This blogger is trying to find the town of Tecuci, Romania, under the snow! For some reason, the Google translation renders the town’s name as Tecumseh. There are more pictures of the huge snowfall at the site Criserb. Link -via Buzzfeed

(Video Link)

Living in San Diego, I always think snow is awesome, but for those of you who live in it and are getting tired of the flurries, it can be nice to remember that at least someone is having fun in the frost.

One of the best things a kid (or an adult) can do with tons of snow is make a snow fort. They keep the wind off you, lend a hand to all kinds of imaginative play, and with enough kids inside, they even get warm! But how fancy did you ever get with a snow fort? Unreality magazine has a collection of forts that will make your inner child green with envy. Link

Think of them as snowy versions of the Weeping Angels. During the winter, you can find snow-covered trees in northern Japan. They are called juhyou and are known for a ghostly appearance.

Link -via Oddity Central | Photo: Casa di Cina

John Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him. Since that time, he has repeatedly gotten annoyed, collected data, and written monographs.

This new study is the third in a series Professor Trinkaus is publishing in the Annals of Improbable Research. The first, “Hand Sanitizing: An Informal Look,” appeared in AIR 15:6. The second, “Hand Sanitizing: Another Look,” appeared in AIR 16:3.

(Image credit: Flickr user purplemattfish)

To glean some indication as to the number of drivers who clean the snow off their vehicle’s roof, and the number of people who shovel snow off fire hydrants, a small, informal enquiry was conducted during the first two days following a major snowstorm during the winter of 2010. The locale was a suburb of a large city in the Northeast.

What Was Noted When

On the morning of the first day following the storm evidence of passenger vehicle roof cleaning — as contrasted with merely clearing a viewing port for the front and rear windows — was observed.

On the second morning, fire hydrant snow clearing was noted. Some owners of homes near a fire hydrant sometimes choose to clear a working area around the hydrant — to permit fire persons access in case of an emergency.

Day 1 — Details

On the first morning the writer positioned himself beside the two city-bound lanes of a 4 lane state highway. As passenger vehicles passed their roofs were viewed for the presence of snow.

For the purpose of this study, they either had snow or they did not have snow. If a vehicle surface had both clear and snowy sections, it was not counted for there was no way of telling if some snow had been purposely cleared or simply had been blown off as the vehicle was driven. If the roof was clean and dry, without any trace of snow, again, for the purpose of this enquiry, it was not counted. It was assumed that the vehicle had been garaged during the storm. Of the 1,000 “qualifying” vehicles noted, 473 (47%) were sedans and 527 (53%) SUV’s (sport utility vans). One hundred forty-two (30%) of the sedans had roof snow, and 469 (89%) of the SUV’S had roof snow.

Day 2 — Details

On the second morning, the writer drove through the area consisting or modestly sized and priced single family homes observing fire hydrants. For the purpose of this enquiry, only two states of the world were considered: the area around the hydrant was purposely cleared, or it was not. If there was a question of “status,” no note was made. One hundred hydrants were observed. Nineteen (19%) were cleared; eighty-one (81%) were not.

(Image credit: Flickr user chbrenchley)

Limitations

The methodological limitations of this study, such as subjective judgment, the use of only one observer, convenience sampling and the inability to replicate the enquiry, are recognized.

Similarly, acknowledged are such setting boundings as: use of a single community, absence of consideration of any applicable ordinances, lack of consideration of prevailing cultural norms and practices, and the want of factoring for other variables, such as day of the week and the prevailing weather following the storm.

Thoughts About The Findings

However, it might well be reasonable to advance some thoughts about what the findings or this enquiry could suggest about social morality. Ease seemingly plays an important part in the practice of social morality. If it is not too difficult for folks to do, they will probably do what society says is right. Removing snow from the roof of a sedan is certainly less of a job than clearing snow from the roof of a SUV. Too, leaving snow around a fire hydrant is easier to do than shoveling it away. Surprisingly, self interest does not appear to be too much of a modifier. Removing snow from a vehicle roof makes for safer driving. Removing the snow from a fire hydrant makes for more effective and efficient fire-fighting.

Satellite image, taken two days after a snow storm of the general region containing the suburb (of a large city) where this study was conducted. Photo prepared by Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2010 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.

