HOME |
RSS | 
A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don’t effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.
For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.
The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link
Hugh Hefner and his daughter Christie spent over 50 years building the image of Playboy magazine, which is now up for sale.
Iconix Brand Group, a fashion house, has expressed interest in purchasing Playboy Enterprises, but they have no interest in the famous magazine, its storehouse of interviews, or its photo archive of naked women. Competition from the internet has rendered those resources less valuable. On the other hand…
…the bunny ears brand hearkens back to an era when Playboy was widely read and epitomized the idea of the urbane sophisticate who appreciates the finer things that the swinging bachelor lifestyle promises.
So the company is seeking a partner in the publishing world to take the magazine and other Playboy-related assets. All they want is the logo.
Quentin Thiacourt of TOKI WOKI created this unusual web clock made solely out of browser scoll bars! The effect is quite mesmerizing: Link
Everyone who’s done it knows that cleaning is a lot like warfare (and if you have children, it’s always a losing battle). Hugo Tornelo and Pedro Alegria of Cabracega have just the weapon for your next house cleaning adventure: "Make Household Not War," a conceptual design of broom, dust pan and feather duster shaped like rapier swords.
Similar: BBQ Sword Spatula
It’s probably not strong enough to support a human user, but Liddy Scheffknecht and Armin B. Wagner’s pop-up cardboard office sure is nifty-looking. The entire structure folds into a portable flat panel.
Via Gizmodo | Armin B. Wagner | Liddy Scheffknecht | Previously on Neatorama: Cardboard Office
Cartography blog Strange Maps has a map of the British Isles showing current place names translated into modern English. It’s one from a collection known as The Atlas of True Names. You can view a larger image at the link.
Link | Other Maps of Translated Place Names | News Story
Drive sober in Salinas, California, and Tuesday could be your lucky night. At a certain DUI checkpoint, some motorists who pass through will be awarded a free turkey!
This is the seventh year Salinas police have added a giveaway to the Thanksgiving week DUI checkpoint.
It’s become so popular, Salinas police are now asking drivers not to go through the checkpoint more than once just to try to win a turkey.
Police keep the location secret ahead of set up.
The turkeys were donated by police, businesses, and private citizens. Link -via J-Walk Blog
These festive robots were built from RoboBuilder kits and synchronized to some classic holiday tunes. OK, just pretend that those little squeaks and servo motor noises are jingle bells. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:
These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.
The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.
“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.
Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C
(image credit: The Pennington Studio)
Photo at PictureIsUnrelated
To see the cream of the croppings, the best in WTF photo and video, head on over to Picture is Unrelated, a blog (a Cheezburger Network concoction) dedicated to the absurd. From their About:
This website is about pictures that DO NOT make sense! I love images
that don’t make sense and YOU SHOULD TOO! Can you even understand
how awesome it is when you see a yeti serving in the armed forces? Can
you grasp the concept of someone creating SCIENCE in a field of daisies on
a beautiful summer day? I totally can, and that’s why I started Picture is Unrelated.
Link (some pics NSFW).
In 2007, Tillman the bulldog amazed the world with his video of him riding a skateboard around a park, just as naturally as you please. Apparently the dog is still refining his moves, via Tony Hawk’s video game. (Obviously, he’s not playing the game, but he’s definitely into it.) More videos of Tillman snowboarding, surfing, and of course, skateboarding can be found here. Tillman’s website.
The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade rolls through New York every year, but how much do you really know about the annual production? Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your memory ahead of the big event. I scored a miserable 20%! Surely you can do better. Link
Photo via World Records Academy
55-year-old Indian citizen Kashi Samaddar has completed an almost-seven year trip around the world. He has visited all 194 countries in the world, thereby setting a world record.
He spent £350,000 to visit every country on earth in the shortest time possible and thereby earnt himself a mention in the Guinness Book of Records – just don’t expect to be thrilled by his pictures.
Samaddar’s mission was inspired by trouble he had in South Africa in 2002 over his Indian passport. Samaddar then vowed to visit every country in the world to show it could be done.
