Reminiscent of the amazing musically coordinated fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas the Burj Dubai fountains named “Dubai Fountains” certainly are impressive. This $217 million project was built by the same California based company WET Design (whose website I highly suggest checking out as it is beautiful!) that created the Bellagio Hotel’s fountains. This record setting fountain uses 6,600 lights with 50 coloured projectors and is able to fire the water into the air at as astonishing 150m or 490ft! The music played in this video is Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s “Time to Say Goodbye”.

The first video I found through Dark Roasted Blend (check out the rest of the site!)

This second video is by far my favourite and allows you to see a much closer view of the fountains at work. The song used in the performance is called “Baba Yetu”, created by Christopher Tin which I’m sure some of you Civ 4 fans will most certainly recognize as the opening track to the game!

The New York Times has an interactive graph that plots the jobless rate for different groups of Americans compared to the average for all those who are unemployed. Mouseover to find lines for different races, ages, and levels of education. In this screenshot, the label refers to the very faint red line above the dotted line which represents the average jobless rate. Link -via Metafilter

Three computer scientists at Colorado University programmed several Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to act like Pac-Man and the ghosts which chase him. Jack Elston, Cory Dixon, and Maciej Stachura did so in order to demonstrate the unmanned aerial system that they are developing. Click on the link for more videos, pictures, and schematics for this project.

Link via CrunchGear

The British Royal Mail service commissioned Studio Dempsey to create first class stamps with classic albums covers. The covers include albums from Blur, New Order, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, David Bowie, The Clash, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay -but no Beatles.

The final selection of ten sleeves (which perhaps oddly doesn’t feature one of The Beatles’ album covers) will appear on a set of 10 stamps that will launch on January 7, 2010 – and the stamps will be uniquely shaped, as shown in these images, to accommodate a glimpse of a vinyl disc poking out of each record sleeve.

Link – via babycreativeblog

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Babycreative.

In Sherman and Clore’s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection did not ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.

And they did, so quickly that the connections could not possibly be deliberate. When moral words were printed in white and immoral words in black, reaction time was significantly faster than when words of virtue were black and sin were white. Just as we unthinkingly—almost unconsciously—“know” a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black and that grace and virtue are white.

The researchers conducted further tests and determined that this color-moral association may stem from concepts of physical cleanliness:

This result offers pretty convincing evidence in itself that the connection between black and bad is not just a metaphor we all have learned over the years, but rather it is deeply associated with our ancient fear of filth and contagion. But Sherman and Clore wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. The researchers tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.

Link | Image: Republic Pictures

Image: Robert Chaplin

Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s smallest book. Each page measures about 11 by 15 microns:

The Robert Chaplin/SFU Nanobook project was produced using a focused-gallium-ion beam with the assistance of Dr. Li Yang, and Dr. Karen L. Kavanagh of Simon Fraser University, located at the summit of Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby, BC. The gallium beam has a minimum diameter of 7 nanometers, and was programmed to carve the space surrounding each letter of a book. The book was typeset in block letters with a resolution of 40 nanometers, and is made up of 30 microtablets, each carved on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon. The entire collection of microtablets is contained within an area of 69 x 97 microns square with an average size of tablet being 11 x 15 microns square.

Link via Make

YouTube Link with HD

William Hoffman is a New York filmmaker who put this video together and uploaded it last August.  It’s finally getting some viral activity, and rightfully so.  It’s “a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.”

I do enjoy a perfectly realized edit, and this one’s full of them.  William’s website.

“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.

Up until now, most historians thought this was mostly just a story, but the discovery of a massive collection of bones and silver and bronze jewelry in the desolate Sahara Desert has them reconsidering.

Link

Link via Urlesque | Image: WENN

Image: Sean McNally

Sean McNally, a 15th-level artist and 7th-level animator, created a resume that looks like a character sheet from Dungeons & Dragons. He claims to have a Base Art Bonus of +11, of which I am skeptical. But maybe a little exaggeration is expected on a resume. Click on the link for a larger image.

Link via Geekologie

The EU is proposing a different type of “train,” which would be comprised of a mixture of trucks, buses, and passenger cars closely following one another in a slipstream, much as race cars do at professional tracks.  The project’s acronym is SARTRE (SAfe Road TRains for the Environment).

The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle.

