Many cooking tasks are commonly done with two hands. What do you do if that's not an option for you? Sichen Sun developed this mechanical cutting board in response to this need. It's called Better Cut.
First, Sun observed the food preparation activities of people who can use only one hand. Many of them had already improvised solutions from conventional cooking equipment. Forms of clamps were common. These held food in place. But they required a lot of resetting, clamping and unclamping.
Sun's Better Cut uses adjustable gears to hold down food and move it forward along the board for chopping. Pushing and pulling the handle moves the food through the gears, which serve as adjustable clamps.
Will Stephen is a comedian with the Upright Citizens Brigade and a writer who has published with the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and CollegeHumor.
Will Stephen is smart. You can tell because he's delivering a TED Talk. Only smart people get to deliver TED Talks. And, more importantly, only smart people watch and--if at all possible--attend TED Talks in person.
So if you cannot attend a TED Talk yourself, then make sure that you are seen in public watching a recording of one. Or just link to a TED Talk on social media and tell people how meaningful it was to you.
This particular TED Talk would be a good pick. It will prepare you to deliver your own TED Talk, as Stephen explains in detail how to enunciate, gesticulate, and obfuscate in ways that will make you appear intelligent to people who like to watch TED Talks. You know--smart people like you.
You can say a lot of bad things about Gordon Ramsay if you base your opinion solely on the way he acts on TV, but all that cursing and screaming is there for ratings sake and in real life Gordon is far more amiable.
He's also the kind of guy who enjoys showing people the ropes in the kitchen, and you'd be surprised how much you can learn from him when he's not screaming orders at you!
Gordon has been posting cooking videos on his YouTube channel for about six years now, and this time he has blended five videos into one powerhouse lesson in mastering 5 basic cooking skills- finely chopping an onion, cooking rice, deboning a fish, sharpening a knife and cooking pasta.
Best job in the world: driver of the Batmobile Parachute Pickup Van. Not only are you working for Batman, but you probably don’t have to do anything all that often. And the sign on the side of the van is a great conversation starter.
From 1728 to 1878, the Socci family of Ponte a Ema, a small town south of Florence, Italy, produced the finest furniture in Europe. Their clients expected the best and got it, including this desk now owned by the Louvre in Paris. It's one of four known examples of this remarkable design.
The whole unit folds away into a small table. Then, when needed, it expands with a built-in chair, writing desk, drawers, and leaves. You can see more photos of it and the other surviving models at Clostermann Antiques.
In this kindergarten gymnastics recital, a young boy attempts to clear the vault. He fails. And fails again. But he keeps trying, and eventually breaks into tears. Still not giving up. But he gets an encouraging cheer from his fellow students (“You can do it!”) and that makes all the difference. -via reddit
And it totally works! The musical duo called Team Kozan performs Taylor Swift’s hit song “Shake It Off” on the koto, which is a long plucked instrument with 13 strings, and the shakuhachi, which is a notch flute made of bamboo. At the end of the video, they put down their instruments and start shaking it off.
Two men go into the ring wearing medieval plate armor and blunted swords. Then they try to beat each other into submission. It's full contact with full steel.
This is Knight Fighting, a sport within the Russian M-1 Global mixed martial arts league. It's emerging in the US, too. USA Knights promotes the sport here.
But the Russians are leading the sport internationally. So to compete, we Americans really need to start training a large pool of fighters--perhaps only 1% of whom will be natural champions--from elementary school on. Make it a school sponsored sport, like volleyball and track.
Echo 12, a pilot of the Rebellion, crashed and is left for dead on the ice planet Hoth. He’s not entirely alone there, which makes the situation quite dangerous. Even worse, it will be dark soon.
Rebel Scum is a Star Wars fan film by Blood Brother Cinema Co.
Rebel Scum pays homage to the original Star Wars trilogy; nearly all visual effects were created without the use of CGI, using time honored methods such a stop-motion animation. Shot on location in -30°C (-22°F) at Columbia Icefield in Alberta Canada.
There is a moment where it might have helped to have a lightbulb go off over the character's head. Read more about this production at its website. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In this uplifting video, a man named Jared talks about how he lost an amazing 300 pounds in fifteen months, in part due to his practice of DDP Yoga, a fitness regimen developed by Diamond Dallas Page. Jared's video is now inspiring others like overweight vlogger Boogie (featured previously on Neatorama) to follow his path of foregoing obesity and embracing health.
