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Redditor Vidzilla composed a story about the end of the world using the internet: website screenshots, photographs, social networking, generators, and news sites -you know, the way internet surfers get their information. The saga begins on January 1, 2012 and ends on the 14th (redditors who followed the story had to wait for each installment). You should click on each day in order, and enlarge the images to follow the progress, but beware that the images become increasingly graphic and may be disturbing to some people. There are also some links in the images for further reading. Each day’s reddit link also has a discussion in the comments. Link -via Metafilter
When you watch a movie or TV show featuring characters in your own profession, it’s natural to criticize the fact that the writers are not as familiar with that profession as someone who actually does it for a living. It would be nice to get professional credit for such criticism, wouldn’t it? A doctor from the Netherlands managed to get his study published in a medical journal from research obtained by reading romance novels. The eight novels were set in the world of medicine, and the actual medicine in this fiction was found to be “sometimes incorrect.”
CONCLUSION: The doctors novels which were studied give an unbalanced and distorted view of medical practice. The medical information was sometimes incorrect, partly due to lack of knowledge by the author, partly due to incorrect translation from English. The reality of medical practice was not represented accurately in either of the series investigated, although the medical information in the ‘Doctors novels’ series appeared to be accurate more often than that in the ‘Dr. Anne’ series.
I wonder if he got a grant for this. Read more at Improbable Research. Link
TV, literature, and movies are full of fictional businesses and products. How well do you know these companies that don’t exist? Find out in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I didn’t know any of the answers, but scored 7/12 by educated guess! I bet you can do better. Link
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Many of these places have been mapped, but now we get the big picture, from Dan Meth. I had no idea Oz was so close to Middle Earth! Frodo would have made sure Dorothy got home safely. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
When fantasy genre and food enthusiast Adam Bruski read the “A Game Of Thrones” novels by George R.R. Martin, he paid close attention to an aspect that i’m sure very few reading the books have even noticed-the amazing sounding recipes. So he has taken it upon himself to recreate the recipes, using only ingredients which would have been available during the Medieval period, on his cooking blog “Cooking Ice And Fire”. Bruski’s passion for food shines through in his recipes, of which there are six so far, and the fantasy food turned haute cuisine recipes range from the strange (cold egg lime soup) to the sublime (veal cutlets blanched with almond milk). With many more books and recipes to go, Adam aims to show us all what we’ve been missing while reading through the series, and how we can bring home exotic and interesting flavors from our favorite fantasy novels!
Did you know that Shrek was partially based on a pro-wrestler named Maurice Tillet? Or that Sonic’s rival, Eggman, was based on a combination of Theodore Roosevelt and an egg? Learn more weird inspirations for fictional characters over at BuzzFeed.
To be honest, these really are music videos, but they were recorded as plot points in TV shows by actors playing fictional characters. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good, but it means you (most likely) won’t get to see the artist perform the songs on tour. However, you can find them on YouTube, and in syndication on the original TV shows they were made for. For example, you remember the song “Smelly Cat” from the series Friends.
Friend’s Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) has a long list of occupations during the course of the show, including singer-songwriter for which she is best known for her least popular song, “Smelly Cat”. Encouraged by a record producer, she records the song professionally as both a track and a music video, but her voice for both is overdubbed by another artist, E.G. Daily, who is less attractive but a much better singer. However Phoebe still appears in the video, along with three backing vocalists, a cast of homeless people, and a possessed (did you see its eyes?) cat.
Read the stories behind ten such videos (and watch them) in this list at brainwavez. Link -Thanks, Mandy!
When a TV show has been running as long as The Simpsons has, you get to know its fictional world pretty well. Jeff Wysaski took the information from the show and mapped out all the stores in the Springfield Mall for your convenience. This is only a small detail of the entire upper-level and lower-level map at Pleated Jeans. Link
Dan Meth came up with the definitive map of fantasy places you know and love -all in one big continent! It’s “the very first accurate map of the entire fantasy world.” Let the arguments begin. Link -via Buzzfeed
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
Ready to brush up on your science? Don’t worry -it’s fake science. Here are the names and properties of various chemicals, elements, and other substances …that exist only in books, movies, and TV shows.
