Forget being squished between sweating tourists inside a hot jeep! Mountain bike champ Hans "No Way" Rey found a better way to go tour the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana: on a mountain bike!
Environmental Graffiti has the story:
When mountain biking legend Hans Rey set off on a safari free-riding trip through southern Africa, he couldn’t know what to expect. “I had ridden amongst wild animals on several occasions over the years, usually in a semi controlled environment, where we either had a vehicle nearby or the chances were unlikely that I would ride into the lion’s den,” says Rey. “Well, this time was different.”
Sleeping in the open bush land – sometimes directly under the star-clustered sky – may sound idyllic, but when hyenas are prowling around close enough to leave pawprints just metres from your camp, reality bites. “We all made sure that we’d stay near one of the rifles at all times,” explains Rey, because if you leave the group you become part of the food chain – meals on wheels as it were.
Hello everybody - it's my pleasure to introduce to you the newest Neatoramanaut in the family. Say hello to baby Georgia, who was born just a few days ago. No, no styling gel was involved in the 'do above - Georgie was born with a Mohawk (Fauxhawk? Kids today!).
It certainly has been a very busy past couple of weeks - my postings on the blog have virtually stopped (and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future) - and this is the very adorable reason.
Though Georgia is our third child, and I now know some hard-learned lessons about diapers, spit ups, and 3 AM feedings, my wife and I welcome any parenting advice. In the meantime, I'd like to thank my parents who traveled a great distance to come and help us out, fellow Neatorama authors who picked up the slack in postings and everybody else who called or dropped in to say hello.
Pigs may never fly, but they certainly can swim! Vince Lauro won National Geographic Traveler's Great Outdoors Photo Contest with this awesome photo of the Caribbean swimming pig. From the Intelligent Travel blog:
As the first mate on a 118-foot motor yacht, Vince Lauro has the opportunity to continuously travel across the Caribbean. This photograph was taken near a small key famous for the "swimming pigs." A colony of pigs lives on the key, and they often swim near visiting boats. To capture this clear image Lauro said, "I had to lure this pig into an undisturbed area with its favorite food: fresh watermelon."
Now, on to the Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey part of the post: funniest caption will win a custom black and white Monkey drawing by our favorite artist, Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many as you can think of - just make 'em funny! Be sure to visit Adam's blog for inspiration. Good luck!
Update 8/26/09 - Adam has picked the winner! Congrats to Lisa G. who came up with this (very punny) gem: Oinkers aweigh!
Brett & Kate McKay of the Art of Manliness Blog wrote a neat post about some of the worst products ever created for men, which included dubious products like hair in a can, chest hair toupee, prostate warmer and so on. The popularity of the post got them to write a sequel, listing gems like glow-in-the-dark neckties, paste-on facial hair, and swim trunks that act like floaties.
But for reasons unknown, though I assume alcohol was involved, they included this incredibly awesome squirrel lamp - so I am duly forced to rename their post "12 More of the Worst Products For Men Ever Created and One Really, Really Awesome Squirrel Lamp." So there I fixed it.
Yes, this week's collaboration with the always awesome What is it? Blog brings us ... a spike - but can you guess its specific purpose? (hint: it has a VERY specific purpose)
Place your guess in the comment section - no prize this week, so you're playing for fame and glory. Please post no URL - let others play. For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog.
Good luck!
Update 8/22/09 - it's a device to disable cannons:
Since the head of this tool can pivot, it can't be used as a hammer or pick. The owner of it had a Civil War book that described it as a cannon tool, he said that it was used by soldiers to disable enemy cannons or their own if they had to retreat. The spike was placed in the ignition hole and hammered until the cannon cracked or until the hole was large enough that the cannon was no longer usable.
I've since been informed that:
The phrase "to spike a cannon" meant to disable it by driving a tapered wrought iron plug, or spike, down the touch hole with a hammer until it was level and firmly embedded. I suppose the spike could eventually be drilled out, but tools to do this were not readily available, and the process would take some time.
If your kid doesn't find dinner time enjoyable, maybe this will help make meals fun: Food Face Kid's Dinner Plate. The plate has a picture of a face that your kid can decorate with food. Pasta hair, mashed potato beards, and string bean eyebrows - the possibilities are endless!
Katie would make one great math mom! Math Mom: If I've Told You N Times, I've Told You N+1 Times
I can practically hear my mother's voice saying "if I told you once, I've told you a thousand times." Well, for this shirt, we've boiled the adage down to its mathematical terms.
