Police officer Javid Iqbal, 38, of Bedforshire, England, doesn't just have any beard. No sir - he has what can truly called an "epic beard."
Daily Mail (yes, I know how you guys feel about this newspaper, but they always come up with the most interesting stories ...) has more on Javid's travail and lawsuit involving said epic beard:
A Muslim police officer claims he was forced out of his job by colleagues who made fun of his beard and called him a 'f***ing Paki'.
PC Javid Iqbal, 38, said white officers openly discussed in front of him how they were ' better' than their ethnic-minority colleagues. [...]
Mr Iqbal says he was sacked after fellow-officers in Luton launched a 'smear and witch-hunt campaign' during which they lodged a string of complaints about his performance.
He is taking the Bedfordshire force to an employment tribunal claiming he is the victim of racial and religious discrimination and unfair dismissal.
The following is a guest blog post
by Jo Marchant, author
of Decoding
the Heavens.
Main fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism (Photo: Jo Marchant)
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek clockwork computer that
has lain at the bottom of the sea for two thousand years. I first came
across it in late summer 2006, when a major paper describing its workings
was due to appear in the science journal Nature, where I was on staff
as an editor.
The story grabbed me immediately. If such a sophisticated device really
existed, what did it do? Who could have made it? And why?
I travelled to Greece to see the remains of the device (on display in
the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and find out more about
it. The modern part of its story begins in autumn 1900, when Captain Dimitrios
Kontos and his crew of sponge divers were sailing home from their summer
diving grounds of the coast of Tunisia. They were heading for the island
of Symi in the eastern Mediterranean but were blown off course by a storm,
and took shelter by a barren islet called Antikythera.
When the waters had calmed, one of the divers dropped down to look for
sponges but soon emerged, gabbling about a heap of "dead, naked
women" on the seabed. These turned out to be not corpses but statues,
from one of the most spectacular shipwrecks ever discovered from the ancient
world - a Roman ship carrying stolen Greek treasures west to Rome.
Among the salvaged hoard subsequently shipped to Athens was a piece of
formless rock that no one noticed at first, until it cracked open, revealing
bronze gearwheels, pointers, and tiny Greek inscriptions. It has taken
more than a century of ingenious labour to fully decode this mechanism
(during which it was largely ignored by mainstream historians) but scholars
now know that it represents by far the most stunning scientific artefact
that survives from antiquity. A sophisticated piece of machinery consisting
of precisely cut dials, pointers and at least thirty interlocking gear
wheels, nothing close to its complexity appears again in the historical
record for more than a thousand years, until the development of astronomical
clocks in medieval Europe.
The mechanism was encased in a wooden box, about the size of a squat
dictionary, and operated by a handle on the side. Its purpose was to calculate
the motions of celestial bodies. A large Zodiac dial on the front had
several revolving pointers that represented the Sun, Moon and planets
moving around the sky. Complex epicyclic gearing (in which wheels ride
around on other wheels) was used to model the Greeks' latest astronomical
theories, in order to display the variable speed of the Sun and Moon as
seen from Earth as well as the wandering motions of the planets. Meanwhile
on the back of the device were two spiral dials - one was a sophisticated
19-year calendar, developed to unify the motions of the Sun and the Moon,
while the other displayed the timing of eclipses.
By turning the handle on the box you could make time pass forwards or
backwards, to see the state of the cosmos today, tomorrow, last Tuesday
or a hundred years in the future. Whoever owned this device must have
felt like master of the heavens.
The mechanism dates to around 100 BC. It's not clear exactly where
it was made, but the choices are limited as by this time the Romans had
taken over most of the Mediterranean region, so Greek scientists weren't
able to work freely. One possible source is Rhodes, where the shipwrecked
vessel had stopped off shortly before its demise. Hipparchus, one of the
greatest astronomers of the ancient world, lived on Rhodes in the second
century BC, and his theory describing the varying speed of the Moon is
beautifully captured within the mechanism's gearing. On the other
hand, the calendar on the device incorporates month names that may be
from Syracuse in Sicily, home to the famous mathematician Archimedes in
the third century BC. Perhaps he first came up with the idea of using
bronze gears to model the universe.
