It’s not unusual to have a pet rodent, but Melanie Typaldos’ pet Caplin Rous is no ordinary rodent. See, Caplin is a Capybara, the world’s largest rodent:
The second part of his name, which Typaldos pronounces like "rose," stands for "Rodent of Unusual Size" (a reference to the movie "The Princess Bride"). He’s also a rodent of unusual abilities. He can walk on a leash and even do some tricks, but Typaldos says it’s important not to exaggerate any similarity to a dog doing tricks.
"Dogs have thousands of years of being trained to be subservient to people," she says. "A capybara will not do a trick just to make me happy. The quality of the trick is very dependent on the quality of the treat."
Link | More at Caplin’s blog Capybara Madness
I, for one, welcome our new hexapod overlord … to a dance off! Here’s a video clip of the best dance compilation from the 4th Hexapod Championship in Hagenberg, Austria.
They’ll eat the humans after building an appetite dancing: Link [embedded YouTube]
Rich CEOs are different from you and I – not only do they have more money, their brains are wired differently. That’s the conclusion of an online "color test":
Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick.
For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY’s CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.
This, it turns out, is more than a curiosity. Psychiatry professor Rense Lange, an expert on tests for everyone from students to job hunters to those with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, has been looking hard at color tests and he has reached the conclusion that the results all but prove that CEOs are wired differently.
They are often wired in counterintuitive ways. For example, the color test shows that the typical CEO is more sensitive and private than the typical person and is less likely to be a perfectionist or to be dominant and more likely to be emotionally unstable. CEOs, it turns out, are not as self-assured as the public at large, and they are more cooperative and less forceful than the typical person, says Dewey Sadka, who has spent the last 15 years refining the color test completed by the 877 current and retired CEOs and chairmen.
Forget James Bond! The best action scene ever filmed is from the 1985 Tollywood movie Alluda Mazaaka…!, starring the "Megastar" Chiranjeevi and directed by E.V.V. Satyanarayana.
You’ll soon see why Chiranjeevi is deserving of the title "Megastar":
… it is quite exciting and wildly over-the-top unrealistic. Especially the horse-sliding scene at 2:07. You don’t know what horse-sliding is? That’s because this action hero invented it.
Link [embedded YouTube]
This is a true color movie, not a “colorized” one.
This wonderful film was made in 1927 by Claude Friese-Greene. Colour film from the 1920s is exceptionally rare, and this is a very powerful example… The Cenotaph sequence from around 3:37 to 3:54 is very poignant. This was filmed only nine years after the end of the Great War. The women and looking at the wreaths would very likely be wives and mothers of the men killed, and the Second World War was, at that time, inconceivable.
Claude Friese-Greene was the son of pioneering cinematographer William Friese-Greene, and devoted himself to developing commercially his father’s colour process – Biocolour – but without great success. It was soon overtaken by Technicolor and Claude abandoned the process. His role as a pioneer of colour film has now been recognised.
Some aspects of London have changed a lot in 80+ years; others have changed very little.
Link.
The objects above are remarkably ornate baby rattles/ teething toys, as crafted by a master silversmith. They are attributed to Nicholas Roosevelt, an 18th-century American craftsman, and are now part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This rare and precious gold toy, with its elaborate chased and repoussé ornament, might have been given as a lavish christening gift. It consists of a whistle, a piece of teething coral, six of the original eight bells, and a loop to hang a toy on a ribbon around the child’s neck. Aside from being a teething device, the coral in the whistle and bells was thought to ward off enchantment and disease.
One can’t help but wonder if creations such as this had some influence on the development of the idiom “bells and whistles” to describe supplementary showy functions.
Link, via Titam et le Sirop d’Érable.
James Stowe has a neat collection of Star Wars cards for Valentine’s Day, which is this Sunday. There are six cards, one for each episode.
Link (Previously on Neatorama: A Very Wrong Star Wars Valentine)
We are often told we must learn from history, and that we should learn from the experiences of others, but how often do we learn about forms of government from scientific experiments? MIT economist Benjamin Olken got the chance to run a field study on direct democracy in three Indonesian districts: one predominantly Muslim, one predominantly Christian, and one with a mixed population.
In fieldwork involving 49 Indonesian villages, Olken arranged to have major decisions on public-works projects in some settlements decided by plebiscite — in which all citizens get a vote — rather than by the traditional small councils of village leaders. Unexpectedly, the types of projects selected by majority vote were nearly identical to those picked by village elites; the voting public did not try to redistribute wealth to themselves. And yet when people were allowed to vote, they expressed greater contentment with the results than when decisions were simply handed down by the elites. The conclusion was that even if democracy doesn’t make a material difference in people’s lives, it creates greater civic cohesion.
