In this comic titled "Other Vaders," artist Adam McCauley imagined a world where the Sith Lord had gone out to do other things like being country music star or a real estate mogul instead of a Star Wars villain.
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Here's a "man fights City Hall" story, with a twist: when Old Town Alexandria's architectural review committee forbid Michael Zarlenga from altering historic property and renovating his store, he decided to exact a little revenge:
To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short of scandalous, a historical desecration just blocks from the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee.
But to Michael Zarlenga, it's justice.
Zarlenga spent $350,000 on plans to expand his hunting and fishing store, the Trophy Room. He worked with city officials for almost two years and thought he had their support -- until the architectural review board told him he couldn't alter the historic property.
Furious and out of money, Zarlenga rented the space to its newest occupant, Le Tache.
"I can't say I didn't know it would ruffle feathers," said Zarlenga, 41. "Actually, I was hoping for a fast-food chain because I thought that would be more annoying to the city."
Allison Klein of the Washington Post has more on the story: Link (Photo: Tracy A. Woodward)
Previously on Neatorama: Man Fights City Hall ... With Signage
If you think that talking on the cell phone and driving is dangerous, wait till you hear what else this woman did: she breastfed her baby while driving her other children to school!
Police say it is against the law to drive with a child in your lap. Children under 4 or 40 pounds must be properly restrained in a child safety seat.
In this case, officers said Compton had the child in the lap with the baby's head up against the steering wheel. They say there is not only the risk of a crash, but deployment of the airbag.
Compton said she will take the advice of the officers into consideration, but she may breast feed her baby while driving in the future if she feels that is is necessary.
If you think about it, she's got some skillz breast feeding, talking on the phone, and driving all at the same time!
WHIO Dayton TV has the story (and video clip): Link
AskMen has a pretty nifty article about the 5 Things You Didn't Know About Sideburns. For instance, how the facial hair style got its name:
1- Sideburns are named after a Civil War general
Ambrose Everett Burnside lived from May 23, 1824 to September 13, 1881. A Union Army general in the Civil War and later a Rhode Island politician, Burnside was well known and well liked. He wasn’t known as a good general, often getting his forces in trouble, but people forgave him because of his freaky facial hair. Two burly muttonchops grew dangerously long and connected to a handlebar mustache. Originally they became known as burnsides, but over time the syllables were switched around.
On a summer day in 1994, a Kurdish shepherd stumbled upon a strange stone in the rolling plains of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Little did he know then that he had just made what could be the greatest archaeological discovery ever: the possible site of the Garden of Eden.
Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old. That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.
Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past. [...]
Over glasses of black tea, served in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me that, in his opinion, this very spot was once the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. More specifically, as he put it: 'Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden.'
Tom Cox of the Mail Online has more on this fascinating story: Link
If you're interested in joining an online community yet don't know which one is right for you, Brainz has done the legwork. Here is a completely unscientific (yet surprisingly accurate) look at social networking and media sites, including digg, reddit, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter: Link - via The Presurfer
Cancer may still be a mystery, but after years of research, science has finally solved the mystery of the belly button fluff:
After three years of research, Georg Steinhauser, a chemist, has discovered a type of body hair that traps stray pieces of lint and draws them into the navel.
Dr Steinhauser made his discovery after studying 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button.
Chemical analysis revealed the pieces of fluff were not made up of only cotton from clothing. Wrapped up in the lint were also flecks of dead skin, fat, sweat and dust.
Dr Steinhauser's observations showed that 'small pieces of fluff first form in the hair and then end up in the navel at the end of the day'. [...]
"The hair's scales act like a kind of barbed hooks," he said. "Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel."
And the secret to a navel fluff-less belly button?
Dr Steinhauser established that shaving one's belly will result in a fluff-free navel - but only until the hairs grow back.
