Recycled Keyboard Purse – $39.95
What to get your beloved geek girlfriend? How about this Recycled Keyboard Purse, made from 365 computer keyboard keys. From the Neatorama Shop: Link
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It’s not unusual to have a pet rodent, but Melanie Typaldos’ pet Caplin Rous is no ordinary rodent. See, Caplin is a Capybara, the world’s largest rodent:
The second part of his name, which Typaldos pronounces like "rose," stands for "Rodent of Unusual Size" (a reference to the movie "The Princess Bride"). He’s also a rodent of unusual abilities. He can walk on a leash and even do some tricks, but Typaldos says it’s important not to exaggerate any similarity to a dog doing tricks.
"Dogs have thousands of years of being trained to be subservient to people," she says. "A capybara will not do a trick just to make me happy. The quality of the trick is very dependent on the quality of the treat."
Link | More at Caplin’s blog Capybara Madness
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A moonbow is a rainbow that appears in moonlight. Light from the moon must be refracted through a mist of water in order for us to see the effect. Photographer Wally Pacholka captured this effect at the edge of Haleakala crater on the island of Maui. The large “star” in the picture is Mars. Link to story. Link to Pacholka’s website. -via Arbroath
PS: There’s a state park near my hometown that has a moonbow every month if the weather is clear. Link
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Photo: Grant Gunderson
The ski report for the Eastern U. S. is a chart-topper this weekend, so to get you in the mood -or if you’d like to have your eyes popped- take a look at Grant Gunderson’s excellent work on the subject. For the shot above, this caption:
Dana Flahr throwing a very large lawn dart front flip over the Mt. Baker road gap at dusk while filming for Teton Gravity Research.
Photo District News has a nice collection, but be sure to check out his website and blog.
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Is it true that most people are introduced to gargoyles through a certain Disney film these days? If so, then perhaps a trip through the various types of gargoyle may not go amiss. Each one has a message to deliver and while that may be getting mislaid over the course of the centuries, the truth is still out there (as it were).
Gargoyles – they can be strange, bizarre, unpleasant or just plain ugly. They have been hovering around our towns and cities for centuries, for so long that it can be forgotten that they have meaning and purpose. Take a tour of the weird world of the gargoyle.
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Found at Cliff Pickover’s always excellent Reality Carnival. It took me a while to get it!
Previously on Neatorama: The Math Book: Milestones in the History of Math
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If you think that dinosaurs looked like giant lizards, you’d be forgiven as that has been the depiction in stories, movies, and even in school textbooks. Scientists, however, have recently reached a different conclusion: dinos actually looked like giant chickens!
The subject of the new study—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi—turns out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown [...]
The color patterns on Anchiornis’s limbs are "quite similar to the silver-spangled Hamburg chicken, a domestic breed of ornamental chicken," said ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University.
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Scientists say that it’s just pareidolia – a fancy word meaning that humans tend to see images or faces in random things, but surely they’re wrong. Sure, you can shrug off religious sightings as overly active imaginations of fanatics, but what if these images come from the world of science. Just think about it, people. Science!
James Dacey of Physicsworld.com Blog spotted two such phenomena:
Michael Jackson: This Is It (It Being Polymer Droplet)
Physicist David Fairhurst of Nottingham Trent University was working on a physics experiment involving droplet of polymer solution (those wacky scientists!) when he saw the face of Michael Jackson!
The ugly-looking globular mound is a droplet of polymer solution, the kind of substance you might find in the ink cartridges of your printer. As the solution began to dry, Fairhurst noticed a number of small “spherulites” begin to crystallise on the droplet surface revealing what appears to be a tiny human face. [...]
The physicist and his group of PhD students reckon the face looks like a small girl, or possibly even the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
I ran the image through an online face-recognition programme and the names that came out included: Rachel Carson, the American environmentalist; Marlene Dietrich the German-born actress; and (tenuously) Iggy Pop.
Link – via Geekosystem, thanks Glenn!
