Transit officials have been touting the benefits of public transit for years and apparently these goats got the message. But when they tried to board the C-Tran bus in Vancouver (update 11/18/08 – that’s Vancouver, Washington, by the way, as pointed out in the comment – Thanks John Milligan!), they were turned away, as you can see in this surveillance video.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Tiffany!
Let’s have a little fun: punniest comment will win a free Funny T-Shirt from the Neatorama Shop. One entry per comment, please. You can enter as many as you’d like. Good luck!
This Thanksgiving, after fighting the long lines at the airport, navigating the parking lot that used to be called freeways, and defusing family tension at the dinner table, everyone could use a little humor. So wear this T-shirt and hope that your family sees the humor in it and give you an extra serving of turkey!
Every geek knows that "A" is for Apple, but I bet not many know that Apple had a "third founder" who gave up his stake for $800 (it would've been worth at least $17 billion today). Or that Cisco was named for San Francisco. Or that Twitter used to be called twttr? Let's take a stroll through the A to Z of computing trivia, Neatorama style!
If you think that Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak, think again: there was a "third founder" of Apple.
In 1976, Ronald Wayne gave up his 10% stake of the fledgling company for
$800 because he was worried that the company would fold and that he would
be liable for debts incurred by the other partners (at the time Apple
wasn't a corporation yet). Of course Apple became the big company, and
Wayne's stake could've been worth as much as $17 billion today.
Originally, Research in Motion wanted its wireless messaging device to
have the word "e-mail" in its name. When RIM hired Lexicon Branding
to do a little research, they found out that people associate "e-mail"
with work and therefore can raise blood pressure. Someone said that the
buttons look like small berries, so they decided to name it BlackBerry.
Evolution of Cisco logo, by Design Maven via Speak
Up
Cisco System was named after the city San Francisco
(the founders of the company worked for Stanford University, which is
just a couple of town over). Indeed, first Cisco System's logo was the
Golden Gate Bridge. (See also: Evolution
of Tech Logos)
In 2003, after three years of playing the Dell Dude,
actor Ben Curtis
was arrested while attempting to buy a bag of marijuana. People immediately
parodied his tag line "Dude, you're getting a Dell" to "Dude,
you're getting a cell." Though charges were dropped, Dell canceled
the Dell Dude commercials. Curtis was working
as a waiter in 2007 but he's making a come back with a (supposedly)
upcoming play "Dude!
I'm Going to Hell"
In 1977, the US Postal Service recognized that email would pose a serious
challenge to its monopoly on delivering mail. At first, it wanted to ban
emails (like it did mails delivered by underground pneumatic tubes), but
the FCC objected and the Postal Rate Commission refused. So it created
an experimental email service called E-COM ("Electronic
Computer-Originated Mail"). The idea was simple: You send the emails,
which the post office would then print out and deliver as physical letters
at the price of 26¢ each (it was said that it actually
cost the USPS $5 to deliver the message). Oh, and the service was
one-way. If something went wrong, you'd get an error message delivered
two days later ... in form of a letter! Needless to say, E-COM failed.
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN programming language,
said this about his invention:
"Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing
programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer),
writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on
a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
HP could've easily have been PH. In 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave
Packard formed HP in a Palo Alto garage, they flipped a coin to decide
the name of the company. Packard actually won the toss, but decided to
name it Hewlett-Packard instead of Packard-Hewlett.
In 1999, Al Gore was asked by Wolf Blitzer what distinguished him from
other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he famously
said: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took
the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore was immediately
ridiculed for claiming to have invented the Internet.
Not to be outdone, Dan Quayle said "If Al Gore invented the Internet,
I invented spell check."
JPEG stands for the Joint
Photographic Experts Group, who created the method of compression
for photo images. Like all image processing algo, JPEG was tested on the
standard test image of "Lenna",
a cropped photo of a 1972 Playboy magazine centerfold Lena Soderberg.
Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth offers to
pay a reward of $2.56 for the first finder of errors in his books. Why
$2.56? Because 256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar, which is sort of
a joke that only a programmer can appreciate. But that's okay since that's
Knuth's target audience anyhow. Indeed, Knuth
reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies,"
according to MIT's Technology Review. If the name Don Knuth sounds
familiar, that's because we've featured his Potrzebie
System of Weights and Measure before on Neatorama. (see also: Fun
and Unusual Units of Measurements)
At first, Linus Torvalds
wanted to name his new operating system Freax, a portmanteau of "freak,"
"free," and "x" (for Unix). A co-worker thought that
it was a horrible name and renamed it Linux without telling
him.
In 1996, Monty Widenius
and David Axmark created MySQL, a relational database
management system that would later become one of the most widely used
software in the world, powering many of the web's largest sites (WordPress,
Neatorama's blogging engine, uses it). What most people don't know is
that the "My" in MySQL doesn't refer to "me" - it's
actually the name of Monty's daughter My.
The
term newbie or noob, originally thought to be from British
public-school and military slang "new boy," was first spotted
in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre as an insult to a clueless newcomer.
(N
is for Newbie Onesies/Kids T-Shirt at the Neatorama Shop)
In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates were working on a CIA-funded
project codenamed Oracle (because the CIA believed that
it would give them answers to all questions). The project failed, but
Larry and friends took the idea and used it to create a company that would
later become the Oracle Corporation.
And you thought you were clever to do a derivative of Blink-182 as your
password!
The keyboard you're using now is most likely set in a QWERTY
layout (named for the first 6 characters of the top row of letters). This
layout was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1874 because people were
typing too fast on typewriters back then, thus causing the machine to
jam. Sholes did frequency analysis on letter-pairs and separated pairs
of letters that tend to cause mechanical jams when typed in quick successions
like TH. Sholes' new layout was designed to slow down typists (technically,
he aimed to improve typing speed by reducing jams - and indeed,
that's exactly what happened.)
ROT13: Jung qbrf
Whyvhf Pnrfne unir nalguvat gb qb jvgu zbqrea qnl Vagrearg? Pnrfne vairagrq
n fvzcyr rapelcgvba
zrgubq gung orpnzr dhvgr cbchyne va Hfrarg arjftebhcf nf n zrna gb
uvqr fcbvyref, chapuyvarf naq chmmyr fbyhgvbaf. Gur vqrn vf fvzcyr: ercynpr
n cvrpr bs grkg jvgu yrggref 13 cynprf shegure nybat va gur nycunorg ("ebgngr
ol 13 cynprf" be EBG13). Gur travhf bs gur zrgubq
vf gung orpnhfr gurer ner 26 yrggref va gur Ratyvfu nycunorg, gur fnzr
rapelcgvba zrgubq jvyy qrpelcg n ebgngrq grkg!
Before Digg, there was Slashdot.
The technology-related news website was so huge that getting linked from
it meant a massive increase of traffic that would cripple smaller web
servers. Webmasters call this the Slashdot effect, which is the granddaddy
of similar terms Digg effect, Farked,
or Drudged.
The very first Twitter message was sent by its co-creator
Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006: "just
setting up my twttr." That's not a typo - twttr was the original
codename for the project (inspired by Flickr). At least twttr was better
than one of the first names they were considering for it: twitch.
I'm including USB (Universal Serial Bus) here so I can
play this awesome "Intel
Star" commercial starring Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the
USB. Watch it and weep:
Before the World Wide Web, there was Gopher
(note: it's gopher://, not http:// - you'd need Firefox to see it) and
Veronica was its search engine. Why Veronica? It's because
the first search engine of the Internet, a tool that indexes FTP archives,
is called Archie. Officially, Veronica is an acronym for "Very Easy
Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives."
Call it user-generated content, Bubble
2.0, millionth-word
in the English language or whatever you want, but know this: Web
2.0 is trademarked
by CMP Media (who partnered with O'Reilly in producing the Web 2.0 conference)
in 2004. In 2006, they sent a cease-and-desist nastygram to the Irish
non-profit organization IT@Cork for using the word in the name of their
conference and sparked a kerfuffle
over the ownership of "Web 2.0"
What's the company that invented the personal computer, graphical user
interface, the computer mouse, but didn't bother to market them because
it couldn't see their commercial potentials? Yep, Xerox.
In 1979, Steve Jobs of Apple visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and
saw the Xerox Alto workstation. Several years later, Jobs brought the
Apple Macintosh to market.
When YouTube was sold to Google for $1.7 billion, the
spotlight was on Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. But did you know that there
was a third
YouTube founder? That's right: Jawed Karim left the company to become
a graduate student at Stanford University. He did, however, fare better
than Ronald Wayne - Jawed got about $64 million worth in stock. Jawed
also uploaded the very
first video on YouTube on April 23, 2005:
If you own a PC in the late 80s/early 90s, then you're savvy about the
ZIP file format. Back then, disk space was at a premium
(a regular 3-1/2" HD floppy disk can only hold 1.44 MB worth of data)
so compression was a big thing. In 1986, Phil Katz created PKZIP (Yep,
PK is his initials) and released it as a shareware. He chose the name
"zip" to imply that his software was faster than other compression
formats available at the time. Sadly, Phil, the alcoholic computer genius,
died alone in a cheap hotel cradling
an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.
Forget the CIA, Frank Warren is probably the world's best keeper of secrets.
In 2004, Frank started a project called PostSecret,
in which he printed 3,000 blank postcards inviting people to mail him
their secrets anonymously. He handed out the postcards to strangers, left
them between book pages in bookstores and libraries, and even left some
on park benches. He got 100 back and posted the secrets on his blog.
Apparently, that struck a nerve: PostSecret went viral and since he started
it, Frank has received nearly half a million postcards in his mailbox
and over a quarter billion visitor to www.postsecret.com.
The website spawned various exhibitions, events and PostSecret books,
as well as various
parodies (a true measure of one's popularity in today's world, I'm
afraid).