Dilithium: Crystalline mineral used in the operation of the warp drive on the U.S.S. Enterprise on Star Trek. It controls the “anti-matter” used to power the warp drive. which somehow allows the ship to travel through space faster than the speed of light. Dilithium is in the “hypersonic” family of elements.
Energon: Highly radioactive and extremely unstable, this substance is found throughout the universe, but in its liquid form it’s both fuel and food for the giant robots from space in the Transformers cartoons and movies. The search for energon is what leads the evil Decepticon robots to earth, where the chemical is abundant.
Beerium: In Yahoo Serious’s Young Einstein (1988), Albert Einstein turns out to be an Australian who, in addition to his many scientific pursuits, invented rock music and beer. He invents beer by splitting the beerium atom, which releases carbonation.
Byzanium: In Clive Cussler’s 1976 novel (and the 1980 movie) Raise the Titanic!, the Pentagon begins work on a secret defense system that uses sound waves to deflect missiles. But it requires tremendous power, which can only be produced by a rare, radioactive element called byzanium. And the world’s only store of it is locked in a vault on board the sunken Titanic, requiring the book’s protagonist, explorer Dirk Pitt, to go get it.
Adamantium: A metal alloy that covers the skeleton of Wolverine in the X-Men comics and movies. It’s what allows him to have metal claws protruding from his hands.
Ice-nine: This substance drives the plot of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Ice-nine has such a high melting point that any substance that comes into contact with it instantly freezes. In the novel, scientists fear that since ice-nine could freeze everything on Earth, it could bring about the end of the world.
Carbonite: A Star Wars substance in which living things could be frozen and suspended indefinitely. Most notably, it’s how Han Solo was imprisoned for delivery to his nemesis, Jabba the Hut.
Unobtainium: In the movie Avatar (2009), earthlings go to the distant planet of Pandora to mine this fuel source, worth $20 million per kilogram. Writer James Cameron actually took the name from real life: scientists have long used “unobtainium” to describe rare or possibly non-existent materials.
Vibranium: A recurring substance in Marvel Comics, it first appeared on earth 10,000 years ago, when a meteorite made out of it crashed in Africa, causing natives to mutate. In the 1940s, a scientist named Dr. Myron MacLain obtained some while developing iron alloys for military tanks and used it to create an indestructible shield for the Nazi-fighting super-soldier Captain America.
Eitr: According to Norse mythology, this bright-blue liquid is the source of all life, from which the first creature, the giant Ymir, first emerged.
Amazonium: In the comics, Wonder Woman’s lightweight armor-like bracelets are made of this metal, found only on her native “Paradise Island”. (On the TV show, her bracelets are made of “feminum”.)
Melange: The much sought after spice from Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), it’s a drug than can both extend life and bend time. Unfortunately, it’s extremely rare and extremely addictive. Once you’ve started taking it, you can’t stop -or you’ll die.
Deutronium: Found on various planets throughout the universe on the ’60s TV series Lost in Space, it’s combustible in liquid form, making it the fuel of choice for the Robinson family’s Jupiter 2 spaceship.
Cavorite: Making appearances in novels by H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds, First Men on the Moon), it’s a rare element that, when heated into a liquid and then cooled, can block the effects of gravity.
Nitrowhisperin: From Get Smart, it was invented by scientist Albert Pfitzer in an attempt to create silent fireworks. It’s exactly like nitroglycerin, except that it explodes in silence. The evil KAOS organization tries to use it to destroy the world in a 1968 episode of the series.
Chemical X: In the 1990s cartoon The Powerpuff Girls, the Professor attempts to concoct the “perfect girls” out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice”, but accidentally drops in Chemical X, which gives the three little girls super powers.