The Beatles in Bouncing Water Droplet
It was whilst writing a story this afternoon about water-repellency in lotus leaves that I noticed something very strange. Bizarrely, everybody’s favourite mop-topped Liverpudlian seems to reveal himself in the high-speed photo images of water-droplets being ejected from the leaf surface.
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I love it when people turn the ordinary into something special, it’s a nice change of pace. For example, check out these 31 cool benches, found all over the world.
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Photo: Joe Stevens
“Vans and the places where they were” is a project by filmmaker/photographer Joe Stevens that artfully presents… a bunch of vans. Each photo frames the subject identically, yet the vans and the locales are various, shot over the course of 13 years and counting.
Vans and the places where they were documents surviving custom and conversion vans across the West and examines the dialogue which exists between a van’s design aesthetic and that of its surrounding environment. The project began in 1996 and currently consists of hundreds of images shot on 120mm film.
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Photographer Nikki Graziano takes pictures and then creates graphs of mathematical functions which map nicely to elements of the image. It’s a very neat and beautiful way of combining math, nature, and art together into a single image.
Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
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That, my friends, is the Gizmo Skirt by Brian Lichtenberg. The skirt is in grey tweed and features "ear-pockets" with swarovski crystal eyes. It’ll set you back $2,100 but that’s the price of mogwai haute couture these days.
Whatever you do, don’t spill food on it after midnight: Link – Thanks Mike!
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The context of the photo is explained at the White House’s Flickr photostream:
June 6, 2009
“After his speech in Normandy, a crush of people tried to get close to the President to shake his hand. I noticed this guy waiting patiently and then literally being pushed back into the crowd. I felt bad for him, and mentioned the incident to the President’s trip director, Marvin Nicholson. Marvin pulled the guy out of the crowd, found him a wheel chair, and brought him over to meet the President. He was a French veteran. The man’s face shows his emotion.”
Official White House photo by Pete Souza, via Reddit.
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I don’t know what’s really going on in this picture, but “turtle wax” was my first reaction. Link -via Buzzfeed
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What happens when the bison at the Museum of Natural History get dusty? Photographer Richard Barnes has traveled the U.S. photographing museum dioramas undergoing repair and maintenance, and his photos have been made into a book, Animal Logic, that was published last fall.
Do his photos, which emphasize the distinction between nature and artifice, increase or diminish your appreciation for museum dioramas, many of which were constructed in the 1920s and ’30s? In a recent issue of The Smart Set, Jesse Smith notes this detached perspective towards dioramas isn’t new– The American Museum of Natural History In New York has a section of its website devoted to their “renowned” and “beloved” dioramas, and the Museum’s chairman describes them as “amazing technical feats of illusion.” But once you admit they’re illusions, Smith argues, the dioramas are no longer viable as scientific learning tools. And perhaps we lose something as a result.
Smith admits that he prefers the approach of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. “It’s not willing to throw in the towel, as the American Museum of Natural History has done. On its site, the Academy budges very little: ‘Although their magic has diminished somewhat with the advent of television and the internet, dioramas still provide an opportunity to experience these magnificent animals up close.’ I don’t know if the Academy really believes this, or it just wants me to. It honestly doesn’t matter. I prefer to be the one stepping back to judge these on their own terms, and the Academy lets me do that.”
(image credit: Richard Barnes)
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I know how much Neato readers appreciate good captions, so here’s a site I just discovered via Ellen Maguire on Twitter. It’s called Unhappy Hipsters and it gives funny captions to photos that have appeared in Dwell magazine. Here’s an example:
“Still recovering from broken trust, neither wanted to be the first to try the eggs.”
Photo: Mark Mahaney, Dwell, November 2009
Link: Unhappy Hipsters
I like this one too:
“You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation.”
Photo: Craig Cutler, Dwell, February/March 2006
Link: Unhappy Hipsters
There are lots more where those came from.
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Crepuscular rays – sunbeams to most of us – can be caught by a camera, mostly just after sunrise and just before sunset (hence the name). Many photographers will loiter for what seems an age to capture the right light and techniques used are known variously as The Golden Hour, Chiaroscura and the Rembrandt effect – all of which those little (or large) sunbeams can help. Here in a remarkable series of images, take in the beauty of those rays.