Google has installed another Easter egg, except this one’s more appropriate at Christmas than Easter. Go to Google search and type in Let It Snow, and watch your wish come true! I’ve even made a shortcut for you. Link -via mental_floss

This guy is just waiting to EXTERMINATE any scrooges out there who haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit yet. If I actually lived somewhere with snow, I’d be out there making one of these right now.

Link Via The Mary Sue

The Nome Volunteer Fire Department was alerted and Vial’s co-workers and volunteer rescuers drove surrounding roads in search of the Toyota.

One searcher drove 41 miles along Kougarok Road — just a few miles from where Vial sat shivering and stranded in his pickup — but saw no tracks. The searcher turned back as daylight disappeared and the road conditions worsened, Handeland said.

Troopers joined the search. Rescuers looked for Vial on the ground and from the air, in planes and from a helicopter.

“When we get called on situations like this, it’s a needle in a haystack,” said Jim West Jr., a Nome fire department captain and search and rescue coordinator.

For Vial, the cold was worse than the hunger, he said. Still he scoured the pickup in vain for food.

His only provisions: Snow, and a few cans of Coors Light that had frozen solid in the cab.

Vial ate the beers like cans of beans. “I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife,” he said.

Vial lost 16 pounds, but showed no signs of frostbite. Link -via Breakfast Links

I know it’s a little warm out for snowflakes, but you will have to agree these detailed images of snowflakes are pretty amazing no matter what time of year it is.

Some look like roman columns, others circuit boards or spaceships. Taken under high magnification using a microscope, these images bring a fragile and beautiful world into view.

Link

(YouTube Link)

This beautiful fox in Yellowstone Park is not about to let a few feet of snow keep him from a tasty dinner. He listens to the mice scurrying about beneath the surface and then he makes his move.

Via Eclecticity

The top of a tractor trailer is covered with snow. In fact, it looks like it’s a few feet deep. When that pile hits an overpass, it sends snow everywhere over the roadway.

via SnarkyBytes

There are plenty of wonderful things to do on a snow day! And if you do these things, be sure to take pictures. This illustration by Grant Snider is available as a print. Link -via Laughing Squid

When there’s snow on the ground, one naturally thinks of Hoth, the icy planet you see in the beginning of the movie The Empire Strikes Back. What better time to haul your LEGO Star Wars creations outside for a photo shoot? Link

After big snow and ice events in the Southeast, Plains, and Midwest this week, 49 out of the 50 states currently have snow on the ground – yes, even Hawaii, where snow falls in Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea all winter.

Thanks a lot, Florida. We almost had a perfect record. But you just had to go and be different, didn’t ya?

Link | Photo courtesy of Google Maps

Street art made possible by snow, with just a few seconds of eerie animation, inspired by a drain grate. The artist is Cem Ulucan. -via Laughing Squid

Aaron Dabelow and Mike Nelson noticed that a freshly-shoveled walkway looked like the trench on the surface of the Death Star depicted at the end of Episode IV of Star Wars. So Dabelow added a digital X-Wing fighter to recreate the scene.

via Great White Snark

This snow vehicle is an example of a screw-propelled vehicle.

In the 1920s the Armstead Snow Motor was developed. When this was used to convert a Fordson tractor into a screw-propelled vehicle with a single pair of cylinders, the combination became known as the Fordson Snow Devil. A film was made to show the capabilities of the vehicle as well as a Chevrolet car fitted with an Armstead Snow Motor.[6] The film clearly shows that the vehicle copes well in snow. Steering was effected by having each cylinder receive power from a separate clutch which, depending on the position of the steering gear, engages and disengages; this results in a vehicle that is relatively maneuverable. The promotional film shows the Armstead snow motor hauling 20 tons of logs.

Link -via Everlasting Blort

Oh no, this is nothing about a dog pulling a sled. This little guy just thinks it’s his turn to ride! -via I Am Bored

Bjorn Carey of Life’s Little Mysteries did the detective work:

Like many East Coasters, I spent just a little bit of time digging out from this past weekend’s snow storm. As I stabbed my wood and aluminum shovel at a hip-high snow bank, I couldn’t help but marvel at the tool I was using. So simple, yet so useful.

The first known shovels, I found out in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology, were discarded ox scapula (shoulder blades) that folks in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain used to move soil and rocks. 5,000 years ago, people probably didn’t need to clear a path through snow drifts to get to their car, but I’d bet that they used these tools to push around snow, too.