The latest book, PostSecret:
Confessions on Life, Death, and God
was inspired by a collection of more than 300 postcards that were part
of the "All Faiths Beautiful" exhibit at the American Visionary
Art Museum. The book contains never-before-seen secrets that, as Frank
so eloquently wrote, "expose the common landscape of our private
lives - from our embarrassing desires to our hidden acts of kindness;
from the private prayers of atheists to the voiceless doubt of believers."
Frank, a Neatoramanaut himself (that's him wearing one of our T-shirts),
has kindly agreed to sit down for a virtual interview with us. You are
invited to submit comments and questions for Frank - we'll pick 5 of the
best comments/questions to get a free autographed PostSecret:
Confessions on Life, Death, and God
book.
Neatorama: Congratulations on the new book (it's fantastic,
by the way, I was engrossed reading it for a couple of hours) - did you
ever think that PostSecret would be as popular as it is today when you
started it?
Frank Warren: No, I have been shocked. In addition to
the five PostSecret books, the website has had over 250,000,000 hits.
I knew that if I could earn people's trust and build a collection of
creative and authentic secrets it would be very special for me. It's great
to know so many others appreciate these extraordinary confessions too.
Neatorama: Why do you think it has been so successful?
Frank: I think people find some of the funny and sexual
postcards amusing but eventually you come across a secret that you might
recognize as one of your own. One you might be hiding from yourself. I
think it is those moments of epiphany and empathy that have allowed the
PostSecret community to grow.
Neatorama: Your latest book focuses on life, death,
and God. Can you tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind the topic?
Frank: PostSecret started as a lark, maybe even a prank,
but over the years the secrets have become more meaningful to me. This
new book, like all the books have never-before-seen secrets that touch
on sexual taboos and some outlandish humor, but more than the other books,
the new book has postcards that share some our deepest and most private
feelings about the greatest mysteries of life. The parts that are always
there beneath the surface but we sometimes forget about during our everyday
lives.
Neatorama: What are some of your favorite PostSecret
secrets?
Neatorama: It's been five years since you started PostSecret
- how has it changed your life?
Frank: Knowing all these secret stories that are happening
in so many of our lives makes life, people, and riding the subway more
interesting.
Neatorama: What's next for you and PostSecret?
Frank: My favorite part of the project now is traveling
to college campuses and sharing the stories behind the secrets at live
events where audience members can share their own secrets - without anonymity,
but sometimes with great emotion.
From PostSecret Confessions on Life, Death and God:
Frank has kindly offered 5 free autographed copies of the book
for a giveaway. Got any questions for Frank? 5 lucky commenters
with the most interesting questions and/or comments will win a copy of
the book (I'll post Frank's replies as an update).
With all the commotion over swine flu, who knew that the culprit – H1N1 Influenza Virus – could be so … cute? Here’s the popular Giant Microbe plush toy based on cause of the global flu pandemic. Get yours before the second wave of the pandemic hits!
Featured Item: every order will get a Free Mystery Bonus. It’s for a limited time only, so get yours today!
Don't let the title fool you - The Math Book is a thoroughly enjoyable
"walk" through the history of mathematics with each milestone
narrated by Pickover in a short and sweet fashion (and surprisingly, with
very little equations) that even non-mathemagicians like myself can enjoy.
If you've ever heard the terms Bessel functions, Transcendental numbers,
and Riemann hypothesis, and want to know more, then this is the book for
you.
Below is an excerpt from the book (selecting which ones to show was a
hard thing to do - there were just so many interesting articles!):
Cicada-Generated Prime Numbers
Cicadas
are winged insects that evolved around 1.8 million years ago during the
Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers advanced and retreated across North America.
Cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend most of their lives below
the ground, feeding on the juices of plant roots, and then emerge, mate,
and die quickly. These creatures display a startling behavior: Their emergence
is synchronized with periods of years that are usually the prime numbers
13 and 17. (A prime number is an integer such as 11, 13, and 17 that has
only two integer divisors: 1 and itself.) During the spring of their 13th
or 17th year, these periodical cicadas construct an exit tunnel. Sometimes
more than 1.5 million individuals emerge in a single acre; this abundance
of bodies may have survival value as they overwhelm predators such as
birds that cannot possibly eat them all at once. (Photo: Joelmills [Wikipedia])
Some researchers have speculated that the evolution of prime-number life
cycles occurred so that the creatures increased their chances of evading
shorter-lived predators and parasites. For example, if these cicadas had
12-year life cycles, all predators with life cycles of 2, 3, 4, or 6 years
might more easily find the insects. Mario Markus of the Max Planck Institute
for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and his coworkers discovered
that these kinds of prime-number cycles arise naturally from evolutionary
mathematical models of interactions between predator and prey. In order
to experiment, they first assigned random life-cycle durations to their
computer-simulated populations. After some time, a sequence of mutations
always locked the synthetic cicadas into a stable prime-number cycle.
Of course, this research is still in its infancy and many questions remain.
What is special about 13 and 17? What predators or parasites have actually
existed to drive the cicadas to these periods? Also, a mystery remain
as to why, of the 1,500 cicada species worldwide, only a small number
of the genus Magicicada are known to be periodical.
Peter Guthrie Tait (1831 - 1901) - A simple yet intriguing set of interlocking
objects of interest to mathematicians and chemists is formed by Borromean
rings - three mutually interlocked rings named after the Italian Renaissance
family who used them on its coat of arms in the fifteenth century. (Image:
Theon [Wikipedia])
Notice that Borromean rings have no two rings that are linked, so if
we cut any one of the rings, all three rings come apart. Some historians
speculate that the ancient ring configurations once represented the three
families of Visconti, Sforza, and Borromeo, who formed a tenuous union
through intermarriages. The rings also appear in 1467 in the Church of
San Pancrazio in Florence. Even older, triangular versions were used by
the Vikings, one famous example of which was found on a bedpost of a prominent
woman who died in 834.
The rings appear in mathematical context in the 1876 paper on knots by
Scottish mathematical physicist Peter Tait. Because two choices (over
or under) are possible for each ring crossing, 26 = 64 possible
interlaced patterns exist. If we take symmetry into account, only 10 of
these patterns are geometrically distinct.
Mathematicians now know that we cannot actually construct a true set
of Borromean rings with flat circles, and in fact, you can see
this for yourself if you try to create the interlocked rings out of wire,
which requires some deformation or kinks in the wires. In 1987, Michael
Freedman and Richard Skora proved the theorem stating that Borromean rings
are impossible to construct with flat circles.
In 2004, UCLA chemists created a molecular Borromean ring compound that
was 2.5 nanometers across and that included six metal ions. Researchers
are currently contemplating ways in which they may use molecular Borromean
rings in such diverse fields as spintronics (a technology that exploits
electron spin and charge) and medical imaging.
Golden Ratio
Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (1445 - 1517) - In 1509, Italian mathematician
Luca Pacioli, a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published Divina
Proportione, a treatise on a number that is now widely known as the
"Golden Ratio." This ratio, symbolized by ,
appears with amazing frequency in mathematics and nature. We can understand
the proportion most easily by dividing a line into two segments so that
the ratio of the whole segment to the longest part is the same as the
ratio of the longer part to the shorter part, or (a+b)/b = b/a = 1.61803
...
If the lengths of the sides of a rectangle are in the golden ratio, then
the rectangle is a "golden rectangle." It's possible to divide
a golden rectangle into a square and a golden rectangle. Next, we can
cut the smaller golden rectangle into a smaller square and golden rectangle.
We may continue this process indefinitely, producing smaller and smaller
golden rectangles.
If we draw a diagonal from the top right of the original rectangle to
the bottom left, then from the bottom right of the baby (that is, the
next smaller) golden rectangle to the top left, the intersection point
shows the point to which all the baby golden rectangles converge. Moreover,
the lengths of the diagonals are in golden ratio to each other. The point
to which all the golden rectangles converge is sometimes called the "Eye
of God."
The golden rectangle is the only rectangle from which a square
can be cut so that the remaining rectangle will always be similar to the
original rectangle. If we connect the vertices in the diagram, we approximate
a logarithmic spiral that "envelops" the Eye of God. Logarithmic
spirals are everywhere - seashells, animal horns, the cochlea of the ear
- anywhere that nature needs to fill space economically and regularly.
A spiral is strong and uses a minimum of materials. While expanding, it
alters its size but never its shape.
Benford's Law
Simon
Newcomb (1835 - 1909), Frank Benford (1883 - 1948) - Benford's Law, also
called the first-digit law or leading-digit phenomenon, asserts that in
various number lists, the digit 1 tends to occur in the leftmost position
with probability of roughly 30 percent, much greater than the expected
11.1 percent that would result if each digit occurred with a 1 to 9 probability.
Benford's law can be observed, for instance, in tables that list populations,
death rates, stock prices, baseball statistics, and the area of rivers
and lakes. Explanations for this phenomenon are very recent. (Photo from
Mark J. Nigrini)
Benford's law is named after Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General
Electric Company who publicized his work in 1938, although it had been
previously discovered by mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb in
1881. Pages of logarithms, with numbers starting with the numerals 1 are
said to be dirtier and more worn by other pages, because the number 1
occurs as the first digit about 30 percent more often than any other.
In numerous kinds of data, Benford determined that the probability of
any number n from 1 through 0 being the first digit is log10
(1 + 1/n). Even the Fibonacci sequence - 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 - follows
Benford's law. Fibonacci numbers are far more likely to start with "1"
than any other digit. It appears that Benford's law applies to any data
that follows a "power law." For example, large lakes are rare,
medium-size lakes are more common, and small lakes are even more common.
Similarly, 11 Fibonacci numbers exist in the range 1 - 100, but only one
in the next three ranges of 100 (101 - 200, 201- 300, 301- 400)
Benford's law has often been used to detect fraud. For example, accounting
consultants can sometimes use the law to detect fraudulent tax returns
in which the occurrence of digits does not follow what would be expected
according to Benford's law.
