Custom Barcodes
Image: d-barcode
The Japanese graphic arts firm d-barcode creates customized barcodes for clients who want to use them to grab customers’ attention. In Fast Company, Cliff Kuang writes:
They’ve even begun selling their wares to anyone who wants to license them, starting at $1,500 for the design, and $200 a year for licensing. A custom or exclusive use code will run upwards of $4,000–but given that companies spend millions on designing a single package, why don’t we see more detailed thinking like this? Middle managers spend weeks arguing about kerning–it’d be better if they spent more time rethinking every inch of such highly prized real estate.
Link via Fast Company
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Top 10 Reasons Why the World Won't End in 2012
This list from the Discovery Channel might come in handy to give to someone you know who might get too nervous about the 2012 doomsday predictions and the movie about them. Each scenario is debunked with what scientists really know. For example,
1. Changes in the Sun’s magnetic field will lead to powerful flares.
So what else is new under the sun? The sun goes though a well-documented 11-year sunspot cycle that is driven by its magnetic field entangling, reforming and flipping polarity. Yes, the peak of the next cycle is in 2012 (or 2013), and some predictions suggest it might be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last peak.
But experts say it will certainly not be the biggest peak ever recorded.
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FUN PRODUCTS FROM THE NEATORAMA SHOP:
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10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist
Matt Blum of Wired’s GeekDad blog came up with a list of 10 geeky laws that should exist, but for some inexplicable reason, do not (at least, they didn’t until now). For example:
1. Munroe’s Law: A person in a geeky argument who can quote xkcd to support his position automatically wins the argument. This law supersedes Godwin, so that even if the quote is about Hitler, the quoter still wins.
2. Lucas’s Law: There is no movie so beloved that a “special edition,” prequel or sequel cannot trample and forever stain its memory. [...]
8. Wilbur’s Law: Bacon makes everything better.
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Firefox: Web's Most Insecure Browser?
Say it ain’t true, Firefox. The popular browser’s reputation has taken yet another hit when a new study by application security vendor Cenzic revealed that Firefox leads the field of browsers in terms of total vulnerability (yes, even besting Internet Explorer):
According to Cenzic, Firefox accounted for 44 percent of all browser vulnerabilities reported in the first half of 2009. In contrast, Apple’s Safari had 35 percent of all reported browser vulnerability, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was third at 15 percent and Opera had just six percent share. [...]
As to why Firefox’s numbers were so high, Cenzic has a few ideas.
"It’s a combination of different things," Lars Ewe, CTO of Cenzic, told InternetNews.com. "They’ve gotten more traction as a browser, which is good for them and the more you get used the more exposure you have. As well a fair amount of the vulnerabilities have come by way of plug-ins."
One key area that Ewe said was responsible for a number of reported Firefox vulnerabilities is with how the browser handles plug-ins.
"The plug-in architecture that they have is a selling fact for the browser and one of the reasons why I love using it," Ewe said. "They can’t control security aspects of all the plug-ins and the vulnerabilities are a side effect of that."
Sean Michael Kerner of the InternetNews explains: Link
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Rent The Runway: Netflix For Fashion
A new website called Rent the Runway is betting that it can do for haute couture what Netflix did for movies:
“It was so easy. You just wear it and drop it back in the mail to them,” Ms. Harris said. “I don’t spend $2,000 on a dress regularly, so it’s nice to be able to wear some of the more expensive brands I wouldn’t be able to buy otherwise. And instead of just buying one or two dresses for this season, I can still have a lot of things to wear.”
Rent the Runway was founded by two recent Harvard Business School graduates, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss. Ms. Hyman said she got the idea for the service last year after watching her younger sister agonize over whether to buy an expensive new outfit to wear to a wedding.
“Here was this young girl who loves fashion and was willing to spend a good portion of her salary on a dress that she’s only going to wear once or twice, and I thought, there has to be a solution for this,” said Ms. Hyman.
Jenna Wortham of The New York Times has the scoop: Link (Photo: Todd Heisler/NY Times)
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Is Sammy Sosa Pulling A Michael Jackson?
Is Sammy Sosa pulling a Michael Jackson? The baseball star has noticeably lighter skin color, which he attributed to a "rejuvenation process":
Sosa was photographed recently during an appearance at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.
"He is going through a rejuvenation process for his skin," Polihronis said. "Women have it all of the time. He was surprised he came out looking so white. I thought it was a body double. Part of (the photo appearance) is just the lighting.
