The Greatest Slam Dunk Ever
When Julian Wright of the Kansas University basketball team took
possession of the ball, he charged toward the basket and performed
what is probably the world's greatest slam dunk ever.
To show that it was nuthin' he went on to play for the NBA's New
Orleans Hornets. Link
Now THIS is a Low Flying Airplane!
If you think you've got it bad living under a flight path, take
a look at this!
The Umbilical Brothers
I can't believe I've never heard of the Umbilical Brothers until
I saw this video (Well, actually, I've seen them before on Noggin,
but that's because I have two small kids - but that's not their
original shtick). Their performance is EXCELLENT!
If you've never seen them in action, do yourself a favor and check
this vide out: Link
Not a Single Person Alive Knows How to Make a Pencil
Economist Milton Friedman explains how the capitalism works: not
a single person alive knows how to make a pencil.
"Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this
pencil. People who don't speak the same language, who practice
different religions, who might hate one another if they've ever
met. When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are
in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds
of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them
together and induce them to cooperate to make this pencil?"
So, unless you've been living under a rock you'll know that the Bush administration is asking for $700 billion to bailout Wall Street.
The need is urgent as "the entire economy is in danger", said President Bush in his address to the nation today. Congress, on the other hand, is in no mood to be hurried along (Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana - a Republican, actually - has the best quote so far on this. He said:
"I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot ... The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal." (Source)
I'd like to ask you, dear Neatorama readers, a simple question: Should we bailout Wall Street? Why or why not?
[poll=8]
Photo: A demonstrator holds up a "Fail" sign behind US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during a Senate hearing. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty, via The Denver Post)
Technorati, the mother of all blog search engines, has just released its annual State of the Blogosphere report. The 2008 report spans 5 different posts in 5 days and includes juicy bits like how much money bloggers are making:
Blogs are Profitable
The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs on par with large publishers.
Not everybody, however, agree on the numbers. American Public Media's Marketplace radio interviewed Om Malik of GigaOM blog who said that it was not easy getting $75,000 in revenue - Thanks Rodney McDonald!
I don't know whether this is sweet irony or simply a crime. Perhaps it's both.
Here's what happened: when a bunch of street artists displayed their artwork in Sao Paulo's Choque Cultural Gallery, a bunch of Pixadores (that's Brazilian for young taggers, I think) stormed the gallery and vandalized the place in protest against the "marketing, institutionalization and domestication of Street Art."
Product names don't necessarily reflect the truth of the products. Ever heard of Corinthian Leather? Think New Jersey, not Corinth, Greece. How about Häagen Dazs? Nothing Scandinavian about it. Read on to find out how a product's name can deceive you ...
Sounds Like: Fancy leather from some exotic place in Europe - specifically, the Greek city of Corinth. The phrase "rich Corinthian leather" was made famous by actor Ricardo Montalban, in ads for Chrysler's luxury Cardoba in the 1970s. (The seats were covered with it.)
The Truth: There's no such thing as Corinthian leather. The term was made up by Chrysler's ad agency. The leather reportedly came from New Jersey.
HÄAGEN DAZS
Sounds Like: An imported Scandinavian product.
The Truth: It was created by Ruben Mattus, a Polish immigrant who sold ice cream in New York City, who used what the New York Times called the "Vichyssoise Strategy":
Vichyssoise is a native New Yorker. Created at the Ritz Carlton in 1917, it masqueraded as a French soup and enjoyed enormous success. When Mattus created his ice cream, he used the same tactic ... He was not the first to think Americans would be willing to pay more for a better product. But he was the first to understand that they would be more likely to do so if they thought it was foreign. So he made up a ridiculous, impossible to pronounce name, [and] printed a map of Scandinavia on the carton.
The ice cream was actually made in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Sounds Like: There's pudding in the pops. The Truth: There isn't. Family secret: One of Uncle John's relatives was involved with test-marketing the product several decades ago. When John asked him about it, he laughed, "Our research shows people think that if it says 'pudding' on the label, it's better quality or better for you. They're wrong. It's really the same." Anyway, we suppose that's why they still sell it with "pudding" on the label.
PACIFIC RIDGE PALE ALE
Sounds Like: A small independent brewer in Northern California. The flyer says:
Brewmasters Gery Eckman [and] Mitch Steele ... always wanted to brew a special ale in Northern California just for California beer drinkers ... so they created Pacific Ridge Pale Ale. It's produced in limited quantities, using fresh Cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest, two-row and caramel malts and a special ale yeast for a rich copper color ... Handcrafted only at the Fairfield brewhouse.