Photo: Graham Barker's Navel Fluff Collection, see also: 25 Strangest Collections on the Web
If the economic crisis is getting you down, take heart: even the Oracle of Omaha and arguably one of the smartest businessman alive today is also having a tough year:
Berkshire Hathaway reported today that its net worth fell in 2008 by $11.5 billion, a decline reducing its per-share book value by 9.6%. That was Berkshire's worst result in the 44 years that Chairman Warren Buffett has run the company and, in fact, only the second decline in that period. The other drop was 6.2% in 2001, a year hurt by 9/11 and other problems in Berkshire's insurance operations. [...]
In his chairman's letter, Buffett states that 2008 had good points mixed in with the bad. But in an unusual admission for the opening pages of the letter (a point easily recognizable by this writer because she has edited Buffett's letter for 32 years) he says bluntly, "During 2008 I did some dumb things in investments."
The dumbest, he said, was buying a large amount of Conoco Phillips stock when oil prices were near their peak and in no way anticipating the dramatic drop in prices that subsequently occurred. Buffett said he still thinks the odds are good that oil will sell in the future at much higher prices than the $40 to $50 per barrel now prevailing. But even if prices should rise, he said, "the terrible timing" of the Conoco purchase has cost Berkshire several billion dollars.
Unlike you or me, however, Warren Buffett can drown his sorrow by counting his remaining bazillion dollars. Carol Loomis of Fortune has more: Link
When the times get tough, the tough goes ... naked? Here's a story of one Donald Crabtree of Vassalboro, Maine, who combined coffee and nudity for his recipe for success:
On Monday, Donald Crabtree opened Grand View Topless Coffee Shop in Vassalboro, Maine, where the waiters and waitresses serve their customers topless.
In a town with fewer than 4,500 residents, the topless coffee shop is booming with business. Paul Crabtree, the owner's brother, describes business so far as "fantastic."
"It's just been crowds mobbing in," he said.
Laurie Segall of CNN has the story: Link (Photo: WGME)
Support Bacteria! It's The Only Culture Some People Have T-Shirt - $9.95
Slave to Science T-Shirt - $9.95 (should've made this while I was a grad student!)
It's been a while since we put up the best-selling I Survived The Large Hadron Collider T-shirt on Neatorama Online Store, but the wait is worth it.
Check out the new fun Science and Tech T-Shirt designs, including some timeless classics: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?science-t-shirt-pg1-cid49.html
Polymer Chemists Do It In Chains T-Shirt - $9.95
And if you like the science shirts above, don't miss this new category of Scientists Do It ... T-Shirts on Neatorama's Online Store: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?scientists-do-it-tshirt-pg1-cid79.html
Here's something for you to ponder the next time you're in the bathroom: American's love for soft toilet paper is ecologically hard on forests!
... fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.” [...]
Though most of the pulp comes from tree farms, but not all:
Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.
Remember the adage "no good deed goes unpunished?" Well, Jim Moffett was helping two elderly women and a man cross a busy Denver street in a snowstorm when a pickup went straight at them - Jim pushed the three out of the way, but got struck himself.
His reward for being a Good Samaritan? A jaywalking ticket:
Family members said 58-year-old bus driver Jim Moffett and another man were helping two elderly women cross a busy Denver street in a snowstorm when he was hit Friday night.
Moffett suffered bleeding in the brain, broken bones, a dislocated shoulder and a possible ruptured spleen. He was in serious but stable condition Wednesday.
The Colorado State Patrol issued the citation. Trooper Ryan Sullivan said that despite Moffett's intentions, jaywalking contributed to the accident.
Previously on Neatorama: Suing a Good Samaritan
Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, and colleagues have identified some of the oldest words in the English language using computer analyses:
Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. [...]
At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.
"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel. [...]
For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.
William the Conqueror (Getty)
Time-travellers would find a few sounds familiar in William's wordsThe word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.
Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.
For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".
Verbs also tend to change quite quickly, so "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab" appear to be heading for the lexicographer's chopping block.
Is life on Earth special? Not according to Carnegie Institution's astronomer Alan Boss. The author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets predicted that there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way:
[Boss] made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
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