Neatoramanaut Cat and Brat told us of a bizarre yet strangely compelling museum in central Alberta, Canada: The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington. The main attraction of the museum are 47 dioramas featuring taxidermied gophers dressed up in various poses by artist Shelly Haase: Link - Thanks Cat & Brat!
Ironically, it was not artistry, but politics and timing that generated the most publicity for the new enterprise. The Gopher Hole Museum opened its doors in 1996, and it wasn't long before People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) got wind of the project. Voila. Instant world fame for the tiny hamlet of Torrington, Alberta. Even though it wasn't what they had in mind, the citizens of Torrington aren't complaining. They created the museum to increase tourism, and they don't seem to mind at all if it's PETA that gets the word out.
"The gophers are a tremendous problem for the farmers here," explained Angie. "We have to kill them. Is it so bad to put them on display afterwards?"
Brett & Kate McKay of our pal The Art of Manliness blog have just put together a mega post of 100 movies every man should see (100! Makes our Top 10 posts look downright puny).
For better and for worse, these 100 movies have had a huge impact on our ideas of masculinity, be it the archetypal manliness or the perception of what constitutes "a man's man" change over time:
To view how male characters of cinema have been portrayed over the decades, is to see clearly the ways in which our perception of masculinity has changed and continues to change. Thus it seemed only proper that The Art of Manliness take a stab at creating a list of essential movies every man should see.
We didn’t want to make a list of movies that consisted solely of violence and gratuitous T and A that make up most guy movie lists. Nor did we want to create a list of just independent avant-garde movies that while culturally or cinematically significant, aren’t very entertaining. We wanted to create a well rounded list of films that have something to say about manliness. Some of the movies speak poignantly about what it means to be a man. Others give examples of true manliness in action. Some are lessons in how not to be a man. And others are simply entertaining movies that are just plain manly. But the common thread that runs through all of them is that they’re great movies that have stood the test of time.
I'm glad to see picks like The Iron Giant, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Seven Samurai made the list. What's your favorites?
This week's collaboration with the What is it? Blog brings us this strange tool above - can you guess what it is for? Place your guess in the comment section. No prize this week, so you're playing for fame and glory.
Update 7/19/09 - the answer is: A transmission spring compressor and holder for Model T Fords, according to a patent for a similar tool: ...for compressing and holding transmission band springs, which band springs are carried by bolts disposed in a removable section of a transmission casing. From patent number 1,433,944. Nobody got it this time around ...
Every sport has its bad boy (I'm looking at you, Ron Artest), but sumo bad boy Asashoryu Akinori is special.
After a string of bad behaviors including a brawl in a communal bath, being drunk in public and so on, the sumo champ is being accused of ... being "podgy"!
Sumo bad boy Asashoryu, no stranger to public criticism, has been labelled "podgy" in a bizarre attack on the volatile Mongolian.
A popular former wrestler now working as a TV commentator accused Asashoryu of being flabby, even though his 150-kilogram frame is relatively small for the sport.
"He looks podgy," Shuhei Mainoumi told Japanese media. "He doesn't look as buff. When I got flabby I hated being naked and showing off my body -- he looks a bit like that."
Um, maybe this is my naiveté but I thought being podgy is the whole point of sumo wrestling? Link
Forget bikini car wash! The new hotness in raising money in today's tough economy is ... elephant car wash!
The elephants at the Wildlife Safari near Eugene, Oregon are fundraising and they don't seem to mind. The safari's three African elephants, Tiki, Alice, and George, have a job at the new "Elephant Car Wash".
For $20, visitors can have an up-close-and-personal encounter with the elephants as they wash down their car.
There's no guarantee that your car will actually get cleaned, but hey, everybody seems to be having fun!
Friend/Enemy Ambigram, by Naguib and Fadilah of Nagfa
English, she's a'changin'. The latest edition of the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary are 100 words that you may already be using:
There are words such as locavore (one who eats foods grown locally), frenemy (someone who acts like a friend but is really an enemy), waterboarding (an interrogation technique use to induce the sensation of drowning), vlogs (a blog that contains video material) and webisode (a TV show that can be viewed at a website).
There's also flash mob (a group of people summoned electronically to a designated spot at a specified time to perform an indicated action before dispersing) and green-collar (involving actions for protecting the natural environment).
Some words that just now made the cut have been around for generations. The term "sock puppet" — a false online identity used for deceptive purposes — was tracked to 1959 but has taken on new popular use with people using fake IDs on social networking sites.
We all know that texting and driving is bad, but texting and walking? Fifteen-year-old teenager Alexa Longuiera learned that texting while you walk may be dangerous the hard way: she fell down a manhole while texting!
Alexa Longueira, 15, was walking on Victory Boulevard with a friend at about 5 p.m. yesterday, preparing to send a text, when she felt the ground give way.
"She literally just handed me the phone and I opened it [and] I felt this big drop," the Susan E. Wagner High School sophomore said.
"It was four or five feet, it was very painful. I kind of crawled out and the DEP guys came running and helped me. ... They were just, like, 'I'm sorry! I'm sorry!'" [...]