The globe trotting adventurer was determined to complete the whole trip using his Indian passport – despite opportunities to adopt Australian and Canadian citizenship – as he wanted to prove an Indian could travel the world.
He also wanted to highlight the difficulties some nationalities encounter obtaining visas to enter countries – a problem he is very familiar with.
‘The most difficult visa to get was Moldova, which took me almost three years with many rejections,’ he said.
‘The problem isn’t with big countries like America, England or places in Europe, a lot of the time it’s smaller countries who don’t know what they should be doing.’
To abide by Guinness Book rules, he traveled using only public transportation. The rules state you only have to set foot in a country to count it, which may explain Samaddar less-than-impressive tourist photographs.
The photo above is of Kashi’s last place visited: Serbia Kosova on May 27 of 2008.
Links: Article at Daily Mail | More at World Records Academy.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Writer Evan Ratliff pondered the same question while writing an article for Wired magazine about people who for various reasons had tried to start over with completely new lives . A few months later he found himself a willing volunteer to find out firsthand what the experience entailed. With a 24 hour head start, $2000 cash stuffed in his belt and a fake office to set up in Las Vegas he drove his Honda Civic across the Bay bridge, then out of California in a bid to disappear entirely. Leaving behind family, a girlfriend, and any semblance of a normal life for a month while assuming an entirely new identity.
The magazine periodically published clues and made accessible to their online community all the information a private investigator might be privy to, as well as placing a $5000 bounty on Evan’s head. His travels took him across the country a few times, his disguises changed almost daily and online groups spontaneously emerged to track and document his every move. Amateurs and professionals from coast to coast took to the chase disseminating all the details they could uncover, staking out airports and bars, even trying to glean details from acquaintances as varied as his cat sitter.
In the end it wasn’t nearly what Evan had expected when he began.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by renderanything.
Did you ever wish you could create the chocolate of your dreams? A German company named chocri allows people like you and me to customize chocolate bars, not only by determining which name is printed on the packaging, but more importantly by combining a base chocolate (dark, milk or white) with your choice of more than 90 toppings. The toppings can be dried fruit and nuts (what we would expect), but can also be crazy, like chive rolls, jalapenos or real gold flakes. The chocolate is fair trade, organic, and sales benefit kids on the Ivory Coast.
One percentage of our revenues goes directly to the organization DIV Kinder, which supports and protects children on the Ivory Coast. The Ivory Coast is the biggest exporter of cocoa beans on this planet. Our customers also get a chance to donate a small amount at checkout. Together, we’ve already raised thousands of Euros to benefit the children.
Chocri is expanding their sales into the United States beginning in January. Link
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Goodnight Keith Moon is a parody of the classic children’s picture book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. This version by Bruce Worden and Clare Cross features Keith Moon (1946-1978), drummer for The Who.
The humor is pretty dark, so readers who don’t wish to have haunting memories Goodnight Moon should probably skip this one.
Link via Popped Culture
Lichtenberg figures are the branching patterns formed by electrical discharges, discovered by 18th Century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. He captured the images in dust on charged plates, but in the 20th Century, laboratories used solid blocks of acrylic, such as the one pictured above. “Captured Lightning” was created by shooting five million volts into the acrylic by the art/engineering firm Stoneridge Engineering. More pictures and an exhaustively detailed scientific explanation at the link.
Link via The Presurfer
John Madden of GeekDad relates the story of how the ‘smoot’ became a measurement of distance:
Way back in 1958, the MIT chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge in Massachusetts, coining the smoot as a unit of measurement in the process – one smoot equaling five feet, seven inches. Smoot (the man) lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, and he moved on (or was moved on – eventually he so tired from the movement that his frat brothers carried him), until the bridge was established as being 364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear, in length. Appropriately, Smoot would later become chairman of the American National Standards Institute.
