VideoSift, one of our favorite-est websites on the Net, dug up this gem of a video clip: a young Yehudi Menuhin playing Habanera by Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate on the violin, with Adolph Baller at the piano.
Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Operas You Didn't Know You Already Like (yes, there's a Habanera there, but it's an aria by Georges Bizet)
How much CO2 does a google search produce if a google search produces CO2? Well, Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross did the math:
... a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Robert Lount of Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business found out why first impressions are so important: people are more forgiving of a
breach of trust later in the relationship as opposed as early on.
Here's the experiment:
Lount and his colleagues had college students play a computer game in which their partners (actually a computer, unbeknownst to the participants) betrayed their trust either right off the bat or somewhere in the middle of the game.
A betrayal of trust occurred when a player defected rather than cooperated in a round of the game. A cooperative play resulted in more money rewarded to both players, while a defector would get a lot more money than the partner.
After the computer partner made two defector moves, it would follow with 30 rounds of pure cooperation. Turned out that cooperation wasn't enough to gain back a participant's trust. Those who experienced a breach of trust at the game's start were the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game, cooperating less than 70 percent of the final 10 rounds.
Meanwhile, participants who experienced a betrayal later in the game, after 10 rounds of cooperation, showed the most cooperation at the end of the game, choosing to cooperate more than 90 percent of the time.
And in fact, those who were betrayed in rounds 11 and 12 were, on average, nearly 40 percent more cooperative in the last 10 rounds compared with participants who experienced an immediate betrayal.
When asked to evaluate their partners, participants gave more negative assessments of those early betrayers compared with the late ones.
"When the partner started off by defecting, and they were taken advantage of, they really formed these negative impressions — 'That person is immoral,' 'They're a jerk,' 'That's not the type of person I would like,'" Lount said.
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the story: Link | Photo from Fisher College of Business
From the awesomeness that is Japanese television, here is Freddie Mercury singing I Was Born to Love You (complete with chest hair!) It's part of Monomane Battle, a show where Japanese celebrities impersonate other celebrities ...
Watch and cry: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Weird Asia News (who has more)
Julian Partridge of Bristol University found something peculiar about the brownsnout spookfish: they have mirrors for eyes!
Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.
"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.
You've got to admire Graham Parker's persistence: after 26 year's worth of attempts, he has finally solved his Rubik's cube:
Delighted Graham, 45, from Portchester, Hants, has been tirelessly trying to solve the riddle of the Cube since he bought the toy in 1983.
Married dad-of-one Graham has endured endless sleepless nights and after more than 27,400 hours he finally managed to conquer his personal Everest.
Builder Graham said: "I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it. It has driven me mad over the years - it felt like it had taken over my life. I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lay awake at night thinking about it. Friends have offered to solve it for me and I know that you can find solutions on the web but I just had to do it myself. I have had wrist and back problems from spending hours on it but it was all worth it. When I clicked that last bit into place and each face was a solid colour I wept."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4217732/Rubiks-Cube-finally-solved-after-26-years-by-avid-fan.html
Someone dubbed the "Byker Romeo" turned a 15-foot letter on top of a carpet factory into a romantic message for a sweetheart:
Staff at Storey’s Carpets in Cut Bank, Byker, Newcastle, were surprised to find that the giant white ‘CARPETS’ lettering which has been on top of their red roof for years had been replaced with ‘I LOVE U’.
The 15ft letters have been manipulated to send out a city-wide message to a sweetheart. The enormous love message is visible for miles and is causing a stir with motorists passing over Byker Bridge and has even been spotted by low flying aircraft.
Now Storey’s staff are desperate for the person to come forward, and the old romantics have promised not to take police action. Natalie Raine, marketing manager for Storey’s Carpets in the North East, said: “We’re all really curious as to who the Byker Romeo is. They must have spent hours painting out the existing sign. Some of our staff who drive into work across Byker Bridge couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it. We all think it’s wonderful and there’s no way we want to take any action against the person who did it.
O.M.G. A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problem pulled his eyeball and then ate it!
Before his trial (of which he was convicted and sentenced to death), he had pulled out an eyeball (but didn't eat it). The judge had declared him mentally fit for trial:
A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.
"Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it," agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.
Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.
"He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1," Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas' trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. "He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."
Here's where men end up when they mess up and get their wives or girlfriends angry: the dog house. Yes, it's an advertisement, but it's funny because it's true (what man hasn't been in the dog house?)
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via SixPackTech
Betcha didn't know that "ha-ha" is an actual word meaning a trench, basically a sunken fence to keep livestocks from coming into your backyard while preserving the uncluttered look of the landscape:
... the name is derived from the response of ordinary folk on encountering them and that they were, "...then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk."
More on Ha-ha at Wikipedia - via Fancy Notion's Word of the Day
Soon to be an ex-racist
Are you a racist? While most people don't view themselves as prejudiced, a surprising new study revealed that many unknowingly have racist views:
The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters." The "experiencers" were placed in a room with a white person and a black person, who played out pre-arranged scenarios for the experiment. The scenarios began when the black role-player bumped the white role-player's knee when leaving the room.
In the first scenario, the white person did not comment afterwards. In the "moderate" case, the white person said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," after the black person left the room. In the "extreme" case, the white person remarked, "Clumsy n****r."
The "forecasters," meanwhile, predicted how they would feel in these situations.
The magnitude of the results surprised even the authors, Kawakami said. Experiencers reported little distress in all three scenarios, much less than the forecasters did in the moderate and severe situations.
"Even using that most extreme comment didn't lead people to be particularly upset," said co-author Elizabeth Dunn, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Previously on Neatorama: How Racist Are You? Take the test!
How do mosquitoes find love? Turns out, they serenade their mates! Scientists at Cornell University found out by supergluing mosquitoes on to a tiny tether and then suspending them in the air:
The male mosquito's buzz, or flight tone, is normally about 600 cycles per second, or 600-Hz. The female's tone is about 400-Hz. In music, he's roughly a D, and she's about a G. So the male brings his tone into phase with the female's to create a near-perfect duet. Together, the two tones create what musicians call an overtone — a third, fainter tone at 1200-Hz. Only then will the mosquitoes mate.
Christopher Joyce of NPR has the story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99133147 (with video clip)
Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating HabitsAh, art. Behold the Eco Brolly by Shiu Yuk Yuen. It's an "environmentally friendly" umbrella that turns whatever happens to be convenient at the time of rain (like a newspaper or plastic bag) into an umbrella:
it can re-use whatever the consumer thinks of reusing. It is a supporting devise when it rains, all the user has to do is unscrew the top lid, poke the lid onto the middle of a reuseable object, quick screw to secure it & open it out like an umbrella!
This is for short distances, but it can last longer, by clipping the clips at each end of the umbrella onto the newspaper to stabalise it. It is pocket size, lightweight aluminium, suitable for Britan, where its hard to predict the weather, espeically for Central Londoners, where free newspaper is avaliable.
This, of course, begs, the question: if you want to carry something, why not carry a regular umbrella in the first place?
Students in California are probably cheering Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to save $1 billion to help the state's big budget deficit by shortening
the school year by five days.
In other news, it costs $200 million a day (!) to run California's schools!
Let's give them 10 days off and save $2 billion!
Seema Mehta of the LA Times has the story: Link