(image credit: Flickr user Pear Biter)
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Beer production goes back thousands of years, and its been an important part of human culture ever since. How much do you know about the history and production of beer?
At a London brewery in 1814, a vat containing more than 100,000 gallons of ale exploded, sending the beer rushing down the street through poor residential areas. It destroyed two houses and one pub, killing nine people in the process. However, one of those people only had himself to blame. When the beer settled into the gutters, people, enticed by free booze (even if it did have bits of road in it), rushed to the streets to drink it. A gentleman indulged a little too much and died from alcohol poisoning the next day.
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Photo: Sam Javanrouh
Sam Javanrouh’s blog, Daily Dose of Imagery, features his photography, one image per day. Today he posted many great photos he’s taken which all fall under one tricky umbrella of shooting – people on the street. People can be unpredictable when it comes to being photographed; Sam tells of friends who have had gear broken and suffered injuries at the hands of their subjects. But on the flip side, being a great photographer is often about seizing the moment and forgoing polite introductions. Sam on the photo above:
When I took this I was almost certain that I didn’t even have a sharp photo. But when i saw it later I liked it. So no way to ask her now. I won’t be selling this image for stock use. And if she ever contacts me and tells me she’s unhappy about it I’ll take it off the site. Street photography is all about the fractions of a second. You have to take the shot when you think you have it (to be precise, you take the shot just before the moment. Good photographers can see the future.
And on this one, he remarks, “I still have a hard time sleeping at night, thinking what will happen to me if I’ve seriously pissed off the dark knight.”
Photo: Sam Javanrouh
Link, and… as Sam says, Happy Shooting!
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Stone Brewing Co.'s beer bottle tumblers by BottleHood
Available from the Neatorama
Shop
Can you help save the environment, create local jobs and help stimulate the economy? Oh, and did I mention that beer is involved? Two San Diego folks did just that with an idea so simple it's genius: turn used beer, wine and liquor bottles into zany glassware and gorgeous vases.
While many of us recycle (Yay! Go us!), more than a billion bottles still end up in California landfills every year. That represents both a problem and an opportunity for artist and eco-activist Leslie Tiano and businessman Steve Cherry who teamed up to create BottleHood. They "rescue" beer, wine and liquor bottles from local restaurants, then wash, cut, grind, and polish them into tumblers, juice glasses, vases, and candle holders.
Stone
IPA Beer Bottle Tumblers - $7.95 each
Tiffany and I met Leslie and Steve at the California Gift Show in Los Angeles recently and asked them a few questions:
Neatorama: These are great! How did you come up with the idea of "repurposing" beer bottles?
BottleHood (Steve): Leslie presented her first few product concepts from which we first started with vases and tumblers made from wine bottles. I didn't want to cut thin beer bottles glass if you can believe it!
Anyway, I thought of the process of repurposing glass based on lapidary techniques as opposed to heat based treatments to repurpose glass which create a huge carbon footprint in the process. My role was in the conception of the manufacturing and distribution strategy, being "neighborhood" based, very scalable and easily replicated geographically.
Neatorama: What's involved in making the tumblers and glasses? How long does it take to make each one by hand?
BottleHood: We treat the bottles as if they were a gemstone, like quartz, and cut, grind, sand, and polish the bottle turned glassware back to its original luster and finish. It takes about 20 minutes to make each tumbler.
Neatorama: What do the breweries and restaurants think of your idea?
BottleHood: Most breweries love what we do as it promotes their brand and it's a green socially conscious connection. Restaurants turn out to be both our bottle suppliers as well as our largest client segment. BottleHood is a sustainable business and to complete the "circle of sustainability" our suppliers turned clients offer the glassware back to the folks that drank the wine in the first place!
Neatorama: What's next for BottleHood?
BottleHood (Steve): We've got our eyes on lots of different neighborhoods, come see us at the SF Gift Show for more!