Link

Michael Black set up a camera to photograph his back yard in New Jersey every five minutes for twenty hours during yesterday’s blizzard. He assembled those photos into this 38-second time lapse video. Note how the clock had to be lifted and lifted higher -until he finally gave up and just dug it out of the snow between pictures. -via Laughing Squid

New York City got such a snowfall that it even accumulated underground -in the subway stations! Link -via Fark

(Image credits: @dwag29 and @caro)

Redditor keef2000 made a snow “man.” That is all. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

“Follow the path you’re on” is not always the best advice -especially if the path maker is a prankster! I don’t where this video originated; the short description in Polish was not helpful. -via Arbroath

With a major winter storm set to hit much of the U.S., this seems to be an appropriate time to share photos from The British Museum illustrating how mankind has coped with winter in earlier periods.

At the top are Eskimo-Aleut spectacles found at Southampton Island, crafted out of ivory.  The center piece was created by Siberian craftsman, using leather, white metal, and beadwork.  The bottom one comes from Salekhard, made of “metal, cloth, skin (reindeer, with fur), brass, beads, and buttons (brass).”

Link, via A London Salamagundi.

At first the staff, all aged under 25, got stuck into the drinks, he said, but on the third day they eased off.

“We haven’t been getting ratty,” he said. “It’s been fun and we have had a laugh.

“We have been getting on with little jobs, having our tea, a drink, playing games and then going to bed.

“The bosses aren’t here, they are snowed out.

“We have wireless internet here and the television works so we have been fine.”

During the day, the couple and staff managed to get out onto the snow on improvised sledges made from beer trays.

Rescue came when snowplows finally broke through and the road was officially open by Saturday night. Link -via Arbroath

When you need a little pick-me-up, there’s nothing like pictures of pandas! This collection shows the joy of juveniles playing in the snow. Link -via Rue the Day

Having analysed the samples, climatologists ruled that the snow is perfectly safe. However, eating purple snow is still not recommended as scientists say it is full of dust from Africa.

A massive dust cyclone rose to upper atmosphere layers and then mixed with regular snow clouds in Russia’s South.

This is not the first time the country has seen such a snow. Link -via Fortean Times

Obviously. Link

Engineer Jeff the Baptist and victim of the recent Snowpocalypse has a problem: he’s got a huge pile of snow in front of his house. Being an engineer, naturally he wants to use noggin-power to solve this problem:

My first thought was to sprinkle them liberally with rock salt. The problem is they’re big enough that putting enough salt in place might be troublesome. My second thought is that the biggest piles are on my lawn and any salt will end up on or under my yard. I’d rather not salt my own fields as Rome did to Carthage.

My second thought is to stab some aluminum strips into the heart of the larger piles. Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor and is available in a number of forms at the local hardware store. If I can find some cheap strips (preferably black), I can essentially conduct heat into the heart of the pile. I could put them in in the morning and then pull them when I got home so they wouldn’t cool the piles during the night. Not sure if they’d work, but it might be neat to try.

Thoughts from my fellow nerds?

I propose a flamethrower. How about you? Link – via The Zeray Gazette

Top 3 best/funniest answers will win T-shirts from the Neatorama Shop. Be sure to write your which T-shirt you’d like with your entry!

Update 2/24/10 – Great entries, guys! Congratulations to Brad (“Al Gore”), Zavatone (“Jet Engine for melting snow on railroad tracks”), and Lola (“Call Vancouver”).

This Russian-language video shows people jumping off a five-story building into a snow drift in the town of Magadan in Far Eastern Russia. Would any Russian-speaking Neatoramanaut care to translate for us?

via Urlesque

Nick and Anna Berte of Bel Air, Maryland built a giant snowman and rigged it with a flamethrower inside! Link

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.

Hair ice, also called silk frost, is a type of ice formation that looks like silk and seems to only appear on woody, barkless materials on the ground. The ice structures tend to grow out of a small pore in the wood, sort of like hairs on the human head. Dr. James Carter has more on the phenomenon (and more photos too) on his site.

Link

Mr Ure spent Christmas and New Year on his own and celebrated his 58th birthday last Sunday with a tin of baked beans.