Karl Menger (1902 - 1985) - The Menger sponge is a fractal object with
an infinite number of cavities - a nightmarish object for any dentist
to contemplate. The object was first described by Austrian mathematician
Karl Menger in 1926. To construct the sponge, we begin with a "mother
cube" and subdivide it into 27 identical smaller cubes. Next, we
remove the cube in the center and the six cubes that share faces with
it. This leaves behind 20 cubes. We continue to repeat the process forever.
The number of cubes increases by 20n, where n
is the number of iterations performed on the mother cube. The second iteration
gives us 400 cubes, and by the time we get to the sixth iteration, we
have 64,000,000 cubes.
Each face of the Menger sponge is called a Sierpinski carpet. Fractal
antennae based on the Sierpinski carpet are sometimes used as efficient
receivers of electromagnetic signals. Both the carpets and the entire
cube have fascinating geometrical properties. For example, the sponge
has an infinite surface area while enclosing zero volume.
According to the Institute for Figuring, with each iteration, the Sierpinski
carpet face "dissolves into a foam whose final structure has no area
whatever yet possesses a perimeter that is infinitely long. Like the skeleton
of a beast whose flesh has vanished, the concluding form is without substance
- it occupies a planar surface, but no longer fills it." This porous
remnant hovers between a line and a plane. Whereas a line is one-dimensional
and a plane two-dimensional, the Sierpinski carpet has a "fractional"
dimension of 1.89. The Menger sponge has a fractional dimension (technically
referred to as the Hausdorff Dimension) between a plane and a solid, approximately
2.73, and it has been used to visualize certain models of a foam-like
space-time. Dr. Jeannine Mosely has constructed a Menger sponge model
from more than 65,000 business cards that weights about 150 pounds (70
kilograms).
The Quest for Lie Group E8
E8 graph as a 2-dimensional projection, by Peter McMullen
(image by Claudio Rocchini [wikipedia])
Marius Sophus Lie (1842 - 1899), Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (1847 -
1923) - For more than a century, mathematicians have sought to understand
a vast, 248-dimensional entity, known to them only as E8. Finally,
in 2007, an international team of mathematicians and computer scientists
made use of a supercomputer to tame the intricate beast.
As background, consider the Mysterium Cosmographicum (The
Sacred Mystery of the Cosmos) of Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630), who
was so enthralled with symmetry that he suggested the entire solar system
and planetary orbits could be modeled by Platonic Solids, such as the
cube and dodecahedron, nestled in each other forming layers as if in a
gigantic crystalline onion. These kinds of Keplerian symmetries were limited
in scope and number; however, symmetries that Kepler could have hardly
imagined may indeed rule the universe.
In
the late nineteenth century, the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced
"Lee") studied objects with smooth rotational symmetries, like
the sphere or doughnut in our ordinary three-dimensional space. In three
and higher dimensions, these kinds of symmetries are expressed by Lie
groups. The German mathematician Wilhelm Killing suggested the existence
of the E8 group in 1887. Simpler Lie groups control the shape
of electron orbital and symmetries of subatomic quarks. Larger groups,
like E8, may someday hold the key to a unified theory of physics
and help scientist understand string theory and gravity.
Fokko du Cloux, a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist who was
one of the E8 team members, wrote the software for the supercomputer
and pondered the ramifications of E8 while he was dying of
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and breathing with a respirator. He died
in November 2006, never living to see the end of the quest for E8.
On January 8, 2007, a supercomputer computed the last entry in the table
for E8, which describes the symmetries of a 57-dimensional
object that can be imagined as rotating in 248 ways without changing its
appearance. The work is significant as an advance in mathematical knowledge
and in the use of large-scale computing to solve profound mathematical
problems.
Mathematical Universe Hypothesis
Max
Tegmark (b. 1967) - In this book, we have encountered various geometries
that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Johannes Kepler
modeled the solar system with Platonic Solids such as the dodecahedron.
Large Lie groups, like E8, may someday help us create a unified
theory of physics. Even Galileo in the seventeenth century suggested that
"nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." In
the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner was impressed with the "unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." (Photo: MIT
Physics Faculty website)
In 2007, Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark published scientific
and popular articles on the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that
states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and that
our universe is not just described by mathematics - it is mathematics.
Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He notes
that when we consider equations like 1 + 1 = 2, the notations for the
numbers are relatively unimportant when compared to the relationship that
are being described. He believes that "we don't invent mathematical
structures - we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing
them."
Tegmark's hypothesis implies that "we all live in a gigantic mathematical
object - one that is more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably
also more complex than objects with intimidating names like Calabi-Yau
manifolds, tensor bundles, and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today's
most advanced theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical
- including you." If this idea seems counterintuitive, this shouldn't
be surprising, because many modern theories, like quantum theory and relativity,
can defy intuition. As mathematician Ronald Graham once said, "Our
brain have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are,
and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us
grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand
dimensions."
__________
Cliff
Pickover is a prolific author, having published more than 40 books, translated
into over a dozen languages, on topics ranging from science and mathematics
to religion, art, history, computers and creativity, human intelligence,
higher dimensions, time travel, and science fiction. He received his Ph.D.
from Yale University's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry,
holds over 50 U.S. patents, and is an associate editor for several scientific
journals. His computer graphics have appeared on the cover of numerous
magazines, and his research has received considerable attention from media
outlets ranging from CNN and WIRED to The New York Times. His website,
pickover.com, receives millions
of visits.
You know all about student pranks – greased pigs in the cafeteria, cows being led upstairs, all of that juvenile stuff. Maybe you’ve even heard about the more complicated college stunts – when M.I.T. students erected a police car on the top of the school’s Great Dome, for example. Its license plate number was pi. Anyway, here are a few lesser-known student stunts. If you’re, um, “inspired” by some of these, I claim no fault… but be sure to take pictures.
Harry Potter and the Scheming Students
In 2007, M.I.T. students pulled two pranks of smaller proportions to commemorate Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Since we’re just a couple of days away from the latest movie, I thought it would be appropriate to mention them. The first appeared a couple of days before the final book came out: a broomstick parking area, complete with broomsticks and appropriate signage, appeared in the Student Street area of the Strata Center. Then on the day of the actual release is my favorite: the Death Eaters acknowledged their presence at the school by setting off an eerie, glowing green Dark Mark on the roof of the Student Center. Awesome. This gives me an idea for Halloween… Photo from Eric Schmiedl.
Screwy Scoreboards
Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.
“We Suck”
During the Harvard-Yale game of 2004, some students took the Great Rose Bowl Prank to the next level. In case you didn’t click the Rose Bowl Prank link above, the story goes something like this: Caltech students handed out a bunch of colored placards to the opposing team and told them that when flipped over at a specified time, it would spell out the name of their team. It didn’t, of course, it spelled out “Caltech.” Yale students repeated this stunt by handing out similar placards to a group of Harvard students and alumni. When they flipped the cards, which they thought would say “GO HARVARD,” it actually spelled out “WE SUCK.” Photo from Yale Daily News
In Cod We Trust
Another one from our friends over at the Museum of Hoaxes – the theft of the Massachusetts Sacred Cod. Yes, Massachusetts has a sacred cod, and they really refer to it as such. The pine likeness is about five feet long and can be found hanging over the entrance to the House of Representatives chamber in the Massachusetts State House – at least, that’s where it is usually found. In 1933, staff at the Harvard Lampoon decided that the fish was theirs. They simply walked into the State House with clippers and a flower box, snipped the Cod down when no one was looking, hid it in the flower box and strolled on out of there like they owned the place. After a couple of days of drama – allegedly the river was even dragged – the Harvard Chief of Police received a tip that he should show up on a certain road at a certain time and follow a certain car. He did, and when the car pulled into a forest, two disguised men jumped out, handed him the Cod, and fled. Photo from MassMoments.org
Rooftop Ride
Pranks aren’t limited to U.S. schools, of course. In June of 1958, Cambridge, England, woke up to find an Austin Seven sitting on top of the Senate House like it was in the middle of a skyward road trip. It took a week for firefighters, police and civil defense units to figure out how to get the thing down – in the end, they decided just to take it apart piece by piece. And the really great thing about the whole prank is that the perpetrators were never caught. That is, until 2008. Fifty years later, 9 of the 12 guys who participated in the prank had a reunion dinner and told the press how they did it. In the middle of the night, they hitched it up to the roof using a makeshift crane of steel cable and scaffolding pieces. Although they had never revealed their identities, the then-Dean suspected the group of men and had a case of champagne sent to them to congratulate them on such an amazing prank. Click the link for a diagram of how they pulled the stunt off. Photo from the Daily Mail.
Rice Gets More Comfortable
In 1988, a group of students at Rice decided that the 2,000 pound statue of William Marsh Rice would probably prefer to face the library instead of having his back to it. So, obviously, they moved it. After a couple of botched attempts, the pranksters got serious. They got plans of the statue from the library to figure out the exact weight, then built some A-frames with one-ton hoists on either side. After practicing with a Toyota a couple of times, they got the hang of things and headed to campus to give Mr. Rice a better view. They were caught moving the A-Frames across campus by some cops, but managed to convince them that they were part of a senior project. They successfully moved the statue, but one of them, Patrick Dyson, was caught and made to pay the cost of moving William back to his rightful position, which for some reason was going to cost up to five times as much as it cost to get him in the new spot. Students rallied behind Dyson, designing t-shirts that said “Where there’s a Willy, there’s a way,” and raised more than enough money to turn Rice back around. Photo from Rice.edu.
Fictional Facebook Fox
Here’s a prank in keeping with our social media-obsessed society. There’s a moral to this one too, if you’re inclined to find one. In 2006, USC basketball player Gabe Pruitt (he’s a Celtic now) was the star during a game against UC Berkeley. He had been cultivating a, um, “relationship” with a girl named Victoria from UCLA – he met her over Facebook and not face to face, but they had been IMing and she sent him pictures. The only problem? She wasn’t real. When Pruitt got up to shoot a free throw, Cal fans started chanting, “Victoria! Victoria!” and promptly followed that up with Pruitt’s personal cell phone number, which he had given to the fictional Victoria. They kept it up for the whole game and Pruitt ended up shooting 3 for 13. There are nine other college sports pranks over at SI.com if you’re interested, including the somewhat sordid history of poor Tommy Trojan over at UCLA. Photo from BigGreenMachine.