Madden then passes on ten more recent forms of measurement, including some of his own devising. These include the milliwheaton (number of Twitter followers), the Warhol (fame duration), and the Emmet (power). The latter comes from the movie Back to the Future:
1 Emmet = 1.21 Gigawatts, or the amount of power required to operated the flux capacitor in a modified DeLorean DMC-12. GeekDad note – when describing the Emmet, it’s pronounced ‘Jigga’ watt. There was briefly some debate as to whether this should be called a ‘lloyd’ or a docbrown’, But for simplicity (and to honour the character rather than the actor – though don’t get me wrong, Christopher Lloyd rocks) I’ve gone for ‘Emmet’.
In the comments, propose Neatorama-themed measurements.
Link | Images: MIT and Universal Studios, respectively
Scientists have always thought that colorful mineral deposits in caves are the work of geology, not biology – but they were wrong: unusual deposits may actually be microbial poop!
"We’re finding that you need to look at things you might write off as not being biological—they might be biological," said Penelope Boston, a cave scientist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
The microbes were found on the walls of lava tubes in Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Portuguese Azores islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean (see map).
The finds include "a lovely blue-green ooze dripping out of the [cave] ceiling in Hawaii; a vein of what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico; and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," said Diana Northup, a geomicrobiologist at the University of New Mexico.
"That’s the waste—the bug poop, if you will."
Link (Photo: Kenneth Ingham)
Why do working moms complain so much about their "useless" husbands? A new study by Rebecca Meisenbach of the University of Missouri suggests that it’s all to make them feel better about themselves:
If there is one thing on which many working mothers agree, it is that their partners do not pull their weight on the domestic front.
But research to be published this week reveals that men are being unfairly accused and working women are advancing the myth of the "useless man" so they can feel more feminine. "Working women who provide the majority of the household’s income to the family continue to articulate themselves as the ones who ‘see’ household messes and needs as a way to retain claims to an element of a traditional feminine identity," said Dr Rebecca Meisenbach, whose research paper, The Female Breadwinner, will be published this week in the journal Sex Roles.
But Meisenbach said the trend of the female high achiever and the male slacker is a tall story that women tell each other to compensate for the fact that most career-orientated women feel an "overwhelming sense of guilt" over their role and less of a mother and a wife.
Psst! Got a tough exam in the morning? Here’s an easy way to improve your grade: listen to study tapes while you’re asleep. Really!
Scientists have found that hearing specific sounds during deep sleep can improve memory and recall. [...]
Scientists asked a group of students to look at 50 objects, including a cat and a kettle, which were all paired to a specific location on a computer screen.
They then asked the volunteers to lie down and as they slept played them a series of sounds related to half of the objects, including a miaow [sic] and a kettle boiling.
Tested later the students were better able to correctly place an object whose sounds that had heard with their locations.
"The research strongly suggests that we don’t shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, from Northwestern University, in Chicago, who led the study. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."
Tiburon, California, has become the first community in the United States to record the license plate of every car that enter or leave the town:
Plates will be compared to databases of stolen or wanted cars, with matches triggering an immediate alert to local officers. If detectives are investigating a crime, they will be able to search the records to try to find possible suspects. [...]
"If it lowers the crime rate even a little bit, then it’s a great idea," said Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor whose husband, Al Anolik, spoke in favor of the cameras at the meeting.
She said she did not share the privacy concerns of some of her neighbors, explaining, "If you’re driving on a public road, you gave up your privacy already. If you want to be private, stay at home."
Do you think this is a good idea? Link
(Photo: CJ Sorg [Flickr])
If you’re on a long-term disability because of depression, perhaps it’s a good idea not to post photos of yourself having fun on Facebook:
Nathalie Blanchard has been on leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, for the last year.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Saturday she was diagnosed with major depression and was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from insurance giant Manulife.
But the payments dried up this fall and when Blanchard called Manulife, she says she was told she was available to work because of Facebook.
She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on Facebook, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday.
Twenty three years ago, a car crash left Rom Houben totally paralyzed. Doctors gave him a battery of tests and concluded that he was in a vegetative state or a coma. Except that they were wrong: he was conscious the whole time but unable to tell anyone about it.
‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46.
Doctors used a range of coma tests, recognised worldwide, before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
Mr Houben describes the moment as ‘my second birth’.