Yesterday, for the first time since mid-December, he managed to drive 11 miles to a small jetty and cross the Kyle of Durness by boat to collect his wife and the turkey.

The couple run the country’s “most isolated tearoom” at the end of an ungritted army road and were forced to spend their first festive season apart in 35 years.

John Ure was down to emergency rations before he could drive to town. He said reuniting with his wife was like a “second honeymoon”. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Peter Jolly)

Thomas said that over the decades, she has never had a power outage that would destroy the cold hunk she says is precious to her.

“It’s just like a little pet,” she said.

Thomas made the snowball during a rare Florida snowfall 33 years ago. Link -via Fark

The Big Picture has a bunch of beautiful pictures of this year’s International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in Harbin, China. Buildings made of ice blocks are illuminated both inside and outside, creating a magical effect.

Link

(image credit: REUTERS/Aly Song)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tsevenut.

Famulari is an environmental artist and a landscape architecture professor at North Dakota State University.

She changes the color of her snow with each new layer that falls. She plans to paint the next snowfall a purplish blue and the one after that will be black.

She chose her colors to become darker as the season progresses. When the snow melts, she expects the older layers to be revealed.

Famulari says she will not paint the snow yellow. Oh yes, she also paints her lawn in the summer. Link -via Unique Daily

(image credit: David Samson/The Forum)

Being raised in sunny San Diego, I never even got to build a snowman before.  That’s why I find snow sculptures to be purely impossible and amazing. Even if you’ve grown up in the harshest winters around though, you’re still certain to be impressed with these detailed snow sculptures on Web Urbanist.

Link

It’s beginning to look a lot like winter in some areas, and run-of-the-mill snowmen are popping up here and there. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait got geekily creative and made a Dalek out of snow! Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1933, observing natural snow, Ukichiro Nakaya {wiki} created the first classification system of snow flakes: categorising them into seven major, and numerous sub-types. In the process of this, he took over three-thousand photomicrographs. In 1954 the Harvard University Press published Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial, a book that still serves as a classic reference on snow crystal shapes. This video discusses how Nakaya, after categorising snow, set about creating it. -via itsnicethat

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Seg.

Otters enjoy sledding and skiing, and they don’t even need expensive equipment to do it! -via Unique Daily

YouTube Link

Just in time for snow season!  DC co-founder Ken Block teamed up with Subaru to design and produce the world’s fastest cat-track snow car.  Primarily for reaching alpine backwoods to engage in some fresh boarding, the vehicle is also built for fun as a standalone toy.

Prepared by Vermont SportsCar, performance modifications include 400-hp and features Group N competition rally dampers made by EXE-TC and a KAPS 5-speed close-ratio dog-engagement gearbox. Under the hood sits a 2.5 liter, 4-cylinder, turbocharged and intercooled STI engine tuned with a MOTEC M800 ECU.

Not seen is a trailer that will haul up to four boarders and equipment.  More info here.

Remember when you were little and playing outside with your friends and someone said lets play ‘War’, ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘Cops and Robbers’? And using your imagination that stick you found turned into a weapon complete with sounds and recoil and the times when you’d argue with friends on whether or not they got hit by your weapon? Well, these kids are doing the same thing but are using their imagination at a much more prodigious level.

**Note: This movie has subtitles so please turn them on by following the instructions that pop up when you press play!

Here he demonstrates how to build a snow cave, which if necessary you could shelter in for weeks at a time until the weather cleared up enough to get to safety. Not many of us are likely to see that much snow any time soon, but its a great bit of knowledge to have.

Link [YouTube]

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.

When some people decide to roll a large snowball down a hill in Hampstead Heath park in London, do you:

a) Jump out of the path of a giant runaway snowball?
b) Jump ON it?

Oh, like you couldn’t guess what happened next! See for yourself.

– via somethinamazing

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.

Celebration, Florida is a planned community near Orlando that was developed by the Disney Company in the 1990s with early 20th c. architecture. 

Every night during December the palm-lined main street in the town center is filled Christmas music and artificial snow (tiny soap bubbles) is pumped out of the streetlights.

Link

Link

This method of beer storage might equally apply for Chicago, Boston, or New York, if the weather prognosticators are correct.  It works if you lose power, and in fact is completely carbon-neutral.

Link – via nagonthelake