The folks over at 2pie blog have a pretty neat idea: make a snow print by pushing their faces into fresh powder on cars. The images are all concave, but make for an optical illusion of 3D sculptures!
I saw this circulating on the Net a few days ago, but didn't get the chance to post it till now. Better late than never! Link
New Scientist has a neat article about Elektro, the world's first celebrity robot, and Jack Weeks, who is trying to rebuild the golden robot he found in the basement of his childhood home:
Elektro was built in 1937 at Westinghouse's plant in Mansfield, Ohio, as a promotional aid to advertise its household products. By pouring all its electrical know-how into the robot, the company created a machine that could walk, talk, smoke and perform counting tricks. Elektro rapidly became a star, and received a rapturous welcome at the New York World's Fair in 1939.
The incredible ingenuity of Elektro's design was topped off by his sleek exterior. There was no remote control. Instead, the robot relied on a combination of motors, photoelectric cells, telephone relays and record players to perform 26 preprogrammed routines, each one initiated by voice commands from a human co-star. These were spoken into a telephone connected to the robot's chest, where circuitry converted each syllable into a pulse of light and transmitted it to a photoelectric cell. A second circuit added up the syllables and triggered relays to operate the corresponding electromechanical functions: a command with three syllables, for example, would start the robot's routine, and four syllables would stop it. As part of these routines, Elektro would raise and lower his arms, turn his head, move his mouth, count on his fingers and even smoke a cigarette and puff out smoke.
The robot could also respond to questions by using relays to switch between a bank of phonographs playing 78 rpm voice recordings that were hidden behind a curtain. This gave Elektro a vocabulary of 700 words and an extensive repertoire of banter: "I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays," he would tell the crowd. "It works just like a telephone switchboard. If I get a wrong number I can always blame the operator. And by the way, I see a lot of good numbers out in our audience today."
Link - via Gizmodo (who has a video clip of Elektro at the 1939 New York World's Fair)
Photo: Colorado Uerling
Dark Roasted Blend has a neat post about all sorts of weird cloud formations. This one above is a Punch Hole Cloud:
Punch Hole Clouds may appear as a circular or oval holes in a layer of supercooled clouds; sometimes they assume a form of a perfect circle and persist for quite a long time, drifting together with the cloud layer. One explanation seems to blame the air traffic (the jet contrail intersections) combined with a thermal inversion (a circular motion of a rising warm air).
Glassdoor.com, a website that lets employees anonymously rate and review their employers, has released its list of the nicest and naughtiest CEOs of 2008. The nicest CEO is Genentech's Art Levinson with a 92% approval rating and the least popular CEO is Steve Odland of Office Depot, with a disapproval rating of 80% (why that's even worse than President Bush's!)
What's up with Office Depot? One department manager in Dallas Texas wrote:
“Fire Odland and kill ridiculous programs like ones listed above. Please, Please, Please give this company back to its workers. The corporate office in Delray Beach, FL is asleep at the wheel and frankly incompetent. Maybe If some of them would listen to or maybe even spend a few hours in a store they would understand their own business a little better. This company will fail If you do not get back to basics! Cheap no hassle prices and fast checkout! NO MORE PROGRAMS PLEASE!”
In the city where I live there are Staples, Office Max and Office Depot within 10 minutes drive of each other. Guess which one they recently closed down!
The genius comedy team JibJab is at it again: here's their 2008 Year in Review video, complete with jokes about the economic crisis, the US presidential election, and more. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Why do more men than women like to play (violent) video games? Professor Allan Reiss of Stanford University found out that it's all about their urge to conquer and vanquish:
In the study, published recently in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, scientists wired up a series of men and women to an MRI scanner while they played a video game, which involved competing to win on-screen territory by clicking on a series of balls.
After analysing the MRI data, the researchers found participants showed activation in the brain's mesocorticolimbic centre, the region typically associated with reward and addiction.
Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount increased as they gained more territory. This was not the case with women.
