If the Rubik's cube is too easy for you, check out this puzzle created by Jason Smith of PuzzleForge, based on Andrew Cormier's design. Behold, the Petaminx, a dodecahedral puzzle with 4 slices per face:
It is entirely custom built and contains almost 1000 moving parts.
This project took place over two months, including:
20 hours on masters and molds. 12 hours casting parts. 30 hours cleaning up parts and sanding (!!) 7 hours assembling all 1000 parts 6 hours stickering.
Latreasa Goodman had an emergency. A food emergency: her local McDonald's ran out of Chicken McNugget, so naturally she called 911!
Told McDonald’s was out of Chicken McNuggets after paying for a 10-piece meal, a local woman called 911.
Three times.
“This is an emergency, If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one,” Latreasa L. Goodman told police. “This is an emergency.”
The McNugget meltdown happened last week at a McDonald’s in the 600 block of North U.S. 1 and ended with Goodman, 27, getting a notice to appear in court on a misuse of 911 charge, according to a recently released police report.
Goodman told investigators she tried to get a refund for the 10-piece McNuggets, but the cashier told her all sales are final.
“I called 911 because I couldn’t get a refund, and I wanted my McNuggets,” Goodman told police.
When Marc Oakland volunteered to clear dumped trash from a pond in Beaulieu, Hampshire, England, he didn't expect to find organisms from the planet Skaro amongst the rubbish:
The 42-year-old said: "I'd just shifted a tree branch with my foot when I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface. I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me.
"It must have been down there for some time because it was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage. One of the dome lights was smashed, but the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out."
It's probably a lost prop from when the BBC shot an episode of Doctor Who back in the 1980s: Link (Photo: Solent)
A baby blue whale in Costa Rica - Link
(Photo: Flip Nicklin)
Quick: what's the largest animal ever to inhabit the earth. The dinosaurs?
Nope - it's actually the blue whale. If you know this, either you've been
paying attention at elementary school or you're an avid naturalist.
The blue whale is big. Phenomenally big: it's almost the size of a space
shuttle orbiter, or if you don't know how big that is, just go to your
local basketball court. The blue whale is longer than it. They're also
mysterious: despite their size, blue whales are so rare that even experts
know little about them.
Image: National Geographic Channel's Kingdom of Blue Whale - Link
Our friends at the National Geographic Channel sent us an advanced copy
of their newest film: Kingdom
of the Blue Whale (it's good to be a blogger, but you don't have to
wait long to watch it free on the NatGeo Channel. It's going to be on
March 8th, 2009 at 8PM).
They've also included these neat fast facts about blue whales:
Blue whales can grow up to 100 feet (~30 m). Lengthwise that's the
equivalent of two city buses and longer than an NBA basketball court.
They can weigh up to 200 tons. That's about 8 DC-9 aircrafts or 15
school buses.
In fact, their tongue alone weigh as much as an elephant. About 100
people can fit in a blue whale's mouth.
A blue whale heart is the size of a Mini Cooper and can weigh close
to 2,000 pounds (~907 kg). Its heartbeat can be detected from two miles
away and a human can easily crawl through its major arteries.
Blue whales can produce sounds louder than a jet engine (188 dB vs.
jet engine's 140 dB) and can communicate with other whales up to 1,000
miles away.
A single adult eats about 4 tons of krill (tiny shrimplike animals)
a day.
The spray from a blue whale's blowhole is almost as tall as a three-story
building (30 feet or 9 m). A toddler can fit into its blowhole.
Note: I'm not being paid or compensated in any way (other than getting
the preview copy) for this post. I just thought that blue whales are pretty
darn neat! Thanks Minjae!
Surprise! Astronomers analyzing images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft have found that Saturn has yet another moon in one of its outermost rings:
A faint pinprick of light embedded in one of Saturn's outermost rings is now the 61st moon known to be circling the giant planet, astronomers announced today. [...]
Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that the as-yet-unnamed moon is a third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide. This is tiny as far as moons go, but the object is likely the largest in its neighborhood.
Do you doodle when you're bored? Turns out, those idle scribbles actually serve a beneficial purpose: doodling help you retain information in the event of boredom!