There’s not many absolutes in science, so absolute zero – the coldest temperature theoretically possible where entropy is reduced to zero – truly stands out. Indeed, things get really, really weird quantum mechanically as we approach absolute zero. Let’s take a look at what fun we can have going down the thermometer all the way to 0 Kelvin.
Antarctica
Let’s begin with the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica. The temperatures there reach a minimum of about -80 °C (-112 °F) in the winter, with the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.2 °C (-128.6 °F).
In 2006, Anthony and Christine Powell of Frostbytes blog (fantastic photos there, by the way) recorded this video clip of what people in Antarctica consider a terrible weather (euphemistically called "Condition 1") at the McMurdo Station. So, next time you’re having some terrible winter weather where ever you are, just remember this video clip.
Liquid Oxygen
Purdue’s Senior System Engineer George Goble hated waiting for his BBQ to light. So, in 1995, he decided to find the fastest way to achieve barbecue ignition. He tried propane, acetylene torches, and even oxygen-fuel gas or racing fuel (the last one took 30 seconds). But that wasn’t fast enough – he wanted to set the world record of fastest ignition. (Source)
So Goble decided to get serious and reached for liquid oxygen (LOX, boiling point: 90.2 K or -183 °C). He doused 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) onto 60 pounds of charcoal and a smoldering cigarette*. Within 3 seconds about 40 pounds of the charcoal burned and the grill was vaporized.
For his creativity, George won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also attracted the attention of the West Lafayette, Indiana fire department who warned him never to repeat the stunt ever again.
*Actually it’s good that he had a lit cigarette in the pile. Pouring LOX onto unlit charcoal will cause it to explode at about the force of one stick of dynamite per charcoal. If you spill LOX on asphalt, it can detonate. Oh, did we mention that LOX is a rocket fuel? (The orange external tank of the Space Shuttle is filled with it.) Needless to say, don’t try this at home.
Liquid Nitrogen
Nitrogen becomes liquid at 77 K (-196 °C), which is pretty darn cold. Liquid Nitrogen or LN2 is actually a very useful substance: it’s used in the laboratory to freeze things, in hospitals as a medical treatment to freeze and remove warts and skin lesions, and even in restaurants to make alcoholic ice cream.
Wait – make alcoholic ice cream? Yes, it turns out though you can’t freeze alcohol in the freezer (not cold enough), you can do so with liquid nitrogen. Here’s Ferran Adria, Head Chef of elBulli Restaurant using liquid nitrogen to make alcohol sorbets and frozen pistachio puree truffles. Yum!
Going down the temperature scale, we have liquid hydrogen at 20.28 K (-252.87°C). Liquid Hydrogen is good for one thing: fuel. It is a component of rocket fuel, and a perennial contender of zero-emission fuel (I’m looking at you, BMW H2R!)
Liquid hydrogen is used in one of the coolest (literally!) rocket engines ever created by NASA. Here’s the Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine ("CECE" for short), which generates a scalding 5,000 degree steam and a whopping 13,000 lb of thrust yet form icicles at the rim of its nozzle at the same time. It’s quite the fire and ice engine:
CECE is fueled by a mixture of -297 F liquid oxygen and -423 F liquid hydrogen. The engine components are super-cooled to similar low temperatures–and that’s where the icicles come from. As CECE burns its frigid fuels, hot steam and other gases are propelled out the nozzle. The steam is cooled by the cold nozzle, condensing and eventually freezing to form icicles around the rim. (Source)
Things get really, really strange with liquid helium. First of all, it’s the only element that remains liquid down to absolute zero (though you can solidify it with great pressure). It has two form of liquid phases – at 4.2K (-268.95 °C), helium-4 (an isotope of helium) becomes liquid. At 2.17 K, it turns into a superfluid.
And the fun begins: superfluid is weird – it has zero viscosity (a measure of friction for fluids), zero entropy, and infinite thermal conductivity. If a superfluid is placed in an open container, it will creep up the sides and flow over the top. If you rotate the container from stationary, the superfluid inside will never move.
And weirder still: if you place a capillary tube in a pool of superfluid, then shine light on it, you’ll get a frictionless fountain that will flow forever (no friction*, remember?)
*Actually, in bulk fluid, superfluid does have some viscosity whereas in capillary it has no viscosity. Scientists think the explanation of this paradox is that superfluid is composed of two components – the normal component, and the superfluid component. I told you it’s strange.
The Coldest Objects in Space
Quick: what’s the coldest object in space? A frozen comet or a chilly gas cloud? Nope, the coldest object in space is actually a manmade object – the Planck Telescope – launched by the European Space Agency.
As part of experiments to measure the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow of the Big Bang to you and me), the Planck Telescope is cooling its instruments to -273.05 °C or 0.1 °C above absolute zero.
But what about the coldest natural object in space? That title belongs to the Boomerang Nebula (aka the Bow Tie Nebula). The protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth has been spewing ultracold gas for 1,500 years. This cooled down the nebula to a mere 1 K above absolute zero (Source).
Boomerang Nebula, credit: European Space Agency/NASA
The Coldest Substance on Earth
In 2003, Nobel Laureate Wolfang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the coolest man-made substance on Earth: they cooled a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 picoKelvin (0.00000000045 K).
In 2009, Tauno Knuuttila and colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology’s Low Temperature Lab used magnetic refrigeration (yes, using magnets to cool things down – ain’t physics interesting?) to cool rhodium to 100 pK (technically, it’s the temperature for nuclear spin, not its overall thermal energy).
This week’s collaboration with the What is it? Blog is super easy (maybe) – can you guess what the object above is used for?
Two prizes this week: a free Neatorama T-shirt for the first correct guess and another one for the funniest, but incorrect one. Place your guess in the comment section – one guess per comment, though you can enter as many as you can think of. Post no URLs or weblinks – let others play (if you do, you’ll forfeit the prize).
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog – Have fun and good luck!
Update 7/3/09 – the answer is: A golf ball marker, according to the patent:
The object of the invention is to provide an instrument for impressing a distinctive mark, as the initials of a person, upon golf balls and the like, whereby, the ownership of said balls will be indicated and said balls returned to their owners, if lost and later found.
The part with the black handle is used to apply the ink, patent number 1,281,063..
Congrats to the winners: Jared, who got it right first, and Sam Saturday, who got me crackin’ with “pocket mohel”!
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the always-fun What is It? blog. Can you guess what this strange contraption pictured to the left is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please – though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please post no URL or weblinks – let others play (you’ll be disqualified if you do so).
The first person who guessed right will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. If no one gets it right, then the funniest guess will win.
Is it a prototype Dalek? Find more clues at the What is It? Blog. Good luck!
Update 5/8/09 – that was too easy! Here’s the answer: A TaylorMade golf club display stand, these can be found near the indoor practice area in a golf shop. It would not have held a full set, but a selection of different models of the same number club, I saw a display like this in a local shop and it was full of six irons. The clubs were available for customers to hit a few balls with each to compare the performance of the various models.
Congratulations to: Joe #8 who got it right first!
Tired of getting burglarized regularly, a bakery in Split, Croatia, decided to solicit the protection of a certain Hollywood action star. At least in spirit:
The posh bakery shop in Split, Croatia, had often been broken until they put up the poster of the karate champ with a sign saying: "This shop is under the protection of Chuck Norris."
Now the bakery hasn’t had a single burglary for more than a month. "People seem to respect him," said a sales assistant.
Best Chuck Norris Fact in the comment about this post gets a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Ready, Set, Chuckify!
Update 5/13/09 – Congratulations to chrome who won with this bakery-themed Chuck Norris Fact: the bakers briefly switched the bear claws with “chuck norris claws” how ever the lack of survivors ran down business.
Today’s collaboration with the What is it? blog brings us this strange contraption for your guessing pleasure: do you know what this strange tool pictured above is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. The first correct guess will win a free Neatorama T-shirt. If no one got it, then the funniest guess will win.
Contest rules are simple: one guess per comment, please – you can enter as many guesses as you’d like but please post no web links or URLs (let others play!)
Update 4/4/08 – That was too easy! Here’s the answer: A corn sheller, used to remove the kernels from the cob, patent number 605,934. Congrats to Beretta who got it right, right from the get go!
This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and glowing lightsaber zipper pull. Now when your kids tell you their favorite Star Wars movie is “Attack of the Clones” you can nestle the wee-ones snug in simulated Tauntaun fur while regaling them with the amazing tale of “Empire Strikes Back”.
Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don’t change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.
Why has no one thought of this before? I, of course, clicked the “buy now” button. Color me disappointed. Like the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt from last year, this will be the in-demand product Think Geek will actually have to produce sooner or later. Link -via Unique Daily
The economy is tough out there for artists but we have good news for you: we are hiring freelance graphic designers to design nifty T-shirts for the Neatorama Online Store as well as a couple of models (male and female, a couple preferred) to showcase the T-shirts.
Both of these positions are part-time/freelance – you can work from your home (though we prefer that you be in the USA and 18-years-of age or older). Oh, and models get to keep the shirts after they’re done modeling ‘em
Please email Alex for more details – be sure to include this as the subject line "Neatorama T-Shirt Designer Application" or "Neatorama T-Shirt Model Application."
Thank you!
Update 3/18/09: Thank you to everybody who applied! We’re sifting through hundreds of qualified applicants now and will make our decision shortly.
I have to admit, the first time I saw Step Brothers, my reaction was this: “Eh….”
