The Atacama Desert in South America is one of the driest places on Earth. It is so dry that it is virtually sterile (indeed, a team of scientists who tested the soil for life in simulation of NASA's Viking missions called the soils of Atacama "Mars-like").
But in the hand of French astronomer Serge Brunier, the beauty of the Atacama Desert is revealed at night:
At night, the purity of the sky is unmatched. When the Sun goes down in Atacama, the sky quickly turned dark blue and the glow of thousands of stars awakened while the desert - invisible, empty and silent - seems to disappear.
Check out the time lapse video clip of the Milky Way galaxy over the Atacama Desert: Link | If you like that, check out Sky Time Lapse's website as well.
Inspired by the UK Royal Air Force's Red Arrows [beware: self-starting audio] aerial acrobatic team, a team of daredevils strive to emulate the stunts using only wing suits:
The team leap from a plane at 13,000ft and fly inches apart as they glide to earth at 120mph with smoke canisters strapped to their ankles. [...]
The extreme sport of wingsuit jumping started in 2002 but has grown in popularity and evolved into formation sky-diving.
The team - called Topgun' - has members from Denmark, Sweden, Britain and Holland and jumps all over Europe in formations including up to 16 divers.
Link (with a blurry yet wicked cool video clip!) - via The Presurfer
Nirmalya Chakraborty created a series of fantastic print ads for Bose, featuring many of their sound equipments to create faces of famous musicians: Link | More at La pubelle blog
Forget a 3-car garage. The new status symbol for the haves in London is this £40,000 pop-up garage by Cardok:
The £40,000 parking spots can be hidden beneath a flowerbed, lawn, or even another parking space.
Owners simply press a button on a keyring to raise they car out of the ground much like the rocket launching apparatus in Thunderbirds.
There is already a four month waiting list to get the sci-fi style parking space installed and bosses of Cardok - the company behind the hydraulic platforms - say orders are pouring in faster than they can build them.
Claude Monet Tulip Fields with the Rijnsburg Windmill, photo: megpi [Flickr]
We've featured a lot of cakes on Neatorama, but never ones so colorful and gorgeous. COLOURlovers has a round up of some of the most vibrantly colorful designer cakes.
Beware, reading it may just make you hungry ;) Link
Hey, Michael Jordan, just because you're
good at basketball doesn't mean you can swing a bat. And a syrupy sweet
voice doesn't make you a poet, Jewel. Oh, and Paul Newman, you're a fine
actor, but your salsa is ... well, it's really good, actually, but you're
the exception.
Sometimes, the talented and famous begin to experience delusions of multi-famed
grandeur. For all those tilting at windmills, mental_floss is here to
provide the ridicule and reality check.
Prose and Cons: Mussolini's Writer's Block
While
noted fascist Benito Mussolini eventually found a fulfilling career as
a tyrannical dictator, his earlier ambitions were literary. Fourteen years
before taking power in Italy, Mussolini penned a serial novel titled The
Cardinal's Mistress for a weekly supplement in an Italian newspaper.
Apparently, it was quite the bodice-ripping romance. You know, the kind
filled with lines such as, "The common brutes of the market-place
satiate their idle lusts on your sinful body." It goes without saying,
but the book didn't do much to secure Mussolini's reputation as a writer.
Curiously, Mussolini isn't the only dictator with a weakness for romance
novels. Saddam Hussein has anonymously published three, and another is
purportedly on the way. None of them have been translated into English,
though we hear they make Mussolini's stuff read like Proust.
Cantor Battles Shakespeare: Left Brain Takes a Right
Georg
Cantor is widely regarded as the most important mathematician of the 19th
century. He invented "set theory," which - in addition to making
life miserable for Calculus II students everywhere - proved that some
infinities are (prepare to have your mind blown) bigger than others. That's
the sort of realization that can make your head hurt. And sure enough,
Cantor eventually went bonkers.