"He is in the middle of doing a cleansing process to his skin. The picture is deceiving. He said, ‘If you saw me in person, you would be surprised. When you see me in person, it is not going to seem like the picture.’
Link (Photo: AP/Tribune/Getty)
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Scientists Construct The Frankenweenie
Scientists from Wake Forest University in North Carolina aroused the world’s interest by successfully performing the world’s first replacement of erectile tissue of the penis. And yes, it’s somewhat fitting that they chose the rabbit to perform the Frankenweenie experiment:
In a previous study, the researchers engineered short segments of rabbit erectile tissue with 50% of full function.
In the latest work, they harvested smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells from the animals’ erectile tissue.
These cells were multiplied in the laboratory and used to seed a three dimensional scaffold, which was implanted into the animals’ penis.
Organised erectile tissue with blood vessel structures began to form as early as a month later.
The researchers believe the key was the fact that the cells were injected into the scaffolds on two separate days, enabling them to hold almost six times as many smooth muscle cells as in previous studies.
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Happy Birthday Sesame Street!
Sesame Street premiered on November 10th, 1969, which makes it 40 years old today! The above clip is from a promotional show aired to introduce the series two days before the premiere. Sesame Street was originally intended for inner-city children, but became a hit with the preschool set all over the globe. Many people don’t realize how much the show has changed in 40 years. The early seasons are available on DVD with a disclaimer that says:
“These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
In those early days, Cookie Monster smoked a pipe. He also ate things that weren’t edible, much less nutritious. Oscar the Grouch was much grouchier. And children rode bicycles without helmets! You won’t see those things on this season’s Sesame Street. Link
More Sesame Street Links
Today’s anniversary episode features guest star Michelle Obama.
Caroll Spinney, who plays Big Bird, is still going strong at almost 76 years old.
8 Memorable Sesame Street Celebrity Cameos.
Sesame Street videos on YouTube.
The 101 Muppets of Sesame Street.
Big Bird Sings at Jim Henson’s Funeral.
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Maggie, the Well-traveled Dog
Maggie the dog had a passport that would make most jet setters jealous, and over the course of her life she has crossed borders, braved wars, and experienced the world. Maggie managed to make friends on both sides of the conflict, with all walks of life, proving the old adage that dogs are man’s best friend. Enjoy this tribute to a dog’s life well lived.
She was born on Cape Cod and came of age in Boston. But she lived in Jerusalem and walked the ancient, cobbled streets of the Old City where she begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She swam in the Sea of Galilee and climbed the Mount of Olives and crossed the Allenby Bridge at the Jordan River. She lived for a while on the rugged coast of Brittany in France and eventually crossed over by ferry, past the White Cliffs of Dover to arrive in London where she spent many long afternoons in a great, old pub.
From the Upcoming 
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Sociological Deconstruction of the Disney Princesses
Image: Jeff Brunner
Jeff Brunner offers this scathing critique of the values that the Disney Princesses teach girls. At the link, you can view a response about what Disney teaches boys.
Link via Popped Culture
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Which Music Will My Cats Like?
What kind of music do cats like? This charming science fair display follows the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, resulting data, and conclusion. The student theorized that the cats would fall asleep to classical music. In this case, the conclusion is what I would call a punch line: “My hypothesis was wrong, because they did not care either way.” Flickr user Daniel N loved this display and took a picture for posterity. You can see a larger version at the photo page. Link -via Buzzfeed
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Chair Made From 374 Wooden Dowels
Photo: Kibardin Design
Prague-based Russian designer Vadim Kibardin created the Deep Forest Lounge Chair out of 374 wooden dowels, carefully molded to seat a person comfortably. Each is custom-made and priced at $6,584. More pictures at the link.
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Seven Strange Golf Courses Around the world
Photo: flickr user Prince Roy
Deck Chair has compiled pictures and videos of seven unique golf courses, including one that floats, one that sits astride a motor speedway, and another that is 1,365 km long. Pictured above is a scene from the golf course at Coober Pedy, a small mining town in Australia. The land is so desolate that golfers must carry around a piece of turf from which to tee off.