But like all Will Ferrell movies, Step Brothers eventually wormed its way into my brain and now I love it. I felt the same way about Anchorman when I first saw it, and I really disliked Talladega Nights the first time around. Citizen Kane it’s not, but Step Brothers definitely makes me grin. Enjoy the trivia, and let me know what you think about the movie in the comments. Did you hate it or love it?
• The Director of Photography shot the Bourne films, so this is quite a departure for him, I would think.
• The driving scenes were all green screen so the actors would be free to improvise more.
• Richard Jenkins (he plays Dale’s dad) met John C. Reilly when he was only about four. He worked for Reilly’s dad when they both lived in Chicago. The “C” is for Christopher, by the way.
• The commentary was largely musical, which was weird.
• Pablo Cruise offered to play at the premiere when they saw that Will Ferrell was wearing a Pablo Cruise t-shirt in one of the trailers. Honestly, I didn’t even know that Pablo Cruise was a real band. They had a few fits in the ’70s, including “Whatcha Gonna Do?” and “Love Will Find a Way.”
• Writer/director Adam McKay says they shot something like 12 hours of the scene where the new family eats their first dinner together. Both actors commented on how sick they were of chicken nuggets and salty fast food afterward.
• Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins both improvised lots of different backstories for Brennan and Dale. Neither of them were really improv pros before, even though Steenburgen is on Larry David’s unscripted Curb Your Enthusiasm on a regular basis. Steenburgen said that even though Curb is unscripted, it was actually a lot harder shooting Step Brothers. With Curb, she said, although there was no script, there was a loose plot line. Step Brothers would veer so far off of script sometimes that the plot line would take a completely different direction.
• You’d never know it to look at them, but the prosthetic testicles Will Ferrell rubs on Dale’s drums were worth $25,000. Will got to keep them as a present when the movie wrapped.
• There’s a sign for Hugalo’s Pizza in Dale’s bedroom, which is the pizza joint Ricky Bobby (played by Will Ferrell) worked at in Talladega Nights.
• The drumset obsession was based on something that really happened to John C. Reilly – one of his brothers was apparently insanely possessive over his drum set when they were growing up and Reilly (I feel like I need to call him John C. Reilly at all times) used to sneak in and use them.
• John was not supposed to throw the glasses at the windows in the kitchen scene when the stepbrothers are sleepwalking, but Adam McKay encouraged him to when the set designers weren’t listening. When he threw glasses, he actually broke real windows because they weren’t made of breakaway glass since the set wasn’t planned for that purpose. The set designers were not pleased with them.
• John C. Reilly says he had to be careful not to choke on food when they were filming that scene. Will Ferrell accidentally ingested some coffee grounds (ew).
• The second dinner scene when Brennan’s jerk brother Derek is there took about seven hours to shoot. When Derek falls out of the treehouse after Dale punches him, the actor really got hurt: everyone was under the impression that there was a pad on the ground, but there wasn’t. No one was seriously hurt, though, and shooting continued.
• Right before Derek comes up to the clubhouse, the guys are in the clubhouse looking at porn and were holding a real “popular pornographic magazine” (Adam McKay referred to it as such) but later found out that they didn’t get clearance to use the brand in the movie, so they spent a lot of money to go back and add a fake cover to the magazines they were holding. I’m kind of curious about this myself, because at the end of the movie, they brothers hold up a bunch of Hustlers. So if they had the clearance for Hustler, why didn’t they just use those magazines earlier in the film? Hmmm.
• The scene where Brennan tries to bury Dale in the backyard was one of the first scenes they shot.
• If you’ve seen the movie, no doubt you’ve noticed the huge array of logo and band t-shirts the brothers wear in the movie. I’m partial to the Judds baseball tee, myself. Adam McKay said the costume designer found hundreds of suitable t-shirts and then he, Will and John would take turns removing 10 until the shirts got down to a manageable level.
• The Catalina Wine Mixer scene wasn’t actually filmed on Catalina Island. They scouted it out for location but didn’t care for the way things looked; however, you can actually see it in the background of the scene because they ended up shooting on the shore facing the island.
• Coincidentally, Will Ferrell sings Por Ti Volare at the end of the film, which is the song he and Jon Heder skate to in Blades of Glory. Will does his own singing in the movie, by the way, and John C. Reilly does his own drumming.
• At one point during the commentary, Baron Davis, point guard for the Clippers, randomly comes in and starts chatting with Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. A good 30 minutes of non-movie related basketball talk ensues, in which I discovered that Baron feels Shaq is the scariest dude to encounter on the court in the NBA. He also does some commentary even though he wasn’t there and had never seen the movie. He refers to John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell as “Adult Cabbage Patch Kids”. Also, Baron did not have bunk beds growing up; he slept on the floor in the living room. You know, just FYI.
Hello
Neatoramanauts! Just a brief update on the State of the Blog:
Mystery Sale - I'm sure that everyone's been wondering
about their packages. Don't worry - they're coming.
We usually ship out orders within one business day, but Mystery Sales
are a bit unusual. We've gotten a lot of orders that it took a while for
the warehouse to gear up to ship (happened last time, too!)
The first batch of shipments is scheduled for this Friday 3/6/09 - and
we will process order and ship continuously for the next week or so. I'll
make another update about the Mystery Sale soon.
Many of you emailed me about tracking the progress of the order - you
can check the status of your order if you're registered at the Neatorama
Online Shop at the time of the purchase. For security purposes, the username
and password for the shop are separate from the blog. If you ordered and
did a quick checkout, you can't check the status online.
Rogue Ads - Some of you have seen inappropriate (though
infrequent) ads on Neatorama. Like I explained in the last
update, we've had a rash of rogue ads that should be taken cared of
by now. If you see one of these, please let me know (a screenshot would
be lovely)
Blocked email - A lot of people who didn't get the automatic
email receipt for their orders have @sbcglobal.net email address. It seems
like our emails are being blocked (not in the recipients' spam filter
and not bounced back to us either) - does anyone know how I can get our
emails unblocked by sbcglobal? We have never spammed anyone.
Reading All of Neatorama - Congratulations to James
Lim, who has just finished reading all of Neatorama. He email me that
it took him 3 months and 2 days to read all 637 pages of the blog (well,
so far anyway - it's a never ending journey because we keep on adding
posts!). James has just joined a small but growing cadre of Neatoramanauts
who have accomplished
such a feat.
Caption This - If you'd like to get yourself a free
Neatorama T-shirt, go forth to One largeprawn who's running a Caption
This contest (with a very strange photo!) If you're a blogger who's
interested in running a competition in your blog and want us to spot the
prize (a free T-Shirt from the Neatorama
Online Store), please email me!
Upcoming Queue: It's Much Better Now. Promise! Neatorama
reader CalamityKate wrote this about the much maligned UQ:
Hi Alex, I just wanted to eat a little crow here. I was one of
the haters of the UQ and was excited when the feeds became separate.
But I still had the original feed on my Bloglines, and I’ve been
converted! I think that the changes you made to “tighten up”
the process have worked really well, and I rarely see posts from people
that seem to just be pushing their own content. Forgive me? :-)
Glad that you've kissed and made up with the Queuebot, CalamityKate!
And for the rest of you feed readers, it's time to give the Neatorama
Full Front Page feed
(with Upcoming Queue posts) another try!
Upcoming Queue Top Submitter for February 2009
As promised,
the top submitter for the month of February 2009 will get a free iPod
Touch. The rest of the Top 10 will get a free Neatorama T-shirt (since
taliesyn30 and scbr are tied for the 10th spot, both will get the prize).
Congrats, guys!
As I have written before, I intend to continue to reward top submitters
to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. I wont' tell you what March will bring
for them (maybe something, maybe nothing), so it'll be fun ;)
And lastly, we've added a couple of new designs to our growing list of
Funny Science T-Shirts on the Neatorama Online store. Check it out: Science
T-Shirts | Science
Toys
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the ever-awesome What Is It? blog – this week’s mystery object is this gun: can you tell us what it is for? (It has a very specific function)
Place your guess in the comment section – the first to guess correctly will get a Free Neatorama T-Shirt. If no one got it, then the funniest guess will win. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many times as you wish.
Update 2/20/09 – The answer is A Rokuoh-Sha Type 89 machine gun camera, used to train Japanese aviators in aerial gunnery. The first guess that’s specific enough was #15, by “Give the shirt to the funniest answer ” So, per that request, the free shirt goes to: Melphistopheles for his guess of early colonoscopy device!
Congrats Mel – and thank you to everybody for their awesome guesses. That was fun!
It's
been a while since we ran our last Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt
- but the wait's worth it, because Tokyoflash
has just released a number of really cool watches.
For those of you who haven't played before, the game is an online treasure
hunt where you can win a free Tokyoflash watch of your choice.
The rules are simple: we'll give you 3 questions, for example:
1. What color is the "O" pebble in the Neatorama logo?
2. How many posts are on Neatorama’s homepage? (in numbers)
3. What’s the first insulting word in Neatorama’s article
10
Insulting Words You Should Know?
The answers (black, 30, frenchify) separated with dashes make a URL on
Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/black-30-frenchify (go ahead, copy
and paste this URL in your browser's address bar)
Got that? Easy, right? So let's get started! Here are the Tokyoflash
Treasure Hunt #8 questions:
What is the name of the Tokyoflash watch featured above? (Not
the brand, the model name)
Go to the Neatorama's Online
Store and look for the Audio Bone Headphones page. What is the last
color listed in the color option?
Go to the Neatorama
Upcoming Queue and look for the Top Submitters page. How many are
listed per page? (in numerals, for example: 10 not "ten") [By the way,
top 10 submitters of this month will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt, the
top
submitter will get a Free iPod Touch - you still got time, if you're
interested ;) ]
Go to Tokyoflash website,
and find the watch with orange acrylic bars "inspired by the neon
skylines of Shinjuku." What is the model name of the watch?
Visit Tokyoflash, and Neatorama's
Online Shop and Upcoming
Queue to find the answers, then string 'em together to make the URL
(all words are lower case, separated by dash). Follow the instruction
you'll find there.
