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EZ Bag Red Rose – $3.95
Valentine’s Day is on its way. Are you looking for the perfect small token of your affection? Get the EZ Bag Red Rose from the NeatoShop. This beautiful red rose unfolds into a convenient reusable bag.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Reusable Totes.
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Angry Birds Plush Laplander Hat – $19.95
Attention Angry Birds fans! As you are well aware it is a bird versus pig world out there. Now is the time to declare your allegiance by donning one of the above Angry Birds Laplander hats from the NeatoShop. Are you a hungry pig or an angry bird? The war against cold heads and ears is on.
These super soft Angry Birds Plush Laplander Hats are sold separately and are available in Red Bird and Green Pig.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Angry Birds items and Headgear fun!
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Photo: Michael Christopher Brown/Newsweek
Ah, the irony. Guess who's profitting from doing something that would've gotten them "re-educated" in a farm back in the days of the Cultural Revolution?
Here's how some clever bourgeious restaurateurs are capitalizing on the boom of nostalgia in China:
To many, the idea of a Cultural Revolution–themed dining establishment is paradoxical, since tasty cuisine was certainly not that era’s strong suit. The first “Red restaurants” sprouted in Beijing in the ’90s, offering little more than a few socialist-realist posters and food that was minimalist in the literal sense of the word. One served dandelion-leaf salad and raw cucumbers to symbolize the grass and bark that some poor Chinese ate during the hardscrabble ’60s and ’70s. Now Red-restaurant cuisine is more in line with middle-class tastes. In Mao’s hometown, “the Chairman’s Favorite”—roast fatty pork—is a must, while Red Scene offers a pricey shrimp dish for $27 alongside less-expensive cornmeal cakes and country-style bean curd.
Melinda Liu of The Daily Beast reports: Link
Hello Kitty Sunglasses Tote Bag – $64.95
Attention Hello Kitty fans! Behold the incredibly adorable Hello Kitty Sunglasses Tote Bag from the NeatoShop. This eye-catching quilted bag features large sunglasses and 3-D red bow. This bag is kitty-tastic!
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Hello Kitty & Sanrio fun!
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Wind-Up Pac-Man & Ghost – $9.95
Attention Pac-Man fans! Now you can relive the golden age of video arcade games with the Wind-Up Pac-Man & Ghost set from the NeatoShop. This fantastic Pac-Man and Blinky, the red ghost, set will have you wound up with excitement and hungry for play. Nom. Nom. Nom.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Cubicle Toys.
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Star Wars Lightsaber Flashlight (Darth Vader) – $25.95
Are you a Star Wars fanatic in need of a new flashlight? Behold the Star Wars Lightsaber Flashlight (Darth Vader) from the NeatoShop. This fabulous red LED flashlight has lightsaber sound effects when you turn it on/off. Get one of these flashlights and a light source force will always be with you! Star Wars Lightsaber Flashlight (Anakin Skywalker) is also available.
Be sure to check out all the fabulous Star Wars items available at the NeatoShop.
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by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff (Image credit: Flickr user Patricia van Casteren)
Bulls care little about the redness of a matador’s cape. Psychologists have been pretty sure about that since 1923, when George M. Stratton of the University of California published a study called “The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle.” The full citation is:
“The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle,” George M. Stratton, Psychological Review, vol. 30, no. 4, July 1923, pp. 321–5.
“It is probable,” Professor Stratton opined, “that this popular belief arises from the fact that cattle, and particularly bulls, have attacked persons displaying red, when the cause of the attack lay in the behavior of the person, in his strangeness, or in other factors apart from the color itself. The human knowledge that red is the color of blood, and that blood is, or seemingly should be, exciting, doubtless has added its own support to this fallacy.”
Professor Stratton, aided by a Miss Morrison and a Mr. Blodgett, conducted an experiment on several small herds of cattle,forty head altogether: a mixture of bulls and bullocks (castrated bulls) and cows and calves, including some who were accustomed to wandering the range and others who lived in barns.
The researchers obtained white, black, red and green strips of cloth, each measuring two by six feet. These they attached “endwise to a line stretched high enough to let the animals go easily under it; from this line the colors hung their 6 feet of length free of the ground, well-separated, and ready to flutter in the breeze.” (Image credit: Flickr user inthesitymad)
The cattle showed indifference to the banners, except sometimes when a breeze made the cloth flutter. Males and females reacted the same way, as did “tame” and “wild” animals. Red did nothing for them.
Farmers seem to have already suspected this. Professor Stratton surveyed some. He reports that “Of 66 such persons who have favored me with their careful replies, I find that 38 believe that red never excites cattle to anger; 15 believe that red usually does not excite them to anger, although exceptionally it may; 8 believe that it usually so excites, though exceptionally it may not; and 3 believe that it always so excites.”
One of those three dissenters described her experience with red-hating cattle: “A lively little Jersey cow whom I had known all her six years of life, chased me through a barbed wire fence when I was wearing a red dress and sweater, and never did so before or after. I changed to a dull gray, and reentered the corral, and she paid no attention to me, and let me feed and water her as usual. Also a Durham bull whom I had raised from a calf, and was a perfect family pet, chased me till I fell from sight through some brush when I was wearing the same outfit of crimson.”
More typical, however, was the farmer who told Professor Stratton: “In referring to the saying, ‘Like waving a red rag before a bull,’ I have found that to wave anything before a bull is dangerous business.” (Image credit: Flickr user Multimaniaco)
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This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Ladies, which of the two men photographed above is more attractive to you? If you picked the one on the right, then like most women, you like yellow.
It turns out that the secret to attracting women doesn’t lie in how masculine a man looks, rather, it depends on how yellow or red he is:
Women in a recent experiment preferred men with yellower and redder skin tones, both of which can signal good health, a crucial factor in choosing a mate, scientists say.
For instance, people of any race who eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables tend to have yellower hues, and people who are physically fit have more oxygenated—and thus, redder—blood and skin.
By contrast, pallid skin with lesions is generally considered unattractive, perhaps because such traits betray a weak immune system, said study co-author Ian Penton-Voak, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
Unexpectedly, the women in the study showed no preference for men with traditionally masculine features, such as a prominent jaw and high muscle mass, the researchers say.
"What we found is—to our surprise—when you measure masculinity, it doesn’t bear any relation to attractiveness at all," Penton-Voak said.
Lois van Baarle is a recent graduate of Utrecht School of the Arts, and the following is her thesis project. Her animation and drawing skills have been a part of her for most of her life, and this video captures her style well. Music & sound design is by Marcel Janssen. Trichrome Blue is also one of three films for a fictitious company whose mission statement could have been penned by Don Draper.
Trichrome Blue from Lois van Baarle on Vimeo.
Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News wrote that even though President Obama doesn’t like to reduce America into a collection of red states and blue states, he wore only red and blue neckties in his first 11 days in office. Is that just a coincidence?
Not according to science – Robert Roy Britt of LiveScience explains why in high-stakes politics and business, there are only two color of ties, red and blue:
Red and blue are also thought by psychologists to improve brain performance and receptivity to advertising. The new study in Science supports this idea. It also suggests nuances the president might want to know about, assuming one buys into the notion that presidential messages — delivered on television or on Capitol Hill — are essentially a form of advertising.
The study found that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.
"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost," said study leader Juliet Zhu of the University of British Columbia. "It really depends on the nature of the task."
Zhu and colleagues tracked the performance of more than 600 people on cognitive tasks that required either creativity or attention to detail. Most experiments were conducted on computers with a screen that was red, blue or white.
Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading up to 31 percent more than blue. For brainstorming and other creative tasks, blue cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs compare to red cues.
