For the Adelaide Fringe Festival, a team of artists known as the Crateman Crew created this Katamari-esque sphere of milk crates:

The crate sphere was designed to be rolled down the street as the final act in the parade. Comprising of 688 milk crates and being over 4.5 meters high, it had an estimated weight of over 700 kilograms. It was hoped that upon seeing us struggle with the beast, members of the audience would join in, and help us roll the sphere to a glorious end!

Unfortunately the reality was somewhat different.

Wooster Collective has what happened next: Link

Image: Fedrus

Artists and designers get inspiration from a lot of things - even plants. Take cactus for instance. Here's a round-up of succulent designs inspired by cact (this one above is fit for your house guests that won't leave!): Link - via Cribcandy

Our friend Tokyoflash is asking visitors to participate in a design process by giving feedback and opinions to help with the development of Buetooth necklaces that let you connect wirelessly to your cell phone or computer (to let you answer the phone handsfree while driving or chat on Skype without having to sit down at the computer).

Some of the designs are very interesting: Link - Thanks Paul!

Broker: what you become after investing in stocks
                                               - Wall Street joke

Continuing our quest to unearth fun facts from A to Z, here's the latest Neatolicious Fun Facts article. "D" is for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Given the current economic crisis, here are some timely fun facts about the granddaddy of stock market indices:

1. Origins: Charles Dow

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (the DJIA or The Dow) is a stock market index. It comprises of stocks of select large companies and is used to gauge the performance of the whole stock market.

The Dow was created by American journalist Charles Henry Dow on May 26, 1896, as part of his research into market movements. That explains the "Dow" in Dow Jones, but what about the "Jones" part? That was named after Dow's business partner Edward Davis Jones, a statistician (not related, as far as I could tell, with the current Edward Jones company). Interestingly, Jones didn't have anything to do with creating the stock index, other than being Dow's business partner in their company Dow Jones & Co.

Dow and Jones didn't set out to be in the business of keeping track of the stock market. They were journalists who had been working for a newspaper before they decided to go into the financial news business for themselves in 1882 (with another business partner named Charles Bergstresser). The trio opened shop in the basement of a lower Manhattan candy store that later became the New York Stock Exchange. (Source)

The Dow, Jones & Company (they later dropped the comma) published daily hand-written news bulletins called "flimsies" delivered by messengers to subscribers. A year later, they came out with the "Customers' Afternoon Letter," which contained the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

You may not have heard of the Customers' Afternoon Letter, but I'm sure you know what the newspaper later became: The Wall Street Journal (the first edition of which was just 4 pages long and sold for 2 cents).

2. Was the Dow Jones Industrial Average the oldest stock index?

Nope - on July 3, 1884, Charles Dow created the first one: the Dow Jones Transportation Average. It consisted of 11 transportation-related companies (most of which were railroads).

3. The first 12 stocks listed and what happened to them

The first 12 stocks listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, published on May 26, 1896 were industrial (or so called "smokestack" companies). Of these 12, only 1 (General Electric) is still doing business under the same name:

(Source: Dow Jones FAQ)

Oh, and the first day's closing is 40.94. If you had invested $1 then, you'd have $169 today, a return of 16,828%.

4. A "Blue Chip" Index

If you're financially savvy, you'd already know this: the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a "blue chip" index, meaning it is comprised of just 30 of the largest companies in the United States.

But why "blue chip"? The term comes from casinos, where blue chips have the highest values. Its first use to describe stocks was coined by Dow Jones staff Oliver Gingold in the early 1920s:

That term apparently got its start in 1923 or 1924 when Gingold was standing by the stock ticker at the brokerage firm that later became Merrill Lynch. Noticing several trades at $200 or $250 a share or more, he said to Lucien Hooper of W.E. Hutton & Co., that he intended to return to the office to "write about these blue-chip stocks." Thus the phrase was born. It has been in use ever since, originally in reference to high-priced stocks, more commonly used to day to refer to high-quality stocks.