One
question that has always intrigued me about the Antikythera mechanism
is why the Greeks would have built such a machine. A clue may be found
in the writings of Cicero, a Roman lawyer and author who lived in the
first century BC. On a couple of occasions, he described "bronze
spheres" that modelled the daily movements of the Sun, Moon and
planets as seen from Earth. According to Cicero, Archimedes made one of
these in the third century BC, while he attributed the other to a philosopher
called Posidonius, who worked on Rhodes in the first century BC. Cicero
gave no details of how these devices worked so historians haven't
taken these stories very seriously - they figured the Greeks couldn't
have been capable of building such complex machines. After all, until
the sponge divers' discovery, archaeologists had never found a single
gearwheel from the ancient world. But now that we know the Antikythera
mechanism was exactly such a model, it seems likely that Cicero's
account was accurate.
For both Cicero and Posidonius, these devices were of religious and philosophical
importance. Cicero wrote about them to make the argument that just as
it would be clear to anyone that they had a intelligent creator, so then
did the universe itself. And Posidonius belonged to the Stoic school of
philosophy, meaning that for him God was a divine life force that pervaded
the entire universe. He would have seen astronomy and astronomical models
as a way to understand and demonstrate the workings of the cosmos, and
therefore to get closer to God.
The Greeks have often been dismissed by historians for wasting the technology
they had on toys such as vending machines or automated puppet shows, instead
of using it to tell the time or do useful work. Yet their most advanced
creation, the Antikythera mechanism, was about demonstrating scientific
principles and understanding the nature of the universe - and elevating
one's spirit in the process. To me, that doesn't seem such
a waste.
Recreation of the antikythera by Michael Wright, narrated by Jo [YouTube
Link]
_____
Jo
Marchant is a freelance journalist specializing in science and history,
and author of Decoding
the Heavens.
In her book, Jo recounts the full story of the 100-year quest to understand
the 2,000-year-old computer. She unearths a diverse cast of characters
- from Archimedes to Jacques Cousteau - and explores the roots of modern
technology in Greece, the Islamic world, and medieval Europe.
The following is a guest blog by Adam
Koford, current curator (if you believe his tale) and/or creator (if
you believe John Hodgman
and everyone else) of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cat comic strip and the The
Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out
book
Alex has graciously asked if I would write a post about the comic strip
I help create and curate entitled the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. You may have
seen it featured here from time to time on Neatorama. If not, and you
don't know what I'm talking about, feel free to visit the archive of the
comic, which contains well over 1000
installments.
I'll wait.
Done? Good.
Here's a very short version of the history of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats
comic strip (which you may or may not believe): in 1912, my great-grandfather
Aloysius Koford created a short-lived comic strip featuring two hobo cats,
Kitteh (the big one) and Pip (the small one). In spite of it's quick disappearance
from the few newspapers that ran it, the world and words of the two filthy
felines he drew somehow made their way into the cultural subconscious
of America, and ultimately the internet. Though long dormant, Aloysius'
influence finally resurfaced sometime within the past few years, in a
much-transmogrified form, as LOLCats.
If you are unfamiliar with standard-issue internet LOLCats, I am both
shocked and somehow very happy for you.
As I mentioned, some have chosen not to believe this origin of the webcomic
I've been saddled with for the past 21 months. That is their right. John
Hodgman, in his introduction to my new collection of comics (the Laugh-Out-Loud
Cats Sell Out, available now from Abrams
ComicArts), makes a valiant attempt to disprove my tale. I leave it
to you, the reader, to weigh the evidence and be the judge. But let's
leave that debate for another time (I myself am not sure whom to believe
anymore).
Several cultural touchstones show evidence of being influenced by my
great-grandfather's handiwork. Or, if you don't believe my great-grandfather
actually existed: I, Adam Koford (coincidentally also a cartoonist) have
looked to several influences in the creation of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats
comics. I'll list a few of the less obvious examples, without mentioning
the LOLspeak we've all learned to love and hate.