Hurry (this contest will end tomorrow - remember to check back to find
if you've won) and good luck!
Most of the time we're willing to shovel down the popcorn and watch Yoda
lift X-Wings out of the swamp using nothing but the Force and a smattering
of questionably parsed English, or let Jean-Luc Picard get the Enterprise
out of a scrape by the convenient discovery of yet another type
of particle beam. But every once in a while we just have to vent about
some of the truly egregious "fiction" in science fiction.
1. Sounds in Space
The tag line from Alien got it right: "In Space, no one
can hear you scream". The reason no one can hear you scream is that
sound needs air to travel in, and there's none in space.
Most of space is a hard vacuum, with a molecule or two of hydrogen floating
around in every cubic meter - not nearly enough to transmit sound. Every
sound in the movies, from photon torpedoes and laser beams to exploding
starships and hyperspace booms, would never happen in real life.
For that matter, you'd never see laser beams in space either, since in
a vacuum there's no medium to reveal them. So a real-life laser dog fight
in space would be really boring to watch.
2. Faster-Than-Light Travel
Warp drives and hyperspace are very useful in science fiction, but there's
one catch. According to Einstein, the speed of light isn't just a good
idea, it's the law. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a
vacuum (that's about 186,000 miles per second).
Even inching toward the speed of light is difficult - immense energy
is required to get to even a fraction of the speed of light, and the closer
you get to the speed of light, the more energy is required. The amount
of energy you'd need to achieve the speed of light is infinite (i.e.,
more than you've got, even with those supercool long-lasting batteries).
So just tossing in a few more dilithium crystals into the warp drives
isn't going to make it happen.
There are loopholes in our understanding of the physics that
make faster-than-light travel theoretically possible. For example,
it's theoretically possible to create a "bubble" of space that
breaks itself off from other space and moves faster than light relative
to that space (all the while everything inside both "spaces"
moves no faster than the speed of light). This is known as an Alcubierre
Warp Bubble. The catch (there had to be one) is that these bubbles
require the existence of exotic matter that has negative energy, and wouldn't
you know, there isn't really any lying around, and it's not clear that
any actually exists.
3. Laser Bolts You Can Dodge
Aside
from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review
a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at
186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits
you is just plain silly.
Not to mention (of course) the idea of a laser bolt being visible as
a streak that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were zapped
by a laser from a laser gun, it would look like a single stream of light,
with one end attached to the barrel of said gun, and the end attached
to whatever portion of your head had not melted yet (assuming you're having
a laser battle somewhere where there is enough air around to illuminate
the entire beam).
Most "laser" beams in science fiction movies travel slower
than bullets do today. Let's see Obi Wan whip his light saber around fast
enough to stop the spray of a Mac-10 (and let's not even begin
to talk about all the things wrong with a sword made of light).
4. Human-Looking Aliens
This
is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from
entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except
for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the
result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all
these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen.
Look, humans evolved on earth and shared a basic body format (four limbs,
one head, side-to-side symmetry) with just about every other vertebrate
on the planet. It's a form that works fine for this planet, but not even
every vertebrate sticks with it (see: snakes, whales, seals, etc).
Given that any planet with life on it will have that life evolve in it's
own way, the chances of the universe being stocked with chesty alien princesses
who crave human starship captains is slim at best.
Related to this is the following.
5. Half-Breed Aliens
Humans
don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply
too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.
Given this, what are the chances of successful mating with an alien species
that may not even have DNA as its genetic encoding medium?
Also going back to the idea that aliens probably won't look like Humans,
how would you do it anyway? It's not exactly the "Insert Tab A Into
Slot B" proposition it would be here at home.
Ditto aliens that control your body by using your brains, or gestate
in your chest, or whatnot. Let's posit that any creature that controls
the brain of any other creature (not that any exist here on Earth) does
so only after a few million years of what's called "speciation"
– i.e., one species eventually enters a symbiotic relationship with
another species. This relationship would have to be pretty specific, as
symbiotic relationships are here on Earth.
Which is to say just because you're in a symbiotic relationship with
one species doesn't mean it transfers over to another species, especially
an alien species, who's body chemistry, DNA, brain wiring, etc., isn't
even remotely close to your own. So don't worry about the "Puppet
Master" scenario too much, or that you'll be nothing more than a
glorified egg sac for some nasty breed of space monster.
7. Shape-Shifting Aliens
Shape-changing
aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly
human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat,
to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien
go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear,
as the case may be); it has to go somewhere.
Unless that "rat" is running around with a highly compressed
mass of a human-sized object (which presents its own problems), shape-shifting
in to different sized objects is not very likely (one of the smart things
about Terminator 2 was that the T-1000 only shape shifted into
things of roughly the same mass, like human beings or a floor).
8. Time Travel
Got
an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg
during the Civil War?
The same relativistic principles that keep us from going faster than
light also keep us rom traveling backward in time and messing with the
past. It's possible to slow down time - the closer you get to
the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to your original
frame of reference - but to get the clock spinning in the other direction
would require you to go faster than light, and you can't do that.
Again, there are theoretical loopholes that could allow it - worm holes,
actually, which are "tunnels" in the fabric of space-time that
could possibly allow travel back in time. but once again, keeping these
wormholes open would require exotic matter with negative energy. Got any?
Neither do we.
9. The Planetary Gravity Scam
Everywhere you go in science fiction, people are walking around like
they weigh just what they do on Earth. Chances of that happening in the
real universe? Slim. Consider our own solar system. On Mars, a 180-pound
man would weigh just 70 pounds; on Jupiter, 424 pounds (not that you can
walk on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface). That man on the moon? Just
30 pounds. The man's mass is the same, it's just that different planets
have different gravitational pulls.
The idea that all the planets that humans might visit would exactly match
Earth's own gravitational profile is a little much. As is, alternately,
the idea that all alien creatures would be as comfortable in our gravitational
field as we are.
10 The Planetary Sameness Principle
Tatooine looks just like the Yuma Desert in Arizona. Actually, it is the
Yuma Desert of Arizona! I stand corrected, it's Tunisia ... y'know, on the continent of Africa, Earth. Photo via Wookieepedia
The desert planet of Tatooine. The ice planet of Hoth. The jungle planet
of Dagobah. What do these planets all have in common? One planetary-wide
ecosystem. Which isn't too likely.
Our own planet has varying zones and ecological areas: desert, tundra,
jungle, and so on; other planets in the system also show marked zones
of varying atmospheric and weather patterns. Mars has ice caps as well
as (relatively) temperate zones; Jupiter has distinct weather systems
based in different areas on its globe. The planets that show a sameness
are the ones we couldn't live on. Venus is all desert, but that's because
a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hot enough to melt lead. Pluto is
all ice, but it's so far away from the Sun that its atmosphere freezes
for most of its orbit.
There may well be purely desert or jungle planets, but most planets we'd
want to live on would probably be able to accommodate both.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
Hello everyone! It’s been a week since we’ve launched the Neatorama Upcoming Queue and I’d like to give you all a little update.
Since we launched on January 26, we’ve had about 400 blog posts submitted, of which about 125 were promoted to the front page. Obviously some submissions are of low quality (spam and copy&paste jobs) and many don’t have the appropriate format, but a success rate of 30% is darn good! Furthermore, what we’re asking you to do isn’t easy: the Upcoming Queue isn’t a simple link submission – we’re asking you to write a whole blog post! But I’m not suprised, really, because Neatoramanauts are smarter than the average bear!
If you own a blog, and have unique and original posts, I highly encourage you to submit a post on the Upcoming Queue. As Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips wrote earlier this week, a front page link from Neatorama is worth thousands and thousands of visitors.
The throughput from the Upcoming Queue is actually more than the output of all of Neatorama’s authors on a daily basis. We actually had to throttle the Queue back a little, lest the front page is totally overwhelmed with posts. I’m sure that we’ll find a good number of new posts published daily that will keep you coming back regularly to find new stuff, without being overwhelmed by new posts.
As with any new (and beta) projects, there are bound to be hiccups. Early last week, our database server tripped over itself – the first outage of its sort since we upgraded our hardware. I hope that the fix we did will prevent this sort of things from happening again.
There are also two general areas that we need to improve:
Format of the blog submissions Despite having a "Please write this in your own words, do not copy and paste" request in the submission page, some of you insist on copying and pasting stuff straight from your blog or website. This leads to incorrectly formatted post (HTML codes showing), so don’t copy and
paste, mmmkay?
Duplicates With over 18,500 posts on Neatorama, it’s not easy to remember what has been on the blog before (heck, even I don’t remember!). It’s best to search the blog first to see if something has been posted before, but I do understand that a lot of things we covered some years back are suddenly "hot" again.
We try hard not to duplicate posts, but part of the fun of the Upcoming Queue is giving up control over the blog.
Finally, I’d like to reiterate our intention of rewarding, rather than punishing, the top submitters. While we obviously like diversity in the submitter pool, the Pareto Principle (or the 80-20 rule) predicts that only a small minority will put in more time and effort into the Upcoming Queue than the majority of readers – and that’s perfectly fine.
So, to repeat the promise: The Top Submitter of February 2009 will win a Free iPod Touch, and the rest of the Top 10 Submitters (also listed on the sidebar of the Upcoming Queue) will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt. Want yours? Start by submitting your posts. It’s easy and fun!
Hello everyone! On New Year’s Day, I wrote about a big surprise that’s coming to Neatorama. Well, today’s the big day. I’m very excited to introduce a new and very neat feature on the blog: the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.
You’re Invited to Write a Blog Post on Neatorama
Like many blogs, Neatorama started with a single author (that’s yours truly). Since then, the blog has expanded into many authors, each of whom bring his or her own unique contribution. I think Neatorama is ready to take the next logical step: to become an open blog in which everyone (yes, including you) can write their own posts.