5. How Now, Dow Jones

Marlyn Mason, Tony Roberts and Brenda Vaccaro in How Now, Dow Jones
(Photo and more on the musical by Skip Card of Playbill: Link)

In 1967, lyricist Carolyn Leigh came up with the idea of a Broadway musical comedy based on the stock market. She collaborated with Elmer Bernstein (music), Max Shulman (libretto) and David Merrick (producer) to create the musical How Now, Dow Jones. (Source)

Though How Now, Dow Jones was considered a Broadway failure, one song titled "Step to the Rear" became quite popular and was later adapted into The Fighting Gamecocks Lead the Way, the fight song of the University of South Carolina.

6. The best and worst days in the history of the Dow

Given the current economic crisis, it seems that every day brings us bad economic news and even lower stock prices. Indeed, we have seen an incredibly volatile stock market and record-setting daily point gains and losses.

The largest daily point loss was recorded on Sept 29, 2008, when the DJIA lost 778 points (7%). The largest point gain happened about two week later (gain of 936 points or 11% on October 13, 2008) only to be followed with another big drop (733 points or 7.9%). You know what happened next: right now, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen by about 45% from last year.

Riding the Dow T-shirt at Crazy Dog T-shirts

The largest percentage loss occurred in Black Monday of 1987, when the stock markets around the world crashed. The Dow lost 508 points or a drop of 22.6%. Even today economists and financial analysts couldn't come to an agreement as to the reason behind such a crash (some blamed program tradings, others blamed market psychology).

7. Dowism

I can't bear to close on such a DOWn note (get it? it's a double pun), so let's end with this pun: dowism. It's a play on the words Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and Dow Jones, used to represent the philosophy of consumerism.

Columnist and radio personality Steve Bhaerman, under pseudonym Swami Beyondananda wrote in Duck Soup for the Soul:

That day, the Swami swore off sects completely. Spirit was immaterial, he decided, and he now sought fulfillment by filling himself full of all the material goodies life could provide. He moved to New York to study with the renowned guru of the stock market, Yuan Tibet, who instructed him in the Dowist path. Swami became more and more dependent on the stock market prophet, buying soybean futures like there was no tamari. Suddenly, the price of soybeans plummeted (due, it was later revealed, to a rumor planted by unscrupulous dairy- heir that tofu actually came from between the toes of Himalayan hikers). Swami frantically tried to call Yuan Tibet for his sage advice, but he could not be found. Tragically, there had been some prophet-taking on Wall Street, somebody took him, and he was never heard from again.

(Source)

"Prophet-taking?" Oh hohoho! (by the way, "tamari" is a kind of soy sauce. Clever guy, that Steve Bhaerman).

Next up: "E" (which I haven't decided yet) - in the meantime, check out these articles on Neatorama:

• 10 American Financial Meltdowns in the Past Century
• 9 Most Brazen Ponzi Schemes in History
• Past Neatolicious Fun Facts Articles: Apple, Beer, Chess
• From the Neatorama Online Store: Stock Market, The Ride

In 2007, we saw the Daft Hands: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger video clip swept through the InterWeb. Fast forward two years later and we get this little beaut: Dwarfed Punk, Daft Punk's epic song set to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

An instant classic: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Look At This

Driving through the little town of Tenaha, Texas, may cost you a lot more than just gas money. A lawsuit contends that driving the stretch of highway that goes through the city is akin to highway robbery ... by the police!

Howard Witt of Chicago Tribue has the story:

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled highway connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking and call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

Link

(Photo: Howard Witt/Chicago Tribune)

Did you spend a good portion of your childhood (and your allowance) playing video game blasting 2-dimensional aliens to smithereens? Well, here's a fun "Ice Invaders" ice tray that brings back pleasant memory. The silicon tray freezes water into the shape of a retro alien ice cubes.

We've just gotten our shipment of the Ice Invaders for the Neatorama Online Store: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?ice-invaders-pid226.html - just $7.45 each.

Update: We've also gotten new inventory of the 2-Carat Cup and Fuzz - the Crime Scene Scarf (both which sold out in about a day last time!)

