Yay! It's time for Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game. Funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cats cartoon by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are darn simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many as you'd like.
For inspiration, check out Adam's blog. Good luck!
Update 9/13/08: Adam has chosen the winner! Congratulations to megiddo who won with this caption: "Hydroponic cabbage patch kids."
The Best of the Best Cat Clips Yay! No need to hunt for the funniest cat video clips anymore. Here are the best of the best cat videos in one convenitne YouTube clip:
Melee: 1 Protestor, 4 Security Guard, 100 Fans When four security guards tackle a protestor who ran into a soccer field during a game, that was fair enough. But when they started beating him with a stick, 100 fans rushed the field and started a melee!
Australian School Rickroll Bell When this Australian school let students choose their own school bell sound, what's the worse worst that could happen? The students chose to Rickroll themselves every period!
So, the scientists at CERN flipped on the Large Hadron Collider and life as we know it didn't end (yet). So to celebrate our continued existence, here's the "I Survived the Large Hadron Collider" T-Shirt on Neatorama's Online Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?i-survived-the-large-hadron-collider-t-shirt-pid104.html - on sale for $9.95
Shock jock Howard Stern is no stranger to controversy, and now, he's at it again: he's "auctioning off" 22-year-old Natalie Dylan's (not her real name) virginity to help pay her college tuition.
Shock jock Howard Stern interviewed 22-year-old Natalie Dylan (not her real name), who is "auctioning off" her virginity to help pay her college tuition:
Expected to step on the block, so to speak, of Stern's Sirius radio studio is a San Diego woman who says she wants to sell her maidenhood to pay her college tuition.
"I don't have a moral dilemma with it," says the pretty brunette, who's using the pseudonym of Natalie Dylan "for safety reasons."
"We live in a capitalist society," she tells us. "Why shouldn't I be allowed to capitalize on my virginity?"
To remind the people of Sydney and Melbourne, Australia that Queensland is a warm place to go to during winter vacation, Tourism Queensland employed a bunch of attractive women to ... um, flash men on the street with this advertising message:
The objective was to make Queensland the number one choice for a winter holiday. To remind the Sydney and Melbourne markets than, evein in winter (it’s winter now in Australia), the weather’s warm enough to enjoy Queensland’s beaches 24 flashers were deployed throughout high traffic areas in chilly Sydney and Melbourne to promote sunny Queensland as a holiday destination this winter.
Here's the "front view": Link (SFW, don't worry - Update 9/10/08: Some visitors complained of a virus from the website - click at your own risk)
Would you believe that Einstein was the inspiration for Yoda, E.T., and
even a spiffy BMX bike trick? Here are 6 things inspired by Albert Einstein,
the smartest man who ever lived:
Stuart Freeborn, the make-up supervisor for the original
Star Wars trilogy modeled Yoda after his own face. He added a bit of Einstein's
eyes and wrinkles for that "wise look" of the Jedi master. (Source)
See also: Top
5 Star Wars Designs and What Inspired Them at Geek in Heels blog
2. E=MC2 Ballet
It
turns out, Einstein's theory of relativity may just be perfect for ...
the ballet!
In 2005, artistic director Mark Baldwin of the Rambert Dance Company
created a new ballet, called the Constant Speed (a reference to the constant
speed of light irrespective of the motion of the light source, which was
postulated by Einstein).
Jerry Cowhig of the Institute of Physics that commissioned the work said:
"Dance is an expressive medium and it will be ideal for abstract
concepts like the theories of Einstein on everything from tiny atoms
to the dynamics of the whole cosmos." (Source)
3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Steven
Spielberg hired special effect artist Carlo Rambaldi to create the animatronic
model of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
Spielberg also asked Rambaldi to incorporate features of Ernest Hemingway,
poet Carl Sandburg, and Albert Einstein into the eyes and face of E.T.
Rambaldi did, but he also threw in a bit of his own cat into E.T.! (Source)
(Photo: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial / Universal at Yahoo!
Movies)
4. Einstein on the Beach Opera
[YouTube clip:
a Documentary on Philip Glass, music starts at 0:50,
Einstein on the Beach at 3:00]
In 1976, Philip Glass scored and wrote an opera (directed by Robert Wilson)
called Einstein on the Beach. It is Glass' first and longest opera - the
full version takes approximately 5 hours to complete with absolutely no
intermission! Because of the length, the audience is free to come and
go as they like.