In a delightful new study, which will be published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in southern England showed that doodlers actually remember more than nondoodlers when asked to retain tediously delivered information, like, say, during a boring meeting or a lecture.
In her small but rigorous study, Andrade separated 40 participants into two groups of 20. All 40 had just finished an unrelated psychological experiment, and many were thinking of going home (or to the pub). They were asked, instead, whether they wouldn't mind spending an additional five minutes helping with research. The participants were led into a quiet room and asked to listen to a 2½-min. tape that they were told would be "rather dull." [...]
Before the tape began, half the study participants were asked to shade in some little squares and circles on a piece of paper while they listened. They were told not to worry about being neat or quick about it. (Andrade did not instruct people explicitly to "doodle," which might have prompted self-consciousness about what constituted an official doodle.) The other 20 didn't doodle. All the participants were asked to write the names of those coming to the party while the tape played, which meant the doodlers switched between their doodles and their lists.
Afterward, the papers were removed and the 40 volunteers were asked to recall, orally, the place names and the names of the people coming to the party. The doodlers creamed the nondoodlers: those who doodled during the tape recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group.
Seeing the moais at Ahu Tongariki, Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island) should be on everyone's bucket list. But if you can't make the trip to the Polynesian island - it is, after all, one of the most isolated inhabited island in the world - you can still view the awesome panorama of the statues at 360 Cities: Link - Thanks Jeffrey!
You
all know by now that Neatorama is a fun blog and a breezy read, but apparently,
there it also has a use that I haven't expected. Neatorama reader Barry
emailed me that he has been using Neatorama as a teaching tool at his
local community center.
Here's what he wrote:
Hello Alex,
I teach a class at my local community center that centers on technology
use and recommend your site to the students. Many of them are underprivileged
youth and I have found that sites like Neatorama can sometimes inspire
them into other avenues aside from what's left for them on the street.
Several students have gone on to pursue a job in IT and we even had
one older gentleman pursue his GED at 60 years old because he wanted
to become a successful blogger like those he saw on sites like yours.
In fact I have it on personal account that at least fifteen people now
know what "Large Hadron Collider" means. At any rate, thank
you and well done.
When I asked for more info, Barry replied:
I use blogs in class because they're such a novel form of communication.
One of the students drew the parallel that, after realizing he had spent
five straight hours reading, "blogs are like books used to be in
the old(en) days". What he meant was that when printed publications
first started showing up all those years ago, literacy rates soared
and that the very same effect had happened to him right in class. He
went on to say that he couldn't remember the last time he spent five
hours reading anything.
Aside from most blog reading being non intensive, I encourage
the students to check out the sources of the posts they enjoyed because
that was where they could find out more about the topics they enjoy.
I don't think that, even with the internet at their fingertips,
new users know how interconnected things are online. This can lead to
the intimidation a lot of them experience when all they have to consider
is that it all really is right there in front of them. Neatorama especially
bridges this gap with its combination of silly, serious, and intellectual
content which is what makes it so effective as a tool.
Thanks Barry! I'm honored and humbled that this li'l blog has helped
your students!
Hello
Neatoramanauts! Just a brief update on the State of the Blog:
Mystery Sale - I'm sure that everyone's been wondering
about their packages. Don't worry - they're coming.
We usually ship out orders within one business day, but Mystery Sales
are a bit unusual. We've gotten a lot of orders that it took a while for
the warehouse to gear up to ship (happened last time, too!)
The first batch of shipments is scheduled for this Friday 3/6/09 - and
we will process order and ship continuously for the next week or so. I'll
make another update about the Mystery Sale soon.
Many of you emailed me about tracking the progress of the order - you
can check the status of your order if you're registered at the Neatorama
Online Shop at the time of the purchase. For security purposes, the username
and password for the shop are separate from the blog. If you ordered and
did a quick checkout, you can't check the status online.
Rogue Ads - Some of you have seen inappropriate (though
infrequent) ads on Neatorama. Like I explained in the last
update, we've had a rash of rogue ads that should be taken cared of
by now. If you see one of these, please let me know (a screenshot would
be lovely)
Blocked email - A lot of people who didn't get the automatic
email receipt for their orders have @sbcglobal.net email address. It seems
like our emails are being blocked (not in the recipients' spam filter
and not bounced back to us either) - does anyone know how I can get our
emails unblocked by sbcglobal? We have never spammed anyone.
