It's called the Bumpair. We receive a history of the development of this invention at Core 77. An early version was paired with a scooter rental company that stored one of these self-inflating helmets with each bike. Checking out a scooter on an app triggered the helmet's inflation.
The new version is available for individual consumers. You can inflate it by mouth or hand pump when needed. I realize that it sounds like you're wearing a pool float on your head, but the Bumpair 2.0 passes Europe's official safety standards for bike helmets. And, of course, it looks really cool.
This warrior is a master archer. She's shooting perhaps 100 feet from across her backyard through a ring that is about an inch wide. She nails three shots, one right after another. A victory dance ensues after each. Her phone records the hits to great visual effect due to its proximity to the target.
Then, with her final shot for the night, she nails her phone itself. The rest of the video (after the decisive blow at the 2:10 mark) shows her laments and attempts at repair.
Content warning: foul language. You'd swear, too, if you just shot your phone.
Remember Crusoe the Dachshund (previously at Neatorama)? Since we last saw him, he's grown a bit. In fact, in this video he's the size of a respectable government building! This dachshund doesn't know his size, as he tears up the pavement around town just by walking. A wag of the tail can destroy windows! I hope the folks at the cookie factory got out alright, because dachshunds love cookies. Can anyone stop this behemoth before he destroys the entire city? It surely won't be Karen, or will it? This story will remind you of a 1950s B-movie, in which something grows to enormous size due to nuclear radiation. The difference is that this is an adorable little dog, and the special effects are better than those old movies.
It's that time of year! The Iowa State Fair will take place August 10-20. There will be a variety of attractions, but here at Neatorama, we usually focus on the food, because every year food vendors compete to come up with the most outrageous, delicious, artery-clogging combinations to draw in publicity and hungry fairgoers. This year Iowa has 64 new gastronomic offerings from various restaurants who will be set up at the fair. Of those 64, a panel of judges has selected three finalists for the title of Best New State Fair Food.
One is the Grinder Ball, which are bacon balls that are stuffed with mozarella, wrapped in more bacon, and then smoked and dipped in marinara sauce. They make sure to inform us that it's gluten-free.
The Iowa Twinkie is anything but a Twinkie. This is a jalapeño pepper stuffed with pulled pork, sweet corn, cream cheese, and ranch seasoning. It is then glazed with barbecue sauce and ranch dressing.
The third finalist is the Deep-Fried Bacon Brisket Mac-n-Cheese Grilled Cheese. The title is the description.
Strangely, none of the three finalists are served on a stick. If you're going to the Iowa State Fair, you can find the foods you want to try by downloading their app. Then you can vote for the Best New Fair Food online between August 10th and 14th. The winner will be announced August 16th, which leaves several days for everyone else to try it.
Most simple children's electric toys run on five volts or less. YouTuber Aboringday has time on his hands and a lot of toys, so he took their batteries out and hooked up a WANPTEK DC power supply to various toys to see what boosting that voltage would do, in increments up to 30 volts! What happens? Well, they go faster. They sound like they are screaming, although that's just the moving parts trying to keep up. And sometimes they tear themselves apart. That can be pretty funny, but what's really fascinating is how odd the toys are in the first place. I would love to have the duck slide; that's just cool. The dancing monkey is charming and clever. But the bee sting dog is downright horrific at any speed. Would a child actually get pleasure from it? Oh, but there's more.
The anticipation grows as we wait to see what more power will do to a Thomas the Tank Engine train! It's an illustration of the phrase "going off the rails." But for consistency's sake, he feels he has to show us all the higher voltage levels anyway. The crab had to be tied down! What he did to the dog bank was downright sadistic. We got some laughs, and now all his toys are broken. -via Metafilter
The life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer has been told in several venues, but none have come close to capturing the complexity of the man. The new movie Oppenheimer from Chris Nolan opens this weekend in another attempt. The real Oppenheimer was a superbly intelligent and educated physicist, a nerd from an early age, who answered the call when the US military needed all the superbly intelligent physicists it could round up. Those physicists included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Felix Bloch, James Franck, and the young Richard Feynman. Amid that distinguished team, Oppenheimer was appointed head of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, a role he surprisingly excelled in.
Oppenheimer put his heart and soul into his work on the atomic bomb, but that was not all he was. He also had relationships with at least two women who belonged to the Communist Party. And the ethics of the bomb his team created weren't lost on the physicist. Read about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer before you see the movie this weekend, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Ed Westcott, U.S. Government photographer)
The sinking of the Titanic was such a momentous disaster that movies are made about it over and over. CaptainJZH collected a dozen of those movies or TV shows and put together clips of the final plunge of the ship as it slipped underwater, out of sight. Theses movies span a hundred years, and you can watch the special effects get better over time. I had to laugh at the first one, but the rest are pretty moving.
You might notice that all the cinematic sinkings before 1985 showed the ship in one piece, and all those afterward show a ship broken in two. The Titanic was gone before any other ships arrived, but most of the 705 survivors said that the ship broke in two pieces before sinking. But those hundreds of eyewitness accounts were not believed! That fact was only confirmed after the wreckage on the sea floor was discovered in 1985. -via Kottke
I decided today that I’m going to see if I can find the restaurant with the highest number of brothers. I am on strike and have nothing better to do with my time. Please join me. pic.twitter.com/BGY3r04PyX
Dan Amira, a humor writer for The Daily Show and modern-day Renaissance man, recently decided to expand our knowledge of the human condition by locating the largest number of brothers attributed to any restaurant in the world.
