Today's collaboration with What is it? blog brings us this strange gadget - can you tell us what it is for?
First person who guessed right will win a free Neatorama T-shirt of their choosing - if no one gets it right, then the funniest guess will win. Contest rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, but you can add as many as you'd like. Please post no URL, let others play.
For more clues, check out What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 8/8/08 - here's the answer: "This tool was used for holding either a lamb's leg (14th photo from the top) or a drumstick from a roasted fowl.Congratulations to montyhaul, who got it right first!
Comments (59)
sidecar_jon
August 7th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Wait, if I remember...
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis.
What I usually got back was a strong sense that somehow the brain just doesn't work this way. That memories and working memory aren't measurable in bits, and thinking isn't measurable in numbers of logical operations or big-O notation.
I'm glad to see a more numerical answer to this kind of question, even if it is (necessarily) very approximate.
Sorry, typing fail
Actually, there are over 100 Billion neurons in the brain and since the connections for each neuron multiply exponentially (eg. 2 neurons connect twice, 4 neurons connect 64 ways, 8 neurons connect 32,000 ways, etc.) After all is said and done, there are more possible synaptic connections in the human brain than there are particles in the known universe. Far, FAR more than a trillion which really is quite meager compared to the numbers we are talking about here.
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis."
I love this myth that we don't use the considerable amount of our brain capacity. Abstract thought of even the most basic sort is the result of the carefully controlled cooperation of numerous disparate regions of the brain. Our brain don't just have huge dead zones.
As for this romantic idea of the autistic savant, it's also silly. The normal human brain receives and processes a massive amount of data every second. It discards the input it deems irrelevant and focuses on the most important. If it didn't, you would be overloaded constantly with trivial, distracting information that impaired your higher functions. This is essentially what disables the autistic. While they may like Temple Grandin be geniuses about very specific topics, they are unable to function on more abstract levels such as comprehending social interaction.