Now buy the shirt, stand up straight and go clean your room! http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?math-mom-told-you-n-times-tshirt-pid477.html
More math and geektastic science T-shirts from the newly spruced up Neatorama Online Store (work in progress, mmkay?):
- Integral of 1/Cabin = Log Cabin - Geometry is For Squares - Math Puns are the First Sine of Madness - I Love Math (in Queen's English)
Some people will go to great lengths to get into the Guinness World Records. Take, for example, this Chinese bride that got married in a wedding dress with a train more than 1.2 miles (2 km) long:
It took guests more than three hours to roll out the gown, complete with 9,999 silk red roses attached to it, in the northeastern province of Jilin, state news agency Xinhua said.
"Both the length of the dress and the number silk roses pinned on the wedding dress can make history," the report quoted groom Zhao Peng as saying.
Zhao, who has applied to Guinness World Records, said he was inspired after seeing a story on the previous record holder in Romania, where the dress measured just over 1.5 km.
"I do not want a cliche wedding parade or banquet," he said.
Some religious rituals are so bizarre that they leave you scratching your head. This one, however, may lead to a cracked skull. Literally. Here's the strange practice of cracking a coconut on devotees of Goddess Lakshmi - and it may just be the fault of the British imperialism:
Many of the visitors believe that it was the British presence in India in the 19th Century that spawned the idea for the festival.
A former village council president tells the story.
P. Mani, Former Council President, Mettu Mahadanapuram Village: "When the British were trying to draw a railway line against the wishes of the villagers here, they found big stones just like coconuts, beneath the ground. They sarcastically told villagers that if they could break these stones with their heads, they would change the course of the railway line. The villagers broke the stones and the line was shifted."
Some of the locals say since then the ritual has been performed at the temple using coconuts, and that these rituals draw thousands.
An obese inmate in Texas has been charged after officials learned he had a gun hidden under flabs of his own flesh. [...] The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin. Vera admitted having the gun during a shower break at the county jail.
Hello everyone - sorry for the slowdown in new posts, we're busy fighting Kraken doing some work under the hood on the blog, so please pardon any hiccups! Hopefully thing will get back to normal soon ... in the meantime, please pardon Neatoramabot if it drops your comment.
I
may not be totally perfect but parts of me are excellent - $9.95,
modeled by the lovely Stefanie.
Better
Mousetrap
Cut
All Ties with Civilization
The
Difference Between Science and Magic
Hooray! We're happy to announce that we've launched a new line of licensed T-shirts
featuring the quotes (17 words or less epigrams, if you want to be technical)
of Ashleigh Brilliant
(featured on Neatorama previously here).
Ashleigh has been doing these wonderful "Pot-Shots" for the
past 40 years and has come up with over 10,000 kinds!
Visit the Neatorama Online Store for our growing selection of Ashleigh
Brilliant quotes on T-shirts, including:
- Down
with Gravity
- Thanks
to my computer, I have achieved a much higher state of disorganization
- My
dream is to cut all ties with civilization but still be on the Internet
- I
may not be totally perfect but parts of me are excellent
- When
you build a better mousetrap, you are challenging nature to build a better
mouse
- Try
to look at things from your computer's point of view
and my favorite:
- The
difference between science and magic is that magicians usually know what
they're doing
Mystery Sale - July 2009 Update Phew! After about two weeks of hard work, we've finally shipped out all Mystery Sale orders. If you haven't received yours yet, especially if you live outside of the United States, please don't worry - the goodies are on their way.
Though the Mystery Sale is over, you can still get geektastic Science T-Shirts, Funny T-Shirts, nifty Ice Trays and other fun stuff at the Neatorama Online Store. Thank you to everybody who participated!
Neatorama Software Upgrade We're going to be doing a maintenance/upgrade soon on Neatorama - if everything goes well, you shouldn't notice anything. If not, then, well, pardon the hiccups!
Upcoming Queue As I've posted before, the Top 5 Submitter (based on Front Paged submissions) to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue for the month of August will win very cool prizes. The top dog will win an iPod Nano, whereas the rest will get cool stuff from the Neatorama Online Store.
As of today, the field is wiiiide open:
Please read the FAQ and Submission Tips to increase your chances of getting posts promoted to the Front Page. Remember that copy & pasting your description is the surest way NOT to get your post picked up ;)
Hooray! It's time for our collaboration with the always excellent (and perplexing) What is it? Blog. Can you guess what the strange object above is for?
First correct guess will win this awesome Stickman Action Figure from Neatorama's Online Store. If no one got it right, then the funniest guess will win.