But even before then, he wasn't exactly a picture of mental health. Toward
the end of his life, he became obsessed with proving that Sir Francis
Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays via complicated schema
and hidden codes the likes of which haven't been seen outside "A
Beautiful Mind."
Cantor's extensive writings on the subject aside, nearly all Shakespearean
scholars agree on two things: William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon,
wrote the plays attributed to him, and Cantor should have stuck to math.
Isaac Newton: Putting the Pseudo in Science
Forget
Isaac Newton's famous falling apple. (For starters, that story was quite
possibly made up by Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire.) Many scholars argue
that Newton's theory of gravity was the product of his obsessive fascination
with what was, at the time, the decidedly unenlightened science of alchemy.
Newton spent more of his life studying alchemy than "real" math
and science. And without his beliefs about occult forces operating in
a vacuum, he might never have understood gravity. So when Newton famously
said, "If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on
the shoulders of giants," many of the giants to whom he was referring
were probably cranks, pseudo-scientists, and alchemists.
Paige Compositor - via Scientific American issue March 9, 1901 at Twain
Quotes
Mark
Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel composed
on a typewriter. Yet, ironically enough, the author formerly known as
Samuel Clemens was nearly driven into bankruptcy by the Paige Compositor.
A massive typesetting machine with 18,000 moving parts, the Compositor
was a complete commercial failure. Twain invested at least $190,000 and
14 years worth of anxiety into the invention and came away with two prototypes,
neither of which worked for very long.
All was not lost, though. One of those prototypes was willed to Columbia
University, which donated it to a scrap metal drive during World War I.
That means the Compositor became bullets ... and finally served a purpose.
The article above appeared in the Scatterbrained
section of the Sept - Oct 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted
here with permission.
Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
Our pal AskMen has a neat (and somewhat controversial) list of the 29 Best Cities to Live In (if you're a guy), based on various criteria such as sports & entertainment, power & money, dating & sex, fashion and so forth (all things important to guys, I suppose).
Sitting at no. 3 is the place I used to live nearby, San Francisco:
Why You Should Live in San Francisco
San Francisco is a cityscape of irresistible drama. Steep hills and skyscrapers overlook a gorgeous bay that changes color with the sky. That drama filters into every aspect of the city’s life, from its topsy-turvy power politics to its go-hard recreation (3,480 acres of parks including three golf courses) and go-harder nightlife (including 2,870 bars). Since the days of the Barbary Coast, San Francisco has boasted one of the great bar and dining cultures, and is home to some of the best restaurants in North America, claiming one restaurant for every 279 people.
The louche life notwithstanding, San Francisco was the healthiest city in the U.S. in 2008, at least according to USA Today. Just outside the city lay miles of vineyards producing some of the world's great wines. The city abounds with classic men’s stores including local favorites Cable Car Clothiers and The Hound. San Francisco is a creative sector powerhouse, with LucasArts located right in the city’s famed Presidio. The city’s boy-to-girl ratio (male: 51%; female: 49%) doesn’t seem promising at first, but remember this is San Francisco, so you can shave a good 8% to 10% off the competition right there. Be advised that women here are the cream of the brain trust -- San Francisco was named one of the top 10 smartest cities by Forbes last year -- so the kind of “hey baby” come-on that works in L.A. or Miami Beach ain’t gonna work here.
There's plenty of things I don't like about diapers - they're expensive, they often leak, and they cause bum rash because babies sit in their poo for too long - but I can't imagine taking care of babies without diapers (my parents told me that they raised me without disposable diapers not because they didn't want to - but because they didn't have disposable diapers back then when I was growing up. So they used cloth diapers, which leaked but it wasn't as bad as wearing no diaper at all they said).
Anyways, apparently there is a movement of sort of promoting a "natural approach" (i.e. diaper-less) to this whole baby poo business:
Elimination Communication, Infant Potty Training, Natural Infant Hygiene, Potty Whispering...whatever you choose to call it, it all refers to the modern adaption of an ancient method of childcare. Traditionally this method was seen and practiced by the whole community, learned naturally over a lifetime. This aspect has largely been lost, yet you can rediscover it on the Practicing EC pages. Think of these as the wisdom of your grandmother, the support of your aunt, the encouragement of your best friend. Celebrate undertaking a journey where caregivers and babies learn and discover together.
