It's Thursday, so you know what it means, Neatoramanauts: it's time for the What Is It? Game, brought to you by the always amusing What Is It? Blog.
What is this thing in the pictures? Your guess is as good as mine! No, yours is better, because your guess can win you a free T-shirt of your choice from the NeatoShop! Here's how to play:
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, but you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Post no URLs or weblinks.
You might know what this item is, but if you want to win a t-shirt, you'll have to use your imagination, because we are going to select two winners who give us the funniest incorrect guesses. If you guess right, then good for ya - but you don't win anything, mmkay? So, it's up to you, funny people: you have twice the chance of winning that T-shirt now.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize. We highly suggest you take a look at the NeatoShop's new selection of Funny T-shirts and Science T-Shirts.
Visit the What Is It? Blog to see an addition picture. Then make your funniest guess!
Update: the mystery item is a dock worker's tool for moving burlap wrapped bales. That’s neat, but you had even neater made-up answers! Happycrab had a good one: “Oh come on! This one's too easy - everyone knows it's a spoon for Klingon gagh. You need the spines to keep it from wriggling off.” Unfortunately, happycrab did not specify a t-shirt. Bo Culjan said it was “a reverse-shoehorn - a tool for yanking your heel out of that shoe you put on with a shoehorn.” That wins him a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! See the answers to all the items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
Comments (26)
Clown Box 2XL
Made in America with Irish Parts 2X
Wait, if I remember...
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis.
What I usually got back was a strong sense that somehow the brain just doesn't work this way. That memories and working memory aren't measurable in bits, and thinking isn't measurable in numbers of logical operations or big-O notation.
I'm glad to see a more numerical answer to this kind of question, even if it is (necessarily) very approximate.
Sorry, typing fail
Actually, there are over 100 Billion neurons in the brain and since the connections for each neuron multiply exponentially (eg. 2 neurons connect twice, 4 neurons connect 64 ways, 8 neurons connect 32,000 ways, etc.) After all is said and done, there are more possible synaptic connections in the human brain than there are particles in the known universe. Far, FAR more than a trillion which really is quite meager compared to the numbers we are talking about here.
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis."
I love this myth that we don't use the considerable amount of our brain capacity. Abstract thought of even the most basic sort is the result of the carefully controlled cooperation of numerous disparate regions of the brain. Our brain don't just have huge dead zones.
As for this romantic idea of the autistic savant, it's also silly. The normal human brain receives and processes a massive amount of data every second. It discards the input it deems irrelevant and focuses on the most important. If it didn't, you would be overloaded constantly with trivial, distracting information that impaired your higher functions. This is essentially what disables the autistic. While they may like Temple Grandin be geniuses about very specific topics, they are unable to function on more abstract levels such as comprehending social interaction.