The Truth: In tiny letters on the bottle, it says: "Specialty Brewing group of Anheuser-Busch, Inc., Fairfield, California."
Sounds Like: The drink was sweetened with nothing but Sweet'N Low. The Truth: As Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo write in The Misfortune 500, "MBC Beverage, Inc.", which licensed the Sweet'N Low name ... discovered that consumers wanted the natural sweetener NutraSweet rather than the artificial saccharine of Sweet'N Low. So they sweetened Sweet'N Low soda with NutraSweet, a Sweet'N Low competitor."
DAVE'S CIGARETTES
Sounds Like: "A folksy brand of cigarette, produced by a down-to-earth, tractor-driving guy named Dave for ordinary people who work hard and make an honest living." According to humorist Dave Barry, here's the story sent to the media when the cigarettes were introduced in 1996:
Down in Concord, N.C., there's a guy named Dave. He lives in the heart of tobacco farmland. Dave enjoys lots of land, plenty of freedom and his yellow '57 pickup truck. Dave was fed up with cheap, fast-burning smokes. Instead of just getting made, he did something about it ... Dave's Tobacco Company was born.
The Truth: Dave's was a creation of America's biggest cigarette corporation, Philip Morris, whose ad agency unapologetically called the story a "piece of fictional imagery." (Photo: SourceWatch)
The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The Bathroom Reader Institute handpicked the most eye-opening, rib-tickling, and mind-boggling articles from everything they have written over the last ten years and carefully crammed them into 576 pages of the book. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute.
Dustin Black, author of The Book of Spam (featured previously on Neatorama here and here) and Toastvertising, sent us this photo and link to his newest website. And just in time for our weekly caption contest, too! (Thanks Dustin!)
So, for today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey contest, I give you ... Kitty Toupee! Funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cat comic by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are darned simple: place your caption in the comment section of this post. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many funny ones as you can think of.
For inspiration, check out Adam's blog. Good luck!
Update 9/24/08 - Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to erikerik who won with this caption "Remember, you can't spell 'meow' without 'emo'."
This week's collaboration with What is it? blog brings us this strange object. Can you guess what it is for?
Place your guess in the comment section. No prize this week, so you're playing for fame and glory only. For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!
Update 9/26/08 - the answer is: "A toaster for use at a fireplace." Too easy, huh? Guessed right by ellrabin right out of the gate!
All right, it's time to let out some political steam here on Neatorama. I know that we haven't posted a lot of political stuff (it's not what the blog is all about, anyhow) but based on the comments these past few days it's clear that there's a lot of interest in the upcoming US Presidential Election.
Now, for those who don't find politics neat, just skip this post - there are some 16,000 neat posts waiting for you on Neatorama (have you tried the random button feature?)
For the rest of you, this is the one post that you can really have at it: who's your man in the race? Who will be the next President of the United States of America ... and why?
LHC Explained with ... Mince Pies! If you don't understand anything about the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps it just hasn't been explained clearly to you.
Here's the LHC demonstrated by Professor Heinz Wolff of Brunel University with the Small Pie Collider: Link
Seventeen Years in Two Minutes Dan Hanna took photos of himself every day for 17 years using a home-made camera positioning ring. The result is an amazing stop-motion film that is unlike any other I've seen! Link
Mouth to Cat Resuscitation Bedford fireman Al Machado went beyond the call of duty to save a cat he saved from a burning building: he gave it a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation!
Spanish artist Jose Manuel Ballester took famous paintings and cleared them of all humans and people! The result is a collection of fascinating yet disturbing empty landscapes and spaces.
Today's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game brings you this strange photo via Scribal Terror. Funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cat comic by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please, but you can enter as many as you can think of.
For inspiration, check out Adam's blog. Good luck!
Update 9/18/08 - Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to gail, who won with this gem: "He ain't heavy, he's my burro."
Hooray! Neatorama is having a Lucky Bag/Mystery Sale - For $9.95, you'll get ... well, it's a secret ... a mystery ... I can't tell you - that's the whole point of the sale!
What I can tell you is this: you'll get something worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product (it could be a t-shirt, or a book, or something else entirely). It'll be new. And hopefully, fun!
Intrigued? I promise you the Neatorama Mystery Sale will be fun.
It's for a very limited time only, so hurry! http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?mystery-box-sale-pid105.html
Update 9/15/08 - Thanks for the great response, guys! Time's up on the Neatorama Mystery Sale. For those who didn't buy today, perhaps next time!