The resulting Twitter thread shows an escalating number of brothers that either founded, worked at, or serve as mascots for eateries. Okay, so two brothers can start a pizzeria. That's fine. But let's add another brother and another until it's brothers all the way down. The vast number of brothers eventually stops looking like a family and more closely resembles a clone army.
During the Golden Age of Piracy, any pirate ship that had a surgeon, or any kind of medical practitioner, onboard probably got him by kidnapping him from another ship. But hey, it beat getting slaughtered like so many others.
Mark C. Kehoe has always been fascinated with pirates. He participated in pirate forums, which led to becoming a pirate re-enactor, which led to difficult research on what the life a pirate surgeon was like, as there are few contemporary accounts, and those are hard to find. All this led to the The Pirate Surgeon's Journals. It contains an extensive history of the medical profession itself and how it fits into seafaring, plus articles on how these surgeons dealt with the plague, alcoholism, provisioning and dietary struggles, and other difficulties of taking care of outlaws at sea. We also get a look at the horrific injuries these surgeons confronted, as well as the diseases and disabilities they encountered. Oh yeah, there are plenty of other pirate topics outside of the medical realm, too. You'll want to bookmark the site because there's just so much. -via Boing Boing
The whole world uses the same basic calendar for communication and trade reasons, but there are still cultural differences that go way back. The four seasons are delineated by the solstices and the equinoxes, but you still hear local jokes about five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and mud. The Japanese calendar divides the four main seasons into 72 much more detailed units called ko, each about five days long. If you want to be in tune with nature, each of these ko describe what the world around us will be doing as the weather, plants, and animals go through their annual cycles.
According to the very detailed calendar, the first cherry blossoms will appear March 26–30, frogs begin to sing May 5–9, and praying mantises hatch June 6–10. Keeping up with such things sounds quite pleasant, as long as the world acts normally. Those who follow traditional ko are the first to notice how climate change is affecting the calendar. As a casual gardener, I am well aware of which flowers should bloom each month, and they've been alarmingly off schedule this year.
In the past few days, we've had posts about bears eating garbage, and about European visitors to Yellowstone. So it only makes sense that Tom Scott would head to Yellowstone to find out how to keep bears from eating garbage. At the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, Tom learns how some bears escape euthanasia after helping themselves to picnic baskets or garbage. If they go to live here, they are put to work testing bear-resistant coolers and trash receptacles. We no longer actually say "bear-proof" because we don't want to overpromise.
The bears at the center are encouraged to continue getting into containers to eat human food, so they can never be released back into the wild, lest they teach other bears how to do it. But as far as trash-eating bears go, these are the lucky ones. While Tom got a great video, he now has to explain the business loss of a GoPro camera in some unusual circumstances.
This weekend saw a horde of fictional characters out in full regalia at Montreal Comiccon, and Geeks Are Sexy was there as usual to capture the magic. Folks went all out, like the Valkyrie shown above. Stay out of her way- that wingspan must be about eight feet!
Who knew Rocket Raccoon had a dog? That's not Cosmo the Spacedog, but more like Rocket's "Mini-Me." They're both pretty hairy, so you have to wonder how warm it was in Montreal this weekend. Check out the gallery of cosplay portraits at Geeks Are Sexy, where you'll see characters from TV, movies, comic books, anime, cartoons, and folklore. Click any of the images to bring up a full-size version. If you don't know the character, it will be revealed when you hover your cursor. A good time was had by all.
Let's face it- the only reason in the world to spend a ridiculous amount of money on clothing is so that everyone around you will know that you have enough money to waste it any way you want. Or enough power to get them free. Last month, Balenciaga staged their 52nd couture show during Paris Fashion Week. One of the more astonishing overpriced creations unveiled was a pair of jeans that retail for $27,000.
Ah, but these are no ordinary jeans. They aren't even jeans at all. These are regular cotton and linen pants, hand-painted in trompe l'oeil fashion to resemble worn and faded denim. Each pair represents more than 100 hours of labor, and you can't even throw them in the washer. Let's break this down. Consider that the materials and company overhead could cost as much as $2,000 (a very generous estimate), that means that the artist, or more likely a team of artists, should have earned around $200 an hour to paint the pants and still give the company a $5,000 profit per pair. Nice work if you can get it, but is it believable? And do they have them in stock in a variety of sizes, or would you have to commission them? Read more about Balenciaga's trompe l'oeil jeans and other new fashions at Highsnobiety. -via Nag on the Lake
Have you ever wondered why bubblegum is pink? Why #2 pencils are yellow? Why blue jeans are blue? It is often the story that many brands of the same product end up the same color because new brands want to be recognized as much as the first popular version, riding on their coattails, so to speak. But someone somewhere had to decide what color that original version would be. And there's a story behind each of those decisions. That's just commercials products. Some universal objects have logical reasons for their color. When it works in one place, it works everywhere. Let's learn some of those stories behind universal colors from Weird History.
Rob Worling is an extreme ice skater who likes to push winter sports to their limits and beyond. It's not enough for him to just play hockey in the winter and tennis in the summer. He has to combine them by setting up a tennis court on an ice rink. I find it amusing, but also compelling because I can see it thriving as a competitive sport.
Worling's other adventures on ice include playing ice basketball, ice football, and ice soccer. The last of these adapted sports looks particularly demanding because of the need to dribble the ball and skate simultaneously without falling over.