The family said it intends to file a lawsuit.
Whether Alexa was sending a text or not shouldn't make any difference, Mrs. Longueira said, because workers never should have left the manhole unattended. And while she's thankful the sewer wasn't full at the time, that didn't make it any less gross.
"Oh my God, it was putrid," she said. "One of her sneakers is still down there."
The Staten Island Advance has the story: Link (Photo: Jan Somma-Hammel/Staten Island Advance)
German conservationists Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich came up with an ingenious solution to Peruvian village Bellavista's water problem. The small village south of the capital city of Lima has very little rainfall but a lot of fog, so the duo set up fog catchers to harvest hundreds of gallons of water a day right out of the air!
The nets stand perpendicular to the prevailing wind, which blows fog into the coarse, woven plastic mesh. From there, drops of fog-water fall into gutters that carry the water to collection tanks.
If you live near the Delaware Bay shore, you can go there to witness one heck of a beach orgy happening now: thousands of horseshoe crabs are piling on top of one another mating ...
On the Delaware Bay shore, there's a swinging party that's been taking place for millions of years.
If you're a female horseshoe crab, then it's your night. You'll swim to shore, meet a special someone and he'll clasp onto the back of your shell. You and he will crawl onto the beach together, where you'll spawn at high tide under the light of the full moon.
But the mate attached to your shell is not your only tryst. On this night, you will mate with up to 13 males, all at the same time. Thousands of horseshoe crabs will pile on top of one another, glistening shells covering the beach for miles.
Louisa Jonas of NPR's All Things Considered has the story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106489695
There's not many absolutes in science, so absolute zero - the coldest temperature theoretically possible where entropy is reduced to zero - truly stands out. Indeed, things get really, really weird quantum mechanically as we approach absolute zero. Let's take a look at what fun we can have going down the thermometer all the way to 0 Kelvin.
Antarctica
Let's begin with the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica. The temperatures there reach a minimum of about -80 °C (-112 °F) in the winter, with the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.2 °C (-128.6 °F).
In 2006, Anthony and Christine Powell of Frostbytes blog (fantastic photos there, by the way) recorded this video clip of what people in Antarctica consider a terrible weather (euphemistically called "Condition 1") at the McMurdo Station. So, next time you're having some terrible winter weather where ever you are, just remember this video clip.
Liquid Oxygen
Purdue's Senior System Engineer George Goble hated waiting for his BBQ to light. So, in 1995, he decided to find the fastest way to achieve barbecue ignition. He tried propane, acetylene torches, and even oxygen-fuel gas or racing fuel (the last one took 30 seconds). But that wasn't fast enough - he wanted to set the world record of fastest ignition. (Source)
So Goble decided to get serious and reached for liquid oxygen (LOX, boiling point: 90.2 K or -183 °C). He doused 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) onto 60 pounds of charcoal and a smoldering cigarette*. Within 3 seconds about 40 pounds of the charcoal burned and the grill was vaporized.
For his creativity, George won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also attracted the attention of the West Lafayette, Indiana fire department who warned him never to repeat the stunt ever again.
*Actually it's good that he had a lit cigarette in the pile. Pouring LOX onto unlit charcoal will cause it to explode at about the force of one stick of dynamite per charcoal. If you spill LOX on asphalt, it can detonate. Oh, did we mention that LOX is a rocket fuel? (The orange external tank of the Space Shuttle is filled with it.) Needless to say, don't try this at home.
Liquid Nitrogen
Nitrogen becomes liquid at 77 K (-196 °C), which is pretty darn cold. Liquid Nitrogen or LN2 is actually a very useful substance: it's used in the laboratory to freeze things, in hospitals as a medical treatment to freeze and remove warts and skin lesions, and even in restaurants to make alcoholic ice cream.
Wait - make alcoholic ice cream? Yes, it turns out though you can't freeze alcohol in the freezer (not cold enough), you can do so with liquid nitrogen. Here's Ferran Adria, Head Chef of elBulli Restaurant using liquid nitrogen to make alcohol sorbets and frozen pistachio puree truffles. Yum!
Going down the temperature scale, we have liquid hydrogen at 20.28 K (-252.87°C). Liquid Hydrogen is good for one thing: fuel. It is a component of rocket fuel, and a perennial contender of zero-emission fuel (I'm looking at you, BMW H2R!)
Liquid hydrogen is used in one of the coolest (literally!) rocket engines ever created by NASA. Here's the Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine ("CECE" for short), which generates a scalding 5,000 degree steam and a whopping 13,000 lb of thrust yet form icicles at the rim of its nozzle at the same time. It's quite the fire and ice engine:
CECE is fueled by a mixture of -297 F liquid oxygen and -423 F liquid hydrogen. The engine components are super-cooled to similar low temperatures--and that's where the icicles come from. As CECE burns its frigid fuels, hot steam and other gases are propelled out the nozzle. The steam is cooled by the cold nozzle, condensing and eventually freezing to form icicles around the rim. (Source)
Things get really, really strange with liquid helium. First of all, it's the only element that remains liquid down to absolute zero (though you can solidify it with great pressure). It has two form of liquid phases - at 4.2K (-268.95 °C), helium-4 (an isotope of helium) becomes liquid. At 2.17 K, it turns into a superfluid.