David Saied, former Securities and Exchange Commissioner for Panama, wrote an interesting article for the libertarian think tank Ludwig von Mises Institute about America's economic myths. For example:
Myth # 1: "Dependence on Foreign Oil"
This myth basically suggests that the problem with oil prices is due to America's "dependence" on foreign oil. One of the worst economic myths, it plays on economic nationalism and on xenophobic feelings that are sometimes pervasive in the United States.
The high price of oil has nothing to do with its origin; the price of oil is determined in international markets. Even if the United States were to produce 100% of the oil it consumes, the price would be the same if the worldwide supply and demand of oil were to remain the same. Oil is a commodity, so the price of a barrel produced in the United States is basically the same as the price of a barrel of oil produced in any other country, but the costs of labor, land, and regulatory compliance are usually higher in the United States than in third-world countries. Lowering these costs would help increase supply. Increasing supply, whether in the United States or elsewhere, will push prices lower.
Importing a product does not mean you "depend" on it. This is like saying that when we "import" food from our local supermarket we "depend" on that supermarket. The opposite is usually true; exporters depend on us, since we are the customers. Also, importing a product usually means buying at lower prices, whereas producing in the United States often means consuming at higher prices. This point is proven when we see the cheap imports we can purchase from China and the higher prices of many of these same products manufactured in the United States. The amazing thing is that the protectionists claim, on the one hand, that America should be "protected" from cheap imports, but when it comes to oil, they say we should be "protected" from "expensive imported" oil.
Most, if not all, of the higher price of oil can be explained by the expansion of the money supply or the debasement of the dollar. The foreign producers are not at fault; our national central bank is the culprit.
The first one is easy: Large because it is really big.
The LHC is a large circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers
(17 miles), buried in the ground under an average of 100 m (328 ft) of
dirt and rock.
In particle physics, hadron is a family of subatomic
particles made of quarks and held together by the strong force*. Examples
of hadrons are protons and neutrons. As you can guess from the name, the
LHC uses mostly protons (with some ions) for its experiments.
Lastly, collider because the LHC accelerates protons
into two beams travelling in opposite directions and then collides them
to see what particles come out.
*There are four fundamental interactions: the strong force, the weak
force, the electromagnetic force and gravity. Despite initial observations
of the elusive metachlorian by Jinn, QG, et al (1999) Star Wars: Episode
I - The Phantom Menace, the existence of "The Force"
remains a controversial hypothesis unaccepted by most modern scientists.
2. Why is it underground?
Well, that's because finding 27 kilometers worth of real estate above
ground is really, really expensive. Actually, the LHC uses a tunnel originally
dug for a previous collider (the LEP or the Large Electron Positron collider),
which was decomissioned in 2000.
All that dirt and rock also provide great shielding to reduce the amount
of natural radiation that reaches the LHC's detectors.
3. Why is the LHC like a Werewolf?
Both are affected by the Moon! Like tides in the ocean, the ground is
also subject to lunar attraction. When the Moon is full, the Earth's crust
actually rises about 25 cm (9.8 in). This movement causes the circumference
of the LHC to vary by (a whopping) 1 mm (out of 27 km, a factor of 0.000004%)
) but that's enough so that physicists need to take it into account. (Source: CERN FAQ: LHC, the Guide [PDF])
4. Why is the LHC like a Refrigerator?
The Large Hadron Collider is not only a cool particle physics gizmo,
it's also a very, very cold one. Indeed, it is the largest cryogenic system
in the world and is one of the coldest places on Earth.
To keep them at superconducting temperature, scientists have to cool
the LHC's magnets down to 1.9 K (-271.3°C), which is lower than the
temperature of outer space (-270.5°C). First, the magnets are cooled
to -193.2°C using 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen. Then 90 tons of
liquid helium is used to lower the temperature down to -271.3°C. The
whole cooling process takes a few weeks.
5. Who the heck is CERN anyway?
In 1952, eleven European countries came together to form the European
Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen
pour la Recherche Nucléaire in French, which gave it the acronym
CERN).
Two years later in 1954 it was renamed the European Organization
for Nuclear Research, which would've given it the French name of Organisation
Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire or the acronym
OERN). Nobody liked "OERN", so the acronym CERN stuck.
