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Some headlines just write themselves. Case in point:
Butts Arrested in Boob Murder Case
POTTER TOWNSHIP, CENTRE COUNTY – Police have arrested a third person in connection with the murder of Samuel Boob.
Boob was shot and killed at his home in Potter Township, Centre County, on the morning of August 23rd, 2009.
Kermit Butts, 26, of Madisonburg, is accused of driving the suspected killer to and from the crime scene on the morning of the killing. He was charged with aggravated assault and assisting a murder suspect and placed in the Centre County Prison.
Jeff Hamada of the art blog Booooooom.com (that’s seven o’s – I counted) has a pretty nifty "Hack Job" contest going on. You have till Sept 10 to submit your own skateboard-design. It doesn’t have to actually function as a skateboard, only to look like one:
"It’s pretty much just taking junk or random materials and turning it into skateboards," Hamada told AOL News. "I want to see people be creative."
Submissions for the "Hack Job" contest already include an homage to pain in skateboarding, featuring a Band-Aid as a board and two pills for wheels, a classic submission made by an adolescent skater who bolted wheels to a 2-by-4 and a business-themed entry in which a contestant turned his laptop into a board and photographed himself skating in business attire.
This one above, the banana skateboard, was the brainchild of Brian Tellock.
See the rest of the designs: Link | Story by Ben Muessig at Aol News
Happy Labor Day Weekend! If you’ve been busy getting ready for relaxing holiday, you might have missed some of our exclusive offerings this week, so here they are again.
We learned some Animal Name Origins, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
From the Museum of Possibilities, Steven Johnson expounded on our habit of dining in our cars in Driven to Eat.
Beer Facts from Around the World illustrated how, despite our differences, people in most countries love beer.
From mental_floss magazine, we had Meet the Beatles Covers about how four of their iconic album covers came about.
At NeatoBambino, Tiffany has some advice on Enrolling Your Kids In Chinese School, like how to and why you should.
Thanks for lending your creativity to Mal and Chad’s Fill in the Bubble Frenzy! Congratulations to Sheepishlion, who filled in the bubble with “Echo!” and won a cool Cthulhu as a Teenager shirt.
At the Neatorama Facebook page, you’ll find a lot more than just links. For example, dozens of people shared fond and not-so-fond memories of their first car.
If you’re looking for some topical reading for Labor Day, may I suggest Meet the People who Make Your Clothes and Luddites and the Original Rage Against the Machine. Of course, you’ll find more at the Best of Neatorama page. Have a great weekend!
T-Rex Night Light – $16.95
Afraid of the dark? That’s no longer a problem with these awesome porcelain night lights over at the NeatoShop. I’m particularly drawn to the dinosaur night lights, but the entire selection is actually very neat: Link
A research team in Hiroshima, Japan is developing airbags that deploy outside, rather than inside, the car. Their goal is to protect pedestrians who are involved in a crash:
Dubbed iSAVE (sigh…), the airbags deflate rapidly upon impact, just like conventional airbags, to soften the effects of a crash for pedestrians. The prototype car equipped with iSAVE that you can see on the pic above was shown earlier this week and is said to be the first of its kind. iSAVE can be used with electric cars only.
The research team behind the airbags says it expects to sell up to 50 units by year end for 3-wheeled cars before fully commercializing them in 2011 for four-wheeled vehicles. The iSAVE system for 4-wheeled cars will likely be priced at $17,800.
Link (in Japanese) via CrunchGear via DVICE | Photo: Asahi
Drake University is a private college in Iowa. Pictured above is a logo from its new ad campaign. Do you think that it sends a good message?
The college administration doesn’t see any problem:
However, Drake officials are standing by the D+ campaign — which college officials crafted with outside PR contractors. Defenders of the ad blitz described it as “edgy and intriguing” in a letter to faculty and staff this week. The letter explained that the campaign “was designed to catch the attention of high school students who are bombarded with college and university materials to the point that they are often in information overload and unable to differentiate among the many institutions that have contacted them.”
