the ‘front cover’ forming a sliding lid…
For the left side of the ‘volume’ mature wood was selected and for the right side sapwood, while the fore-edge was made from heartwood; the top surface incorporated cross-sections from branches of various ages while the bottom surface showed a section through the trunk…
While the box itself served to illustrate the characteristics of the timber, the interior was reserved for an exposition of the whole natural history of the plant… a complete seedling is included to one side, with its roots, seminal capsule and first pair of leaves. In the centre of the box the tip of a branch displays buds and leaves in various stages of development…blossoms are shown varying from full blooms to faded flowers, while fruits are similarly represented at every stage in their development… Examples of associated parasites and lichens are included…”
The empress Catherine tried to purchase Schildbach’s collection, but he deeded it to his master, Landgrave Wilhelm IX; it now resides in the Naturalienkabinett in Kassel, where it is still used as reference material. Schildbach inspired several imitators, including Candid Huber, a Benedictine monk, whose collection survives in the Bavarian Burgmuseum. Peter the Great eventually acquired a collection for his Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, and another resides in the Musee National des Techniques of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.
The cited text above is excerpted from Chapter IV (“Museums and the Natural World”) in Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, by Arthur MacGregor (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2007) – a comprehensive history of cabinets of curiosities, museums, and specialized collections.
Small-format photos of Schildbach’s collection are available at the webpage of the Naturkundemuseum in the Ottoneum at Kassel. The embedded photo is from a similar Holzbuch in a collection at the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe. Other examples may be seen here and here. The creation of such “wooden books” seems to have been primarily a European endeavor; a related project by Romeyn B. Hough collecting North American woods in book form (using thin sections of wood attached to cardboard within a conventional book binding) was produced at the turn of the last century.
From The Fun Theory, a project by Volkswagen and the ones who brought us the piano staircase, comes bottle bank arcade. Again the question is posed, “If we make it fun, will people start doing it?” Yes, they will.
Thanks, Luna!
Photo: RevolverOcelot
In the Pacific Ocean and parts of the Red Sea, bubble coral can be found in varying species, colors and forms. They maintain their egg-like appearance during the sunlit hours (maybe an egg-like disguise?), then deflate at dark, manifesting finger-tentacles that feed on plankton, etc.
See more of this beautiful creature at Environmental Graffiti.
Previously on Neatorama: Great Barrier Reef: Gone in 20 Years
WebUrbanist has a great roundup of pictures of train cars that have been converted to other uses, such as hotels, houses, and bridges. The image above is of a train car that has been turned into a Russian Orthodox church — an emerging trend in Russia.
Precise language is the hallmark of intellectual refinement, which is why it’s important to know how to phrase the pluralizations of the supernatural creatures that you encounter on a regular basis. For example, a multitude of yetis is a “flurry of yetis” and more than one nymph is a “delectation of nymphs”. David Malki! (his name is spelled with an exclamation point) of the webcomic Wondermark has a comprehensive guide.
NEC is developing a gadget that will translate spoken words into text displayed on a user’s eyes:
The prototype device called a “Tele Scouter” is a glasses type display that translates the foreign language being spoken by a partner and projects the translation onto a tiny retinal display.
The device mounted on an eyeglass frame consists of the retinal display, front-mounted camera and microphone, but doesn’t perform the translation itself. Rather the microphone picks up the conversation and transmits it to a portable computer worn on the user’s waist. This computer in turn transmits the information to a remote server, which is responsible for carrying out the heavy processing of converting the speech to text, translating it and sending it back to the wearable parts of the system to be displayed on the retinal display.
A creature with a musical name presents a spectacular light show to the cameras of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute‘s remotely operated vehicle. This ctenophore seems to be exhibiting bioluminescence, but what the “lights” actually represent is reflection or refraction of the photoflood lights from rhythmically beating cilia. The deep red color is a survival adaptation, helping to mask the bioluminescence of creatures it ingests, so that it does not itself become visible to other predators.
It has been suggested that comb jellies such as the ctenophores are ancestors of all life on earth.
YouTube link, via The Daily Dish and Nerdcore.
The blog Bank Notes is a collection of real robbery notes from all over. They aren’t literary masterpieces, but some are interesting, along with sparse details of the actual robbery. Link -via Metafilter
In 1926, Fritz Kahn created the poster “Man As Industrial Palace.” as was appropriate for the Art Deco era, he depicted the human body as a factory run by little workers processing food, moving blood, and pumping engines. Henning Lederer took this idea and turned it into an animated short. From a promotional brochure for the film:
The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn’s artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy between human physiology and the operation of contemporary technologies. Therefore, by illustrating the body as a factory, Kahn was able to relate the body’s complex organic interior to the industrialized space so common in society during that period of time (the poster was created in 1926).
Link via The Presurfer | Full-Sized Poster
Randall Munroe of xkcd has posted intricate movie graphs that help explain the sequence of characters for those who have trouble figuring out what went on over a long narrative. The most helpful is the largest graph, which deals with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Grouping of lines shows which characters are together over time. There are also graphs for the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer. Only a small portion of the LOTR graph is shown here. Link -via reddit
A trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago will make you glad you live in the modern world instead of the “good old days”! Wired has a gallery of exhibit photos ranging from a skull that belonged to a trepanation patient to early x-ray machines. Pictured is a vest used in 1899 to correct scoliosis. If this were posted as a “What Is It?” I would guess it to be an instrument of torture. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)
I went to China and took an electrical adapter with eight different plug-ins, and still managed to stay at one hotel in which none of them fit. Why are there so many types of electrical plugs and sockets in the world? When household electric use began in the late 1800s, different areas of the world settled on basically two voltage systems, 110-120 and 220-240 (with some exceptions). Then each nation had their own reasons for developing the plug-in system they have.
But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?
For example, Britain incorporated fuses in the appliance plug instead of the wiring system because of a shortage of copper at the time.
You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.
Despite widespread global travel, the expense of rewiring electrical grids all over the world means there won’t be any standardization of plugs anytime soon. Read the whole story at Gizmodo. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