Paper Moon
Peter Bogdonovich's wonderful
road movie about a traveling con-man and the young girl who may or
may not be his daughter was released on the day I was born. The two aren't
technically hoboes, but they are petty thieves, and by the end of the
film you'll love them both.
Sullivan's Travels
Preston Sturges' 1941 film starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake is
a movie about
hoboes. John L. Sullivan (McCrea) is a movie director tired of making
popular comedies. To research his career-shifting epic of the common man,
entitled O Brother Where Art Thou?, he decides to hit the road as a hobo
to see how the down and out live. Hilarity ensues, plots are twisted,
lessons are learned, and Veronica Lake makes the best looking tramp you
ever saw.
Old Doc Yak
I
first read the adventures of Sidney Smith's anthropomorphic talking yak
on the Barnacle
Press website, which has several months of the strip archived. It's
not his most significant creation, and not particularly monumental in
the history of comics, but it is fun to read.
I've since learned (with the help of the essential Smithsonian Collection
of Newspaper Comics and several wonderful blogs) that most early 20th
Century comic strips still retain their charm if you're willing to invest
some time to get to know the characters.
Hank Ketcham
Dennis the Menace was never my favorite character growing up: in his
50 year history, you can count the number of times his parents smiled
on one hand, and I he didn't use that slingshot nearly enough. But it
was certainly fun to look at. Hank Ketcham and his ghost artist Al
Wiseman crafted a charming world that any cartoonist would be wise
to learn from.
B. Kliban
You'll
likely recognize his trademark cat, especially if you have any memories
of the 1970s, but Bernard Kliban created many more strange and hilarious
drawings. To me, he's the quintessential cartoonist: his work can be cryptic
and impenetrable on one hand, and timelessly funny on the other.
My very own children
They say you should write what you know, and I don't think I could have
created Pip before I had kids of my own. Pip's inexplicable fascination
with leaves has it's genesis in my own son's early obsession with any
and every tiny rock we'd come across in our meanderings. Kitteh's anger
at the mere mention of ducks has it's roots in one of my kid's early perception
that ducks only existed to be chased (he's since learned otherwise).
Finally, the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats wouldn't exist without
people like you. That may sound trite, but it's true. I started the project
as a way to make money, one drawing at a time. Nearly 1,100 drawings (only
a few of which I still own), 600 or so fan club members, and a hardcover
book later, you've helped me create a little world of hoboes and bindle
sticks I've grown to love exploring. Thank you.
_____
A.
Koford is the cartoonist behind such web gems as the 700
Hoboes Project, Order-a-Monkey
(the origins of our collaborative Caption
Monkey series), Alphabet
of Monsters, Onomatopedia,
and oh yes, the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats as well as the Neatoramabot and Neatoramanaut.
Definitely check out Adam's new book The
Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out
( with introduction by John Hodgman.)
_____
Are you an author and would like your book featured on Neatorama? Please
email me about a possible guest blog
post just like this one!
It's been a while since our last What is it? game, but this one should make up for the absence: do you know what the strange tool to the left is used for?
Place your guess in the comment section - the first correct one will win a Neatorama T-shirt. If no one get it, then the funniest guess will win.
Game rules are simple: One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guesses as you'd like. Post no URLs - let others play.
Update 3/13/09 - The answer: A cannonball sizer, it was used as a gauge to determine if a cannonball was the correct diameter.. Congratulations to Anth who got it right!
Mystery Sale - the warehouse started shipping out the orders last Friday. We will ship every day (it may take us a week or so) till all the orders go out. I'll do another update later this week.
Upcoming Queue - if you have original content on your blog, here's a good reason to submit it to the Upcoming Queue. From Bill Zeman, whose blog was frontpaged on Neatorama:
[Tiny Art Director] has been getting tons of traffic and links lately, including Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, The Guardian (best of the web), Saatchi Gallery (world art news), Neatorama.com, b3ta.com, Metafilter.com, Daily Candy, Design Observer, NotCot.org, FlavorPill (in the viral section), Urlesque.com...