Link | College Website | Screenshot: Yahoo
Unspoken social rules make normal interaction with other people difficult -especially with someone you really don’t want to interact with in the first place. Or if you like the other person, but have nothing to say. And there are other situations that can become painfully awkward. You’ve been there. I certainly have. Link
People (and cats) love Roombas, but they were always better at entertaining us than cleaning our floors. Two new competitors, the Neato (for carpets) and the Evolution Mint (for bare floors) clean in a way far different from the Roomba’s random movements.
Eventually it cleans every part of the room—but the anti-Roomba crowd claims that it does so unevenly, going over some parts of a room many times while cleaning other spots just once. A more systematic approach could yield greater efficiency: If a robot cleaned each part of the floor just once, it would have a lot more battery power to clean more forcefully and could clean more quickly, to boot.
That’s the theory behind both the Neato and the Mint. “We clean your floor the way a Zamboni would, or the way you would,” says Max Safai, the CEO of Neato Robotics. The Neato uses several different sensors to create an internal map of a room. Based on this map, it will first clean the room’s perimeter before going back and forth within the perimeter in a systematic way.
See videos of both the Neato and the Mint in action at Slate. Link
Wait for it…. -via Arbroath
Margarine is a substitute for butter, which makes it a fighting word for the dairy industry. Butter producers and margarine producers battled back and forth for the better part of a century to capture the market for spreading our bread.
Butter was big business, and the notion that a cheaper substitute, even one made in part with milk, might storm the market terrified dairy farmers. They didn’t take the threat lying down, though, and convinced legislators to tax margarine at a rate of two cents per pound—no small sum in the late 19th century. Dairy farmers also successfully lobbied for restrictions that banned the use of yellow dyes to make margarine look more appetizing. By 1900, artificially colored butter was contraband in 30 U.S. states.
Several states took even more extreme measures to turn consumers away from margarine—they required the product to be dyed an unappealing pink color.
The margarine industry fought back, however. Read the whole sordid story at mental_floss. Link
New York artist Sally Davies bought a plain hamburger Happy Meal from McDonalds. She didn’t eat it, but took pictures of it every day -for 137 days so far. The project will likely continue at least until the meal starts to look different. Link -via Cynical-C
Pocket Jams – Vinyl 45 – $4.95
Carry all your small stuff and display your retro coolness at the same time with this Pocket Jams Vinyl 45 from the NeatoShop. The 7" diameter zippered pouch is versatile enough to carry your pencils, iPods, and other hipster trinkets: Link | More Fun and Unusual Wallets and Coin Purses
Astronaut and educator Don Pettit recorded this time-lapse video from the International Space Station. It shows day turning into night as the Earth rotates beneath him.
via Radley Balko
At a 1997 soccer match, Roberto Carlos scored a goal against the French national team that seemed physically impossible. The ball seemed to curve around the French players. Physicists couldn’t explain the ball’s movement:
A group of French scientists, perhaps desperate to prove that at least the laws of physics weren’t actively rooting against their national team, have been able to figure out the trajectory of the ball and, with it, an equation to describe its unusual path.
It all comes down to the fact that, when a sphere spins, its trajectory is a spiral. Usually, gravity and the relatively short distance the ball travels cover up this spiral trajectory, but Carlos was a mere 115 feet away and kicked the ball hard enough to reveal its true spiral-like path. As you can see in the diagram above, the ball would have kept spiraling if gravity (and the netting) hadn’t gotten in the way.
At the link, you can see a video of the kick.
