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At The Business Insider, Alyson Shontell wrote about her unsuccessful job interview with Google, which has gained a reputation for asking hard and bizarre questions that test a candidate’s creativity, priorities, and critical thinking skills. She provided 15 examples from other people who’ve interviewed with Google:
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?Why are manhole covers round?
Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
You have eight balls all of the same size 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
You can read more questions and the preferred answers at the link.
Link via Gizmodo | Image: US Department of State
It took over 11 hours to create these two "Where the Wild Things Are" chalk murals at Arnold DC, a Washington ad agency. Watch the timelapse video of their creation, using over 1,500 stills. Really cool.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray was not amused – I repeat, not amused – when kids in his school started saying the word "meep." Anyone caught uttering or displaying the word of choice of Beaker, the orange-haired muppet from The Muppet Show, will be – gasp – suspended!
It’s no surprise that using bad language in school can get you into hot water. But "meep"?
Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word "meep" at school, they could face suspension.
Meep doesn’t mean much, unless you are Beaker — the hapless, orange-haired assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on "The Muppet Show."
While meep may be nonsense, what it represented was no laughing matter to the high school’s administration. High school Principal Thomas Murray said students were using it and other words to disrupt school in a particular part of the building on Cabot Road.
Link | Article at ABC News | Apparently, you can’t even email the word "meep" to him, but one presumes that "Bork, bork, bork" is still safe.
Up until now, scientists believed that coral only ate plankton and other micro-organisms, but a new discovery shows the mushroom coral can actually eat jellyfish almost its same size. Scientists were diving near the Israeli city of Eilat in the Red Sea, when they photographed the phenomenon for the first time.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw it,” Ms Alamaru, a member of the research team, says. “This is definitely unusual. As far as I know no other coral are reported to feed on jellyfish. However, some sea anemones, which are close relatives of corals, are documented feeding on other jelly species.”
Scientists have suspected that coral must eat microscopic baby jellyfishes, but this is the first time they were presented with evidence of the animal eating adult jellies.
Link Image by Omri Bronstein from the Tel Aviv University
Montreal acrobat and Cirque du Soleil performer Oli Lemieux amazes in this practice video. This makes me want to see another show of theirs, and soon! From Asylum~
While most of us are content to bounce up and down (and occasionally fall off and break a leg), when you put Oli on a trampoline he leaves physics behind him. The man runs up walls and bends gravity in whichever direction is appropriate to make backflipping off ledges look effortless.
YouTube Link (Note: some NSFW lyrics in the song)
The routines practiced are for the current show, Dralion.
ESC from New York – $9.95 | More Funny T-Shirts
Neatorama designer Chris "Snake" Murphy came up with this excellent design "ESC from New York." Ah, this certainly brings back memories. From the Neatorama Shop: Link
Le Creative Sweatshop is a French art studio that produces (among other things) enormous papercraft art installations. The high-heeled shoes pictured above are a part of their effort to “make a paper world.” You can view more pictures of the studio’s work at the link.
Link via Gizmodo | Video about their work
It Made My Day (IMMD) is a blog of reader-submitted anecdotes about the funny experiences that made their day. On the right-side of the page, you can type in your own “moment of win” and vote on other submissions — sort of like the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.
So. Yesterday, we heard that the Pope’s astronomer conceded that there may be alien life outside of planet Earth, and today NASA said that it discovered significant water on the Moon.
"The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon," the space agency said in a written statement shortly after the briefing began.
Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said the latest discovery also could unlock the mysteries of the solar system.
He listed several options as sources for the water, including solar winds, comets, giant molecular clouds or even the moon itself through some kind of internal activity. The Earth also may have a role, Wargo said.
"If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data," NASA said in its statement.
Coicidence? I smell a conspiracy. Where’s my tin foil hat? Next stop: microbes on Mars! Link
Ok, so maybe there is a slight hint of sarcasm incorporated into the title of this video. Apparently there is a learning curve, for some, when it comes to the classic household game of hide and seek. This little "ninja" has a long way to go in terms of mastering the art of finding a stealthy hiding spot. The two images at the end of the video are priceless.
– via youtube
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by flagler.