Do you have a blog and would like it featured on Neatorama? Have you ever found something neat/funny/weird on the Web and would like to share it with all of Neatorama’s readers? Now you can.
Of course, there needs to be a mechanism to separate good posts from bad ones (like spam, for instance). The Upcoming Queue makes this easy by letting you vote good posts up and bad ones down. Posts that gather a lot of positive votes will then be promoted to the blog’s front page.
Neatorama Upcoming = Social Media + Blog Hybrid
The first thing that comes to many people’s mind will undoubtedly be this: It’s a social media thing, just like digg. And while we love digg, reddit, and other social media websites, the Upcoming Queue has a few differences (explained in greater length in the FAQ):
Your submission is a blog post Neatorama is a blog and will remain a blog. By writing a blog post instead of a link, you’ll have more than just a few sentences to tell people what your pick is all about.
Equal chance to get promoted to front page Not a power user? Don’t have a lot of friends that will vote for your submissions? No problem. Besides garnering upvotes, Neatorama editors will be on the look out for good posts to promote, regardless of the number of votes they garner. This will even out the playing field for everyone.
Credit is given where credit is due This is a personal pet peeve of mine: social networking posts don’t give via or author credits. If you found an interesting item to post on Neatorama via a certain blog, please be neighborly and give it a via credit link.
Promoted posts will also have author credit – your posts will carry a link to your blog or website. (We do reserve the right to edit this in cases of spam or inappopriate content).
No burying Once a post is on the front page, it’s on the front page. There’s no burying or personal vendettas (though we do reserve the right to edit/delete in cases of spam, misformatted or inappropriate content).
Want Your Own Upcoming Queue?
The Upcoming Queue project is carried out in collaboration with Sift Partners, the people behind VideoSift, the best video community website on the Web today. The Queue is a specially customized version of Varo CMS (the engine of VideoSift), hooked up to the WordPress software that Neatorama uses.
I’d like to thank Rommel Santor, the genius behind VaroCMS, for writing such wonderful program and for putting up with me and my incessant nagging during the project.
If you’d like your own version of this Upcoming Queue or similar functionality for your blog, I highly recommend that you join the VaroCMS Interest List.
Rewarding, Not Penalizing, Top Users
To celebrate the launch of the Upcoming Queue, let’s have a contest: the Top Submitter of the month of February 2009 will get a Free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 Submitters will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Why February? That way, we all have a fresh start (the statistics will reset to zero so early testers don’t have a head start). You all have a week to play around with the Queue before it’s for keeps!
Lastly, the Upcoming Queue is technically still a "beta" feature – if you’ve found a bug, please let us know. And if you have a blog, I’d appreciate it if you would write a post about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.
Last month, we started a new feature on Neatorama: an open forum for Neatorama readers. In the blog post introducing the forum, I promised that the best posters will win a mystery prize, and since I’m a man of my words, here it is:
Congratulations to SparkS, blakdragon, and Johnny Cat for being the top forum posters. As my thanks, they’ll get a free iPod shuffle (they even get to choose the colors!). The rest of the top participants in the forum, shown above, will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt.
Thank you again for putting in the time and effort to make the Neatorama forum an enjoyable to hang out and chat!
The following is reprinted from the May - June 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
PARDON OUR FRENCH
What do D-Day and disco have in common, besides the letter D? Nazis,
of course! During World War II, when the Third Reich occupied Paris, jazz
clubs were closed and live music of a liberal nature was strictly verboten!
But Parisians couldn't live without their jazz, so they took it underground,
opening illicit cellars where they could drink booze freely and listen
to pre-recorded music. One such club, on Rue de la Huchette, called itself
La Discothèque - coined from the French words for "record"
(disque) and "library" (bibliothèque).
ALWAYS STARTIN' SOMETHIN'
Many elements of what we now call disco music appeared in songs like
The Jackson 5's 1969 smash "I Want You Back" and Isaac Hayes'
1971 hit "Theme from Shaft." (Actual movie tagline: "The
mob wanted Harlem back. They got Shaft ... up to here.") Chubby Checker
even released a song back in 1964 titled "At the Discotheque."
But most historians agree the first real disco record was 1972's
"Soul Makossa" by the Cameroon-born sax player Manu Dibango.
In the song, Dibango can be heard chanting Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-koo-sa.
Sound familiar? It should. Michael Jackson used it 10 years later in his
song "Wanna be Startin' Somethin'"
BEE KEEPING
Oddly enough, members of the disco super-group The Bee Gees never dug
their moniker. In fact, after Robert Stigwood signed on as the band's
producer in 1967, the group lobbied to change its name. But what could
possibly be better than The Bee Gees? The band suggested Rupert's World.
Luckily, their manager nixed the notion. Years later, singer Barry Gibb
remarked, "It was like changing your name from Charlie S--t to Fred
S--t."
"D"
IS FOR DISCO
The success of "Saturday Night Fever" changed the face of disco
forever. Suddenly, everyone was sporting white polyester suits - and not
just Travolta wannabes. Rod Stewart, Cher, Bette Midler, The Rolling Stones,
Dolly Parton, Andy Williams, David Bowie, Neil Diamond, and, yes, even
Cookie Monster all donned disco-wear.
Sometimes, bold experiments result in mundane things like polio vaccines
(yawn.) But other times, they result in wild, earth-shattering breakthroughs!
Case in point: 1953's birth of the DJ. That's when 24-year-old Regine
Zylberberg, manager of Paris' famous Whisky a Go-Go, undertook an
experiment to replace the club's jukebox with two turntables and a microphone.
In no time, DJs were pumping up the jam at parties the world over, as
was Zybelberg. By the 1970s, she was running 25 clubs across Europe and
the Americas. In fact, you could boogie down at Regine's establishments
somewhere in the world 17 out of every 24 hours - assuming you could get
in.
FIELD OF FLAMES
Because
1970s discos were often frequented by African-Americans, homosexuals,
and working-class white women, the scene was perceived as a threat to
the rock 'n' roll community, which had long been a Viking ship of straight
white males. Their establishment's witty, orginal slogan - "Disco
Sucks" - became popular in the later part of the decade and was available
for purchase wherever fine rock T-shirt were sold. (Photo: Rich.lionheart
via Wikipedia)
Album-oriented rock (A.O.R.) stations also fueled the anti-disco fire.
On July 12, 1979, Steve Dahl, longtime DJ at Chicago's WDAI, staged Disco
Demolition Night at Comiskey PArk, where the White Sox were playing a
doubleheader. Fans bearing disco albums were admitted into the stadium
for a mere 98 cents. Then, between games, they stormed the field to set
their records ablaze. Some even detonated them with bombs.
As the fires roared, the masses chanted "Disco sucks!", whipping
the stadium into a chaotic frenzy so threatening, the second game of the
doubleheader had to be cancelled. Fittingly, more records were broken
on July 12, 1979, than on any other day in baseball history.
"SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER": DISCO INFERNO OR DISCO INFURIATING?
THE STORY
IN THE FILM: Based on a 1976 article written by English rock critic
Nik Cohn and published in the New York magazine under the title "Tribal
Rites of the New Saturday Night."
IN REAL LIFE: In 1997, Cohn admitted the entire story was fabricated.
He knew nothing about the world of disco and interviewed no one for
his article.
HOMOSEXUALITY
IN THE FILM: The only two gay men in the movie appear in the basketball
court scene, when Tony's cronies verbally harrass them.
IN REAL LIFE: Discos helped establish an openly homosexual community
for thousands of gay men (not just the Village People).
AFRICAN-AMERICANS
IN THE FILM: Blacks appear on screen a whopping three times.
IN REAL LIFE: Discos were nothing if not places where blacks (and
gays) went to escape the oppression of the straight, white world of
rock 'n' roll.
MUSIC
IN THE FILM: The Bee Gees hold court - an all white, Aussie-Brit pop
band that cut its teeth writing soft-rock ballads in the 1960s.
IN REAL LIFE: Discos were thumping to the groove of African-American
soul and funk bands like The O'Jays, Harold Melvin & The Blue
Notes, Love Unlimited Orchestra, and The Jackson 5.
The article above is reprinted from Scatterbrained
section of the May
- June 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss'
website and blog for more fun stuff!
Sarah Needleman of The Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting article about a new CareerCast.com study from Les Krantz, author of Jobs Rated Almanac, about the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
The study evaluated 200 jobs according to environment, income, employment outlook, physical demand and stress. The data are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, amongst others:
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions — indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise — unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren’t expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching — attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.
The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job’s median income and growth potential. Mathematicians’ annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with What is it? Blog. This week’s mysterious object is pictured to the left: can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you can think of. Post no URLs, let others play. The first person who guesses right (or gives the funniest guess, if no one gets it right) wins a Free Neatorama T-Shirt.
Update 1/2/09 – here’s the answer: A BLU-26/B ball-type submunition of a cluster bomb, this inert practice piece has aerodynamic vanes and is made of solid metal, it’s also called a Guava Bomblet.
Congratulations to JKirchartz who got it right! And a big thank you and a free T-shirt to Coyote who corrected the missing picture error!
Hooray! It’s time for our collaboration with the always excellent What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange object pictured to the left. Can you guess what it is?
Today being Christmas, the first person (or the funniest guess, if no one gets it right) wins a Free Neatorama T-Shirt! The game rules are darned simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, but you can enter as many ones as you can think of. Post no URLs, please let others play.
Update 12/28/08 – the answer: This was marked “grenade launcher”, I’ve since found that it’s a European racquet grenade that’s missing the charge and the fuse, it was probably meant to be used with a trip wire to make a booby trap, but if a different type of fuse was attached the whole thing could have been thrown as a grenade. – congrats to SarahW who got it right first!