Of course, this experiment only compared direct voting to village councils, in which the leaders are close to the citizens. Whether the results of this study can be extrapolated to a comparison with larger governments is unclear. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Benjamin A. Olken)
A moonbow is a rainbow that appears in moonlight. Light from the moon must be refracted through a mist of water in order for us to see the effect. Photographer Wally Pacholka captured this effect at the edge of Haleakala crater on the island of Maui. The large “star” in the picture is Mars. Link to story. Link to Pacholka’s website. -via Arbroath
PS: There’s a state park near my hometown that has a moonbow every month if the weather is clear. Link
Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your familiarity with city nicknames. If you’re lucky, your city will be one of the ten! If you’re unlucky, you’ll score 30% like I did. Link
The Moa was the only wingless bird that ever existed.
The moa were hunted to extinction by 1500 by the Maori in New Zealand. They were the only species of birds with no wings. But wait, you say, what about kiwis, emus, and ostriches? Well, these flightless birds, a group of birds called ratites, actually do have wings (some of them vestigials).
Oh, and one more thing. I mentioned New Zealand – have you ever asked yourself where is Old Zealand? New Zealand is actually named after Zeeland, a major seafaring province of the Netherlands, by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642 (yup, the island of Tasmania is named after him). Captain James Cook misspelled it New Zealand and the name stuck ever since.
British artist Rob Smith has some lovely wood carvings in his deviantART gallery. One of the most striking is this table that looks like it’s melting. It’s made of recycled oak and took him four weeks to make.
The US division of the Boy Scouts turns 100 today. The movement began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell. An American publisher, William Boyce, met a Boy Scout in London and was so impressed that he decided to bring scouting to the United States. It grew rapidly during World War I and reached its peak with 6.5 million members in the 1972:
Supporters say the scouting experience builds strong, confident leaders. They point with considerable pride to its roster of former Scouts who went on to great achievement, including President Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong, baseball great Hank Aaron and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
“I think the Scouts have changed America profoundly, because as of now, 110 million people have worn the Scout uniform in one way or another. And the moral lesson and the experiences that have been imparted to them have obviously percolated through society as a whole just too profound to really enumerate,” said Wills.
Link via Fast Company | Image: Norman Rockwell
Remember the I Love xkcd animated music video (inspired by the Discovery Channel promo I Love the World, drawn by animator Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes) posted previously on Neatorama?
Well, Olga Nunes and Elaine Doyle have teamed up to create the real life version of the song, titled We Love xkcd featuring the who’s who of the web, including Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Bruce Schneier, Jason Kottke, Phil Plait … and perhaps the most famous, our very own Miss Cellania!
Boomdeyada indeed! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Boing Boing
Previously on Neatorama: I Love the World – Video Game Edition
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Michael R. Barrick created a graphic last summer using the Vancouver Olympics mascots and the internet cartoon character Pedobear. The image shows up in a Google image search for the mascots, so it was only a matter of time before someone used it without knowing that Pedobear is not an Olympic mascot. The graphic showed up this weekend in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztyn. Link
You can get a swine flu vaccination at Walgreens. To advertise that fact, they put stickers on other products, but do they say “vaccine”? No, the stickers just say “H1N1 Available Here”, which won’t make much sense once you get these products home. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Go get your protective tin foil hat, because you’re going to need it. German scientists have been trying to understand why their equipment that measures gravitational waves has been picking up a particular sound. One possible answer that they’ve come up with is that the entire universe is a holographic illusion:
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
I can’t speak Russian, but I’ve read that this Russian-language commercial is about a man trying to report a claim to his insurance company. The employees vanish into their equipment the moment that the customer walks in the door.
via reddit
In this instructional video, a safety expert at a drainage site stresses the importance of having a sturdy harness, properly attached. He demonstrates how a rope line connecting him to the guardrail will prevent an accident. You can guess what happened next.
via reddit
The secret to happiness doesn’t come from thinking happy thoughts … it comes from thinking happy thoughts fast.
Here’s what researchers at Princeton and Harvard universities found:
Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful. Activities that promote fast thinking, then, such as whipping through an easy crossword puzzle or brain-storming quickly about an idea, can boost energy and mood, says psychologist Emily Pronin, the study’s lead author.