Photo: NickIsConfused [Flickr]

Photographer Nick Drummond has a neat Flickr photoset of ATilla, his "pet" AT-AT. The best thing about having your very own Star Wars All Terrain Armored Transport Walker? It's easily house-trained, of course! Link - via Super Punch

Last year, vise-grip manufacturer Irwin held a contest called "Tell Us Your Vise-Grip Story" where people share their personal experience of using the tool. They've chosen 3 finalists, one of which is this one by Bryan from Chesapeake, VA:

As a US Navy spine surgeon, I routinely deal with dozens of different types of screws, rods and bolts that have been implanted into the spine. Each manufacturer has their own unique tools to insert and remove their specific hardware. While deployed to the Middle East in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I did not have access to these specialized tools. I did however have some Vise-Grips that could be sterilized and used to emergently remove the screws and rods from this infected solider's spine.

No doubt about it - vise-grips are useful. Almost as useful as duct tapes: http://irwin.eprize.net/visegripstory/index.tbapp - via Popular Mechanics and The Zeray Gazette

Our very own Stacy Conradt wrote a neat article over at mental_floss about 10 people who died on their birthdays (full circle!) Here's one that particularly interesting:

Jean Felix Piccard. Name sound familiar? It’s because he and his twin brother Auguste Piccard were the inspirations for the name of Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard. Jean’s inventions have been used in building aircrafts, spacecrafts and balloons (that’s him with his wife in the picture). He died on his (and his brother’s) birthday on January 28, 1963 at the age of 79.

Link - via i met a possum

Unfortunately, I'm sure that some idiot will see that as a challenge instead ... - via Rue the Day and Miss Cellania

Do the two logos look similar to you? They do, according to the trademark attorneys of Re/Max, a national real estate franchise. They're challenging the trademark application of a real estate startup Rehava, which has a new commission structure that is different than the established culture:

Adam Scoville, Re/Max's legal counsel, said he can explain.

First of all, both names start with "r" and have logos with accent lines near the letter "e," he said.

"It goes beyond that," Scoville added. "If you chop the top off of the 'h,' you (almost) have the 'm' in Re/Max. The next letter is an 'a,' and if you take the 'v' then you have half of an 'x.' "

Steve deGuzman, Rehava's broker-in-charge, said he doesn't buy it. He said the trademark challenge is harassment and a form of corporate bullying that will cost his firm thousands of dollars.

"It's a huge distraction, particularly for a startup and also in this kind of a market," deGuzman said.

He suspects the Colorado-based franchise is challenging the trademarkbecause of Rehava's controversial commission rebates, which some in the industry see as a threat to traditional compensation standards.

http://www.charleston.net/news/2009/mar/07/its_big_guy_vs_little_guy74198/ - via reddit

In 1978, Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius created this nifty documentary titled "Reproduction Cycle Among Unicellular Life Forms Under the Rocks of Mars." It's part of a fictional "Early Childhood Enrichment Series, Science for Elementary Schools" series.

Claymation has never been this good: Link [embedded YouTube clip, quite risque yet oh-so-funny. You've been warned ...]

Do you call that a game? Ha! Ha! No, thankee; life's too short for chess - Henry James Byron, in Our Boys (1875)

English playwright Henry James Byron's character aside, who doesn't love chess? Though Garry Kasparov once mentioned that "chess is mental torture," we'll keep this list of neatolicious facts about chess a fun read:

1. Chaturanga: the grandaddy of chess

The Hindu deity Krishna and his consort Radha playing chaturanga

Though there are various schools of thought, the version that is accepted by most as the forefather of chess is the 6th century Indian game of chaturanga (Sanskrit for "four divisions of military"). The name came from the battle formation of an army platoon: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots - represented in the chess pieces of pawn, knight, bishop, and rook.

The game came to Persia in the 7th century and was renamed chatrang then shatranj. There, players started calling "Shah!" (Persian for "King!") when attacking the opponent's king, and "Shah mat!" (Persian for "the king is finished!") when they win. From these words, we get the words for "check" and "checkmate."

You can still play chaturanga, or a four-player chaturanga, if you want.