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has given out almost all of the first $350 billion of the $700 billion bailout fund, and the economy continued to slide down – so where did all those money go? Mike Madden of Salon.com finds out:
The infusion of money may have kept credit from tightening up further, but it certainly didn’t jump-start the economy — banks didn’t resume lending to businesses and consumers. Stock prices never really recovered from their early autumn plunges, and more than half a million jobs vanished just last month. With the benefit of hindsight, lawmakers now express regret about the way the bailout was handled — with few provisions for oversight of the banks or the Bush administration — and the public hates it more than ever. The feeling that money and political capital were squandered even helped endanger the far cheaper and more popular bailout of the auto industry. So what went wrong — and where did all that money go?
A lot of it is, apparently, just sitting in the bank. A Government Accounting Office audit released earlier this month showed the Treasury Department doling out buckets of cash: $15 billion for Bank of America, $45 billion for Citigroup, $3.5 billion to Capital One, nearly $6.6 billion to U.S. Bancorp. The feds were essentially taking out the trash — buying shares in various banks that had gotten themselves into trouble by issuing crappy mortgages using complicated formulas, assuming the cost of many of the mortgage-backed securities that were weighing down the balance sheets of every financial institution in the country. The feds were pumping money into these banks so they would feel free to make more loans — better, simpler, sounder loans. The epidemic of exploding mortgages and failing institutions would ease. But the banks did not start making new loans. They seemed to sit on their federal windfalls.
Hooray! I’m excited to tell you that we have a new feature on Neatorama, a Forum that we hope will be a neat place to hang out and interact with fellow Neatorama readers.
Unlike the blog, which as a top-down approach (authors write a post, which you then can read and add comments), the forum is open to all registered users of Neatorama. Found something interesting on the net? Got a burning question? Want to showcase your art? You can start a topic! (But please, no spam and keep the discussion civil.)
Jennifer Zelazny of Sandbox Development was a big help in the design and integration of the forum into the blog’s Wordpress platform. She knows her stuff and is a pleasure to deal with. If you ever wanted a customized forum or need help with your blog or website, I highly recommend her.
Let’s give this a try: originator of a particularly neat forum post (or one that develops into a lively discussion), will win a Free Neatorama T-Shirt. The best 3 forum posters of the month will also get something (a mystery prize, but it’ll be good, I promise).
Without further ado, here it is: please check out our new Neatorama Forum.
Woohoo! It’s time for the Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt on Neatorama!
For those of you who don’t know how to play (what? how could you!), here’s what it’s all about: it’s an online treasure hunt where you can win a free Tokyoflash watch of your choice, courtesy of the good folks at Tokyoflash.
Here’s the basic instruction. We’ll give you 3 questions, for example:
1. What color is the "O" pebble in the Neatorama logo? 2. How many posts are on Neatorama’s homepage? (in numbers) 3. What’s the first insulting word in Neatorama’s article 10 Insulting Words You Should Know?
The answers (black, 30, frenchify) separated with dashes make a URL on Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/black-30-frenchify (go ahead, copy and paste this URL in your browser’s address bar).
Easy, right? Let’s get started then. Here are the Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt #7 Questions:
What is the name of the Tokyoflash Kisai watch *model* pictured above? Go to Tokyoflash to find out!
Go to Neatorama’s Online Shop and look for Mike Jacobsen’s Wizard of Oz T-Shirt. What is the last word uttered by the cowardly lion?
One of Tokyoflash’s wonderful watches has an "always on" liquid crystal display with seven colors in one watch. What is the name of the watch?
Visit Tokyoflash and Neatorama’s Online Shop to find the answers, then string ‘em together to make the URL (all words are lower case, separated by dash). Follow the instructions you’ll find there.
Yay! It’s time for our weekly collaboration with the What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange object to the left – can you guess what it is for?
The first person who guessed right (or the funniest guess, if nobody got it right) wins a Free Neatorama T-Shirt! Contest rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, but you can enter as many times as you wish. Post no URLs, let others play.
The
term newbie or noob, originally thought to be from British
public-school and military slang "new boy," was first spotted
in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre as an insult to a clueless newcomer.
(
was inspired by a collection of more than 300 postcards that were part
of the "All Faiths Beautiful" exhibit at the American Visionary
Art Museum. The book contains never-before-seen secrets that, as Frank
so eloquently wrote, "expose the common landscape of our private
lives - from our embarrassing desires to our hidden acts of kindness;
from the private prayers of atheists to the voiceless doubt of believers."
Cicadas
are winged insects that evolved around 1.8 million years ago during the
Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers advanced and retreated across North America.
Cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend most of their lives below
the ground, feeding on the juices of plant roots, and then emerge, mate,
and die quickly. These creatures display a startling behavior: Their emergence
is synchronized with periods of years that are usually the prime numbers
13 and 17. (A prime number is an integer such as 11, 13, and 17 that has
only two integer divisors: 1 and itself.) During the spring of their 13th
or 17th year, these periodical cicadas construct an exit tunnel. Sometimes
more than 1.5 million individuals emerge in a single acre; this abundance
of bodies may have survival value as they overwhelm predators such as
birds that cannot possibly eat them all at once. (Photo: Joelmills [
,
appears with amazing frequency in mathematics and nature. We can understand
the proportion most easily by dividing a line into two segments so that
the ratio of the whole segment to the longest part is the same as the
ratio of the longer part to the shorter part, or (a+b)/b = b/a = 1.61803
...
Simon
Newcomb (1835 - 1909), Frank Benford (1883 - 1948) - Benford's Law, also
called the first-digit law or leading-digit phenomenon, asserts that in
various number lists, the digit 1 tends to occur in the leftmost position
with probability of roughly 30 percent, much greater than the expected
11.1 percent that would result if each digit occurred with a 1 to 9 probability.
Benford's law can be observed, for instance, in tables that list populations,
death rates, stock prices, baseball statistics, and the area of rivers
and lakes. Explanations for this phenomenon are very recent. (Photo from
In
the late nineteenth century, the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced
"Lee") studied objects with smooth rotational symmetries, like
the sphere or doughnut in our ordinary three-dimensional space. In three
and higher dimensions, these kinds of symmetries are expressed by Lie
groups. The German mathematician Wilhelm Killing suggested the existence
of the E8 group in 1887. Simpler Lie groups control the shape
of electron orbital and symmetries of subatomic quarks. Larger groups,
like E8, may someday hold the key to a unified theory of physics
and help scientist understand string theory and gravity.
Max
Tegmark (b. 1967) - In this book, we have encountered various geometries
that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Johannes Kepler
modeled the solar system with Platonic Solids such as the dodecahedron.
Large Lie groups, like E8, may someday help us create a unified
theory of physics. Even Galileo in the seventeenth century suggested that
"nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." In
the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner was impressed with the "unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." (Photo: 
Cliff
Pickover is a prolific author, having published more than 40 books, translated
into over a dozen languages, on topics ranging from science and mathematics
to religion, art, history, computers and creativity, human intelligence,
higher dimensions, time travel, and science fiction. He received his Ph.D.
from Yale University's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry,
holds over 50 U.S. patents, and is an associate editor for several scientific
journals. His computer graphics have appeared on the cover of numerous
magazines, and his research has received considerable attention from media
outlets ranging from CNN and WIRED to The New York Times. His website,
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Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the 
So Goble decided to get serious and reached for liquid oxygen (LOX, boiling point: 90.2 K or -183 °C). He doused 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) onto 60 pounds of charcoal and a smoldering cigarette*. Within 3 seconds about 40 pounds of the charcoal burned and the grill was vaporized. 
Quick: what’s the coldest object in space? A frozen comet or a chilly gas cloud? Nope, the coldest object in space is actually a manmade object – the Planck Telescope – launched by the European Space Agency.
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the always-fun What is It? blog. Can you guess what this strange contraption pictured to the left is for?
Tired of getting burglarized regularly, a bakery in Split, Croatia, decided to solicit the protection of a certain Hollywood action star. At least in spirit:
Psst! Do you want to make a few extra bucks? 
• Writer/director Adam McKay says they shot something like 12 hours of the scene where the new family eats their first dinner together. Both actors commented on how sick they were of chicken nuggets and salty fast food afterward.
• The scene where Brennan tries to bury Dale in the backyard was one of the first scenes they shot.
Hello
Neatoramanauts! Just a brief update on the State of the Blog:
It's
been a while since we ran our last Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt
- but the wait's worth it, because 
Aside
from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review
a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at
186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits
you is just plain silly. 
This
is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from
entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except
for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the
result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all
these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen. 
Humans
don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply
too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.
Shape-changing
aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly
human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat,
to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien
go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear,
as the case may be); it has to go somewhere. 
Got
an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg
during the Civil War? 
Hello everyone! It’s been a week since we’ve launched the 
Finally, I’d like to reiterate our intention of rewarding, rather than punishing, the top submitters. While we obviously like diversity in the submitter pool, the 
Congratulations to SparkS, blakdragon, and Johnny Cat for being the top forum posters. As my thanks, they’ll get a free iPod shuffle (they even get to choose the colors!). The rest of the top participants in the forum, shown above, will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt.
"D"
IS FOR DISCO
Because
1970s discos were often frequented by African-Americans, homosexuals,
and working-class white women, the scene was perceived as a threat to
the rock 'n' roll community, which had long been a Viking ship of straight
white males. Their establishment's witty, orginal slogan - "Disco
Sucks" - became popular in the later part of the decade and was available
for purchase wherever fine rock T-shirt were sold. (Photo: Rich.lionheart
via 
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with What is it? Blog. This week’s mysterious object is pictured to the left: can you guess what it is for?
Hooray! It’s time for our collaboration with the always excellent What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange object pictured to the left. Can you guess what it is?
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has given out almost all of the first $350 billion of the $700 billion bailout fund, and the economy continued to slide down – so where did all those money go? Mike Madden of Salon.com finds out:
Hooray! I’m excited to tell you that we have a new feature on Neatorama, a 
Yay! It’s time for our weekly collaboration with the What is it? Blog. This week brings us this strange object to the left – can you guess what it is for?
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