Entrance to the Fortress of Solitude? Not quite - but as you can probably
tell, it is leading to somewhere cold ... and cool! Most people want to
go to a warm, tropical beach for their holiday getaway, but if you like
it cold, you can't go wrong with the Snow Village in Ylläsjärvi,
Finland. The hotel and restaurant are made of snow and ice!
Idle
hands are the devil's playground notwithstanding, some experts now believe
that you should let children be bored, so they can develop their innate
ability to be creative:
Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should
be constantly active could hamper the development of their imagination.
[...]
Dr Belton said: "Lack of things to do spurred her to talk to people
she would not otherwise have engaged with and to try activities she
would not, under other circumstances, have experienced, such as talking
to elderly neighbours and learning to bake cakes.
"Boredom is often associated with solitude and Syal spent hours
of her early life staring out of the window across fields and woods,
watching the changing weather and seasons.
"But importantly boredom made her write. She kept a diary from
a young age, filling it with observations, short stories, poems, and
diatribe. And she attributes these early beginnings to becoming a writer
late in life."
Emil Johansson, who created the Middle-Earth
Problem Solving Chart and Lord
of the Rings Familiy Tree we featured on Neatorama before, has completed
another ambitious project. This time, he charted the timeline of The One
Ring, from its forging by Sauron and destruction in the fires of Mount
Doom.
Did you lose your camera while vacationing in Hawaii? Is it this one
above? If so, it's your lucky day! Someone found your camera and you can
pick it up ... in Taiwan.
HawaiiNewsNow is trying to find the owners of a camera that washed away
on Maui in 2007, and spent a few lazy years exploring the Pacific Ocean,
until it was found by an employee of China Airlines on a beach in Taiwan:
Bruce Chen, General Manager of the China Airlines Honolulu Branch says
an employee found "something strange" on a beach in Taiwan
and took a closer look and realized "Oh this is a camera."
It was a Canon camera, covered in barnacles, with the memories, perfectly
preserved inside.
"We checked the memory card and found lots of pictures" says
Chen.
The pictures are from an August 2007 diving trip in Kaanapali, where
perhaps, the camera drifted away, and the owner wrote it off as gone
for good. Until it washed ashore five and a half years later, more than
62-hundred miles away, on the east coast of Taiwan. [...]
The airline has been trying to track down the owner, believed to be
a young blond woman seen in many of the pictures.
If that's your picture, you've got a free airline ticket to Taiwan, courtesy
of the airline, to pick up your long-lost camera.
NeatoMail subscribers got first dibs: Choose your own
Funny T-Shirt
or Science T-Shirt
prize by leaving a comment below. Let us know which T-shirt you'd like
to win. You can choose anything in stock from the Funny T-Shirt and Science
T-Shirt categories.
Five lucky Neatoramanauts picked at random will win. NeatoMail subscribers
get first dibs (and guaranteed 3 winners), before the contest is opened
to blog readers.
Contest rules are simple: One entry per person (duplicate entries will
forfeit the prize). If you don't have a Neatorama account already, you'd
need to register one in order to leave a comment. Only confirmed accounts
are eligible to win.
Go ahead, check out the NeatoShop's selection of Funny
T-Shirts and Science
T-Shirts and pick one that you'd like to win! Good luck!
Update 3/26/13: The giveaway is open to all readers of the blog. Subscribers to NeatoMail get first dibs - so why don't you subscribe to our newsletter and be the first to know about cool contests and giveaways?
Remember the Neatorama post about tying
exotic necktie knots? Well, this is the exactly opposite. Behold the
idiot-proof Zip Tie by Josh Jakus of Actual studio: Link
- via design-milk
A bowl of soup makes everything better. Yang
Yongliang (previously
on Neatorama) extended that bit of folk wisdom to art with the series
A Bowl of Taipei, featuring marvelous Chinese landscape on ceramic bowls.
Photographer Masashi Mitsui
captured the serenity of a sleeping baby as it is being carried in a basket
by a boy (brother?) in Nepal. Do you think your baby can sleep as soundly
in a basket like that? Link
A lot of men think of themselves as alpha males, but Werner Freund, 79,
has got them beat: he's an alpha male amongst wolves. Reuters photographer
Lisi Niesner documented Werner's life amongst packs of wolves that he
reared by hand in a wolf sanctuary in Western Germany. Check out the gallery
over at The Atlantic: Link
We've featured
Estonian artist Eiko Ojala before on
Neatorama, but the man has got a new papercut artwork that you've simply
got to see: Link.
Gorgeous!
Well, somebody at Wolfram Alpha likes StarCraft. The computational knowledge
engine that high school students everywhere use to, uh, check their math
homework (of course, they wouldn't use it to actually do the homework)
has an Easter Egg of sorts. All you have to do is type in the phrase "zerg-like
curve" into the Wolfram Alpha search field:
But the fun doesn't stop there! Turns out, there's a whole bunch of these
fun
curves of fictional characters. Check out some examples below and
let us know which one's your favorite:
Kasper Stromman won the coveted Graphic Designer of The Year, which he
promptly celebrated by designing the best sweatshirt the world has ever
seen. Naturally, Comic Sans is involved. Link
" 'Sup?," we imagine this False Killer Whale said to Doug Perrine
of SeaPics
as it swam on by. To which we imagine Doug replying back, "Oh, nothin'
- please don't eat me."
The American marine wildlife photographer snapped this marvelous pic
of the grinning cetacean off the shores of Kona, Hawaii. The Telegraph
has the pic: Link
