Are you killing it on amateur night at the comedy club? It's more likely that the audience is about to kill you. That's why the Laugh Track Jacket may save you. Becky Stern of Adafruit developed this comedy aid. It's an audio soundboard with a thin 4-button keypad. When you need some support, click the appropriate button. Stern selected canned laughter, crickets chirping, and a foghorn. But it's a customizable system, so you can choose any sound file.
P.S. Now let me pitch my idea for a horror movie: a man wakes up one day to discover that there's a laugh track for his life--but he's the only person who can hear it.
When I'm running outside and I hear a bicycle bell, then I know that there's a rider behind me who wants to get by. But how do I pass by walkers easily without sounding obnoxious? Sometimes even saying (or gasping, in my case) "Good morning!" or "Coming up on your left!" doesn't get their attention.
The Runbell looks like a great solution. Kevin Nadolny and Tomoko Yano invented it to help them run through one of the largest cities in the world: Tokyo. It's a tiny bicycle bell that fits over two fingers. The user strums it with the thumb. It comes with silicone inserts so that it can be worn with or without gloves and still fit easily.
In the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror," Captain Kirk and several colleagues were accidentally transported to a mirror universe ruled by evil. The Enterprise was a ship of conquest, promotion within Starfleet was by assassination, and Spock had a beard. It was terrible--except for the beard part, which looked rather nice on Spock.
Every crewman on the Enterprise carried a personal device called an agonizer. When a superior officer gave the order, you must turn on your agonizer, which sends searing pain coursing through your body.
Captain Kirk and the other characters from the home universe were shocked and scandalized by this brutal machine. This is only because they had forgotten that such a device existed in Earth's dark, barbaric past. We have agonizers today, but we call them snooze buttons.
The Soviets have struck against the American homeland, so this farmer and his cow head into their shelter in the barn. It's one scene from a series of nuclear war preparedness public service announcements that the US Department of Agriculture produced in 1965. The basics of what you need to know to survive are illustrated by marionettes.
If you grew up during the Cold War, then you may have already learned through similar films how to protect your family from radioactive fallout. But if you're a farmer, then you may have livestock to protect. These videos address the needs of farm animals after a nuclear war in addition to those of humans.
Jerry, a goldfish, has gone to join his comrades in Valhalla. Redditor chairmanxiao gave him a proper send-off. Jerry lay in a fine paper longship with important possession to carry with him into the afterlife: food and incense. Then chairmanxiao lit the boat, bidding him a fond farewell. They shall meet again when it is time for the valkyries to come for chairmanxiao.
Ostensibly, they did this to advance human knowledge of science. But let's be serious: the made their saw blade mostly because a saw of shark teeth would be totally awesome.
But awesomeness alone does not get you published in the scholarly world. So when K. Korn, J. Brash, S. Farina, and A. Summers presented their findings at this year's meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, they claimed to be studying the means by which shark teeth cut:
Shark teeth both pierce and cut their prey, which is viscoelastic and structurally and materially heterogeneous. We propose a device for testing the function of shark teeth in a biologically relevant context with respect to their movement relative to the prey. We used this device to test whether tooth shape has an effect on cutting efficiency on a large actinopterygian prey item (salmon) and how quickly teeth dull. Teeth from four sharks, tiger (Galeocerdo cuvier), sandbar (Carcharhinus plumbeus), silky (C. falciformis), and sixgill (Hexanchus griseus), were attached to 30.5cm straight saw blades with epoxy. Each blade was mounted in a reciprocating saw and applied to a chum salmon with constant force.
As you can see, it's quite effective. The builders call it the Jawsall, which is sadly a one-off product that is not available for the consumer market . . . yet.
Super strength? The ability to fly? No, this is a truly great superpower. If you can go without sleep, you can free up several hours of the day to do even more work.
Why, I could probably double the number of cat videos posted here at Neatorama! And my home would stay incredibly clean.
Surely we would all become so much more productive if we could eliminate the need to sleep!
They taste so good that you'll feel the chocolatey flavor erupt through you! Ghoulia Childs, a chef who makes foods inspired by horror movies, prepared this Cadbury Creme Egg that looks like a chestburster from the Alien movie franchise. Is this the result from Cadbury's recent decision to change the recipe?
Police cruisers in Dover, Delaware have continuously running cameras that record what's going on inside. Whoever is driving the car is always on camera. Supervisors regularly review the video footage, sometimes catching officers at embarrassing moments.
The Green Bay Packers are a football team in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They play football for a living. But for fun, a group of them play the board game Settlers of Catan--at every possible moment. It was started by offensive tackle David Bakhtiari, but now there's an entire group that pursues the game with a passion. Kevin Clark writes for the Wall Street Journal:
Packers center Garth Gerhart was intrigued by the game, because teammates were “talking about it all the time, all the different strategies.” He wasn’t expecting such cutthroat competition until he sat down with them two weeks ago and, he said, longtime players ensured his failure. “Everyone is super competitive, so when you first start playing they don’t tell you all the rules. So you start your moves and they say ‘well, actually you can’t do that’ and it sort of screws you in the game,” Gerhart said. “They get very salty.”
Word got around the town of Green Bay that the Packers are avid players of the game. The result was that many football fans began to explore and embrace the game:
Perillo, in passing, mentioned on a local radio show that he and his teammates had played the game the night before. Pat Fuge, who runs Gnome Games, a Green Bay game store, was flooded with texts and calls about it. Packers have occasionally come into Gnome Games—where the events include Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering releases—but those players were there to buy backgammon or other basic games. “Jordy Nelson bought a chess set,” Fuge said of the Packers’ star receiver.
Fuge said most of the gamers are Packers fans, but the store is one of the few local businesses that don’t allow Lambeau Field parking on game days—because many of the customers would like to play board games on a Sunday and not necessarily watch football. But when word spread that the Packers were playing Settlers, people started pouring into the store. After Perillo mentioned it in December, Fuge said, he sold “double what I expected.” He usually orders too many for the Christmas season, but this time he had to restock in mid-December. “When the average person sees the Packers doing it, it becomes a safe thing. That it’s not the kids in mom’s basement anymore,” Fuge said.
Van Truong, 19, is a sophomore anthropology student at the University of Florida. Last December, while studying for a final exam in biology, she thought of a new way to organize her notes. Using a whiteboard at a campus library, she recreated Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting Starry Night. This was Truong's way of keeping the task interesting. She explained to the Huffington Post:
"I knew if I had to read through a packet of notes, I’d fall asleep," Truong said. "I don’t know if I would’ve lasted through three hours just going through notes."
Truong said she chose to recreate "Starry Night" because of its composition. Unlike a portrait of a person, which she thought would look disjointed if made out of individual lines of biology notes, words and sentences could look like Van Gogh's brush strokes.
The Line It Is Drawn is a regular feature at Comic Book Resources. It invites professional comic book artists to draw eccentric and funny takes on pop culture. This week, artists redrew popular comic strips with superheroes. The results are hilarious. Garfield is Wolverine, Batman is Snoopy, and Deadpool is Little Orphan Annie.
Wally from Scott Adams's Dilbert is, of course, Aquaman. He could be no one else.
Patrick Stewart played Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was an early pick for casting directors, but they took some time to develop the character. Although the character is a Frenchman, the English actor played the role with a more neutral accent.
Stopping for second breakfast at a Starbucks, a customer drew this richly detailed and precise map of Middle-Earth on his cup. Redditor Carpe_Natem (that’s Latin for “seize the buttocks”) was on hand to shoot photos of the wonder. Where should we go first?
