(YouTube link)

This insect (it looks like a katydid, but I may be wrong) keeps turning this thing over and over. What is it thinking? “Where’s the opening on this thing?” or maybe “I keep walking, but I’m not getting anywhere.” The bug did this for three hours, according to Zain the pain. THEN WHAT? He doesn’t say! I would like to think that Zain took the poor thing outdoors and showed it the right way up. -via Tastefully Offensive  

With the help of her Fairy Godchef, Cinderella’s dress turns into a marvel of cheese and pepperoni. The result is much tastier than the fabric original. Just make sure that it’s delivered before midnight or the next dress is free.

(Video Link)

This .gif was made by Animation Domination High-Def, the animation team responsible for Axe Cop.

-via That’s Nerdalicious!

Gallery 1988 is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the movie Ghostbusters with an art show based on the film. It’s not just in L.A., either -this show is traveling all over the country! The exhibit is in New York until April 26th, then travels to Los Angeles, Chicago, and ends at Comic-Con in San Diego. Around a hundred artists have contributed works to the exhibit, and many will be available sale as limited edition prints. -via Flavorwire

(Image credit: Joshua Budich)

(Maps: Google Maps)

This is Machias Seal Island, a 20-acre island in the Bay of Fundy.

You can't see it? Let's zoom in.

Hmm. That doesn't help much. Let's zoom in some more.

There it is! It's a speck of land that barely appears on the map.

(Photo: Albnd)

You can see the lighthouse in the photo above. The island is inhabited by 2 human lighthouse keepers, a few seals...

(Photo: Thomas O'Neil)

...and lots and lots of puffins.

The ownership of Machias Seal Island is disputed by the United States and Canada. Canada is in physical possession of it, but the United States has not formally dropped its claim to the island.

I've previously written several posts about the development of the US-Canadian border, which includes weird exclaves. Ambiguity about the border even led to the creation of 2 short-lived nations.

As I type this, I have a demanding cat on my lap who thinks I have nothing better to do than pet her. She’d have plenty to do if I had a CATable! The CATable was designed by Ruan Hao of LYCS Architecture in Hong Kong. It has an interior maze that cats cannot resist, and portholes so they can keep an eye on not only you, but the birds outside the window in your office. GThe CATable was exhibited during Milan Design Week, but is still so new that no price has been determined. -via Time Newsfeed

(Image credit: LYCS Architecture)

In this mod of Grand Theft Auto 4, you play Princess Anna from Frozen. She sings a foul-mouthed version of her sister’s song “Let It Go” while going on a murderous rampage around Liberty City. Anna may not have Elsa’s powers or responsibilities, but she’s definitely ready to:

It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free

Of course, you don’t have to slaughter random people in boblester122’s mod. It’s not mandatory. But that’s what people do in GTA, right?

(Video Link)

I found this video at Kotaku, where you can also find a video of a spree-killing Elsa.

Content warning on the video: foul language.

Hollywood spends big bucks for lavish film sets on location. What happens to these sets when the movie wraps? Moving or reusing them costs more than they’re worth, but sometimes dismantling them is required by agreement. Often, they are just left as they are. And then? Some just fall into ruin, but others find a new life under the management of people who know an opportunity when they see one. Take, for example, Sweethaven, the seaside town that was the setting of the Robin William’s film Popeye.  

Robert Altman’s 1980 film adaptation of the comic Popeye suffered at the box office, but the nation of Malta has done very well with the film’s set, turning it into the Popeye Village theme park.

The park preserves the original 20 buildings constructed for Popeye’s “Sweethaven” setting, and adds a museum devoted to the movie’s history. It also stages shows featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl, and scenic boat tours of the village and its bay.

Tourists can also visit The Shire in New Zealand, the Field of Dreams in Iowa, and several Tunisian places that were transformed into Tattooine for the Star Wars movies. Several Western towns are still in place as well, and you can read about them at Atlas Obscura.  -via mental_floss

(Image credit: Edwinb)

It took me several months, off and on, but my latest carpentry project is finally complete! It's a hanging cupboard that looks like Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

The door is made of 0.25 inch birch plywood. The body is made of 0.5 inch birch plywood. The box has exterior measurements of 12.5 inches high, 10.5 inches wide, and 4.5 inches deep. The door is, at its furthest extent, 20 inches across and 19 inches tall.

The box is held together with 16 0-gauge wood biscuits. The door is attached to the box by hinges to a 1x1 inch strip of pine which is glued to the door. The door is held in place with a magnetic clasp.