If CERN sounds familiar to you even before this whole LHC business got
started, that's because the World Wide Web was started by CERN employees
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (See: 10
Things You Should Know About the Internet)
6. How much does it cost, and who's paying for it?
The Large Hadron Collider is nearly 30 years in the making - and costs
the member countries of CERN and other participating countries an estimated
€4.6 billion (about US$ 6.4 billion). Like those late night infomercials,
however, we can say "but that's not all!" Extra things like
detectors, computing capacity, and extra warranty (just kidding!) cost
an extra €1.43 billion.
The United Kingdom, for example, contributes £34 million per year,
less than the cost of a pint of beer per adult in the country per year
(Source).
The United States contributed approximately $531 million to the development
and construction of components for the LHC (with the US Department of
Energy shelling out $450 million and the National Science Foundation kicking
in the remaining $81 million).
7. How much electricity is used to run the LHC?
It takes 120 MW to run the LCH - approximately the power consumption
of all the Canton State of Geneva. Need a better comparison? 120 megawatt
is equivalent to the energy used by 1,2 million 100 watt incadescent light
bulb or 120,000 average California home.
It's estimated that the yearly energy cost of running the LHC is €19
million.
8. How much data is expected from the LHC?
The LHC experiments represents about 150 million sensors delivering data
40 million times a second. The data flow is about 700 MB/s, or about 15,000,000
GB (15 petabyte) per year. If you put all that in CDs, it'll stack 20
km tall each year! Perhaps it's better to put them in DVDs. That'll just
be 100,000 DVDs every year ...
To prepare for the deluge of data, CERN built the Worldwide LHC Computing
Grid - sort of a super-fast, private Internet connecting some 80,000 computers
to analyze the data (Source).
9. Okay, will the LHC spawn a black hole that'll eat my planet?
Every time physicists come up with particle accelerators, party poopers
come up with doomsday scenarios on how they will destroy Earth: black
holes, killer strangelets, magnetic monopoles, and vacuum bubbles.
Let's talk about them one by one:
Micro black hole: Basically it's a region in space
where gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Planet-eating black holes are created when massive stars collapse on
itself (and by massive, we mean massive - even our Sun isn't big enough
to create a black hole if it collapsed. You'd need 10 times the mass
of the Sun.)
There is a remote possibility that micro black holes can be created
in the collisions at the LHC. These black holes are small: about 10-35
m across (the so-called Planck Length) and puny in mass (less than a
speck of dust). These black holes would evaporate in 10-42
seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation. Even black holes with the mass
of Mt. Everest would have a radius of about 10-15 m across.
It would have trouble "eating" a proton, much less the entire
planet. (Source: Pickover, C. (1997) Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide)
Strangelets: These are strange matters that, like
the Ice-nine in Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, would turn all
matters it touched into strange matters and eventually all of the planet
will be transmuted into strangelets.
The problem with strangelet doomsday scenario, besides being very bizarre,
is that no one has ever seen a strangelet. It remains a hypothetical
particle. Previous particle accelerators that operated at lower energy
than the LHC were actually better candidates to producing strangelets,
and so far, we're still here.
Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles
with a single magnetic charge (hence the name) - either a north pole
or a south pole, but not both. Magnetic monopoles "eat proton."
Actually, physicists have been looking for magnetic monopoles for a
long time - and so far they've never found it. By calculations, magnetic
monopoles are actually too heavy to be produced at the LHC.
Vacuum bubble: It is actually a very interesting idea
in quantum field theory. It states that life, the universe and everything
aren't the most stable configuration possible. Perturbations caused
by the LHC could tip it into the more stable state (called the vacuum
bubble) and all of us "pop" out of existence.
In all of these cases - if micro black hole, strangelets, magnetic monopoles,
and vacuum bubbles were a problem to begin with, they would've been created
by cosmic rays already. The continued existence of Earth and the rest
of the universe tend to discount the validity of these doomsday scenarios.
But if you were itching to celebrate our continued survival, here's a
"I Survived the Large Hadron Collider" T-shirt from Neatorama's
Online Store for you: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?i-survived-the-large-hadron-collider-t-shirt-pid104.html - $9.95
10. How can I help?
Well, although over 7,000 physicists are tackling the hard sciencey stuff,
your computer can help! The LHC@home
project lets you contribute idle time on your computer to help calculate
simulations of the real thing.
Truth in Hydration is a bottled water companyTruth in Hydration is the blog of Tap'dNY, a bottled water company that sells ... New York tap water in bottles! To market their product, the company's "street team" went about Central Park refilling people's empty bottled water with good ol' fashioned NYC tap!
