Oh, English. The language we all know and love, the lingua franca of a large part of the world, is filled with many beloved idiosyncracies. Judith Herman of mental_floss dug up 14 of English words that are their own opposites.

For example:

1. Sanction (via French, from Latin sanctio(n-), from sancire ‘ratify,’) can mean ‘give official permission or approval for (an action)’ or conversely, ‘impose a penalty on.’

2. Oversight is the noun form of two verbs with contrary meanings, “oversee” and “overlook.” “Oversee,” from Old English oferseon ‘look at from above,’ means ‘supervise’ (medieval Latin for the same thing: super- ‘over’ + videre ‘to see.’) “Overlook” usually means the opposite: ‘to fail to see or observe; to pass over without noticing; to disregard, ignore.’

3. Left can mean either remaining or departed. If the gentlemen have withdrawn to the drawing room for after-dinner cigars, who’s left? (The gentlemen have left and the ladies are left.)

4. Dust, along with the next two words, is a noun turned into a verb meaning either to add or to remove the thing in question. Only the context will tell you which it is. When you dust are you applying dust or removing it? It depends whether you’re dusting the crops or the furniture.

5. Seed can also go either way. If you seed the lawn you add seeds, but if you seed a tomato you remove them.

Read more over at mental_floss: Link

Photographer Fabien Nissels always has a model, now that he's constructed the "block man" for his series called Blocks. And he's fairly easy to pose, since he's made of disjointed blocks.

So, to make it short, I took my friend Johan (http://www.chezkatz.com) in the studio and we shot 4 views from each part of his body. We then printed everything and fixed the images on polystyrene blocks we had constructed. Once the blocks were all finished, we took my car and went shooting them in various environments. There is no photoshop cheating, our modular man really went to all these places and always asked for souvenir pictures, except maybe the one when he was on the toilets :)

See the rest of the series at his website. Link -via Laughing Squid

Photo: Sebastian Saarloos

It was 10 degrees below zero, with 30 mph winds in the Alaskan wild, where the nearest town was 50 miles away, but Sebastian Saarloos came out alive and with this gorgeous souvenir: a magnificent photograph of a moondog.

In this image, the first quarter moon is flanked on both sides of a halo by "mock moons," also known as paraselenae or "moondogs." The apparitions are formed when moonlight is refracted through thin, plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus clouds. They are easy to spot at an angle of 22 degrees from the moon when it is low in the sky.

SPACE.com has the story: Link

The Walken Dead

Street artist and punmeister Hanksy (featured previously on Neatorama) hit Los Angeles and had a run-in with the LAPD. Benjamin of Krause Gallery told us:

The handcuffs came out and the blue/red were lit up while Hanksy was putting up the Weird Gal Yankovic piece. The artist said the police were laughing and taking photos of the art piece while he was in handcuffs.

Hanksy was in town to promote his upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery1988. The show opens on May 24th.

Thanks Benjamin! (Photo: Jared Soule)

In the mean time, check out more of Hanksy's work (most of these are in LA):

Weird Gal Yankovic. Melrose/La Brea, Los Angeles

Cage Against the Machine. Melrose/La Brea, Los Angeles

Pee-Wee Merman. Big Adventures in LA. Culver City, California

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

* Lincoln had a wart on his right cheek, a scar on his thumb from an axe accident, and a scar over his right eye from a fight with a gang of thieves.

* He loved the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

* As a six-foot teenager, Lincoln once lifted a chicken pen that weighed 600 pounds.

* Lincoln and his wife held many seances in the White House. They were greatly interested in psychic phenomena.

* Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. It was named that because it was created as a guest room during renovations under the supervision of Mary Todd Lincoln.

* Lincoln is the only president to have a patent. He created a hydraulic system that raised ships over shoals.

Victoria Belanger's jello eggs look like Cadbury creme eggs, but they're actually made with Irish cream and cocoa powder. You can find her recipe at the link. I suggest serving them alongside the real thing.

Link -via Tasteologie

For her project entitled 52 Forms of Fungi, Leigh Martin is knitting realistic fungi. She's making a new one every week. They're very good pieces, especially when left in appropriate settings. You can view more at the link. 

Link -via Knits and Knacks

The new gay rights center in Topeka, Kansas, got a paint job and a sign on Tuesday to let everyone know what they're about. The house is directly across the street from Fred Phelps' infamous Westboro Baptist Church.

