Tuttuki Bako (or Tuttuki Box) is a toy unlike any other.
Made by Bandai Japan (who else but the Japanese would make such a wonderfully silly thing?), the box is a clock ... until you insert your index finger into the hole on its side. Then, it's game on: you'll see a digital replica of your finger and you can explore a virtual world like tickling a Panda, or playing with a squishy slime ball.
Link - via sleepinginmyhead | Here's the video clip of the Tuttuki Bako in action
Sanjay Kulkarni of Cowbirds in Love comic nailed it: "Mad scientists" are actually just mad engineers! Check out Sanjay's website for more webcomic goodness: Link
To help his sister who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, Boris Legradic of Letters from Lausanne blog made her a DIY lightbox:
My sister suffers from seasonal affective disorder, also known as winter depression. A commonly prescribed therapy is light therapy - about thirty minutes of bright light in the morning. Bright in this context means more than 10 000 Lumens. You can of course buy commercial light-boxes, but I wanted to construct one by myself...
Photo: DogFromSPACE [Flickr]
For Halloween, Sterling Ely built himself and friends a set of Ghostbuster proton packs out of foam. Silly strings substitute for real proton discharge, and I'm sure that Sterling remembered not to cross the stream to avoid total protonic reversal.
Link: Ghostbuster Proton Packs [Flickr photoset] | The proton packs in action
Remember the epic Star Wars and Star Trek mash up on Neatorama a while ago? Well, Squeezing My Mind Grapes blog has something that may just be even better: forget Star Wars, the Enterprise has just met ... Doctor Who!
From Kelvington (who has a whole bunch of other mash up parodies), behold the Doctor Who Meets Star Trek for Christmas: Link [embedded YouTube]
Granuloid and Black Granuloid by Pamela Sunday
These are but two of some really interesting ceramic sculptures, in shapes inspired by nature, made by former fashion stylist and art director Pamela Sunday.
I think granuloid and black granuloid shown above are inspired by the shapes in nature specifically called ... cheerios.
http://www.pamelasunday.com/sculptures.htm - via Peek
Here's to a more prosperous 2009! We have a big and fun surprise for Neatorama coming very soon (you'll see) but for now, I wish everyone a safe and happy New Year!
Got a New Year's Resolution? What's yours? I'll go first in the comment.
Thailand, nicknamed "The Land of Smiles" by countless tourist books, are living up to its name: the highway policemen in Thailand will be wearing smiley masks to "lift the mood of motorists":
The new cloth masks, which hook behind the ears and cover the mouth and nose, will help "reduce the stress from drivers when they see the police," said Somyos, the Highway Police commander.
To that end, he said, some 200 police booths would also distribute holy water, chewing gum and mints.
He defended his force when asked why drivers needed smiley masks and gum and holy water to calm down when approached by a patrolman.
"The police are not that scary," he said. "When I was in the United States, their highway police seemed to be more fierce than Thai police. I was scared of them."
Photo: Sarot Meksophawannakul/Bangkok Post
Despite costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, Hollywood movies are filled with "mistakes" (Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero even parodied these mistakes by purposely incorporating them in the film).
But one man's mistake is another man's bread. To wit, here's MovieMistakes, a website dedicated to documenting the glaring, silly, and obscure mistakes that occur in some of Hollywood's greatest hits. Here are their list of 2008 Movies with the Most Mistakes:
... and the list for the Best Movie Mistakes of 2008:
Image: J Fowler and N Christakis/New England Journal of Medicine/BMJ
Research by medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis and colleague at the Harvard Medical School in Boston revealed how oher people's happiness, depression, and obesity can affect you:
Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.
At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.
Previously on Neatorama: 14 Habits That Make You Fat (which also noted the study above)
Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Scientist at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, are getting ready to do something spectacular: ignite a tiny man-made star inside a lab and trigger a thermonuclear reaction!
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.
The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.
"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."
Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.
Igniting a tiny man-made star, what could go wrong? Seriously though, this is pretty nifty: Link | National Ignition Facility website | video clip at Wired Science
Is it time for an I Survived the Tiny Man-Made Star T-shirt yet? (Much in the line of our I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt)
After hitting pay dirt with his Military Truisms forum post, Neatorama reader SparkS did it again with this gem: Aviation Humor.
This one made me ROFL:
The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are renowned as a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one's gate parking location, but how to get there without any assistance from them. So it was with some amusement that we (a Pan Am 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground
control and a British Airways 747, call sign Speedbird 206":Speedbird 206: "Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of active runway."
Ground: "Speedbird 206. Taxi to gate Alpha One-Seven."
The BA 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and slowed to a stop.
Ground: "Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?"
Speedbird 206: "Stand by, Ground, I'm looking up our gate location now."
Ground (with quite arrogant impatience): "Speedbird 206, have you not been to Frankfurt before?"
Speedbird 206 (coolly): "Yes, twice in 1944 -- but I didn't land."
http://www.neatorama.com/forum/topic/aviation-humor
We've featured incredibly cute Wall-E LEGO creations on Neatorama before (twice, actually), but this one takes the cake: an incredibly detailed Wall-E wooden sculpture by Morpheus Prototypes Morpheus Creative Form Development, commissioned by Disney as a gift for Pixar/Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter
Andreas Aronsson is a professional IT technician by day and an awesome optical illusion artist at night: he made a series of cleverly drawn "impossible figures" that at a glance look perfectly fine, but upon closer inspection will give your mind some sort of a Twilight Zone moment.
These are awesome, trust me: Link
We posted about Jen Stark's amazing construction paper art a while ago on Neatorama, but we've just run across her interview by ArtStreet on WLRN South Florida.
It's definitely worth another look: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Jen Stark's website