Mithril: A rare metal in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth of the Lord of the Rings, it looks like silver but is lighter and stronger than steel. When a cave troll stabs Frodo in the Mines of Moria, the hobbit is saved by his vest made of mithril.
Upsidaisium: From the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, this mineral floats in the air, unbound by gravity. Its only known source: Mt Flatten, a mountain that hovers in the sky. (Bullwinkle inherited the mine from his Uncle Dewlap.)
Flubber: In the 1961 Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor, Medfield College chemistry professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) botches a calculation and accidentally creates an elastic substance that absorbs energy when it hits a hard surface, causing it to bounce sky-high. He names it ‘flubber” (a contraction of “flying rubber”). First Brainard uses it to help basketball players jump higher, which helps them win the big game, and then he charges the flubber with radioactive particles, enabling his Model T to fly.
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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
The “best” hangovers are, of course, fictional, since there are really no good hangovers. But witnessing the misery in this list may make you more cautious about overdoing the New Year partying and give you a laugh besides. Here’s how Tom Wolfe described a hangover in Bonfire of the Vanities:
“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” The fictional British journalist is reputed to be based on Christopher Hitchens
The slide show from The Guardian has more hangovers described poetically and painfully. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Mandy J. Watson took text from ten classic novels and generated word clouds in fonts and colors that portray the feeling of the novel. The results are pictures that are quite familiar to those who have read these works. In addition to The Wizard of Oz shown here, see Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, The Time Machine, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and others. Link
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In this version of the Thanksgiving story, Mario fled a famine to try raising power-ups in the New World. He had a hard time until he and his people made friends with the natives, which, of course, eventually leads to a feast. Link -Thanks, Scott!
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Wouldn’t you love to know someone like the inventors in our movies and books -someone who can come up with gadgets, materials, and machines to solve your problems? Of course, in some stories inventors cause the problem themselves! Gizmodo takes a look at these geniuses from movies, TV, and literature and why we love them. My vote goes to Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who invented
The flux capacitor, the core component of a machine that allowed Brown to travel through time. Brown came up with the idea of the capacitor on November 5, 1955, and worked tirelessly for the next 30 years developing it into a working time machine. The capacitor, which requires 1.21 Gigawatts of electrical power to function, was first implemented in a customized DeLorean and later, or maybe earlier?, in a 19th century train.
In their tribute to Shark Week, BroBible compiled a list of sharks that appeared in literature, films, and TV shows, ranked from the ridiculous to the nightmare-inducing. If you can identify the shark pictured here from memory, you can probably guess where it ranked. Link
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You can spice up your Twitter feed by following characters from movies, TV, and literature! Twitter is full of people who don’t exist, but have plenty to say anyway. Buzzfeed searched for the most entertaining of those feeds and listed them for your convenience. Link
All you and I have to do to tell a fiction from a non-fiction is to read a piece of text – but how can a computer tell the difference? It’s tricky, but doable:
Joseph Stevanak and Lincoln Carr at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden have come up with a way to do it. They say that the key is to look at the networks that form when you examine how often words appear close together in each type of text.
The type of network they examined creates a graph in which each word in the text forms a vertex. A line connects two vertices if these words appear next to each other in the text. It is possible to explore longer range links by connecting vertices when they appear two or three or four words apart and so on.
Stevanak and Carr say that just two properties of this kind of network can help distinguish fiction from nonfiction stories. The first is the power law that describes the number of links to each vertex in the network. The second is the cluster coefficient which describes how well the vertices are connected to the rest of the network.
Measuring these two quantities alone can identify the type of story with remarkable accuracy. "Our analysis yielded a 73.8±5.15% accuracy for the correct classification of novels and 69.1 ± 1.22% for news stories," say Stevenak and Carr.