“Bliss” by Charles O’Rear (L), “After Microsoft” by Goldin & Senneby (R)
The default desktop image for Windows XP was called “Bliss,” and became instantly recognizable. The image was taken by a photographer named Charles O’Rear, but now it’s being phased out. The image on the right is what that hill in Sonoma Valley looks like today.
Charles O’Rear used to pass that hill almost daily between his home in Napa and his wife, Daphne, who lived in Marin County. He always carried his medium format camera.
It was hard even to slow down on highway 12/121. But one day, it must have been in January, he pulled over. After about a month of rain the sun comes up, and there is beautiful green grass. The weather during the winter can change dramatically. A break in the storm. Intense blue sky with cumulus clouds. Maybe later that day it rained.
Looking to brand XP as green, Microsoft bought the photo right around the time the soil recovered enough to replant grapes for vineyards. Link -via grow-a-brain.
Are you fat? It may not be your fault, blame the bacteria in your intestines instead:
Ninety percent of the bacteria fall into two major divisions, or phyla: the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes. Previous research had shown that obese mice had higher levels of Firmicutes, and lean ones had more Bacteroidetes.
Analyzing the genomes of the bacteria, Gordon and graduate student Peter Turnbaugh concluded that the Firmicutes were more efficient at digesting food that the body can’t.
Animals that have a higher proportion of Firmicutes convert a higher proportion of food into calories that can be absorbed by the body, making it easier to gain weight.
When the researchers transferred bacteria from obese mice into so-called gnotobiotic mice, which were raised in a sterile environment and had no bacteria in their guts, the mice gained more weight than did those receiving a similar amount of bacteria from lean mice, even though they were fed the same diet.
If you’re afraid of Friday the 13th (the date, not the movie), you’re in good company. There’s a certain US president who shared your paraskevidekatriaphobia:
It’s also the number that prompted FDR to alter his own travel plans on any day of the week that landed on the 13th.
"FDR would not depart on a (train) trip on the 13th," said Thomas Fernsler, a University of Delaware mathematician who has studied the number enough to earn the moniker "Dr. 13." He recounted a story that originated with FDR’s personal secretary, Grace Tully, who said the former president would order the train to leave the station before midnight on the 12th or after midnight on the morning of the 14th.
In a final act, FDR died in 1945 on April 12. Thursday, April 12.
"He avoided traveling to the beyond on the 13th," joked Bob Clark, head archivist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
More about Friday the 13th phobia in this article by Don Babwin of AP: Link
Photo: MR38 [Flickr]
Flickr user MR38 has a nifty photoset of bumper cars modded into street legal mini cars (complete with real license plates!) as seen during the annual Cruisin’ Grand festival in Escondido, California.
Does anyone know who made these bumper cars?
Link – via nowthatsnifty
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ninigoat.
Update 11/13/09 – The creator is Tom Wright. Benchrace has a neat story about the bumper cars: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Article at CoolThings – Thanks marn!
A city of limestone towers rises in western Madagascar.
Photo: Stephen Alvarez / National Geographic
Benson weaves through skin-ripping pinnacles. In Malagasy, the formations are called tsingy, meaning "where one cannot walk barefoot." The terrain resists intrusions from hunters, hungry cattle, and wildfires.
Photo: Stephen Alvarez / National Geographic
A couple of weeks ago, we featured a story of how NatGeo photographer Stephen Alvarez’s went deep underground to explore the caves in the corner of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.
This time, Stephen, along with Neil Shea and biologist Hery Rakotondravony and colleagues went the opposite way – they climbed Madagascar’s astonishing Tsingy de Bemaraha stone forest:
One afternoon, returning from a hot, wet slog, vines along the trail tripped me up, and my right knee landed on a small rock. Back home in New England, where rocks come in rounder forms, I would have walked away with a bruise. But this was tsingy in miniature. A barb of limestone drove in nearly to the bone. It took two days to reach a hospital, where a nurse removed dirt from the wound. "Why were you doing this?" she asked, twisting a swab deep into the hole. She looked up. I was sweating. "I think you are a little dumb," she said. The tsingy is the perfect foil to human ambition.
