Oh, where are me manners - with everything that's been going on with preparing for the new baby and all, I've been neglecting doing my usual round of visiting my favorite blogs, including those run by Neatoramanauts, for quite a while.
So happy belated Blogiversary to Miss Cellania, who celebrated her fourth year blogging on August 25! Her blog just passed two million hits, too.
Here's her post marking the occassion: Link - it's definitely worth a read because she posted a link to her wedding photos ... and why wasn't I told that the photos were up?
Does this mean that we have to start calling her Mrs Cellania? And since mr. Wonderful wanted to remain anonymous, perhaps we should start calling him ... Ed Cetera. Sorry, I blame sleeplessness for the pun.
Sixty one year old Georgia man named Roger Stephens was apparently fed up with a crying toddler while shopping at Walmart. Not one to suffer in silence (just look at that scowl!) Roger took matters to his own hands - literally:
The child was crying, which apparently greatly perturbed Matthews. "If you don't shut that baby up I will shut her up for you," Stephens warned Matthews, according to a Gwinnett County Police Department report. Moments later, Stephens acted on his threat, slapping Paige "across the face approximately four or five times." Though the child "started crying and screaming" after being struck, Stephens told Matthews, "See, I told you I would shut her up."
This and many more clippings of newspaper article titles so bad they're good, funny typos and more at this gem of a blog called Criggo. Be prepared to lose hours: Link - via Miss Cellania
Hello
everybody! I'm happy to be back blogging on Neatorama after being mostly
absent last month (why? Here's the very
cute reason). Anyway, it's good to be back! I'd like to update you
on a number of going ons at the blog:
Neatorama Update
We've done some work under the hood (so to speak). The idea is that regular
readers don't see any changes, though some things may be broken. If you've
subscribed to the No Upcoming Queue RSS feed, you'll know what I'm talking
about (the feed is now ironically only posts from the UQ!). We'll try
to get that fixed soon, I promise.
In the meantime, please give the full
RSS feed a chance - there's a lot of gems coming from promoted posts
from the Upcoming Queue.
If you see anything broken, please email me (alex at this here blog dot
com). I appreciate the help!
New Features
If you look at the right-hand side navigation bar, you'll see a number
of new neat features:
Browse by Date
We've gotten a lot of requests from people who like to read
all of Neatorama by going back posts after posts in the archives.
This "browse by date" feature should help them keep track
of where they're at.
Browse by Tags
I'm kind of late to the whole tagging thing (I started tagging my posts
in November 2008 but have since seen the light!) It's revealing to see
that we write more about Star Wars than Star Trek, as denoted by the
size of the tag (reflecting the frequency the particular tag is used).
At the very bottom of the navigation bar, you can see the 5 most recent
comments made on the blog - so comment frequently, mmkay?
New Ad Units
We're still playing around adding new ad units (showing products from
the Neatorama Shop) in the front
page and in the single post pages and deleting some in the navigation
bar.
We're trying to reach a balance between controlling the number of ad
spots and types of ads (for example, the rotating product ads are static
images and not Flash) while maximizing revenue to pay the blog's operational
cost (dem darned bills).
Neatorama Upcoming Queue: Top Submitters of August 2009
We promised
to reward the top 5 submitters to the Upcoming
Queue for the month of August ... and here they are (thanks guys!)
Congratulations
to coconutnut who got the grand prize (an iPod Nano) - the rest of the
people listed above will win something neat from the Neatorama Shop.
We'll continue to reward the Top Submitters, so if you haven't tried
the Upcoming Queue, what are you waiting for? Here's the FAQ
and Formatting Tips
to maximize your chances of getting your submissions promoted.
The freakiest video clip you'll see today: behold the man who can bug his eyes out (and watch him gently tap the back of his head to return everything back to where they belong).
Why, you're welcome. Hit play or go to Link [Break]
Qu Liming learnd that the hard way. The stubborn man tried to block heavy machineries from digging by parking his car in the way ... but this is what he got instead:
"I thought that would slow them down so we could talk, but it just made them mad," said Qu.
"They began to dig out all the earth around my car and my home so now it sits on a mountain all of its own I think as a warning to others," he added.
Now the silver Chrysler sits on top of its own mini-mountain nearly 60ft up in the air amid the 500,000 GBP construction site.
"I tried to climb up and fell all the way down - but the police said it was all my fault for being big-headed," wailed Qu.
http://www.austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2009-08-31/16033/Fit_of_peak - via Arbroath
Across many cities in the United States, hundreds of thousands of foreclosed and abandoned homes turned some neighborhoods into urban blight ... but nowhere is the effect as acutely felt as in Detroit.
Sweet Juniper blog has an interesting post about how nature is now reclaiming some of those abandoned houses. They use the description "feral houses," which given the condition they are in, seem very appropriate:
I've seen "feral" used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn't also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.
Take a look at the image above and tell us what do you see. A field of mushrooms? A series of tubes a la Super Mario Bros.? Actually they're a crop of silicon nanowires, grown by IBM researcher Frances Ross. The gray columns are the wires and the black blob are liquid droplets that catalyze the growth of the nanowires.