Actually, Wilson wanted Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler as the subject
of the opera, whereas Glass wanted Mahatma Gandhi. The two compromised
on Albert Einstein.
Einstein on the Beach is hailed as a groundbreaking work in opera: even
stranger than the 5 hour performance, the opera is also accompanied by
a slideshow of visual imageries that border on crazy!
(In 1993, the rock band Counting Crows recorded a single titled Einstein
on the Beach (For an Eggman), which title was inspired by Glass'
opera)
5. Einstein Comes Through, the Play
In 2004, David Ellenstein was thinking of ideas for a one-man play as
a backup to his regular acting gigs when he ran into actor Marc Silver.
Turns out, both of them had played Einstein before, so naturally they
decided to write a play about the man:
The two playwrights tell the story of Hank, an actor who performs
a one-man Einstein show, but can't on this day due to uncertain circumstances.
He turns to Einstein to get him back on track and out of trouble.
"We used Marc's day job as a starting point because it gave
the character the option of being the actor or Einstein," he said.
"The play is surreal. It's a pretty wild ride because it jumps
around between him being an actor and Einstein." (Source)
6. Einstein Flip BMX Trick
To
celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's annus mirabilis (that's
what he called his most productive year ever), Helen Czerski, a Cambridge
University physicist and BMX rider Ben Wallace collaborated to create
a nifty bike trick dubbed the "Einstein Flip":
The stunt "pushes the boundaries of what it is humanly possible
to do on a bike", said Helen Czerski, a Cambridge University physicist,
who collaborated with BMX rider Ben Wallace to create the manoeuvre
to show young people the physics in everyday life.
Wallace, 18, launched himself off a 6ft ramp and rotated 360 degrees
while folding his bike underneath him. Ms Czerski said: "It is
at the limits of what is possible. I did the maths and found that it
could work. Having said that, I wouldn't want try this myself - however
much I trust my calculations. It takes a lot of guts." (Source)
(Photo: David Bebber)
Don't miss this article: 10
Strange Facts About Einstein
Did you know that the current US flag was designed by
a high school student for a class project? (He got a B, though his teacher
changed it to an A after Congress accepted it as the national flag!).
Did you know that the Libyan flag is green (and nothing but green) or
that the precursor to the Philippines flag had a Jolly Roger? Read on
...
1. Flag of the United States: The Stars and Stripes
Supposedly, it was George Washington himself who proclaimed "We
take the stars from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating
it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and
the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing Liberty."
Lower Left: Colonial Flag,
used chiefly by Colonies of New England before the Revolutionary War.
Lower Right: Bunker Hill Flag, used by New England troops
at the battle of Bunker Hill. Upper Left: Pine Tree Flag
of the Navy, used by the American ships early in the Revolutionary War.
Upper Right: Rattlesnake flag, used early in Revolutionary
War. Center Left: First National Flag, used in 1776,
before the Declaration of Independence. Center Right:
The Present "Star Spangled Banner" (Image: History of the
US, a high school text book in 1885 [wikipedia])
At the time of the signing of the Declaration Independence, the United
States of America had no official national flag. The Grand Union Flag
is considered to be the first national flag of the United States, though
it didn't have any official status.
In 1777, the Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Resolution stating
that the national flag of the United States has 13 red and white stripes,
and 13 white stars in a blue field. But it didn't specify the arrangement
of the stars. One popular story is that George Washington asked Betsy
Ross to design and sew the flag (Betsy decided to use a 5-pointed star
instead of 6 to save time). Though this story is accepted as historical
fact by most Americans, historians doubted it as the only evidence was
the words of her only surviving grandson.
Since then, a new star is added to the flag when a new state joined the
Union (in 1795, 2 stars and 2 stripes were added when Kentucky and Vermont
became states, but the number of stripes subsequently reverted back to
13).