I used this image by DeviantART member Vexorb as a template for Pinkie Pie’s head. I painted it on with acrylic craft paint, then applied a clear matte spray paint as a protective coating. I used a latex house paint for the back of the door and the box.

Overall, I am pleased with the results. But there were some difficulties. For one, the box fitting is imprecise. Although I've used my plate joiner on 3 other projects, this is the first time that I've used it on anything other than 0.75 inch wood. It's built to slice evenly into this thickness, so I had to improvise to cut into 0.5 inch wood.

I select my carpentry projects in order to teach myself new skills. This is the most demanding painting job that I've had and the only artistic work that I've done since high school.

The door turned out well. A bandsaw would have been ideal, but I have only a jigsaw. It was surprisingly adequate. The hardest sawing task was the eyelashes. I managed to smooth out the spaces between the eyelashes (where the jigsaw couldn't reach) by slicing narrow strips of sandpaper (about 0.25 inches across) and flossing them back and forth until the eyelashes were shaped properly. I was worried that the eyelashes would break off, but they're actually quite sturdy.

This and my other carpentry projects are a part of an ongoing, deliberate effort to teach myself practical building and repair skills. I live in an apartment, so there is a limit to what I can do. I've mostly been building wood furniture. As a result, I've learned a lot about carpentry that is applicable beyond cabinetmaking.

(Image: Ninja High School/Ben Dunn)

Now it's time for me to tackle an electrical project. I have almost no experience with electrical work, so it's a skill void that I should fill. I haven't settled on a firm idea, but I'm thinking about building from scratch an 8-way variable lamp. Since I'm a fanboy, I may design it to reflect the art of my favorite comic book series, Ninja High School.

(YouTube link)

Mean Girls is only ten years old? I thought it was much older than that. But I recall when it came out, that I meant to watch it because I love Tina Fey. But I didn’t get around to it. Then when my daughters hit middle school, I made a point to watch Mean Girls with them, because I trust Tina Fey. Now the movie is ten years old, and these teenagers think that’s, like, ancient. But it has a universal message that’s still as relevant now as it was then -or even forty years ago when I was in high school. My message to my daughters was “Don’t ever be a mean girl,” although I suspected that they would more likely need a defense against mean girls, which first comes with understanding what is happening. I know from experience how such dishonesty, manipulation, and head games can mess with your adolescent years.

Mean Girls should be required viewing for every middle school student, and the book it is based on should be required reading for parents. Besides, if you’re not in the midst of dealing with teen angst, it’s hilarious. -via Viral Viral Videos

(Image Via Knithacker)

(Image Via Lorna Watt)

Yarnbombers add color and crocheted warmth to gray and sooty cityscapes, and their creations are the warmest and fuzziest works in the street art scene.

Yarn enthusiasts Jill and Lorna Watt brought a bit of monstrous fun to San Francisco’s Embarcadero by turning two benches outside the Ferry Building into colorful yarnbombed monsters.

These monster benches weren’t created solely for aesthetic value or to further yarnbombing as a valid art form- the yarn art installation was created for an upcoming episode of CCTV America’s Full Frame which will focus on these innovative yarn artists who also happen to be sisters.

-Via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

American drivers, imagine a busy intersection in a large city with no traffic lights and no traffic cops. This is the condition in many cities around the world. This intersection is in Meskel Square, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The thing that keeps drivers from constantly crashing is the idea that no one has any right-of-way, and you just go when you can, stop when someone is in front of you, and don’t hit anyone. Could the famously traffic law-abiding American drivers deal with such a system? Probably not, because we are concerned with who has the right-of-way, and tend to get a little hostile when someone causes us a two-second delay in our travels. -via Arbroath

(Video Link)

Energy efficiency is a big part of “going green”, and delivering electricity to a long, lonely stretch of highway is not only a daunting dask- it’s simply inefficient.

With the advancement of solar power we may find better ways to bring electricity to rural areas, but a remote highway generally has little use for light, and typically needs to be lit up on the road itself more than the shoulders.

That’s what makes this highway in Oss, Netherlands so unique- the road markings glow-in-the-dark.

Studio Roosegaarde spent two years developing the idea of integrating photo-luminescent powder into the road paint, and their glowing highway innovation makes a drive in the dark seem like a trip into the world of Tron.