2. The Turk: 18th Century Chess-Playing Machine

In 1770, Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen created The Turk, a chess-playing automaton to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. And impressive it was: The life-size "Turk" sat on top of a large cabinet with doors that opened to reveal complicated gears and cogs. Its mechanical hand would move the chess pieces as it played and it would even make various facial expressions.

The Turk was a chess genius: it beat skilled and "celebrity" opponents alike (even Benjamin Franklin played against The Turk when he was serving as the US ambassador to France, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte). It could also do complicated chess puzzles like the knight's tour (where the knight is moved around the chessboard, touching each square once and only once along the way).

After the Turk was lost in a fire, it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax: a human chess master was inside the Turk directing its every move. Kempelen had even built in a sliding seat that allowed the man to avoid detection as the various doors are opened to reveal the fake machineries.

Link: Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess Playing Machine That Fooled the World

3. Shannon number: the possible number of moves in chess

In 1950, information theorist Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories wanted to find out whether a computer could be programmed to play chess.

He calculated the number of possible moves* in chess to be 10¹²⁰, which became known as the Shannon number. By the way, that's more than the number of all atoms in the universe (estimated between 4x 10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹).

Shannon wrote that "a machine operating at the rate of one variation per micro-second would require over 10⁹⁰ years to calculate the first move!" (Source)

*If you want to be technical, the number of possible positions after fifty-move rule is "just" 10⁴³.

4. The shortest and longest games of chess

The quickest possible checkmate is called the Fool's mate or the two-move checkmate. It never happens in a real chess game, except with a really weak opponent (i.e. when playing a fool).

Though technically forfeits are games won with zero moves and there have been games drawn without any moves, the shortest recorded chess game was between German grandmaster Robert Hübner and then 19-year-old Kenneth Rogoff playing in the 1972 World Student Team Championship game. Hübner played one move and offered a draw to Rogoff, who accepted (as the story went, the arbiters insisted that some moves be played so the duo played a few non-sensical moves instead!). Rogoff, by the way, went on to become a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Harvard University.

The longest game of chess (under modern time rule) was played by Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic in Belgrade in 1989. The duo played for 20 hours and 15 minutes, ending in 269-move draw.

5. Simul: playing chess against multiple opponents at a time

Some people are so good at chess, they can play against more than one opponent at a given time. In 1922, World Champion José Raúl Capablanca played 103 opponents simultaneously and won 102 of the games (with 1 draw).

Some people are very good at chess, but not so good at simul. In 1951, International Master Robert Wade played 30 Russian schoolboys aged 14 and under - and lost 20 games and drawn the remaining 10!

The world record for simultaneous chess exhibition (or "simul" as chess lovers often call it) was just set in 2009 by Bulgarian Grandmaster Kiril Georgiev. He played 360 games for more than 14 hours. He won 284 games, drawn 70 and lost 6 games.

The neatest world record for simultaneous chess, hands down, was set by George "Kolty" Koltanowski in Edinburgh in 1937. He played 34 chess games simultaneously ... while blindfolded! He won 24 games and lost 10 over a period of 13 hours. In 1960, Koltanowski did one better: he played 56 chess games blindfolded (with only 10 seconds a move) ... and won 50 and drew 6! After the games were over, he could recite the complete moves from memory.

His wife Leah once said this about her husband's prodigious chess memory: "I don't know how he does it. He can't even remember to bring home a loaf of bread from the supermarket." (Source)

(Photo: Cleveland Public Library)

6. Why must I lose to this idiot?

Chess grandmaster and writer Aron Nimzowitsch, who has been called "perhaps the most brilliant theoretician and teacher in the history of the game," (he was a leading proponent of the hypermodern school of chess) liked to stand on his head and once broke a leg in a tournament.

When he learned that he had lost a chess game to Friedrich Saemisch, Nimzowitsch jumped up on the table and yelled "Why must I lose to this idiot?"

Incidentally, Nimzowitsch also carried around a card that proclaimed him to be "Candidate for the World Championship of Chess and Crown Prince of the Chess World." (Source)

7. Chess Boxing

Garry Kasparov once famously said that "chess is mental torture," so perhaps it's only natural that someone decided to connect it with physical torture. In 1992, cartoonist Enki Bilal thought of the idea of combining chess with boxing for his comic book Froid Equateur.