Link via The Presurfer | More about the Coober Pedy golf course
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New Anti-Whaling Vessel Looks Like Something From Batman
Photo: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, best known for its aggressive tactics against whaling vessels, had added a stealthy, high-speed boat to its fleet. At The National Post, Jeremy Barker writes:
The Ady Gil, a bio-diesel powered trimaran, can hit 40 knots and Captain Paul Watson plans to sail it quickly into harms way….The Andy Gil, which has circled the globe in a little over 60 days, has been coated with radar blocking black paint, which will be used as an ‘intercept and blocking’ weapon against the Japanese fleet.
More pictures and video at the link.
Link | Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
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Caption Monkey 65: Scopin' Bulldog
Photo: Art Verduzco
Psst! Wanna win your very own Monkey drawing by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford? Here’s your chance – but first, the ’splanation by Art Verduzco, whose photo was featured in National Geographic Magazine’s Your Shot editor Susan Welchman’s Daily Dozen:
Her name is Minicooper and she is a one years old English bulldog. We where relaxing on the beach when I caught her looking thru the scope.
Your task is simple: caption the photo above to win! Place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You may enter as many funny ones as you’d like.
Good luck and be sure to visit Adam’s blog for your daily Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.
Update 11/11/09 – Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to sybann who won with this caption: I really wish you wouldn’t use a rocket launcher for "fetch."
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The Dubai Fountain
Reminiscent of the amazing musically coordinated fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas the Burj Dubai fountains named “Dubai Fountains” certainly are impressive. This $217 million project was built by the same California based company WET Design (whose website I highly suggest checking out as it is beautiful!) that created the Bellagio Hotel’s fountains. This record setting fountain uses 6,600 lights with 50 coloured projectors and is able to fire the water into the air at as astonishing 150m or 490ft! The music played in this video is Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s “Time to Say Goodbye”.
The first video I found through Dark Roasted Blend (check out the rest of the site!)
This second video is by far my favourite and allows you to see a much closer view of the fountains at work. The song used in the performance is called “Baba Yetu”, created by Christopher Tin which I’m sure some of you Civ 4 fans will most certainly recognize as the opening track to the game! 
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The Jobless Rate for People Like You
The New York Times has an interactive graph that plots the jobless rate for different groups of Americans compared to the average for all those who are unemployed. Mouseover to find lines for different races, ages, and levels of education. In this screenshot, the label refers to the very faint red line above the dotted line which represents the average jobless rate. Link -via Metafilter
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Roombas Playing Pac-Man
(YouTube Link)
Three computer scientists at Colorado University programmed several Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to act like Pac-Man and the ghosts which chase him. Jack Elston, Cory Dixon, and Maciej Stachura did so in order to demonstrate the unmanned aerial system that they are developing. Click on the link for more videos, pictures, and schematics for this project.
Link via CrunchGear
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Iconic Album Art on Stamps
The British Royal Mail service commissioned Studio Dempsey to create first class stamps with classic albums covers. The covers include albums from Blur, New Order, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, David Bowie, The Clash, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay -but no Beatles.
The final selection of ten sleeves (which perhaps oddly doesn’t feature one of The Beatles’ album covers) will appear on a set of 10 stamps that will launch on January 7, 2010 – and the stamps will be uniquely shaped, as shown in these images, to accommodate a glimpse of a vinyl disc poking out of each record sleeve.
Link – via babycreativeblog
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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The Science Behind Cowboys In Black and White Hats
In old Western movies, heroes often wore white hats and villains wore black hats. Why? Wray Herbert wrote in Scientific American about a new study that investigated why people often associate the color white with righteousness and black with wickedness:
In Sherman and Clore’s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection did not ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.And they did, so quickly that the connections could not possibly be deliberate. When moral words were printed in white and immoral words in black, reaction time was significantly faster than when words of virtue were black and sin were white. Just as we unthinkingly—almost unconsciously—“know” a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black and that grace and virtue are white.
The researchers conducted further tests and determined that this color-moral association may stem from concepts of physical cleanliness:
This result offers pretty convincing evidence in itself that the connection between black and bad is not just a metaphor we all have learned over the years, but rather it is deeply associated with our ancient fear of filth and contagion. But Sherman and Clore wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. The researchers tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.
Link | Image: Republic Pictures
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You'll Need an Electron Microscope to Read the World's Smallest Book
Image: Robert Chaplin
Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s smallest book. Each page measures about 11 by 15 microns:
The Robert Chaplin/SFU Nanobook project was produced using a focused-gallium-ion beam with the assistance of Dr. Li Yang, and Dr. Karen L. Kavanagh of Simon Fraser University, located at the summit of Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby, BC. The gallium beam has a minimum diameter of 7 nanometers, and was programmed to carve the space surrounding each letter of a book. The book was typeset in block letters with a resolution of 40 nanometers, and is made up of 30 microtablets, each carved on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon. The entire collection of microtablets is contained within an area of 69 x 97 microns square with an average size of tablet being 11 x 15 microns square.