Link | Image: New Journal of Physics
Tony Orrico is both a visual and a performance artist, and often combines the two approaches by creating works in front of audiences. Here, he created an elaborate geometric pattern in eight circles using the movements of his body as measuring tools. The result took precisely 1,000 body movements to complete.
via Make | Artist’s Website
Students at the Columbus College of Art & Design (Columbus, Ohio) made an interactive mural that lets you put yourself into Super Mario Bros. Twelve students spent eight days making it. The mural measures sixteen feet tall and thirty-eight feet wide. You can view several full-size pictures at the link.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo: NBC4
Are you tired of your chickens pooping all over your nice carpets and grandmother’s table cozies? Now there’s a solution to your problem (well, one of them): chicken diapers. Ingrid Dimock of Australia invented and sells them for people who keep their chickens indoors:
The nappies she sells are bought by families who encourage their birds inside to interact or for people in apartments or townhouses who keep birds but have limited space.
“Chickens have become incredibly interactive with people,” Ms Dimock said.
“When you come home they are looking for you and run up to you. They make really good pets and are really social creatures.”
The leads were developed because Ms Dimock said people wanted to take their birds with them when they left the house.
“People were telling us that they wanted to take their chickens to the park to have a scratch around while they watched their kids playing soccer,” she said.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Courier-Mail
I know some people who would rather rebuild something ten time than read the directions! Of course, putting something like a deck chair together is infinitely easier when the directions are written by someone who is fluent in your language. This video is the latest from SheepFilms. -via b3ta
The above map shows the border between the United Arab Emirates (yellow) and Oman (green). Inside the UAE is a tiny enclave of Omanese territory called Madha. It consists of about 29 square miles. Inside that enclave is another enclave of UAE territory called Nahwa, which is under a square mile in area. At the link, you can view pictures of this enclave within an enclave.
Link via Dan Lewis | Map: National Geographic Society
BrickExpo 2010 will be held in Cincinnati the weekend of September 11-12. One of the displays will be a recreation of the 2009 plane crash in New York in which an airliner safely landed in the middle of the Hudson River, which became known as “the Miracle on the Hudson” as all passengers and crew were rescued from the water. Ken Osbon of Goshen Township, Ohio created the Lego version of the incident. Osbon, one of the event’s organizers, said other Lego displays will depict a farm, a city with a train running through it, a pirate tableau, and even one recreating a scene from the TV show The Deadliest Catch. Link -via Fark
Back when families felt secure enough in their jobs to take two-week vacations, my wife and I would drive to the Sierras with our son every summer. We would leave early in the morning when it was cool, and head east out of Sacramento climbing hot, winding and steep grades. We would reach our favorite high altitude camp at Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park by late afternoon. What has always puzzled me is why I would ask for a snack (an apple or trail mix) as soon as the car door was shut and we had barely left our driveway. Why was I suddenly so hungry?
I’ve never figured out the reason for that habit. I know that most people eat inside their cars, though there is a special class of folks who insist on maintaining a pristine car interior and disallow eating. I never had such a rule, even in my nicest cars.
I wish it were the case that the acts of dispensing and consuming food inside a car was better supported and acknowledged by the auto interior design community. On more than one occasion I have tried to design devices that address the need for eating while in a moving automobile. In Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-a-mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century (1991) I presented a system for passing food between front and back seats, called the Automobile Snack Conveyor. I noted:
Households have so little time for bonding and closeness that even a moment passing food with an automobile snack conveyor seems special. The conveyor has forward and reverse directions and can also be used for passing notes or maps.
It is my habit to work away at an idea for a long time, sometimes for decades. In 2006 I updated the food exchange belt, making it look less like an aftermarket accessory. I integrated the belt into a center console that included a snack drop bin, trash holder and forward-reverse toggle switch. Backseat passengers, especially children, would be assigned the duty to ask for candy bar wrappings or orange peels, which they would place inside the trash bin.
Sometimes when I attempt to solve a design problem I discover that the solution has created new problems. In the nifty two-seater convertible below, a picnic table is automatically lowered in place, but both driver and passenger must stand outside the car while it is dropped into place, and later when it is returned to its place. This is a flawed design!
Another idea that I came up with is the Inflatable Dining Tray that inflates to a convenient table height when placed on the lap. The Tray could be used by passengers but not by the driver.