Pronin notes that rapid-fire thinking can sometimes have negative consequences. For people with bipolar disorder, thoughts can race so quickly that the manic feeling becomes aversive. And based on their own and others’ research, Pronin and a colleague propose in another recent article that although fast and varied thinking causes elation, fast but repetitive thoughts can instead trigger anxiety.
Why? The researchers think that "thinking quickly may unleash the brain’s novelty-loving dopamine system, which is involved in sensations of pleasure and reward."
Come to think of it, reading Neatorama should trigger the same novelty-loving dopamine system and thus make you all feel happier!
I love these kinds of interactive generators, and this one’s pretty cool. For the above panel, fill in what you’d like each word balloon to say. Link via Buzzfeed (where there’s a bunch of funny examples).
The stethoscope was invented by a doctor too embarrassed to place his ear on a woman’s ample bosom.
Before the invention of the stethoscope, a physician would listen to a patient’s heart by placing his ear over the chest.
In 1816, René Laennec, a physician and devout Catholic, was called to examine a young woman suspected to have a diseased heart. According to the medical procedure of the time, Laennec tapped his hand on the patient’s back and tried to listen to the resulting sound (the "thumpyness" of the sound was used in diagnosis). Unfortunately, because the patient was too fat, he couldn’t hear anything.
Too embarrassed to put his head on the young woman’s ample bosom to listen closer, Laennec came up with a simple yet brilliant solution: he rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder and used that to listen to the patient’s heartbeat.
Laennec later created a new instrument made from hollow wooden cylinder he called stethoscope, from the Greek words stethos (chest) and skopos (examination).
Now, you would think that such an invention would be universally embraced by the physicians of his time, but you’d be wrong. Even the founder of the American Heart Association, Lewis A. Conner, resisted the stethoscope, preferring to listen to the heart directly over the chest of the patient.
Photo: Grant Gunderson
The ski report for the Eastern U. S. is a chart-topper this weekend, so to get you in the mood -or if you’d like to have your eyes popped- take a look at Grant Gunderson’s excellent work on the subject. For the shot above, this caption:
Dana Flahr throwing a very large lawn dart front flip over the Mt. Baker road gap at dusk while filming for Teton Gravity Research.
Photo District News has a nice collection, but be sure to check out his website and blog.
The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.
It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.
At the time of its creation, it was intended as “an encyclopaedic summary of the world.”
Link. Previously on Neatorama: The [other] Largest Book in the World
A variety of birds may use their crests and protruberant feathers to feel their surroundings. Studies were conducted on auklets, who breed in dark, rocky crevices.
The researchers placed individual auklets into a dark experimental maze, designed to resemble a natural crevice, and recorded how often they bumped into things. Both crested and whiskered auklets bumped their heads 2.5 times more often if their feathers on their heads had been artificially flattened.
When the ornithologists then compared the lifestyles of birds with their feather patterns, they found that “Birds that live in complex, cluttered habitats and are active at night tend to have a greater probability to express such facial feathers.”
Cat owners will not be surprised by this news, since whiskers serve an equivalent purpose.
Coincidentally, this week National Geographic is reporting the existence of a tentacled snake whose head appendages are used to find prey in murky lakes at night.
Link.
If you want to sing in a karaoke bar in the Philippines, be forewarned not to sing Frank Sinatra’s My Way … that tune by Ol’ Blue Eyes could just be your last …
“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times has the fascinating story: Link (Photo: Jes Aznar/NY Times)
Tired of waiting for "the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement," the Pentagon has decided to take matters into its own hands: military scientists will create "synthetic organisms" that can live forever. But don’t fear – they can be killed with a molecular kill-switch. What could go wrong?
As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”
Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch
Katie Drummond of Wired’s Danger Room has more: Link
A patent has been issued for this device, which would conserve space in burial grounds. The inventor even envisions a transparent variety:
“A clear plastic Easy Inter Burial Container, where the body is additionally encased in clear resin and is standing erect for all to view during installation, creates a very impressive image.”
The screwing-into-the-ground would be performed either by humans or by an adaptation on a tractor backhoe.
Read about four different sightings of wild kangaroos in the United States. Not surprisingly, some people believe that the mystery animals of North America are paranormal manifestations of some kind. But that might be jumping to conclusions.
Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon, but to date no satisfactory answers have been found. Some commentators suggest that kangaroos in the United States are the shy descendants of animals that, on some unknown occasion in the past, escaped from a circus or zoo. One rational explanation is that they are native marsupials not yet officially discovered or classified; however, the only evolutionary ancestors come from South, not North, America.
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