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Moments
William Hoffman is a New York filmmaker who put this video together and uploaded it last August. It’s finally getting some viral activity, and rightfully so. It’s “a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.”
I do enjoy a perfectly realized edit, and this one’s full of them. William’s website.
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Lost Persian Army Discovered Almost 2,500 Years Later
A massive army of Persian King Cambyses II was said to be swallowed up by the desert in the year 525 B.C. The army, containing a whopping 50,000 soldiers, made it to a desert oasis and then was never heard from again –until now.
“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus.
Up until now, most historians thought this was mostly just a story, but the discovery of a massive collection of bones and silver and bronze jewelry in the desolate Sahara Desert has them reconsidering.
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Human-Shaped Root
Farmer Zheng Dexun of Langzhong, China dug up a fleeceflower root that looks like a human being right down to the arms, legs, and facial features. It is 62 centimeters tall and weights 5.8 kilograms. Zeng, worried about the consequences of digging it up, put it back in the ground, saying ” don’t know whether it is good or bad to dig out a Chinese knotweed that looks like a human. I’d better put it back in the earth!” Full-sized image at the link.
Link via Urlesque | Image: WENN
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D&D Character Sheet As Resume
Image: Sean McNally
Sean McNally, a 15th-level artist and 7th-level animator, created a resume that looks like a character sheet from Dungeons & Dragons. He claims to have a Base Art Bonus of +11, of which I am skeptical. But maybe a little exaggeration is expected on a resume. Click on the link for a larger image.
Link via Geekologie
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The EU may approve "road trains" for European highways
Truck-based road trains are currently used for long-distance transport in rural Australia and in several other countries; they are created by physically connecting several trailers or semi-trailiers to the lead tractor unit.
The EU is proposing a different type of “train,” which would be comprised of a mixture of trucks, buses, and passenger cars closely following one another in a slipstream, much as race cars do at professional tracks. The project’s acronym is SARTRE (SAfe Road TRains for the Environment).
The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle.
The idea, of course, is to improve fuel economy and to relieve congestion by allowing a greater number of vehicles to occupy a given area of the roadway. But notice how this concept also solves the problem of texting-while-driving, by removing the “driving” component and allowing the driver to spend his/her entire time texting. Sounds perfectly logical to me. What could possibly go wrong?
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How Big Is Antarctica?
Photo: Icebridge (NASA)
Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, and that’s with all of its ice. There is a land mass beneath, which looks like this. Twitter user Icebridge made this image to illustrate just how large our most unvisited continent actually is.
Conversely, “it is estimated that at any given time there are (only) 1,000 people ‘living’ in Antarctica, but this varies depending on the season.” (from Answerbag.)
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Remote-control Bowling Ball
At one time or another, everyone wishes they could control a bowling ball after it leaves his/her hand. The RC900 remote-control bowling ball makes that dream come true! A weight in a threaded shaft inside the ball determines its direction, and the user controls the weight. The purpose of the ball is to give young children a bit of success as they learn to bowl, and to help disabled people paticipate in the sport. Don’t even think of sneaking the RC900 into a competition! Link (with video) -via Gizmodo
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Top 10 Clever Fixes for Your Broken Stuff
Lifehacker collected ten handy household repair secrets from around the web that may come in handy when you least expect them. For example, a tip for getting your dying hard drive to survive long enough to make the backup you should have made long ago.
If it looks like mechanical failure is the cause, and you need just a bit more data off that drive before it’s gone for good, try sticking it in the freezer until it’s good and cold, then let it reach room temperature again and give it another try. This passed-around tech geek tip works, as a last resort, because when worn-out mechanical parts fail to connect and align properly, contracting them with cold, then allowing them to expand again, can sometimes restore things to barely-working order just long enough to give you a little more time before the funeral.
You’ll also find quick fixes for stripped screw holes, broken light bulbs, and even hangovers! Link -via the Presurfer
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The Matrix as a Silent Movie
What if The Matrix had been produced in the silent film era? This skit is from the Russian group Bolshaya Raznitsa, which translates to Big Difference. (via Dark Roasted Blend)
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