Links: Article | Photo Gallery
Amanda Bensen of the Smithsonian blog Food & Think attended a program at that institution on the history of beer. Her post summarizes the long history of the beverage, from prehistoric soggy bread to modern microbrewing.
But while beer’s popularity waned in the Middle East, it was gaining ground in northern Europe. People there somehow figured out brewing (perhaps via another soggy-bread epiphany) by at least 800 B.C., based on beer residues in a Celtic amphora found in modern Bavaria. Dornbusch says the Romans were the first to invent the modern brewing process—involving malting and mashing—based on the ruins of a 179 A.D. brewery discovered in a Roman settlement near what is now Regensburg, Germany.
Link | Image: US National Archives
Why can humans talk and chimpanzees can’t? Scientists at UCLA and Emory University suspect that it comes down to a single gene designated FOXP2. There is only a slight variation in this gene between humans and chimps, as Elaine Schmidt writes in UCLA Newsroom:
“Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans,” said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells[...]“We found that a significant number of the newly identified targets are expressed differently in human and chimpanzee brains,” Geschwind said. “This suggests that FOXP2 drives these genes to behave differently in the two species.”
The research demonstrates that mutations believed to be important to FOXP2′s evolution in humans change how the gene functions, resulting in different gene targets being switched on or off in human and chimp brains.
Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy
In the original Ninja Cat video, the cat only moves when you’re not looking. In this new video, the camera is stationery so we can see how he moves only when his “prey” (a feather in this incident) can’t see him. -via Arbroath
This 11-month old baby isn’t even their youngest customer! The ad copy also says:
By the way, Mom, when it comes to toddlers- if they liked to be coaxed to drink their milk, try this: add 7-Up to the milk in equal parts, pouring the 7-Up gently into the milk. It’s a wholesome combination- and it works!
Click the picture at Kitchen Retro to see the full-size version of this and other vintage ads. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Newsweek Magazine has begun a series of stories looking back at the first decade of the new millennium. In this list, the most-watched crime stories are ranked and summarized. If the complicated developments of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or the hunt for the D.C. Snipers were hard to follow in real time, you can catch up on the important details. Pictured is Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in 2001. Link -via the Presurfer
A road crew and a television crew were on the scene on Highway 64 in Polk County, Tennessee Tuesday when a massive rock slide covered the road. Workers were busy removing a large rock that fell Tuesday morning when the mountain gave away at about 1PM. Rock slides are not uncommon in the mountain area of East Tennessee, but they are rarely seen in progress, much less recorded. The road will be closed for at least a week. Link
A thief in Wuppertal, Germany made off with a Mercedes Transporter owned by Circus Probst, apparently unaware that a lion was in the back. The van was recovered Wednesday morning with Caesar still inside. It is not yet known whether the presence of the lion led to vehicle being crashed and abandoned. It was found with the motor still running.
Police then towed the van away, also unaware of its feline freight and it wasn’t until midday on Wednesday that Caesar was returned to his rightful owners, more than 12 hours after his adventure began.
“Caesar is fine. We’re not worried about him,” circus spokesman Laurens Thoen said.
Graffiti artist Tony Quan suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and is unable to move any part of his body other than his eyes. But thanks to an open source computer project called EyeWriter, he can still draw. The technology tracks the movements of his eyes, allows him to select different shapes and colors, and then projects his images onto the sides of buildings. The above video is a selection from a documentary about the project.
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If you haven't had your big breakthrough yet, try one of these simple strategies: 1. CRACK OPEN A CAN OF BEER
Several nights later, while suffering from insomnia, Fraze went down to his workshop. By the next morning, he'd developed a built-in, tear-off opener for cans. Over time, Fraze refined the idea, and by 1965, 75 percent of American brewers were using Fraze's ring-pull design for their beer. 2. SHAVE YOUR STUBBLE
As a traveling salesman, he understood that the key to financial success was to create something that people would have to buy over and over again. But his big idea didn't hit him until he started shaving one morning in 1895. At the time, Gillette was using a traditional safety razor, which had to be sharpened after almost every use. So, Gillette imagined a blade that could simply be thrown away when it became dull. By putting a sharp edge on a thin piece of sheet steel, he created the first disposable razor. It took him eight years to get the invention to market, but once it hit stores, Gillette quickly became a millionaire.