Contest rules are simple: place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you can think of. Please post no URL or web links (you'll forfeit the prize if you do) - let others play.
Update 8/7/09 - The answer is: A heat sink from an old television. A lot of you guessed heat sink, but no one got it specifically for an old TV, so I picked the guess that got me ROFL-ing. Congrats to endgame47 for this guess: It is a bow tie for bad-asses.
The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader It sits just steps away from some of the most brilliant cryptographers in the country, and yet after nearly 20 years of trying no one has been able to unlock its secrets. OBJET D’ART In the late 1980’s, the General Services Administration, the federal agency responsible for building and operating government buildings, started accepting proposals for artwork to decorate a courtyard outside the cafeteria of the CIA’s new headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. One artist who submitted was James Sanborn, a sculptor from the Washington, D.C. area. Sanborn was struck by how CIA agents spend their entire lives keeping secrets from even their closest loved ones. He decided to put himself in their shoes: His sculpture, if accepted, would contain an encoded message- the CIA’s stock-in-trade—and only he’s take the secret with him to the grave, just like a CIA agent. (Photo: Elonka) OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD Sanborn pitches his concept to the GSA and won the commission. But he’s an artist, not a code expert, so he asked the CIA for assistance in coming up with a code that would be difficult for even the agency’s own cryptographers to crack. They put him in touch with Ed Scheidt, chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, and known within the agency as the “Wizard of Codes.” Scheidt coached Sanborn for four months—he was free to teach any technique that did not compromise the agency’s security—and then Sanborn spent two and a half years cutting 865 individual letters, plus some question marks in rows onto a giant sheet of copper that was to be the main part of the sculpture. He names it Kryptos, after the Greek word for “hidden.” The work was unveiled in November 1990; it consisted of a standing petrified log with a sheet of copper flowing out from it, almost like a sheet of paper rolling out of a computer printer. The work also featured several smaller elements: carved stones, smaller sheets of copper, and even a duck pond, located around the CIA campus. GOING PUBLIC Few people would have guessed that Kryptos would attract much public interest. The CIA headquarters is off-limits to anyone who doesn’t have business there, so the public never gets a chance to see the sculpture in person. Nevertheless, as CIA employees began to talk about it with outsiders—the sculpture is apparently one of the few things around the CIA that isn’t top secret—it wasn’t long before photographers, detailed descriptions, and transcriptions of the inscribed letters began circulating outside the agency. All over the country, aspiring code breakers set to work trying to unlock Kryptos’ secrets. The first person outside the intelligence community to make significant progress was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from Los Angeles. In 1999 he announced that the information on the copper scroll was actually four different encrypted passages, not just one, and that he had succeeded in cracking three of them (768 of the 865 characters) using software he had written. Gillogly’s announcement prompted the CIA to admit publicly what had already become well known within the intelligence community: A team of four National Security Agency employees had cracked the same three sections of the code in 1992 using NSA computers, and in 1998 a CIA analyst named David Stein—had been able to crack the last section of the code. AS EASY AS ONE, TWO, THREE As the code breakers discovered, Sanborn encrypted the first two sections, known as K1 and K2 to code buffs, using substitution, a classic technique in which each letter of the alphabet is switched with another. For example, if X substitutes for the letter D, R substitutes for O, and B substitutes for G, then the word DOG is encrypted as XRB. K3, the third passage, was encrypted using another classic technique called transposition. Instead of substituting one letter for another, the existing letters are rearranged according to some systematic pattern. Using transcription, DOG could be encrypted as DGO, OGD, ODG, GOD and GDO. That may sound pretty simple to crack, but is DOG appeared in a larger body of text, the hundreds of thousands of letters, making the code very difficult to solve. ADD’EM UP How do cryptographers identify these codes? One interesting feature of many languages—including English—is that no matter what the text, letters always appear in roughly the same frequency, For example, the letter E is likely to appear about 12% of the time in any passage, more often than any other letter if the alphabet. The letter Q appears least often—only 0.2% of the time. So if the letter X appears in a body of encrypted text about 12% of the time, there’s a good chance that the letter X is substituting for the letter E, and the encryption method used is substitution. But if the letters in the encrypted text appear about as often a you’d expect them to in an unencrypted text—E still appears about 12% of the time—then the encryption method used is likely to be transposition. ENCRYPTION REVEALED The first passage of Kryptos, K1, was decoded to read as follows: BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION (Sanborn deliberately misspelled illusion to make it more difficult to crack; he did the same thing with the other words in K2 and K3.: The second passage, K2, was decoded to read: IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO The graphic coordinates indicate a point on the CIA campus about 200 feet south of the sculpture. Why this point is mentioned in the text, or what the rest of the text is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess. Sanborn hasn’t given up many clues. He has revealed, however, that WW stands for William Webster, who was CIA director when Kryptos was dedicated. (According to CIA legend, Webster refused to pay for the sculpture unless Sanborn handed over a copy of the solution…which is how “WW” seem to know the “exact location” of whatever it is that is “buried out there somewhere”… if there really is something buried “out there.” The CIA’s copy of the solution—if it really does exist—is believed to remain in the CIA director’s safe to this day.) The third passage, K3, decoded: SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?) Sanborn created this passage by paraphrasing archaeologist Howard Carter’s description of his opening of King Tut’s tomb in his 1923 book, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. The passage deals with discovery, which fits in with the sculpture’s theme of decoding encrypted texts. Sanborn included the text because it was one of his favorite passages since childhood. So how is K4, the fourth section of the sculpture , encrypted? No one but Sanborn knows. Here’s the encoded text as it appears on the sculpture. Let us know if you get anywhere with it: OBKRUOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSOTWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJK LUDIAWINFBNYPVTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAEKCAR CONCEALED IN PLAIN SIGHT Why is the K4 passage so much more difficult to crack than the other three? It could be that it’s not written in English—Sanborn has used Russia-language codes in other works of art—which would make statistical analysis of the characters much more difficult. He could also have used any number of “concealment” techniques to mask the text. Removing all the vowels before encoding the message is one method of concealment; another is spelling words out phonetically: If a word like”people” is spelled “peephul,” for example, the correct solution may appear to be meaningless gibberish at first glance, causing the code breakers and computer software to discard to correct solution without realizing what it is. The number of people attempting to crack the final Kryptos code grew dramatically after the references to the sculpture appeared on the dust jacket of the bestseller The Da Vinci Code. One website dedicated to solving Kryptos saw its traffic increase from a few hundred hits per month to more than 30,000…but no one has been able to crack the final code yet. There have been hints that Kryptos will be featured in the plot of the sequel to the Da Vinci Code; if so, the sculpture’s fame is just beginning. QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS There may be other clues that will aid in decoding the fourth passage. Some of the letters cut into the copper are slightly higher than others in the same row. Why? And because all 865 letters are cut all the way through the copper, sunlight slows through the sculpture to create interesting patterns of light and shadow on the ground. Do these patterns provide a clue to cracking the code? It’s a big possibility—remember, the first decoded passage reads, “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of Iqlusion.” If the light and shadows around the sculpture do provide a clue, that will make cracking the code very difficult, at least for outsiders, since none of them have been allowed into CIA headquarters to study the sculpture in person. Adding insult to mystery, Sanborn placed a number of large stones around the base of the sculpture. This, and the fact that the copper sheet curves around to form an S Shape, makes it virtually impossible to capture all the encoded text in a single photograph. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE Remember, the copper scroll is only the main part of Sanborn’s work—there are several other mysterious objects scattered around the CIA campus, including stone-and-copper slabs with mysterious messages like “virtually invisible” and “t is your position” engraved into the copper in Morse code. There’s also a magnetic lodestone set on the grounds that appears to be pulling a compass needle carved into a nearby rock away from due North. What does it all mean…and what about the duck pond? Are there clues hidden there, or does Sanborn just like ducks? Denied access to the genuine article, many aspiring cryptographers have visited the other code sculptures Sanborn created since Kryptos. Antipodes, one he created for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., contains a copy of the same encrypted text that appears on Kryptos, Other code crunchers use 3D modeling software to create elaborate models of Kryptos and the CIA grounds and study those for clues. A few pesky diehards have even stooped to calling Sanborn on the phone to beg for hints…but he refuses to play ball. Which of the sculpture’s features provide clues to decoding the fourth passage…and which one hints at the solution to the final riddle within a riddle that Sanborn says can be solved only after all four passages have been decoded? Is there really something buried somewhere in the CIA campus, perhaps a prize of some kind, waiting to be discovered by the person who finally cracks the rest of the code? Only Sanborn and (perhaps) the CIA director know for sure, and they aren’t talking.
The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. Proving that some things do get better with age, the latest Bathroom Reader is jam-packed with 600 pages of fascinating trivia, forgotten history, strange lawsuits and other neat articles. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