Thanks to everyone who is linking and sorry that I can't list everyone, but I want to give a shout out to neatorama.com where all this traffic originated. If you want to promote a site, check out their upcoming queue feature - just make sure your server is ready for it - mine wasn't!
Neatorama reader Nick Schwartz sent us this intriguing account of an "angel" captured on a webcam from a scuba club in Cozumel, Mexico:
"One of my bookmarks is a scuba club in Cozumel - which I have never been, but I'm from Buffalo, NY and its nice to see something tropical once in a while. So point of all this being, I opened the app and saw what looks to be an angelic figure walking through the scuba club. I don't have any program to zoom in on this image but it's certainly something interesting. Some say angel. Some say a bunch of coincidences coming together at the moment I opened it. "
... and soon after, the "angel" was gone:
What do you think? Is it an angel or just Buzz Lightyear showing up for a little night dive? Thanks Nick!
There's an odd fad taking off (jumping off?) in Russia: jumping off a bridge en masse after tethering yourself to a rope! For even more fun, wait till the train is passing by ... Link - via kottke
Excessive Ping Pong Score Celebration
Footballers do it, soccer players do it, so why not celebrate your
score in ping pong? Here's Adam Bobrow's take on how to excessively
celebrate in ping pong (don't miss the score at the end of the clip)
What Happens to Stuff Left in a Foreclosed House?
Someone has to clean up after homeowners were evicted from their
foreclosed houses... and given the current economic situation, business
is booming for the "trash out crew." Link
Is this the Face of the Young Leonardo da Vinci?
When Italian science journalist Piero Angela was looking through
da Vinci's work, he noticed an image of a nose - upon closer look,
it may just be the face of a young Leonardo.
That's the condominium building on 290 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, New York, designed by SHoP Architects. The rippled brick facade and the way light shines on it results in a different look for the building during different times of the day.
If chipper and optimistic people annoy you, here's a finding that will make you hate them even more: they'll outlive everyone else ...
A study of 100,000 women presented at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting Thursday found a strong correlation between optimism and a person's risk for cancer-related death, heart disease and early death.
Researchers surveyed the personality traits of middle-age women in 1994 as part of the Women's Health Initiative study run by the National Institutes of Health.
Eight years later, researchers found that the self-reported optimistic women were less likely to have died for any reason and had a 30 percent lower death rate from heart disease.
Meanwhile, women scoring high on the hostile scales had a higher general death rate and a 23 percent greater risk of dying from a cancer-related condition by the end of the study.
Desiderio Fortunato is a stickler for courtesy and respect. But when the Canadian man asked a US Border agent to be polite and say "please," he got something unexpected: pepper spray to his face!
He said he was questioned by a border officer who demanded he turn off his car and, when asked to make the request more politely, threatened to spray him with his pepper gun if he did not comply.
``I just felt I should stand my ground about it. I should not be treated like that. No matter what kind of position you are in, if you want respect you have to show respect,'' he said Tuesday. ``I asked him three times and when I didn't turn the car off, because he didn't say please, he pepper sprayed me ... It was terrible. For half an hour or so I couldn't see anything.''
The British Home Office's effort to crack down on illegal immigrations has an unintended consequences of sort: Britain is experiencing a clown shortage!
"My season started in February," says Martin Lacey, owner of the Great British Circus, "and I've got comedy acrobats stranded in the Ukraine, and Mongolian horse riders who were refused their visas in Ulan Batur." The holes in his lineup have forced Lacey to draft last-minute substitutes. "Our Mexican clown is stuck in Mexico, so we've got a trapeze artist pretending to be a stooge just to get everybody out of trouble," he says. "It's a mess."