Shenanigans or not, to learn more about "potty whispering" (I just love that term!), check out DiaperFreeBaby - via The Zeray Gazette
Our very own John Struan, who blogs at Super Punch, wrote a very neat article summarizing the secrets of his blogging success.
3. Give more than you expect to receive
Every selfish move I made failed. As I've explained, I tried posting spammy comments and begging for links. It got me nowhere. But what worked extremely well was trying to help other people. I recommended countless tips to other sites. Now, this didn't help me directly or quickly. Many sites would post my suggestion and thank me, but not even offer a link. Other sites would credit me with a "via," but I've learned over the years that "vias" drive no traffic at all, even when they come from the biggest websites.
However, "vias" helped in two ways. First, they improved my site's status in Google's eyes, and thus increased the chance someone would find me accidentally via a web search. Second, vias directed a few visitors to my site, typically other bloggers who were looking for new sources. Those bloggers then started linking to me with more vias, further improving my site's status. Also, every once in a long while, a site I'd helped would drive traffic to me in thanks. I stuck with it, and it all started to snowball.
As you probably know, John is a blogger here on Neatorama (as he mentioned in the article), so let me add three additional things that I think contributed greatly to his success: 1) John has a keen eye in finding neat stuff in his area of expertise (custom toys, pop culture); 2) he has integrity; and 3) he blogs about what he's passionate about (it shows in his blogging style). I know that he's an authority on the subject, and if I have a question about custom toy, he'll be the first guy I'll ask.
Miss Cellania wrote a very funny post over at YesButNoButYes blog about people who submit fake names to TV stations ... and got 'em broadcasted! This one above is a classic:
Dixie Normous is the fictional female lead in the movie-within-the-movie entitled Austinpussy featured in Austin Powers in Goldmember. Now a proud (and sweepstakes-winning) resident of Byron, Minnesota.
Our pal WebEcoist has a very neat post about the graveyards of "stuff" after they're no longer wanted. This one above is the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center or AMARC ("The Boneyard") in Tucson, Arizona, where military airplanes go to die:
When U.S. military airplanes need to be repaired or are just too old to fly, many of them end up in the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center, or AMARC, in Tucson, Arizona. Some of these planes are restored to operational status while others are broken down for parts. Seen from above, the planes make beautiful patterns in blue and white against the earthy brown backdrop.
Today's collaboration with the What is it? blog brings us this strange contraption for your guessing pleasure: do you know what this strange tool pictured above is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. The first correct guess will win a free Neatorama T-shirt. If no one got it, then the funniest guess will win.
Contest rules are simple: one guess per comment, please - you can enter as many guesses as you'd like but please post no web links or URLs (let others play!)
Update 4/4/08 - That was too easy! Here's the answer: A corn sheller, used to remove the kernels from the cob, patent number 605,934. Congrats to Beretta who got it right, right from the get go!
Remember the video clip of a guy tossing a cannonball into a pool of mercury? Well, here's something even more amazing: a 1972 photo from the National Geographic magazine showing a man sitting on a pool of mercury.
Warp coils and photon torpedoes aside, have you ever thought of the weird fact that there's no money in Star Trek? Or how people get stuff done in real life when they can just ... erhm, enjoy what the holodeck can offer?
Our very own John who blog at The Zeray Gazette has, and he's given it some serious thoughts:
... my usual interpretation of the economics of Star Trek: they were unrealistic, as they eliminated the first law of economics -- scarcity. Thanks to the replicator, there is virtually no need to manufacture anything. Although there were a few objects, such as latinum or yamok sauce, that could not be replicated, there was essentially nothing that your replicator could not provide for you -- including more replicators.