Pandemic takes the idea of audience participation to the world of social networking. The Colony is a simulated-reality Discovery Channel show that creates the scenario of a disease pandemic and we watch to see how isolated participants react to the altered world. You can join in via Facebook. The Pandemic site takes your circle of friends and puts them into that world. You can change the time line from the outbreak to the pandemic to the survival phase. I have to admit it was unnerving to read as my Facebook friends “reported” on the fictional chaos. The pandemic requires you to allow access to your Facebook data. Link
You know them, you love them (at least some of them), but you might not know that Captain Crunch, The Comic Book Guy, Mr. Clean, the Michelin Man, and the patient in the game Operation all have given names. It’s true! Mental_floss dug them up, along with lots of other fictional characters with full names, just so you’ll know. Link
For Joyce Carol Oats, it’s Crime and Punishment. For Carl Hiassen, it’s Catch-22. The blog Online Degrees has a list of the favorite books of fifty famous authors. Here’s a selection:
10. John Irving: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: The author of best-selling novels like The World According to Garp loved this Dickens classic
14. Norman Mailer: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Himself an innovator of New Journalism, a style that blended non-fiction and essay, Mailer’s favorite book was this renowned piece of realist, though highly romantic, fiction.
43. Stephen King: The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Campbell and Charles Grayson: King chose this fiction anthology as his favorite, though he has stated that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a close second.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: National Science Foundation
David Thorne is at it again. The guy who tried to pay a bill with a picture of a spider and suffered through a surprise apartment inspection now has overdue video rentals. The correspondence between Thorne and Blockbuster Video goes about as you’d expect (if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…), but there is a delicious twist at the end.
Dear Megan,
With the possible exception of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the movies were not worth watching let alone stealing. In Logan’s Run, for example, the computer crashed at the end when presented with conflicting facts and blew up destroying the entire city. When my computer crashes I carry on a little bit and have a cigarette while it is rebooting. I don’t have to search through rubble for my loved ones. The same programmers probably designed the Blockbuster ‘returned or not’ database.
Yes, in the midst of sweet, sunny, sweltering, early-summer days, with the gnats swirling around your head and the bees singing their bzzzzy song, the incomparable results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have risen from the depths of a writer’s dark and stormy mind to torture readers yet again. And if you think that sentence was bad, you should read this year’s winning entry:
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
That gem was written by 55-year-old David McKenzie of Federal Way, Washington. Honors also go to runner-up Warren Blair of Ashburn, Virginia and winners in various fiction categories. Link
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Allivymar.
I’m a big fan of the genre of fiction known as alternate history. That’s why I’m excited about a new novel by Harry Turtledove and Bryce Zabel called Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy.
The point of divergence is that a Secret Service agent spotted the glint off of Oswald’s rifle seconds before he fired. Kennedy survived November 22, 1963. Whether or not he would survive scandals that would rock his administration would not be so certain.
You can read the first chapter of the novel here, and the articles of impeachment here.
Check out this award winning short film (it’s only 3 minutes long). It’s a nice shoutout to the gothic horror films of the 20s and 30s. Simple but effective.
Plot Synopsis:
A leasing agent prepares an apartment with a mysterious past for an
afternoon viewing. While awaiting the arrival of the prospective client
the leasing agent learns that she’s not alone in the apartment.
– via fightingowlfilms
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Gukbe2000.
The Heartbroke Daily is an online diary of a fictional character, Knox Dupree, who suffers from a chronic ailment: love sickness. In it, Knox tell us an engaging story every day about a different woman who broke his heart:
Dahlia was that girl in the airport terminal who you see out of the corner of your eye and think, She seems really intriguing. I hope I sit next to her. It usually doesn’t happen, so you pop an Ambien and fade yourself out for the duration. However, in this particular instance I wound up sitting in next to the girl from the terminal, thinking to myself, maybe my luck has changed.
I struck up a conversation about nightlife in Tokyo, where we were departing from. This led into a rundown of who we were, and what we did. She worked in advertising, liked it ok, preferred Seattle, where she lived, to Southern California, where she was raised. It was all mundane small talk and I found my infatuation fading, until, two hours into the flight, both engines stopped and the plane fell from the sky like a anvil in an old cartoon.
Link – via The Presurfer