And it's totally incompatible with the needs of Britain's circus sector. According to Malcolm Clay, secretary of the Association of Circus Proprietors of Great Britain, British circus schools don't produce artists at an acceptable standard, largely because their students refine skills like tightrope walking or fire-breathing as a hobby, not as part of a life-long career. As a result, British circuses rely on artists from countries with long-established histories of state-sponsored circus schools: they call on Argentina and Colombia for their renowned high wire acts, China and North Korea for acrobats, and Mongolia and Russia for horse riders. (Interestingly, they don't need to import bearded ladies.)
In 1960, Basque anthropologist Jean-Claude Auger received a tip from
nomads in the Sahara that a child was running free in the desert. He went
to investigate, and sure enough, he spotted a boy galloping with the gazelles.
Auger watched as the kid sniffed and licked to communicate and ate roots,
lizards, and worms just like the rest of the herd.
Auger returned two years later with a Spanish army captain to capture
the child. But when they tried to chase him down, he outran their Jeep.
In 1966, Auger made one last attempt to nab the child with a helicopter
and a net, but even an aerial attack was no match for Gazelle Boy.
John of the Monkeys
In
1988, a 4-year-old boy named John Ssebunya watched his father shoot and
kill his mother. Fearing for his life, John ran into the Ugandan forest
and joined a pack of green vervet monkeys, one of the few mammals that
accepts other species into their fold.
When John was found more than a year later, he had thick hair covering
his body, he walked on his knees and knuckles, and he couldn't tolerate
cooked food.
But after a Christian orphanage in the town of Masaka adopted him, he
slowly acquired more human traits. Now age 24, John has learned to speak
and walk upright. He even sings and plays guitar. And in 1999, he traveled
to Europe with the famed Pearl of Africa children's choir. (Image: BBC
- Children in Wolves'
Clothing)
Doggy Day Care
In
1996, 4-year-old Ivan Mishukov ran away from his abusive parents to become
one of the 2 million homeless children living on the streets in Russia.
After begging for food and rifling through garbage bins for leftovers,
he'd share his scraps with a pack of stray dogs. In turn, the dogs offered
Ivan protection and warmth on Moscow's bitterly cold nights and made him
their leader.
Two years later, police captured the boy by luring him into the back
of a restaurant kitchen. Snarling and biting, he was taken ito a children's
home, where he quickly began to adjust to the human world and started
school. Now, Ivan lives a fairly normal life, although he still dreams
of dogs. (Photo: Marcianitos
Verdes)
The Feral Poster Child of the Enlightenment
When
12-year-old Victor emerged from the woods of Aveyron in France, he couldn't
speak, ate raw meat, and had scars all over his body.
It was 1799, the height of the Enlightenment, and Victor soon found himself
at the center of a philosophical debate surrounding the nature of man.
Is man born good, only to be corrupted by society? Or is he born selfish
and cruel, in need of society?
A doctor named Jean Itard devoted himself to Victor, believing that if
he could teach the boy to speak and show compassion, it would prove that
education can temper the beast in all of us. Unfortunately for Itard,
Victor never made much progress.
Crying Wolf: Feral Children Who Faked It
A Pack of Lies
In
1997, a woman named Monique "Misha" Defonesca published her
memoirs about surviving the Holocaust. According to the book, the Nazis
killed her parents in Brussels when she was just 7 years old. Completely
alone, Misha set out on foot to cross war-torn Europe. She eventually
ended up in Ukraine, thanks to a pair of trusty wolves who traveled with
her for months, possibly years.
The story would have been an amazing tale of survival had it not been
totally fabricated. A Belgian newspaper investigated the details and discovered
that Misha's real name was Monique De Waal. Although her parents did die
in the war, she was actually raised by her grandfather. Misha later came
clean and explained to the Belgian press that the story was her "reality"
and her "way of surviving."
Link: Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years
The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
As
the story went, two young girls were found near Calcutta in 1926 by Rev.
Joseph Singh, a rector at the local orphanage. Singh wrote in his diary
that they had unnaturally long teeth and an aversion to the sun, howled
at the moon, ate out of bowls on the ground, and saw clearly in the dark.
He tried to civilize the girls, Amala and Kamala, but to no avail.