"What Would a Zombie Do?" Spinner Folder – $4.95
Poor zombies – being the undead is hard work and rotting brains don’t exactly make quick decisions. But take heart, this What Would a Zombie Do? Spinner Folder (yes, with a disembodied zombie arm spinner) over at the NeatoShop surely will make their lives (deaths?) a lot easier!
Link | More Fun Back to School Items | Fun and Unusual Office & Desk Items
Think that your sibling is embarrassing? That’s nothing compared to these brothers and sisters. I mean, take Al Capone’s brother Vince, for example. Could you imagine how mortified Scarface was when he learned what his brother was up to? I mean, he’s got a gangster image to keep up and all:
In most families, Al would be the embarrassment. However, while he was out making a success of himself by criminal means, his brother “Vince” ran away from home to join the circus, fought in WWI, and eventually became a policeman. Not in Illinois obviously, that would be a conflict of interest. In Nebraska. Vince spent Prohibition shutting down the same type of illegal alcohol productions that were making his brother rich and powerful. He was known as “Two-Gun Hart” and became famous in the Midwest for his law enforcement prowess. Al Capone must have been mortified.
Remember the scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson chopped down the door with an axe and saying "Heeere’s Johnny"? Turns out it was inspired by a scene in the 1921 film The Phantom Carriage:
Filmed in 1921, The Phantom Carriage ranks with Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as one of the most important silent horror films in cinematic history. A primary influence for countless filmmakers, especially Ingmar Bergman who supposedly watched it once every year, The Phantom Carriage pioneered the use of certain special effects and narrative flashbacks. In one scene, a man named David Holm is visited by his dead friend Georges, cursed to drive the phantom carriage ushering the dead to the afterlife for an entire year. In order to spare his friend from the same fate, Georges forces David to confront the sins of his past, including one incident when he was infected with tuberculosis and locked in a small room by his wife so he wouldn’t infect their family. In a drunken rage, he took an axe to the door, smashing it to pieces. The film inspired Stanley Kubrick to recreate the scene for his film The Shining.
TopTenz has 9 more famous scenes in the movies and their original inspirations: Link
It’s not easy being a dad. A human-hunting, flesh eating dad. Here’s what a Predator father and son bonding looks like: Link [embedded College humor clip]
Where would the Net be without all those funny pic memes? Even if you’re tired of LOLcats, you’ll still enjoy this big list of image-driven memes lovingly compiled by Geekosystem.
This one above is part of a long CAPTCHArt (previously on Neatorama) thread over at Something Awful’s legendary Photoshop Phriday:
CAPTCHArt, or works of art MSPaint inspired by those squiggly CAPTCHA codes some websites make you type in to post or comment, is making a comeback lately since 4chan implemented it recently, but we’ve got to give Something Awful credit for pioneering the form. This is also the origin of Internet hero Responsibility Scallop.
Cool Material blog has a nifty round up of cool chess boards. I particularly like this one above, the 3D Chess Board by Ji Lee. Check out the entire gallery here: Link
Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham {wiki} has spina bifida and began using a wheelchair when he was three yers old. He has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of eight. Fotheringham achieved the double backflip last weekend. -via the Daily What
Restroom signs say much the same thing all over the world, but the way they say it says a lot about how view the differences between men and women. Why are women so often depicted as wearing skirts? And why do we have to use separate bathrooms anyway?
Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.
As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.
Link -via Metafilter
Photo: Rebecca A. Pyles
Scientists studying a species of Australian lizard called the yellow-bellied three-toed skink discovered that they’re seeing evolution in action: the lizard lays eggs on coasts but birth babies in mountains.
Evolutionary records shows that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and today about 20 percent of all living snakes and lizards give birth to live young only.
But modern reptiles that have live young provide only a single snapshot on a long evolutionary time line, said study co-author James Stewart, a biologist at East Tennessee State University. The dual behavior of the yellow-bellied three-toed skink therefore offers scientists a rare opportunity.
"By studying differences among populations that are in different stages of this process, you can begin to put together what looks like the transition from one [birth style] to the other."
Link – Thanks Ethan!