BottleHood (Leslie): There's a steady flow of ideas that comes from discarded bottles, so there will be new products in the very near future by BottleHood.
Arrogant
Bastard Ale Beer Bottle Tumbler - $12.95 each
... and who can resist: the Double Bastard!
Double
Bastard Ale Beer Bottle Tumbler - $16.95 each
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I'm particularly taken by Leslie and Steve's line of glass tumblers made from beer bottles. They're SO awesome that we just have to collaborate with BottleHood to carry these beer bottle tumblers in the Neatorama Shop. Check it out - they'll make awesome Valentine's Day present for beer lovers everywhere: Link
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When Titanic blasted Star Wars off the top of the earnings throne, George Lucas had a congratulations illustration made to honor fellow director, Jim Cameron. See the whole thing at the link. Interestingly, if you look just above Leia, the backwards shadow of the word “television” can be seen, making me wonder if this was actually doodled on the back of some other document.
Now, what will Jim send to himself now that Avatar has sunk Titanic?
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The National Wildlife Federation has an annual photography competition. The image above was the Grand Prize winner in the “Professional” category in 2009.
While watching a group of bald eagles that had congregated at a local cattle feed lot, Palmer noticed the raptors were climbing into the air to catch starlings and blackbirds—not necessarily typical prey for the large birds.
At the link are the winning photographs in about a dozen other categories.
Link.
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The Geekologie writer suggests that this mysterious object in the sky of a Google Street View image is the hole from which the “Four Unicornmen of the Apocalypse” will emerge. It’s from outside of Porto, a city in northern Portugal town in western Spain.
What do you think that it is?
Link via Geekologie
UPDATE: There is a city in northern Portugal called Porto and a town in western Spain called Porto. Which one is it? A ferocious debate rages in the comments.
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You Drive What? is a photoblog of unusual cars, tricked out, pimped out, and worn out:
Youdrivewhat.com is here to show the rest of the world what (for some reason) you feel is an awesome ride. You decided to paint your car like a child’s cereal character; you may find yourself on youdrivewhat.com. Did you turn you van into a convertible? Then this is your new home. Oh, you glued 400 action figures on your car….guess where a photo of your creep-mobile will show up? At youdrivewhat.com you will find a collection of all the hilarious, crazy, creepy, broken-down, beat-up, and utterly unbelievable cars, rides, whips, and whatever else people use to get from point A to point B.
Now who wants to go halvsies with me on a llama?
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Interspecies Friends is a photoblog all about animals of different species either being friends or at least not killing each other. Sometimes, even predator-prey relationships are nullified by sheer cuteness, as with this rat and cat.
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Photo: gammaraybots [Flickr]
What do you get when you mash up Charles M. Schulz’s comic Peanuts with Star Wars? Behold the Charlie Brown TIE Fighter by Tom Torrey: Link – via The Zeray Gazette
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Photo: daryl mitchell [Flickr]
Why waste all those shells from your lobster dinner when you can turn them into art? Here’s Lobster Man, as spotted by Daryl Mitchell in Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada.
That is all. Now you know what’ll be in my nightmare tonight! Link – via Rue The Day
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Craftster user gorgaus, as an art installation, put on a fashion show in which the women participating wore enormous plastic sleepy-eye doll heads.
They are made from fibreglass. They are quite light, they have a stem at the back of the neck that leads down to the waist where there is a back brace so all the weight is on their hips. The wigs are heavier than the heads, especially the geisha style one. They used dancers instead of models cause they thought they might have more strength and balance.
More pictures at the link. And in the comment thread, gorgaus provides detailed technical descriptions.
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You may have seen the Star Wars Arrested Development parody, now it’s Seinfeld’s chance thanks to artist Julie Bell. The best part is George just sitting on an R2D2 trash can.
Link via Laughing Squid
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It’s almost a shame to eat something as beautiful as the mushrooms on the most beautiful list… of course, most of them are probably poisonous, so you probably wouldn’t want to anyway.
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