In 2001, Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh decided to bring chess boxing to reality. In Rubingh's version, opponents alternate between playing rounds of chess and boxing. While the idea is a bit strange, chess boxing has grown into a somewhat popular sport. It even has a governing body, the World Chess Boxing organization (motto: "Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board.") and world championship games (the first one in 2003 was won by Rubingh himself).

Both players have to be skilled at chess and boxing as you can either win by checkmate or knockout.

Here's a clip of Iepe the Joker vs. Luis the Lawyer at the very first world chess boxing championship in Amsterdam:

[YouTube Clip, fun starts at 1:40 | Here's part 2]

8. Bobby Fisher: the greatest - and craziest - chess player that ever lived

17-year-old Bobby Fisher playing against world champion Mikhail Tal in 1960.

Bobby Fisher is considered by many to be one of the greatest players (if not the greatest) in the history of chess. And while there's no denying that the man's brilliant (he became the youngest-ever junior champion at the age of 13 and a grandmaster at 15), what made Bobby Fisher fascinating was his craziness and paranoia.

Rene Chun of The Atlantic wrote an interesting article titled Bobby Fisher's Pathetic Endgame that offers a glimpse into the strange (and sad) world of the chess genius:

In 1977, after a bitter falling-out that led Fischer to claim that the [Worldwide Church of God] was taking its orders from a "satanical secret world government," he cut all ties with the Church. Then he crawled even further into his own netherworld. He began dressing like a hobo. He took up residence in seedy hotels. He began worrying about the purity of his bodily fluids. He bought great quantities of exotic herbal potions, which he carried in a suitcase, to stave off the toxins he feared might be secretly put in his food and water by Soviet agents. According to a 1985 article in Sports Illustrated, Fischer medicated himself with such esoteric remedies as Mexican rattlesnake pills ("good for general health") and Chinese healthy-brain pills ("good for headaches"). His suitcase also contained a large orange-juice squeezer and lots and lots of vitamins. He always kept the suitcase locked, even when he was staying with friends. "If the Commies come to poison me, I don't want to make it easy for them," he explained to a friend. Perhaps the most telling sign of his rapid mental deterioration was that he insisted on having all his dental fillings removed. "If somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking," Fischer confided to a friend. "I don't want anything artificial in my head."

9. Star Trek Tri-D Chess

Amongst the many chess variants out there, the most famous is probably the three-dimensional chess or Tri-D chess seen in Star Trek TV episodes and movies.

The original Star Trek prop was cobbled using boards from 3-D checkers and 3-D tic tac toe. The rules of the game was never explained in the storyline (beyond the famous "Queen to Queen's Level Three" line by Scottie for transporter clearance in TOS: Whom Gods Destroy), but in 1976, programmer and Star Trek fan Andrew Bartmess developed what is now the standard rules for playing Tri-D chess.

For more chess variants, check out The Chess Variant Pages

10. Man vs. Machine: Deep Blue Beat World Champion Garry Kasparov

It had been the dream of computer scientists everywhere to program a chess-playing computer that could win against a human chess genius. In 1985, doctoral students Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell and Thomas Anantharaman came up with a computer that evolved into Deep Thought, the first chess-playing computer of a serious caliber. (Yes, it was named after the computer in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy - the very same on that returned "42" as the answer to life, the universe, and everything).

Deep Thought evolved further into Deep Blue, a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP-based IBM computer system. And on February 10, 1996, it happened: Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess game. Kasparov bounced back and won the next 3 games and drawn the remaining two, thus beating the machine.

But victory for humans didn't last long. In 1997, an upgraded Deep Blue (nicknamed "Deeper Blue") with a capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second (vs 3 chess positions per second for its opponent), defeated Kasparov 3½–2½ in a rematch. Kasparov, however, maintained that IBM cheated and demanded another rematch. IBM, however, declined and dismantled Deep Blue.

Phew, C is done! I'm sure there's a lot more fun facts about chess, so if you know of any, please add them to the comments. And what shall we do for "D"?

See also our previous Neatolicious Fun Facts: Apple, and Beer.