When Alaska and Hawaii were being considered for statehood, people sent
in more than 1,500 new flag designs to President Eisenhower. One of the
designs was submitted by a 17-year-old high school student named Bob Heft,
who first created it as a school project. He got a B- for it (for "lack
of originality"), though his teacher agreed to change his grade if
his design was accepted. When Bob's flag design was chosen, his teacher
changed the grade to an A! (Source)
2. The Flag of Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a landlocked country in south-central Asia. It is not
particularly rich in natural resources, but its geographical location
made it a crossroad between the East and the West. Throughout history,
Afghanistan has probably seen more wars and conquests than any other piece
of land in the world.
A true reflection of its history, the Afghan national flag has had more
changes during the 20th century than flags of any other countries in the
world.
The national flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland is the royal banner known as the Union Flag or more popularly
the Union Jack. Its current design is the combination of the red Cross
of St. George (patron saint of England), the white red Saltire (or X-shaped
cross) of St. Patrick of Ireland and the white Saltire of Saint Andrew of Scotland.
Why is it called the Union Jack? Some people say because it was named
after King James I of Great Britain (after Jacobus, Latin for James) who
introduced the flag; others say that the "jack" refers to the
jackstaff, a small pole in the bow of the ship used to fly flags - and
since Britain's navy was formidable, the name Union Jack stuck.
If you look closely at the Union Jack, you'll notice that the diagonal
red and white stripes aren't symmetrical. Here's the story behind it:
In 1801, an Act of Union which made Ireland a co-equal member of
the United Kingdom made it necessary to add a symbol for Ireland to
the flag, but without obliterating any of the existing symbols. If the
St. Patrick's cross had been centered on the diagonal stripes, then
St. Andrew's cross would have been relegated to an inferior position,
basically serving only as a border for St. Patrick's. But Scotland was
the senior of the two kingdoms, so this was unsatisfactory. The solution
was to divide the diagonal stripes diagonally, so that the red St. Patrick's
cross would take up only half of each stripe, and so that half devoted
to St. Andrew would take the place of honor. Thus, in the two hoist
quarters, the white St. Andrew's cross occupies the upper position,
and in the two fly quarters, the red St. Patrick's cross occupies the
upper position. (Source)
But
what happened to Wales? The Flag of Wales, The Red Dragon or Y Ddraig
Goch, isn't represented in the Union Jack because Wales was annexed
by England in 1282. With the Laws in Wales Act 1535 - 1542, it is legally part of the Kingdom
of England and thus represented under the St. George's Cross flag.
4. Flag of Albania
Albania has one of the most kick ass flags around: the two-headed eagle
design was derived from a 15th century Albanian warrior named Gjergj Skanderbeg,
the Dragon of Albania (who, ironically, had a two-headed eagle as a seal,
not a dragon). Skanderbeg, in turn, got the design from an ancient Byzantine
heraldry.
The evolution of the flag of Albania is as follows:
5. Flag of Libya
The flag of Libya is ... green. Green, and nothing but green - in fact,
it's the only national flag in the world with only one color and no design
or insignia. Green is the traditional color of Islam, the state religion
of Libya, and also symbolizes Gaddafi's "Green Revolution,"
where he overthrew the Libyan monarchy in 1969.
6. Flag of the Seychelles
Seychelles is an archipelago nation of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean
east of Africa. The country has 3 flags since its independence in 1976
from the British Commonwealth.
In the current flag, the blue band represents the sky and the sea that
surrounds the island nation, the yellow band is the sun, the red symbolizes
the people, the white band represents social justice and harmony, and
the green band depicts the country's land and nature.
7. Flag of the Philippines
The present-day national flag of the Philippines has elements of the
flags flown by the Katipunan secret society during the Philippine Revolution.
The Pambansang bandila ("National Flag") was first
conceptualized by General Emilio Aguinaldo during his exile in Hong Kong
in 1897 and hand sewn by Marcela Agoncillo, her daughter Lorenzo and a
friend named Josefina Herbosa de Natividad.
Though the Katipunan flags aren't considered national flags (and thus
not a direct precursor of the current flag), their varieties and designs
deserve a mention (plus what other national flag has a Jolly Roger?)
Some of the Katipunan generals have their own personal flags:
Anyway, here is the evolution of the Philippine national flag:
Actually, the blue color has been changed at least 5 times in the Philippines
flag (read more about the
blue shade debate here)
Obviously this article is woefully incomplete. There 193 recognized countries
(more if you count special entities and territories) in the world, and
we've only covered a handful. So if your country isn't listed and you
think that its flag deserves a mention, please write about it in the comment
section.