-Via DesignTAXI

This interactive map from Climate Central has the average temperatures of each state and how they've changed since the first Earth day in 1970. Click on a state to see its graph. The states that have warmed the most since then are Delaware and Wisconsin, at about 3 degrees warmer than in 1970.

Average temperatures across most of the continental U.S. have been rising gradually for more than a century, at a rate of about 0.127°F per decade between 1910-2012. That trend parallels an overall increase in average global temperatures, which is largely the result of human greenhouse gas emissions. While global warming isn’t uniform, and some regions are warming faster than others, since the 1970s, warming across the U.S. has accelerated, previously shown in our report The Heat is On. Since then, every state’s annual average temperature has risen accordingly. On average, temperatures in the contiguous 48 states have been warming at a rate of 0.48°F per decade since 1970, nearly twice the global average.

You can find a chart to compare the warming among the states at Climate Central.

Your Move, Creep 2014V by Fuacka

There's a new sheriff in town, one who's more machine than man, and he's taking back the streets of Detroit and thanking people for their cooperation.

Celebrate the return of everyone's favorite robotic cop with this Your Move, Creep 2014V t-shirt by Fuacka, and stay out of trouble!

Visit Fuacka's Facebook page, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more neat designs:

Your Move, Creep 1987V	On Duty	Who You Gonna Call	From Gallifrey with Love

View more designs by Fuacka | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

This beautiful looking (and probably tasting) dish is a skinned 5-foot alligator filled with a crawfish-based stuffing. It's the creation of the BBQ Pit Boys, a barbecuing federation that teaches members how to cook food properly. The alligator was the centerpiece of a full Cajun gourmet meal that also included poboys, stuffed red snapper, and deep fried oysters.

I've had barbecued pork, chicken, turkey, and beef, but never alligator. The narrator says that it has the consistency of pork and the taste of chicken. That squares with my experience of baked alligator.

(Video Link)

-via I Own the World

(vimeo link)

Valentin Delluc is shushing down a mountain without touching the ground, with the help of a parachute! We get to tag along thanks to his helmet cam. Along the way, he grinds his skis on the cable of the ski lift. He knows what he is doing, but if it were me, I wouldn’t want to get any closer to the ski life than to the trees- they can all tangle a parachute up big time! See more awesome stunts at his Facebook page. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Waking up with some hair of the dog that bit you last night means something completely different when you’ve just spent the night in a B&B shaped like a beagle.

This charming canine shaped cabin is called the Dog Bark Park Inn, it’s located in scenic Cottonwood, Idaho and it was built by chainsaw carvers Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin.

Each room is decorated with works by Sullivan and Conklin, which are all shaped like dogs of course, and the modest bed and breakfast has room to host four guests in the main beagle building called Sweet Willy.

There’s one major rule at the Dog Bark Park Inn- guests must love dogs, or else they’re barking up the wrong tree!

-Via 22 Words

(vimeo link)

When we say we are going off to “find ourselves,” we usually don’t mean it literally. That journey is literal for a disembodied robot hand! He wants to find himself “or at least as many pieces as possible.” Pull yourself together, hand! After making the rounds of film festivals, this short by Simon Fink is now available to the rest of us. -Thanks, Simon!

(Coffee Time t-shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop)

Caffeine--it's nature's wonder drug! And it's best consumed with coffee, often by spooning the grounds directly from the can into your mouth at 3 AM as a deadline nears.

It also makes you more honest. Well, kind of. Michael Christian, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina, studied 171 sleep deprived nurses. Those who had some sweet, sweet caffeine flowing through their veins tended to be more honest than those who didn't. Anne Fisher of Forbes reports:

For this study -- which, by the way, wasn't sponsored by Starbucks -- volunteers who had been kept awake all night were divided into two groups. All were asked to chew gum in the morning, but one group got a plain wintergreen placebo, while the other chomped on gum laced with 200 milligrams of caffeine, or about the same amount that's in two cups of black coffee.

The participants were then put in situations where researchers "encouraged them to go along with a lie in order to earn some extra money," Christian says. "We tried to replicate a situation where a boss or a peer was pressuring them to cut ethical corners at work."

The results: Those who got the extra boost of caffeine consistently balked when researchers urged them to cheat, while those who were just exhausted -- and had chewed the non-caffeinated gum -- showed a marked willingness to cast conscience aside and go along with the deception.

Employers who want to reduce the likelihood of misbehavior should make sure people aren't putting in too many long hours without a break and "avoid scheduling tasks that require a great deal of self-control when looming deadlines make long hours unavoidable," the study concludes. Two other suggestions: Put in nap rooms at the office and don't skimp on the free coffee.