The center is the work of a roving do-gooder named Aaron Jackson, a 31-year-old community-college dropout whose other projects have included opening orphanages in India and Haiti and buying a thousand acres of endangered rain forest in Peru. This year, his charity, Planting Peace, also intends to de-worm every child in Guatemala.

Jackson was drawn to Topeka after reading about Josef Miles, the local boy who last year, at the age of nine, photobombed one of the Westboro protests with a handmade sign that read "God Hates No One." Jackson had been looking for a way to support equality, anti-bullying programs, and some sort of pro-LGBT initiative, he said.

"I've been accused in the past of being all over the place, and they're probably right on some level," Jackson told me last night by phone. "Right now we are standing up to bigotry and promoting equality."

The house was purchased six months ago, but the rainbow paint job is the first indication to the Westboro congregation, with several members living in the neighborhood, of what the new neighbors are up to. Link

Update: The facility is called Equality House. Link

Devin at According to Devin drew a series of cats to illustrate what goes on at the biggest social networking sites on the internet. See more of them at his site. Link -via Laughing Squid

Jason Welborn mashed up 90's toon Ren & Stimpy with Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi classic Rendezvous with Rama in this nifty illustration. If you don't like it, we've only got one thing to say to you: YOU SICK LITTLE MONKEY!

See more Nickelodeon/Sci-Fi mash up series over at Draw2D2: Link

The 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is about a future American society where books are banned and burned (by firemen who start fires, rather than put them out). The title refers to the temperature at which the author believes paper auto ignites.

Fast forward to 2013, where art director and graphic designer Elizabeth Perez created this conceptual work, Fahrenheit 451 match book. Link - via NerdCore

Richard J. Pope has one simple question at the beginning of his day: should he take his bike or the Tube to work? This gadget is a barometer that checks the weather--but also a lot more:

The bicycle barometer takes data about the weather, the status of the tube lines I use to get to work, and whether my local station is open or shut.

It then reduces all that data down to a single value and displays it on a dial with a bike sign at one end and a tube sign at the other.

For example, if it is raining a bit the dial will move a bit towards the tube sign, but if the tube is suffering delays, it will move a bit back in the other direction.

Different data points get different weightings. E.g. snow is more important than a bit of drizzle; the tube station being shut trumps everything.

Link -via Technabob

Is there intelligent life in TV's outer space? You decide.

"Is there anyone on this ship, who, even remotely, looks like Satan?" -Kirk

Tuvok: "The phaser beam would ricochet along an unpredictable path, possibly impacting our ship in the process."
Janeway: "All right, we won't try that."

"Mr. Spock, the women in your planet are logical. That's the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim." -Kirk

"I'm a doctor, not an escalator." -McCoy

"I must say, there's nothing like the vacuum of space for preserving a handsome corpse." -Doctor

"I'm attempting to construct a mnemonic memory circuit, using stone knives and bearskins." -Spock

"The best diplomat I know is a fully-loaded phaser bank." -Scotty

"Mr. Neelix, do you think you could possibly behave a little less like yourself?" -Tuvok

"What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?" -McCoy

"Time travel, from my first day on the job I promised myself I'd never let myself get caught up in one of those God-forsaken paradoxes. The future is the past; the past is the future. It all gives me a headache." -Janeway

"It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent." -Q

Data: "Tell me, are you using a polymer-based neuro-relay to transmit organic nerve impulses to the central processor of my positronic net?"
Borg Queen: "Do you always talk this much?"

"The weak innocents …they always seem to be located on the natural invasion routes." -Kirk

"I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer." -McCoy


These quotes reminded me of a video. Continue reading to see it.

Photo: Carl Bento/Australian Museum

Surely you've seen fossils in museums, but what about this: opalized dinosaur tooth. Opalized fossils occur when silica settled into cracks in the dinosaur bone and then hardened into opal. This one above is a particularly fantastic specimen: an opalized theropod dinosaur tooth from the Australian Museum.

Photo: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Painters and mechanics slap on ads on their trucks to drum up business, but what if your skill is basket weaving? Nigerian artisan Ojo Obaniyi of Ibadan decided to cover the interior and exterior of his pick up truck completely with woven raffia palm cane!

Designboom has more pics: Link - via Nag on the Lake