Whatever you do, don't bet on a game of pool with two-year-old Keith O'Dell Jr! Neatoramanauts, meet the world's youngest pool shark. He may still in diapers, but this pool prodigy can surely whip my butt!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
I've always liked ABBA, and now I like 'em even more because apparently their music can miraculously awaken someone from a coma!
Here's the story of how 3-year-old Layla Towsey woke up from a meningitis coma, singing Mamma Mia:
Ms Towsey [...] , said: "Before they put her in the ambulance we were told to give her a kiss goodbye - it was an awful moment."
Layla was also diagnosed with meningococcal septicaemia and the family prepared themselves for the worst as she lay in intensive care.
Ms Towsey said: "But on the Sunday morning I could hear her singing Mamma Mia quietly. I couldn't believe it.
"I knew immediately she was going to be OK."
We've featured a lot of cool and neat stuff on Neatorama, but I dare say this is really hard to beat. Behold, the embossed drawings of Simon Schubert: http://www.simonschubert.de/papierarbeiten.html - via Paper Forest
Biggify at: PhD Comics by Jorge Cham
Oh, this is SO true! Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (which stands for Piled Higher & Deeper, if you must know) nailed it with this cartoon panel, The Science News Cycle, about how a scientific finding gets exaggerated and distorted as it trickles down through "The Internets" and the media.
As proud member of the blogosphere and a trained scientist myself, I'm happy to report that Neatorama works hard to wrestle and twist a lengthy scientific finding full of caveats into short (and hopefully witty) couple of sentences with the purpose of partly enlightening you, partly entertaining ourselves and, of course, driving traffic to the blog. The scientific truth be damned! ;)
Link - via The Zeray Gazette
Y'all remember Susan Boyle, the instant sensation who took the Interwebs by storm when she sang at Britain's Got Talent.
She recently sang at the semi-final of the show - and as you can tell, she's got herself a make-over, though the bumbling and gosh-darn qualities that endeared her to the rest of the world are still there.
If you haven't seen it, Miss Cellania got the clip: Link [embedded YouTube]
YesButNoButYes blog has a post about anti-drug PSAs that look like they were made by people who were under the influence themselves!
The post includes such gems PSAs by Hanna-Barbera, Pee Wee Herman (I half expected him to giggle by the end), and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Link - via Rue The Day!
Beer has come a long way since the very first beer can was produced back in 1935. Our pal WebUrbanist has a nifty post about some of the most unusual and collectible beer cans in the world. This one to the left is the very first canned beer:
American Can Co. began experimenting with canned beer in 1931, as it anticipated the end of Prohibition. Krueger’s Special Beer was the first commercially packaged beer in a can. The very first canned beer was sold in Richmond, Virginia in 1935. Early on, manufacturers were mostly concerned with creating a beer can that could hold up to the heat and pressure of the pasteurization process without bursting or later leaking on the store shelves. Style and branding were considered, but were not a top priority in the beginning. Pabst was the first major brewer to offer beer in a can.
(Photo: Rustycans, who has a great many more collections of, well, rusty beer cans!)
Taxidermy has certainly come a long way since I last saw a stuffed animal head in a dark, stuffy lodge a long, long time ago.
Chad Garrison of the St. Louis Daily Riverfront Times blog shows us what "masters of masters" taxidermists can do, in this gallery of the 2009 World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships in St. Louis, Missouri: Link
Don't ever say that Big Pharma doesn't care about you ... Pfizer is offering free Viagra (and other drugs) to Americans who have lost their job:
Pfizer Inc. said Thursday it will give away more than 70 of its most widely prescribed drugs, including Lipitor and Viagra, for up to a year to people who have lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been taking the drug for three months or more. The announcement comes as the unemployment rate topped 8.9 percent in April.
Pfizer stands to benefit, too _ by keeping its customers, and with a tax write-off that will cover much of the cost of the donations. The move also buys the world's largest drugmaker some good will as Washington looks to overhaul the health care system.
We haven't posted a fun Flash game in a while, so here's one to make up for the oversight: Splitter by Eugene Karataev.
It's a fun little physics engine game with the simple goal: get the smiley to its goal by slicing and dicing through stuff. It starts off easy, but it gets more and more maddening (maddeningly fun, that is!): Link - via Onelargeprawn
There are two very exciting recent advances in nanotechnology may soon result in a massive increase in memory capacities of your DVDs and iPods:
- Researchers
at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology
in Victoria, Australia, created a new material that could lead to new
discs that can store 10,000 times more data than your average DVDs.
The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.
The picture to the right shows 6 patterns written in the same area of the nanorods using three different color and two different polarization of lasers: Link (Photo credit: Nature Publishing Group)
(Image: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
University of California at Berkeley)
- Berkeley (yay! My alma mater) researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues
created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that
can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron
particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense
and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime: Link
How stable is stable? Here's a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff beats rock!
Jim Graham, a Washington D.C. councilman, has an unusual proposal to fight crime in his neighborhood: ban pizza!
Democrat Party councilman Jim Graham says the late-night “Jumbo Slice” pizza shacks operating on the popular Adams Morgan club and bar strip in Ward 1 attract the element that is likely to commit crime.
“Even though it’s a legal business and everything, they have become a nuisance,” Graham said. “Behaving the way they do in terms of music, in terms of letting people hang out and also in terms of tolerating a certain level of violence.”
Needless to say, the pizza joint owner is not amused: Link
Hang out, drink wine, send tweets and Facebook updates all day ... and get paid for it! Can this possibly be the best job for a twitterholic ever?
Sonoma County winemaker Murphy-Goode is looking for a "lifestyle correspondent" that makes it look good, all for the sweet salary of $10K a month plus living accomodations:
We at the Murphy-Goode Winery got to thinking about the new age of communications and we figured it was a pretty good thing. So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that — to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country.
In exchange, we’re offering you a “Really Goode Job” — a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations!
We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.
Did we mention that the compensation was $10,000 per month Plus accommodations in a beautiful home in picturesque Healdsburg, a popular vacation destination in our neck of the woods. Working hours are flexible. And all you have to do is experience wine and good living, and then tell people about it. (Do you play Poker, or Liar’s Dice? Don’t worry; we’ll teach you.)
Here's where you'd sign up: http://www.areallygoodejob.com/ - via SFoodie
Now this is cute: New York City PS22 elementary school chorus singing "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac. I'd say they did just as good a job as Stevie Nicks. Great job, PS22 kids and their music teacher Gregg "Mr. B" Breinberg!
Watch it before the goons from RIAA deliver a takedown notice for copyright violation (even though Stevie likes it): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Urlesque
More PS22 Chorus vids here: Link (including my current fave: their cover of Viva La Vida by Coldplay and Eye of the Tiger by Survivor)
Background story from the Brooklyn Rail by Sophie Gilbert:
In a school where more than three quarters of the students are eligible for free lunch, the lyrics of the song have resonance, and the performance is haunting, emotive, and delivered with far more soul than one might expect from a bunch of fifth-graders. As Breinberg plays, he makes eye contact with the kids, coaxing performances from them and letting them enjoy themselves. Later, Davoya, one of the chorus members, explains how he does it. “At first, when I sang, I had no emotion,” she says. “I didn’t move. But Mr. B taught me to sing with feeling. With feeling and heart.”
Tokyoflash Landmark Clocks entry by Cliff
A couple of weeks or so ago, we told you of our pal Tokyoflash's design-a-landmark clock contest, where you can submit your idea for a famous landmark modified to include a "Tokyoflash way of reading time."
Well, here are some of their favorite entries - and best of all, you can vote for the winner: Link - Thanks Paul!
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