The idea, of course, is to improve fuel economy and to relieve congestion by allowing a greater number of vehicles to occupy a given area of the roadway.  But notice how this concept also solves the problem of texting-while-driving, by removing the “driving” component and allowing the driver to spend his/her entire time texting.  Sounds perfectly logical to me.  What could possibly go wrong?

Link

Photo: Icebridge (NASA)

Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, and that’s with all of its ice.  There is a land mass beneath, which looks like this.  Twitter user Icebridge made this image to illustrate just how large our most unvisited continent actually is.

Conversely, “it is estimated that at any given time there are (only) 1,000 people ‘living’ in Antarctica, but this varies depending on the season.” (from Answerbag.)

Link

At one time or another, everyone wishes they could control a bowling ball after it leaves his/her hand. The RC900 remote-control bowling ball makes that dream come true! A weight in a threaded shaft inside the ball determines its direction, and the user controls the weight. The purpose of the ball is to give young children a bit of success as they learn to bowl, and to help disabled people paticipate in the sport. Don’t even think of sneaking the RC900 into a competition! Link (with video) -via Gizmodo

If it looks like mechanical failure is the cause, and you need just a bit more data off that drive before it’s gone for good, try sticking it in the freezer until it’s good and cold, then let it reach room temperature again and give it another try. This passed-around tech geek tip works, as a last resort, because when worn-out mechanical parts fail to connect and align properly, contracting them with cold, then allowing them to expand again, can sometimes restore things to barely-working order just long enough to give you a little more time before the funeral.

You’ll also find quick fixes for stripped screw holes, broken light bulbs, and even hangovers! Link -via the Presurfer

What if The Matrix had been produced in the silent film era? This skit is from the Russian group Bolshaya Raznitsa, which translates to Big Difference. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

Can you distinguish whether a name belongs to a cat litter brand or an actual military operation? That’s the challenge in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I didn’t know any of the answers, because they all sounded like military operations to me, but I managed to score 70%. Link

Psst! Got a smart friend? Is he brainier than the average ursine? If so, here’s the perfect T-shirt: Brainier Than the Average Bear, only from the Neatorama Shop: Link

Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander. Photo via Wikipedia

I miss Carl Sagan. Sagan's enthusiasm for science and his knack for translating difficult scientific concepts into simple explanations that many can understand, made him a popular figure. He was an ambassador for science, if you will, as he had inspired many people to study science (yours truly included).

Today would've been his 75th birthday, so in honor of the great astronomer, scientist and author, Neatorama presents 10 Neat Facts About Carl Sagan:

1. Carl Sagan's First Book About Stars

When Carl was five years old, he wondered about the stars: what were they? Unsatisfied with the answers he got from his friends and from adults he knew, Carl went to the library and asked for a book about stars. The librarian handed him ... a book on celebrities! In Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life, Carl explained how his fascination with the cosmos began:

I gave it back to her and said, "This wasn't the kind of stars I had in mind." She thought this was hilarious, which humiliated me further. She then went and got the right kind of book. I took it—a simple kid's book. I sat down on a little chair—a pint-sized chair—and turned the pages until I came to the answer.

And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... And while I didn't know the [inverse] square law of light propagation or anything like that, still, it was clear to me that you would have to move that Sun enormously far away, further away than Brooklyn [for the stars to appears as dots of light]....

The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. [It was] kind of a religious experience. [There] was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

2. Sagan vs. Apple

In 1994, Apple chose the internal codename "Carl Sagan" for its PowerMac 7100. Though it was meant as an homage to Carl (and an in-joke that the computer would make Apple "billions and billions" of dollars), they also used the codenames "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion" for the Power Mac 6100 and 8100, respectively. When Carl found out that he was being put alongside scientific hoaxes, he sued Apple. Though Apple won the suit, the codename was changed to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) ... which prompted yet another lawsuit from the p.o.'d astronomer! Apple won again, but their lawyers demanded the engineers change the codename one more time, which they did. The PowerMac 7100 was known by its final codename LAW, which stood for "Lawyers Are Wimps."

3. Spaced Out ... On Pot!

In 1969, Carl Sagan wrote under the Pseudonym "Mr. X" about the virtues of cannabis. Harvard Medical School Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon has the article in his website Marijuana Uses:

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . .

4. The Politics of Science

Anyone who has ever worked in a university or an academic institution would know this, but most people assume that because science relies on logic and careful reasoning, scientists would behave in a clinical and dispassionate way. Nothing is farther from the truth.

Carl's popularity had backfired on him not once but twice. In 1967, he was denied tenure at Harvard because his colleagues bristled at "what they perceived as self-aggrandizement and pandering to the public."

In 1992, Carl was again disappointed when his application for membership at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences was denied. Ironically, he received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the Academy for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare."

In both instances, Carl persevered and succeeded to overcome setbacks resulting from the politics of science.

5. Billions and Billions

Carl Sagan actually never used the term "billions and billions." His exact words on the series Cosmos were "billions upon billions" (which, for all practical purpose, is pretty much the same thing).

So how did "billions and billions" came to be? We can blame Johnny Carson:

[YouTube Clip]

Carl was a good sport - his final book, titled Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of the catch phrase and noted that Johnny Carson himself was an amateur astronomer.

6. The Sagan Unit

A sagan is defined as at least 4 billion (the smallest amount in "billions" is two billion, so "billions and billions" equal 4 billion). It is estimated that the Milky Way galaxy has 100 sagan (400,000,000,000) stars.

Previously on Neatorama: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements

7. Pioneer Plaques

Many people know that Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecrafts carry metal plaques that carry a message from mankind. But not many know that it was Carl Sagan, together with Frank Drake (yes, the man who came up with the Drake Equation that attempts to estimate the number of alien civilization in our galaxy), that designed the plaque. The controversial artwork, which featured a nude man and woman, was drawn by Sagan's then-wife Linda Salzman Sagan.

After the Pioneer Program, NASA put a Golden Record aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts, which included a greeting "Hello from the children of planet Earth." That was recorded by then six-year-old Nick Sagan, Carl's son.

8. Carl Sagan Memorial Station ... on Mars!

Nick Sagan grew up to become a novelist and screenwriter. He wrote an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise titled "Terra Prime," which included a CGI of Carl Sagan Memorial Station plaque on Mars.

Image via Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki

The plaque above is fictional - but the Carl Sagan Memorial Station is real. It's the formal name of the NASA Mars Pathfinder lander, which delivered the Sojourner rover that explored the Red Planet.

9. Sagan Asteroid

Just in case a unit of measurement and a memorial station on Mars aren't enough, Carl had another thing named after him: a small asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was named the 2709 Sagan.

10. Sagan's Last Interview

In 1996, not long before his death, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose, in which he discussed the rise of pseudoscience in the United States. He looked gaunt in the interview, but as you can see, he remained as sharp as ever:

[Google Video]

Bonus: Carl Sagan A Glorious Dawn Auto-Tune

This has been on Neatorama before, but it's so good that we just have to feature it again for those of you who might've missed it. Behold, Carl Sagan's A Glorious Dawn auto-tuned:

[YouTube Clip]

__________

I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is a woefully inadequate post about one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived. We didn't talk about Cosmos (because it's so popular, I opted for the more obscure Sagan trivia), his books and Pulitzer Prize, Carl Sagan Day and so on. If you have a Sagan story, please share it in the comments.

Ever wonder what would happen if you combined true musical talent with a popular video game like Rockband? This is what you would get.

While taking a break from practicing one day, MsFrizzyHair, a recent college graduate with music degree had a bizarre thought as she watched her brother play Rockband. "I wonder if that microphone would pick up a flute…" Check out the video to see the answer!

– via youtube

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lennie02.

At midnight East Germany’s Communist rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

They surged through cheering and shouting and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side.

Ecstatic crowds immediately began to clamber on top of the Wall and hack large chunks out of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) barrier.

Link | Timeline of the Wall | Interactive Map of the Wall | PBS Documentary | Image: U.S. Department of State

34-year-old Teane Harris of Bensenville, Illinois had planned a big wedding, but it was called off when the groom backed out only a week before the big event. Harris and her mother were told it was too late to get their deposit back for the reception. What to do? Harris decided to use the facilities and all the wedding supplies to throw a party for the Asbury Court Retirement Community.

Just like that, the Halloween party planned for the 340 residents at Asbury Court turned into a lavish banquet, with a sumptuous meal, elegant flowers, sparkling masks right out of a masquerade ball, and a disc jockey who kept the mood lively.