Reading All of Neatorama - Congratulations to James
Lim, who has just finished reading all of Neatorama. He email me that
it took him 3 months and 2 days to read all 637 pages of the blog (well,
so far anyway - it's a never ending journey because we keep on adding
posts!). James has just joined a small but growing cadre of Neatoramanauts
who have accomplished
such a feat.
Caption This - If you'd like to get yourself a free
Neatorama T-shirt, go forth to One largeprawn who's running a Caption
This contest (with a very strange photo!) If you're a blogger who's
interested in running a competition in your blog and want us to spot the
prize (a free T-Shirt from the Neatorama
Online Store), please email me!
Upcoming Queue: It's Much Better Now. Promise! Neatorama
reader CalamityKate wrote this about the much maligned UQ:
Hi Alex, I just wanted to eat a little crow here. I was one of
the haters of the UQ and was excited when the feeds became separate.
But I still had the original feed on my Bloglines, and I’ve been
converted! I think that the changes you made to “tighten up”
the process have worked really well, and I rarely see posts from people
that seem to just be pushing their own content. Forgive me? :-)
Glad that you've kissed and made up with the Queuebot, CalamityKate!
And for the rest of you feed readers, it's time to give the Neatorama
Full Front Page feed
(with Upcoming Queue posts) another try!
Upcoming Queue Top Submitter for February 2009
As promised,
the top submitter for the month of February 2009 will get a free iPod
Touch. The rest of the Top 10 will get a free Neatorama T-shirt (since
taliesyn30 and scbr are tied for the 10th spot, both will get the prize).
Congrats, guys!
As I have written before, I intend to continue to reward top submitters
to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. I wont' tell you what March will bring
for them (maybe something, maybe nothing), so it'll be fun ;)
New Funny Science T-Shirts
A
Day Without Nuclear Fusion is a Day Without Sunshine - $9.95
Great
Vocab Didn't Save the Thesaurus From Extinction - $9.95
And lastly, we've added a couple of new designs to our growing list of
Funny Science T-Shirts on the Neatorama Online store. Check it out: Science
T-Shirts | Science
Toys
This one is fantastic: cartoonist extraordinaire Nina Paley has just released her animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, with 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw.
The story revolves around Sita, a goddess separated from her Lord and husband Rama and the present-day break up of animator Nina whose husband left for India and dumped her by email.
Nina Paley wants to release the animation 100% DRM-free, but in order to do so, she has to raise $50,000 to pay the holders of some of the musical compositions used in the film (you can help here at QuestionCopyright).
Quick: what are some of the world's most covered songs? Our very own Stacy Conradt (who btw just got an awesome Haunted Mansion-inspired tattoo) did a nice job in covering the 10 most covered songs in history.
This one is my favorite:
10. The Look of Love, Dusty Springfield. Written by Burt Bacharach and originally sung by Dusty for the first Casino Royale soundtrack in 1967, it’s been covered a lot. Just a few include The Zombies, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Shirley Bassey and Diana Krall.
Do you ever wonder what R2-D2 was saying in the Star Wars movies? YouTube user Mortal Wombat (of meanestbear blog) went to the trouble of translating "Artoo's" machine chirping into English for all of our enjoyment:
Link (Embedded YouTube clip, warning: foul yet funny language) | If you like that, here's the second part: Link (ditto)
I'll never understand the South. Take, for instance, its idea of fishing. You don't need a rod and reel - just dive into the murky water (!) and grab yourself a catfish with your two hands.
Here's a tribute video of attractive Girls Gone Grabblin' - catfish grabblin (or noodling, if you want to call it that): Link
Rob Lammie of our pal mental_floss blog wrote a very nifty post about the origins of 8 tech names. For instance, ever wonder why it's called a Tivo?
Can you imagine if, instead of “TiVo-ing” the latest episode of Lost, you were “Bongo-ing” it? “Bongo” and “Lasso” are just two of the 800 possible names the marketing folks kicked around before settling on TiVo. The final name was cobbled together from “TV” and the engineering acronym “I/O,” which stands for “input/output.” Little did they know their noun would become a verb and their oddly-named invention would forever change the way people watch television.
