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On Tuesday, folks in the Stavropol Region in Southern Russia found their countryside covered with purple-tinged snow!
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
Photo (origin unknown) via Dark Roasted Blend’s pretty nifty article Lots of Snow!
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
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How to Clear the snow off a Roof Actually, we’re not sure how they did- but you can’t deny it’s a good method. Link |
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Awesome Augmented Reality in a Lego Store A brilliant application of AR- that my son and I wish was installed at our local toy store. Link |
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Patrick Stewart is afraid of playing his videogames Patrick Stewart loves modern technology but he’s not there with gaming. Link |
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How to stop a clicking hard drive People at Flashback demonstrate how to stop a hard drive from clicking. Link |
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Mindblowing EXTREME zoom into the Mandelbrot Set Lastly, something to scramble your mind a bit. Vimeo submitter, teamfresh, says: “The final magnification is e.214. A magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This animation took me about two days to set up. My computer then rendered day and night non-stop for just over a month to produce the animation.” Link |
Nick and Anna Berte of Bel Air, Maryland built a giant snowman and rigged it with a flamethrower inside! Link
I would have to agree that the Olympics would be improved with sports that people actually participate in during snowy weather. Snowball Fights, Snowman Building, and Hot Toddy Drinking are right up my alley, but I will leave Dogsled Racing to those who are more experienced. Video examples of each are included. 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.
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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.
John and Kay Ure live in a former lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the edge of a cliff on the coast of northern Scotland. On December 19th, Kay Ure left to go buy a Christmas turkey in Inverness. Before she could return, a snowstorm blocked the road and she had to stay in the village of Durness, eleven miles from home.
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)
Prena Thomas of Lakeland, Florida has an unusual “pet” she keeps in her freezer -a snowball! She made the snowball in 1977 and has kept it frozen safe in a bread bag ever since. Thomas occasionally takes it out to show to friends.
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.
(image credit: REUTERS/Aly Song)
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
It’s not a weather anomaly, but an art project. Stevie Famulari used a weed sprayer to paint the snow on her Fargo lawn pink!
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.
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 
Otters enjoy sledding and skiing, and they don’t even need expensive equipment to do it! -via Unique Daily
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!
While Bear Grylls may have all the charm and reckless abandon that we all love, everyone knows he doesn’t really do half the surviving he claims to on his show.
Ray Mears however has spent his life learning from the worlds Indigenous tribes, picking up skills and dedicating all his time to survival, so he knows a thing or two.
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.
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
Maybe it’s just because I live in sunny Southern California and never actually see snow, but it truly fascinates me. Even if you’ve had your lifetime share of cold weather though, you’ll still probably love these photos of frost, snow and ice. Plus, if you actually read the text, you just might learn something new.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When a freezing winter gives you thousands of tons of snow, what’s an Alpine farmer to do? Harvest the snow and sell it to ski resorts, of course!
In Austria the biggest “snow harvesters” are the owners of the Grossglockner Hochalpenstrassen AG (GroAG), a 40-mile stretch of road 8,200 feet above sea level which is Europe’s highest Alpine crossing.
GroAG spokesman Dietmar Schondorfer said: “Even if it doesn’t snow, every day we have tonnes of snow dumped on the road by the wind, all we have to do is drive back and forward to scoop it up.
This image is a 5′ sculpture made out of snow. In March of 2003, there was a huge blizzard in Denver and school was canceled for an entire week. With nothing else to do and artistic frustration to get out, my cousins, brother, sister, and I decided to sculpt an enormous face in the packed snow. I hope you post this work of art – I personally think it’s awesome
I think it’s awesome, too! Link -Thanks, GwenAnn Hua!
The folks over at 2pie blog have a pretty neat idea: make a snow print by pushing their faces into fresh powder on cars. The images are all concave, but make for an optical illusion of 3D sculptures!
I saw this circulating on the Net a few days ago, but didn’t get the chance to post it till now. Better late than never! Link
What could be cuter? Penguins at Everland Park in South Korea aren’t used to snow, so their keepers outfitted them with suits to wear the first time they used their new snow run. Link (embedded video) -via Metafilter
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