“We knew we weren’t going to be getting our money back,” says Harris, during a phone interview from Hawaii, where she followed through with her honeymoon trip. “So after doing damage control and not wanting anything to go to waste, we looked for somebody who would benefit from it, and we saw the retirement center.”

Asbury officials still marvel over the turn of events, and of the selfless act by Harris. On Friday, they mounted a marquis sign thank you to Harris to show their appreciation.

“It was out of the blue; she knows no one here,” says Eric Haugan, resident services director. “And yet when she came to the party herself, she had all these grandmas wanting to give her a hug. She just broke down.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Illustrator Paul Rogers puts together six drawings of iconic images for each classic movie. Your challenge is to name the movies from the drawings. You don’t get a clue as to the plot, the dialog, or the actors. I could name most of them; I suspect that the others are movies I haven’t seen. Link -via reddit

Image: De Urbanisten and Studio Marco Vermeulen

Two Dutch architects want to alter the storm drainage system of the city of Rotterdam to redirect water into playgrounds. The water will be used to fill fanciful ponds and moats for children to play in/around:

In Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen’s proposal, rainwater runoff isn’t funneled into a complex system of underground pipes, a system that is rather expensive to build and maintain, but is managed instead through a network of surface reservoirs, the Waterpleinen, or Watersquares. These storage spaces will be dry for most of the year, but during storm events, they will collect water from the surrounding neighborhood. If one reaches capacity, excess water will overflow into another basin. After the rain, the collected water will slowly recede into nearby bodies of water or seep into the soil.

So instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old.

Link via Fast Company

Photo: Dalia Birske

Martynas Birskys of the Vilnius-based design studio DaDaDa sells slippers made out of bread. For your comfort, you can select from various sizes and grains. It’s hard to argue with his sales pitch “eatable…dries itself… made from bread…first in fashion…needs no pressing…feels good in dry climate …won’t sag.”

Link via GearFuse

Image: GeekStir

Luis Diaz Santis and Magaly Guerrero Ramierz sent out invitations to their wedding depicting themselves as 8-bit characters in a two-player combat video game. Chris Jacob of Gizmodo suggests that this is a subtle social commentary on modern marriage. Either way, it’s cool, and you can view a picture of the groom proposing in binary at the link.

Link via Gizmodo

Ford is developing a seat belt that inflates when the car detects a crash. In The Wall Street Journal, Matthew Dolan writes:

Its inflatable rear seat belts spread crash forces over five times more area of the body than conventional seat belts, said Sue Cischke, Ford group vice president of sustainability, environmental and safety engineering

Each belt’s tubular air bag inflates with cold compressed gas, which flows through a specially designed buckle from a cylinder housed below the seat. The inflatable belt’s accordion-folded bag breaks through the belt fabric as it fills with gas, expanding sideways across the occupant’s body. It looks something like a water wing children wear in the pool before they know how to swim.

Link via Popular Science

Ben Miller of Urlesque has compiled several pop, rock, and metal songs performed by harpists, such as CKania13’s rendition of Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” The other videos are selections from Journey, Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Lenny Kravitz.

Link | Previously on Neatorama: Harptallica

Longcat is long, and warm, too because he’s a scarf made of fleece, felt, and polyfil. Also available in Tacgnol style (black). This internet meme is brought to you by artist Heather Dugger. Link -via The Daily What

The Outback town of Kulin, Australia, welcomes many tourists for the annual Kulin Bush Races in October. In the days leading up to the races, locals construct fanciful horses out of all kinds of materials to entertain those who travel the highway leading to the Jilakin Racetrack. This has become known as the Tin Horse Highway. See more tin horses placed in funny situations at Holtie’s House. Link

An Amazon search brought me to Ivan Bunin’s Collected Stories.  The first story is called “The Scent of Apples,” and I learn on the first page that antonovka means autumn apple:

“I remember a fresh and quiet morning…The big garden, its dry and thinned out leaves turning golden in the early light.  I remember the avenue of maples, the delicate smell of the fallen leaves, and the scent of autumn apples — antonovkas –that mix of honey and fall freshness. The air’s so clear it seems there is no air at all…”

There is a long  history of miniature books in Russia, and you can read more about it here.

Via Nag On The Lake.