I met a ferocious turtle once. Turns out it was just hungry ... Actually, the sign above is an ingenious direct mail campaign by SulAmérica, a provider of home insurance. The company has a very unusual database of what pets their clients own.
Sun/MRM ad agency of Brazil engineered a clever direct mail campaign, where they send funny signs to people who have birds, turtles, ferrets but no watch dogs to protect their homes! With this customized campaign, over 85% of the people renewed their insurance (as compared to 30% the year before the campaign).
The artwork of Javier Jaén is an excellent example that you don't need complexity to get good art. Take a quick look at his portfolio and I'm sure you'll agree that sometimes, simplicity is best: Link - via why not?
Crafster user Bethany Joyce came up with what has got to be the geekiest oven mitt ever, combining Star Trek and a love for baking. Behold, the Bake It So oven mitt.
Do you have an old Scrabble board game abandoned because of a few missing tiles? (Or perhaps because you hate losing at Scrabble) Well, turn it into this marvelous DIY photo frame. Check out the instruction at Photojojo: Link - via DIY:happy
Forget those regular ol' boring wedding videos. Tim Warwood and Adam Gendle of LOCKDOWN projects will take your special day and turn it into something truly sensational. Take, for example, Brian & Eileen's wedding. Don't Stop Them Now!
Your spray can empty after a hard night graffitying? Don't toss the can! Remember the environment, and recycle it into something cool.
That's what artist Jake Rankin of Portland, Oregon, does: he takes spent Krylon cans and turn it into a lamp. Best yet, the on/off switch is the paint nozzle.
(No words on whether you get the faint smell of fumes whenever you turn it on). Breeze Block Gallery has 'em for $60: Link - via Coolbuzz
Are cave paintings signs of intelligence of ancient cave dwellers or are they just scribbles of crazy cavemen?
Take a look at the two photos above. The one to the left is a painting made by a patient at St. Elizabeth's hospital. The patient had a case of dementia praecox (eventually classified as schizophrenia) and used a pin or fingernail to scratch paint from the wall, creating pictures symbolizing past events in the patient's life and represent a mild state of mental regression.
Jeb of Modcult made this intriguing observation:
You know, everyone assumes cave paintings were made for some sort of vaunted religious or technical purpose, but maybe in olden times they just sent their crazy people into a cave. I mean, that’s basically what we do now.
Here's a trivia for all you Trekkers to talk about during the previews of the new Star Trek movie. Did you know that the Vulcan salute - you know, the "live long and prosper" hand signal invented by Leonard Nimoy:
Nimoy felt that there should be some kind of distinctive greeting among Vulcans, analogous to a handshake or a bow. Alan Dean Foster's novelization, based on an early script, has Spock kneeling before the Vulcan matriarch, T'Pau, who places her hands on his shoulders, like royalty dubbing a knight. But Nimoy didn't care for this. Previous episodes had already established that Vulcans are touch telepaths. Therefore, a touch on the shoulders would be an invasion of privacy. Instead, Nimoy drew upon his own Jewish background to suggest the now-familiar salute. Back in the 1960s, hippies who watched "Amok Time" thought the salute was a variation of the two-fingered peace sign. But we Jews knew better. The Vulcan salute came not from protest marches, but from the pulpit of Nimoy's childhood synagogue.
The Vulcan greeting is based upon a blessing gesture used by the kohanim (koe-hah-NEEM) during the worship service. The kohanim are the genealogical descendants of the Jewish priests who served in the Jerusalem Temple. Modern Jews no longer have priests leading services as in ancient times, nor do we have animal sacrifices anymore. (Yes, people really do ask about that!) The sacrificial system ended with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the year 70. C.E. However, a remnant of the Temple service lives on in the "kohane blessing" ritual (duchenen in Yiddish) that is performed on certain holy days.
http://www.pinenet.com/%7Erooster/v-salute.html - via grow-a-brain
Morris Cerullo in a poster advertising for his "Mission to London" (Photo: LoopZilla)
Loan modification and debt cancellation are hot businesses right now. So hot that God himself apparently decided to get in on the action.
Here's a story of how one man built himself a surging evangelistic ministry, complete with "God's debt cancellation" program - yours for the unbelievably low payment of a mere few hundred bucks:
Emotional on-air pitches generate much of the money used to pay network salaries. In March, Morris Cerullo appeared on Inspiration's “camp meeting” with a message to fire up prospective donors.
“Is anybody ready for the greatest financial breakthrough you've ever experienced in your life?” he asked.
The elder Cerullo, a Pentecostal minister, at times appeared to speak in tongues. His gravelly voice periodically rising to a shout, he urged members of the audience to fill envelopes with $900 donations.
“When you sow for your financial anointing, the windows of heaven are going to open for you,” he said. “ … In the next nine months, you are going to experience more financial blessings than you've ever experienced in your life! 100 fold! Debt cancellation!”
Soon, these words appeared on the screen: “Call now with your $900 offering and receive God's debt cancellation.”
Ames Alexander and Tim Funk of Charlotte Observer have the investigative report: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/408/story/741812.html - via Raw Story
Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha.
For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen
Wolfram (of Mathematica
fame).
Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but
I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search
engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google
does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You
and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question
and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.
What is butter? Wolfie knows
- it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert
$1 to British pounds, or the distance
between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred
in Casablanca? How is the weather
in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck
chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Impressive, eh?
Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first
paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD
from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair,
Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore,
the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is
limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed
to it by its programmers.
But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha:
it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning
of life, and it has its own blog,
but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.
Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie,
Gizmodo = komodo
(the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal);
Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).
Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama
(which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my
query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind
of 7 mph and few clouds).
At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker"
instead.
Heck, ask what
is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:
Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards
(dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la
Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The
Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram
Research will rectify this oversight soon.
But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.
If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...
Well, that's low tech compared to what these other prisoners did:
Four suspects were arrested late on Sunday outside a maximum security facility in the southern town of Presidente Venceslau in Brazil's Sao Paulo state after the mini-chopper, 14 mobile telephones and the equivalent of 500 dollars in cash were found in their rented car, according to reports in local media.
Note that this is also in Brazil: what's up with that? Can't they smuggle things the good ol' fashioned way - in their butts - just like all other prisoners do in the rest of the world?
Our pal mental_floss is having another trivia hunt: over the course of 5-days, they will present a trivia challenge - the first to submit the right answers will win a $100 shopping spree in their store.
The Nazis at Buchenwald concentration camp did it. And so did serial killer Ed Gein. Now, Andrew Krasnow is making sculptures and lampshades out of human skin, all in the name of art:
His works include human skin lampshades – a direct response to the belief that similar items made from the skin of Holocaust victims were found at Buchenwald concentration camp.
Using skins from white men who donated their bodies to medical science, he has created freak versions of mundane items including flags, boots and maps of America – in effect using skin like leather. His work, he says, is a commentary on human cruelty and America's ethics and morality. [...]
Gallery owner Robert Devcic said Krasnow uses only white skin because much of the suffering in the Americas has been caused by white people. "He uses skin to make the point that suffering is universal," he said. "It is tanned using the same process that you'd use for an animal skin."