And the fun begins: superfluid is weird - it has zero viscosity (a measure of friction for fluids), zero entropy, and infinite thermal conductivity. If a superfluid is placed in an open container, it will creep up the sides and flow over the top. If you rotate the container from stationary, the superfluid inside will never move.
And weirder still: if you place a capillary tube in a pool of superfluid, then shine light on it, you'll get a frictionless fountain that will flow forever (no friction*, remember?)
*Actually, in bulk fluid, superfluid does have some viscosity whereas in capillary it has no viscosity. Scientists think the explanation of this paradox is that superfluid is composed of two components - the normal component, and the superfluid component. I told you it's strange.
The Coldest Objects in Space
Quick: what's the coldest object in space? A frozen comet or a chilly gas cloud? Nope, the coldest object in space is actually a manmade object - the Planck Telescope - launched by the European Space Agency.
As part of experiments to measure the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow of the Big Bang to you and me), the Planck Telescope is cooling its instruments to -273.05 °C or 0.1 °C above absolute zero.
But what about the coldest natural object in space? That title belongs to the Boomerang Nebula (aka the Bow Tie Nebula). The protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth has been spewing ultracold gas for 1,500 years. This cooled down the nebula to a mere 1 K above absolute zero (Source).
Boomerang Nebula, credit: European Space Agency/NASA
The Coldest Substance on Earth
In 2003, Nobel Laureate Wolfang Ketterle and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the coolest man-made substance on Earth: they cooled a Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms down to 450 picoKelvin (0.00000000045 K).
In 2009, Tauno Knuuttila and colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology's Low Temperature Lab used magnetic refrigeration (yes, using magnets to cool things down - ain't physics interesting?) to cool rhodium to 100 pK (technically, it's the temperature for nuclear spin, not its overall thermal energy).
When landlord Elaine Stenson couldn't get her tenants to pay their rent for months and ignored legal notices to vacate the premises, she decided on a very old (medieval, actually) technique: public shaming.
And while the technique worked, it sparked an outrage by some:
A letting agency in Dundee is taking radical measures to name and shame tenants who are running up rent arrears. Lease2Keys are installing “for sale”-style signs outside properties with "Rent Dodger Lives Here", emblazoned on them. [...]
Gordon MacRae of the homeless charity Shelter is outraged by the letting agents’ actions. He said: “We thought tarring and feathering went out with the middle ages. People who find themselves in rent arrears usually have multiple reasons for being in debt.
The
evolution of the eye is fascinating
stuff (in a nutshell, the eye is so complex that Creationists claim
that it couldn't possibly have evolved ... and scientists countered that
not only did the eye evolved into being, it is so useful that it did so
more than one time)
Well, add this to the mix: Margaret McFall-Ngai and colleagues at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that squids can detect
light through an organ other than their eyes (and if that's not cool enough,
it's done through a symbiosis with luminous bacteria!):
"Until now, scientists thought that illuminating tissues in
the light organ functioned exclusively for the control of the intensity
and direction of light output from the organ, with no role in light
perception," says McFall-Ngai. "Now we show that the E. scolopes
squid has additional light-detecting tissue that is an integral component
of the light organ."
The researchers demonstrated that the squid light organ has the
molecular machinery to respond to light cues. Molecular analysis showed
that genes that produce key visual proteins are expressed in light-organ
tissues, including genes similar to those that occur in the retina.
They also showed that, as in the retina, these visual proteins respond
to light, producing a physiological response.
"We found that the light organ in the squid is capable of
sensing light as well as emitting and controlling the intensity of luminescence,"
says co-author Nansi Jo Colley, SMPH professor of ophthalmology and
visual sciences and of genetics.
Necessity may be the mother of inventions, but prison seems to be a particularly fertile birthing ground. Take a look at these collection of improvised tools, escape equipments and weapons made by inmates undoubtedly inspired by MacGyver.
This one to the left is the crucifix shiv:
Disguised as a wooden crucifix; found in an inmate’s cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, sometime around 1994; intended for use in an escape or as a general weapon. At that time a lot of crucifixes were fashioned in prison woodshops until jailers finally dug their true purpose.
Marc Steinmetz has the photos of what surprisingly creative inmates have made (first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in 1999) : Link
Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley brought the bottle city of Kandor from the Superman comic series to life. If you don't know, Kandor is a Kryptonian city miniaturized by Brainiac and kept in a bottle by Superman:
The exhibition of new works by Mike Kelley at the Jablonka Galerie features sculptures, lenticular lightboxes, and videos related to the fictional city of Kandor, the capitol of Superman’s home planet Krypton. According to the Superman mythos, Kandor is the only remaining vestige of the exploded Krypton, and the city is preserved, in a reduced state, in a bottle in Superman’s possession. Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance. In this exhibition Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle, which, despite obvious differences, purport to depict the same city.
John Struan over at Super Punch has more pics and a video clip from the exhibit: Link - Thanks John!