Although the story became famous, scholars now doubt its veracity. For
starters, Singh's diaries were written years after the events supposedly
took place. Also, photographs of the girls on all four acting like wolves
were found to have been staged years after their deaths. In all likelihood,
Singh faked his "work" with Amala and Kamala to raise money
for his orphanage. (Photo: T.
Honjo / Wikipedia)
The article above, written by Eric Furman and Linda Rodriguez, is reprinted with permission
from Scatterbrained section of the Jan/Feb
2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss'
website and blog for more fun stuff!
The following reprinted from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. Got an idea but no paper to write it down? Don't worry, just do what these people did and grab whatever's in front of you and start scribbling:
Written on: A cocktail napkin
By: Rollin King and Herb Kelleher
The Story: Kelleher was a lawyer. King was a banker and pilot who ran a small charter airline. In 1966, they had a drink at a San Antonio bar. Conversation led to an idea for an airline that would provide short intrastate flights at a low cost. They mapped out routes and a business strategy on a cocktail napkin. Looking at the notes on the napkin, Kelleher said, "Rollin, you're crazy, let's do it," and Southwest Airline was born. [editor's note: This issue of the Bathroom Reader was printed in 1997. In 2007, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Rollin King admitted that the napkin story was "a hell of a story" but not true]
Written on: Toilet paper
By: Richard Berry
The Story: Berry, an R&B performer, was at a club in 1957 when he heard a song with a Latin beat that he liked. He went into the men's room, pulled off some toilet paper, and wrote down the lyrics to "Louie, Louie."
Written on: The back of a grocery bill By: W.C. Fields
The Story: In 1940 Fields needed money quickly. He scribbled down a plot idea on some paper he found in his pocket, and sold it to Universal Studios for $25,000. Ironically, the plot was about Fields trying to sell an outrageous script to a movie studio. It became his last film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Fields received screenplay credit as Otis Criblecoblis.
Written on: The back of a letter
By: Francis Scott Key
The Story: In 1814 Key, a lawyer, went out to the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay to plead for the release of a prisoner. The British agreed, but since Key had arrived as they were preparing to attack, they detained him and his party until the battle was over. From this vantage point Key watched the bombardment, and "by the dawn's early light" saw that "our flag was still there." He was so inspired that he wrote the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner" on the only paper he had, a letter he'd stuck in his pocket.
Written on: A cocktail napkin
By: Arthur Laffer
The Story: In Sept 1974, Arthur Laffer (professor of business economics at USC) had a drink at a Washington, D.C. restaurant with his friend Donald Rumsfeld (then an advisor to President Gerald Ford). The conversation was about the economy, taxes, and what to do about recession. Laffer moved his wine glass, took the cocktail napkin, and drew a simple graph to illustrate his idea that at some point, increased taxes result in decreased revenues. The graph, known as the "Laffer Curve," later became the basis for President Reagan's "trickle-down" economics.
Written on: A napkin
By: Roger Christian and Jan Berry
The Story: In the early 1960s Roger Christian, one of the top DJs in Los Angeles, co-wrote many of Jan and Dean's hits with Jan Berry. One night he and Jan were at an all-night diner and Christian began scribbling the lyrics to a new song, "Honolulu Lulu," on a napkin. When they left the restaurant, Jan said, "Give me the napkin ... I'll go to the studio and work out the arrangements." "I don't have it," Christian replied. Then they realized they'd left the napkin on the table. They rushed back in ... but the waitress had already thrown it away. They tried to reconstruct the song but couldn't. So the two tired collaborators went behind the diner and sorted through garbage in the dumpster until 4 a.m., when they finally found their song. It was worth the search. "Honolulu Lulu" made it to #11 on the national charts.
Written on: The back of an envelope
By: Abraham Lincoln
The Story: On his way to Gettysburg to commemorate the battle there, Lincoln jotted down his most famous speech - the Gettysburg Address - on an envelope. Actually, that was just a myth. Several drafts of the speech have been discovered - one of which was written in the White House on executive stationery.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