The persistence of people like Jared has the power not only to inspire others to lose weight, but to give hope to any person who needs to make a major change in their life that will be a significant challenge to their self discipline. Via Laughing Squid
Arnold Lobel wrote Frog and Toad Are Friends in 1970, which was thankfully a different world at the time. What would the most famous works of children's literature be like if they were written in 2015? Kristi Olberding of Distractify has 9 photoshopped covers to show you. I can't even . . . .
The crew of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower put together their own version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. The Navy’s creative use of what they had available will make you laugh and then make you go “Whooooa!”
At the end, you’ll see the title, and maybe think it says The IKEA Wakens. No, it’s The Ike Awakens. That’s the short name of the aircraft carrier. It's an easy mistake to make. -via Uproxx
Seven-year-old Evan Leversage of St. George, Ontario has been courageously fighting brain cancer for the majority of his life. After five years of living with the disease, Evan's brain tumor has been recently determined to have increased in size. Medical professionals have told his parents that he could be gone by the year's end.
Once they received that heartbreaking prognosis, Evan's parents decided to gather their family and celebrate Christmas on October 24th. But the extended family did not stop there. They circulated flyers, created a Facebook event page and started a crowdfunding campaign to allow the entire town to celebrate Christmas early with Evan and his family. Thus far they've raised $21,000. Evan's mother told the CBC,
"You look out our front window, the entire street is lit up. Everywhere you look it's Christmas. It's more than I could have imagined. When Evan looks out his window, the backyard is decorated and there's a sign saying 'Merry Christmas.'"
This proud hunter is posing with his catch. Something tells me he went over the limit; surely you can’t get a license to bag that many! Of course, in the discussion at reddit, the vegetarians are coming out of the woodwork to disparage this man’s ethics in hunting poor defenseless zucchini, while others are proclaiming the superior taste of free-range zucchini over farm-grown zucchini.
How an architect revolutionized the basketball shoe.
(Image credit: Mike Rogalski)
Something strange was in the air at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It wasn’t just that deadlines loomed—that was typical. A shareholders meeting was just around the corner, which never brightened the mood, but that wasn’t it either. Tinker Hatfield Jr., a 35-year-old sneaker designer, couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His boss, Nike’s creative director and lead shoe designer, Peter Moore, typically blasted music in his office while he sketched new ideas for shoes. But this summer morning in 1987, the music wasn’t playing.
A few weeks prior, Rob Strasser, Nike’s vice president, had suddenly handed in his resignation. Nobody had seen it coming. Strasser was an industry veteran who’d spent nearly two decades as Phil Knight’s marketing guru. He’d become a local legend, “the man who saved Nike.” In three years, he’d turned the company’s fortunes around by signing Michael Jordan to the most high-profile and successful athlete endorsement deal in history. Soon, Jordan’s contract would be coming up for renegotiation. Wherever Strasser was about to go, he seemed poised to take Jordan with him.
Moore, who’d designed the first two iterations of the Air Jordan, was clearly frustrated. Suddenly, he called Hatfield into his office. Sketches for a new shoe were scattered around the desk. Handing Hatfield a thin sheet of tracing paper, Moore said, “You do it. Design Michael Jordan’s next basketball shoe.” A week later, Moore followed Strasser’s lead and walked out the door, leaving behind a thin file filled with those same sketches. The deadline to present the new Air Jordan was a few weeks away, and the company’s fate seemed tethered to the deal.
Hatfield had never even worked on an Air Jordan, let alone designed one. In fact, he was new to the field: He’d barely worked on sneakers for two years. But now, with Nike reeling from the loss of its design and marketing leadership and with its relationship with Jordan on the line, Tinker had a lot riding on this one shoe. (Image credit: Jimmka89)
In high school, Hatfield had been a standout track athlete. He was part of Oregon’s robust amateur-sports culture (near the center of which was his father, a legendary track coach). He attended the University of Oregon on a track-and-field scholarship and held the school’s pole-vaulting record for a while, but his teammate, Steve Prefontaine—who would go on to become one of the most celebrated track stars in history—got most of the attention. That was fine by Hatfield. He’d chosen Oregon because the school offered a bachelor’s degree in architecture—his true passion.