-via The Hairpin

Design student Joyce Lin created Study in Bird Motion, a kinetic sculpture made of mylar and popsicle sticks. When you crank the handle, it flaps like a bird! I want one -but my cats would destroy it in no time as soon as someone made it flap. Lin is a dual degree student at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. -via Laughing Squid

(Video Link)

What was once something kids did while sitting around bored in class has now become a thing kids do while bored in class, while hanging out with friends, and also to impress people online.

Whether you call it twiddling, spinning or twirling a pen the two smug young men in this video are really good at making writing instruments fly around their fingers, flip across their legs and generally flit around like they have a mind of their own.

Ian Jenson and PPM are bringing epic pen spinning to the masses, but no matter how hard they try it will never be as cool as being part of the color guard!

-Via Geekologie

Benjamin Rice, a designer in Manchester, UK, made this lamp for SPIN London, an urban bicycling show. Appropriately, he made it from old Raleigh Grifter children's bikes. In this darkened setting, the X-wing looks like it's making the trench run.

-via Geek Art Gallery

(Video Link)

It’s safe to say that Spongebob Squarepants is not a scientifically accurate cartoon show, despite the fact that the squirrel wears a diving suit and the squid is a bit of a jerk.

Toon heads don’t tune in to see science, they watch to see zany antics and colorful characters, so making a scientifically accurate version of Spongebob would totally ruin the show.

Well, that’s exactly what the folks from Animation Domination High-Def have done with their short Scientifically Accurate Spongebob Squarepants, and once you watch it you may not be able to watch Spongebob ever again without wondering about the dark truths ADHD has revealed about life in Bikini Bottom.

-Via Gamma Squad

While many Americans complain about the costs of healthcare: insurance, hospital bills, paperwork, and medicine, relatively few begrudge doctors making a good living. After all, they study for years to achieve their degrees and usually graduate in deep debt. Then most of them work really hard to manage illness, improve our health, and save our lives. How much money do doctors actually make? It depends on their specialty and in what part of the country they work. According to Medscape’s annual Physicians Compensation Report, the doctors you actually see regularly make the least and specialists make quite a bit more. Do doctors believe they are making enough? Strangely, the biggest difference in satisfaction are two specialties that are close together both on the chart and on the body: dermatologists and plastic surgeons.    

Dermatologists were the most likely to say their compensation was fair; plastic surgeons were the least likely.

While dermatologists earn $308,000 and plastic surgeons earn $321,000, 65% of dermatologists are satisfied with their careers, compared to just 37% of plastic surgeons. And only about one in four dermatologists spends more than 40 hours a week seeing patients, compared to more than half of plastic surgeons.

That suggests that the demands and joys of the job shape how much compensation seems "fair" more than just the salary itself.

Read more about the report at Business Insider, and see more graphs from the report at Medscape. -via Digg

(Image credit: Medscape)

This Tuesday, April 22, is Earth Day. To mark the occasion, Beth Klosterboer made a spherical cake. She used 2 hemispheric pans to form the body of the cake, then hollowed out the core. She frosted blue icing around the outside and then filled the core with rock candy. After assembling the components, she then used green frosting to show the continents.

It's not only beautiful, but a masterpiece of cake craftsmanship. You can see step-by-step photos of her build process here.

(Video Link)

Jack White is a musical mastermind who puts a lot of mental energy into the songs he creates, but there’s a whole ‘nother level of deep thought going on in his latest video for his song High Ball Stepper.

This visually mesmerizing video has a whole lotta science goin’ on, including a non-newtonian fluid dynamically dancing on a vibrating speaker cone in a most appealing manner, and the awesome look of sand forming patterns on top of a vibrating Chladni plate.

Want to find out what the heck this all means? Check out this fascinating article about The Science Behind Jack White’s Amazing New Music Video over at io9 and get hip to the scientific jive.

Albero means "tree" in Italian, so it's only fitting that this tree-like bookcase bears the name of the very thing that inspired it. The central post serves as a trunk and like a real tree, it can expand and grow to fit any space -although this particular tree only grows to 11 feet tall. Similarly, the branches can be spread out in any given pattern although these boughs are better suited for holding books and knickknacks than leaves. 

Check out more pictures of the cool modular design over on Homes and Hues: This Bookcase Is Like A Tree In Your Living Room