In 1913, he retired to California to grow fruit and pursue his utopian dream of founding a city called Metropolis, where everyone would live in perfect harmony. Let's just say the shaving venture went more smoothly. 3. TAKE A COLD SHOWER
One morning, Hoerni was taking a shower when he noticed the way the water flowed over his hands, and it gave him an idea. If the transistors could be coated in the right substance, then dust and moisture would just flow right over them. He then thought of silicon dioxide, the perfect material for the job. His solution eventually led to the integrated circuit, the silicon chip, and almost everything else to come out of Silicon Valley. (Photo: Fairchild Semiconductor) 4. WALK THE DOG
A few weeks later, he was walking his dog in the woods when he noticed that his pants were covered in burrs. When he got home, he examined one of the burrs under his microscope and noticed that it was covered with tiny hooks that stuck to the small loops of thread in his clothes. By replicating the idea using little hooks and loops made of nylon, de Mestral developed Velcro. He eventually sold the rights to the patent and made millions in royalties, never to deal with zippers again. (Photo: Francoise and Charles de Mestral) 5. DREAM A LITTLE DREAM
Then one night, he awoke from a nightmare about being captured by cannibals and stuffed into a stew-pot. The dream nagged at him until he realized that the cannibals had each carried a spear with a hole in the tip. This was the breakthrough that Howe needed. Traditional sewing needle were designed so that the hole carrying the thread went through the fabric last. For Howe's machine to work, he needed the hole to go through first. He patented his sewing machine in 1846, but other manufacturers, including Isaac Singer, stole his design. After a lengthy court battle, Howe was finally awarded royalties on all sewing machine sales until both he and his patent expired in 1867. |
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The article above, written by Ashley Larsen, is reprinted with permission from Scatterbrained section of the Jul/Aug 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!
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Forget gas-guzzlin’, smoke-belchin’ lawnmowers. The eco-friendly way to mow grass and get rid of unwanted vegetation is to … rent some goats!
The city of Andover, Massachusetts has some unwanted guests: invasive species like the European buckthorn tree and the strangling bittersweet vine from Asia are shouldering out local wildlife. To make matters worse, in tight times the city can’t always afford the mowing machines and the manpower required to keep the invaders at bay. That was until they brought in the experts–goats.
The mowing “machines are massive, constantly breaking down, [and they] use a lot of fuel so we have actually had to skip several years of the mowing program because it’s very expensive,” says Bob Douglas, the director of Andover’s Conservation Commission.
Luckily, the commission recently hit upon a neat solution when one of their volunteers spoke to Lucy McKain, who tends dairy goats next to one of the city’s preserves. They worked out an arrangement where her animals get to graze the land and the commission saves a few thousand dollars a year. The fix was a win-win for everyone.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bizwiz27.
This beautiful picture of Earth was taken by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta is on a mission to intercept the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which will happen in 2014. The brightest part of this picture is our South Pole. Link
(image credit: ESA)
Toolmaker
Ermal Fraze was on a picnic in 1959 when he realized he had no way to
open his beverage. At the time, drinking from a can required a triangular
tool called a "church key" to punch two holes in the top. Because
no one had thought to bring one, Fraze tried to use a car bumper to pierce
the container. The result was a foamy mess. 
Although
he'd written extensively about the evils of capitalism, King Camp Gillette
still dreamed of getting rich. 
In
1958, Jean Hoerni was one of eight engineers at the Fairchild Semiconductor
company racing to build a better high-speed transistor. At the time, transistors
were easily disrupted by dust or moisture, which is, you know, everywhere.
One
evening in 1948, George de Mestral was getting ready to go out to dinner
when his wife asked him to zip up the back of her dress. As he struggled
with the jammed zipper, he longed for a better way to fasten cloth. 
In
the late 1830s, Elias Howe Jr. was working as a machinist's apprentice
when he overheard someone say that the first person to invent a small
automatic sewing machine would make a fortune. Howe decided to take on
the challenge, but it proved harder than he thought. 