If you have this Snowman Snow Globe from Hallmark Cards, beware! The jumbo-sized snow globe can act as a magnifying glass when exposed to sunlight and ignite nearby materials!
http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PREREL/prhtml09/09073.html
(Photo: US Consumer Product Safety Commission)
Meet Fred and Ginger (yes, after Astaire and Rogers), two seals at the North Carolina Zoological Park that love to dance! Apparently, they also dance because they love fish:
The secret of the perfect dancing partnership, in this case at least, seems to be a healthy diet based largely on seafood.
'They eat fish and lots of it,' added Miss Abbott.
'They get some in the morning and then in the afternoon they go through a training exercise where they are rewarded with more fish.'
Link (Photo: Valerie Abbott)
It's been a while since I posted a Bizarro cartoon (sorry Dan!) - but I ran across this gem on Christmas and couldn't resist despite the um, slightly political undertones.
For more Bizarro, be sure to check out Dan Piraro's website and blog!
We don't post a lot of politics on Neatorama, and even less of Sarah Palin (we only have 5 posts about her). But in for a penny, in for a pound in this case, I suppose. A while ago, I ran into this interesting photo of Alaska Governor Palin sitting on her ice throne at the 2007 World Ice Art Champsionships. It was -30° below, and she managed to look pretty comfy there! (Source)
For the record, I find Palin fascinating - and whether you agree with her politics or not, you can't argue that she has captured the Republican
spotlight of the 2008 US Presidential Election and the hearts of many Americans.
A surveillance video at Smith's Food & Drug grocery store in Idaho has captured a ... shoplifting dog!
Surveillance video at Smith's Food & Drug shows the dog walking in the front door and giving a friendly sniff to a young girl at a checkout stand.
Then the dog headed straight for the pet food in Aisle 16, grabbed the $2.79 bone and made a break for the door, only to be confronted by store manager Roger Adamson.
Adamson says that when the dog didn't obey his command to surrender the bone, he decided not to force the issue. Adamson tells KSL-TV, "I decided I wanted to keep all my fingers." (Source)
Nothing to do with Arbroath blog has the video clip: Link
David Dunnico has an interesting Flickr photoset where he photographs the ubiquitous CCTVs (and their signs) in Manchester, England as an ongoing art project: Link - via Accordion Guy
Christmas has come and gone and if you're going through Santa Claus withdrawal syndrome, here's a post for you: the world's largest Santa Claus snow sculpture in Harbin, China.
China's freezing northern city of Harbin is building what organizers say is the world's largest Santa Claus ice sculpture.
The giant Father Christmas, 160 meters (525 ft) long and 24 meters (79 ft) high, centers on an enormous face of Father Christmas, complete with flowing beard and hat.
Its huge size and unseasonably warm temperatures have made the job especially challenging, said Tang Guangjun, one of the sculptors.
"It is even bigger and higher than last year's, and more difficult. The weather swings between warm and cold, so it becomes very wet and slippery on the ice. It is very dangerous for us," he told Reuters Television.
Link (Photo: Sheng Li/Reuters) - via Weird Asia News (who has the video clip)
If you happen to run across a rubber duckie floating in the ocean, it may be worth $100! NASA has lost 90 of its yellow rubber ducks and it wants them back, badly:
The US space agency has yet to find any trace of 90 bathtub toys that were dropped through holes in Greenland's ice three months ago in an effort to track the way the Arctic icecap is melting. Scientists threw the ducks into tubular holes known as "moulins" in the Jakobshavn glacier on Greenland's west coast, hoping they would find their way into channels beneath the hard-packed surface, to track the flow of melt water into the ocean.
Link - via Treehugger
People Who Deserve It is a theme blog dedicated to documenting the types of people who deserves a good punch in the face (I think they mean metaphorically or at least I hope they do!). To wit, this annoying character type, The Self-Important Bluetooth Guy:
Hey there buddy, I see you got one of those fancy cyborg ear attachments for your cell phone, you must be pretty important?
No?
Oh, of course you’re not, you’re not even on the phone right now, instead your just walking around with a blinking light in your ear like a metro-sexual robot.
Honestly, unless you’re police dispatch, or air traffic control, there is no way you’re getting enough calls to justify sporting that glorified techno-earring 24/7. So do us all a favor take that “thing” out of your ear and rejoin regular society.
Otherwise, it’s open season, and our fist-to-face connection is one call that always goes through. Can you hear us now?