One day, these mushroom-shaped wires just may replace today's transistors:
In Dr. Ross’s laboratory at I.B.M., researchers are concentrating on more near-term technology. They are exploring the idea of constructing FinFET switches in a radical new process that breaks away from photo etching. It is a kind of nanofarming. Dr. Ross sprinkles gold particles as small as 10 nanometers in diameter on a substrate and then suffuses them in a silicon gas at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the particles to become “supersaturated” with silicon from the gas, which will then precipitate into a solid, forming a wire that grows vertically.
I.B.M. is pressing aggressively to develop this technology, which could be available commercially by 2012, she said. At the same time she acknowledged that significant challenges remain in perfecting nanowire technology. The mushroom-shaped wires in her laboratory now look a little bit like bonsai trees. To offer the kind of switching performances chipmakers require, the researchers must learn to make them so that their surfaces are perfectly regular. Moreover, techniques must be developed to make them behave like semiconductors.
John Markoff of The New York Times has the fascinating story: Link - via Make
I'm happy to announce that we've started a new collaboration with Very Funny Ads, a website by Turner Broadcasting System that aims to bring you the world's funniest commercials (motto: "ads that were too hot for tv").
We'll do a regular weekly round of the best of the best funny ads (though you can easily lose hours watching every single clip over at VFA) - and you can see the Neatorama-branded Out There Ads on VFA.
This one is by "Clap" by Good Knight, which shows that even one mosquito can be deadly ... http://www.veryfunnyads.com/?oid=26383
Reporter and former Green Beret Michael Yon took a series of intriguing photos of glowing rotor blades as a helicopter lands in a military base in Afghanistan. The eerie "halo" is caused by static electricity generated as the titanium/nickel blades move through a field of dust (which is kicked up from the ground as the heli lands).
The phenomenon, striking as it is, has no name - and Michael decided to name it the Kopp-Etchells Effect, as a tribute, after Corporal Benjamin Kopp and Corporal Joseph Etchells, who died in battle.
The full story at Michael's blog: Link via TYWKIWDBI
John of Super Punch Blog has a really neat post showing mashed up characters from Disney and Marvel to mark the recent purchase of the comic book publisher by The Mouse.
Got a loved one who loves to monkey around? Do you have an ardent Creationist friend who you'd love to poke a little fun at? Here's a new T-shirt from the Neatorama Shop that will fit him or her nicely.
The Taxonomy: Keeping the Family in Order T-shirt is designed by the super-talented (and available for hire) Chris Murphy of ChrisM70 Graphic Design. Words by our very own national treasure, Neatoramanaut Kalel.
For more geeky science T-shirts, check out the Neatorama Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?science-t-shirt-pg1-cid49.html
It may be counterintuitive (and hard to digest for parents like myself who always have to tell our kids to wear shoes when playing outside) but going barefoot may actually be better for you.
Here's a New York Times article by Amy Cortese about the controversial movement of running barefoot (or barely barefoot anyhow, as these runners still wear thin rubber running shoes like the ones shown to the left):
Recent research suggests that for all their high-tech features, modern running shoes may not actually do much to improve a runner’s performance or prevent injuries. Some runners are convinced that they are better off with shoes that are little more than thin gloves for the feet — or with no shoes at all.
Plenty of medical experts disagree with this notion. The result has been a raging debate in running circles, pitting a quirky band of barefoot runners and researchers against the running-shoe and sports-medicine establishments.
Naturally, Nike and other large shoe manufacturers aren't amused:
The shoe industry giants defend their products, saying they help athletes perform better and protect feet from stress and strain — not to mention the modern world’s concrete and broken glass.
But for all the technological advances promoted by the industry — the roll bars, the computer chips and the memory foam — experts say the injury rate among runners is virtually unchanged since the 1970s, when the modern running shoe was introduced. Some ailments, like those involving the knee and Achilles’ tendon, have increased.
Businesswoman Shari Arison, who happens to be Israel's richest citizen worth some $2.7 billion by Forbes' most recent estimate), has revealed a secret: she can see the future!
This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison's extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.
Arison explains that she has finally dropped the fear that has held her back from doing more about what she has perceived. Armed with the insight gained through work with Florida-based psychiatrist Brian Weiss, a proponent of regression therapy and the exploration of (take your pick) deep memories or past lives, she says she is ready to go public with her visions and bring together her spiritual and business goals.
Unfortunately, seeing the future isn't the secret to her wealth. She got rich the old fashioned way ... by inheriting her fortunes! Link
If a shotgun wedding isn't fast enough for ya, you can get married in the world's fastest church: a mobile wedding chapel (converted from a firetruck) owned by Rev. Darrell Best.
His 1942 firetruck is by no means a Ferrari, but it is equipped as a fully functioning chapel.
"I've had it up to 55 mph," Best said. "It gets a lot of attention on the highway."
Mechanics from the Country Music Television show "Trick My Truck" did the conversion after Best's family wrote to the program last year. The chapel has stained-glass windows, a pipe organ, an altar and two wooden pews.
Couples recently paid $100 to get married in the tiny church at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. "It fits me, the bride, the groom, the best man and the maid of honor," said Best, of Shelbyville, Ill. "It gets a little crowded, but it works."