During World War II, Japan had a secret weapon designed to spark a massive forest fire in the United States. Thanksfully, the device - which was partly made by Japanese schoolgirls - was a dud. Here's the bizarre story of the Fugo killer balloons:
On May 5, 1945, Reverend Archie Mitchell, his wife Elsie, and five children from his Sunday school drove from the tiny southern Oregon town of Bly for a picnic on Gearhart Mountain. While Reverend Mitchell parked the car, his wife and the children explore. They came upon a device the U.S. government knew about but had kept secret. When one of them touched the device, it exploded: Mrs. Mitchell and the five children were killed. The six Oregonians became the only known fatalities on the U.S. mainland from enemy attack during all of World War II.
MADE IN JAPAN
The exploding contraption was a Japanese Fugo balloon bomb, the brainchild of Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba of the Japanese Ninth Army Technical Research Laboratory. The balloons measured 33 feet across and 70 feet long from top to bomb. They were constructed (by Japanese schoolgirls) from bits of a tough paper called washi, made from mulberry trees, and glued together with potato paste. The bomb parts were made in a factory - not by schoolgirls. Filled with hydrogen gas, the payload consisted of 36 sandbags for ballast, four incendiary bombs, and one 33-pound antipersonnel bomb.
Launched to rise 35,000 feet, the balloons were designed to use the prevailing Pacific eastward winds to reach the west coast of North America. As the balloons leaked gas and lost altitude, barometric pressure switches caused the sandbags to drop off and the balloons to rise back to the jetstream. The trip took three to five days. By the time they reached the United States, the baloons, now out of sandbags, were supposed to drop the bombs and then self-destruct. The Japanese hoped the bomb would cause forest fires and panic the American public.
FUGO, FUGO, FUGO!
Between October 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched 9,300 of these balloons. Estimates are that fewer than 500 balloons reached the United States or Canada; the rest fell into the Pacific Ocean. In November 1944, one balloon was discovered in the ocean off San Pedro, California. In January 1945, a balloon bomb landed in Medford, Oregon, without exploding. At some point, a rancher in Nevada discovered a balloon and used it as a tarp to cover his hay; police later discovered that two bombs were still attached to it.
WHAT BALLOONS?
Most of the balloons either exploded harmlessly or failed to detonate on impact. Approximately 90 of them were recovered in the United States as far east as Michigan. Strict censorship kept their existence out of the newspapers, and those who knew of their presence were sworn to secrecy. It was feared that news of the balloons arrival would encourage the launching of more balloons. They weren't seen as much of a danger, but the hush-hush handling of the situation worked: the Japanese abandoned the project because they didn't hear of any success. But after the Mitchell family tragedy in Oregon, the public was warned.
The last balloon bomb was found in Alaska in 1955; its bombs were still capable of exploding. Ironically, on March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons desceded near Hanford, Washington. The balloon landed on electrical power lines, shutting off the Hanford nuclear reactor for three days. The Hanford reactor, part of the top-secret Manhattan project, was producing plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, five months later. The Fugo balloon bombs are considered a failure as weapons system. There were no proven bomb-caused forest fires, and they caused little other damage. Elsie Mitchell and the five children were the tragic exceptions.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again. The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
How well do you know your animal traps? Our pal Rob H. of What is it? Blog has a neat featurette: a quiz of 28 of the strangest and most gruesome-looking animal traps.
This one above is the man trap:
A man trap, it was used by a wealthy land owner in England to catch poachers. It takes a key to open the jaws and they can't be pried apart. It was designed so as not to break the leg, a small consolation since the victim probably paid with his life.
The stick was used as a trigger, it kept the jaws open and when stepped on, the trap was sprung.
What if M.C. Escher designed a real life building? It'd probably be something like the Chand Baori stepwell near Jaipur, India. The amazing 13-stories well was built in the 9th century and has 3,500 narrow steps. Don't fall - at 100 feet (~30 m) deep, it's a long way down.
Neatorama reader Rosemary Travale spotted this creative graffiti (technically graffito, I think) near the corner of Iriquois Shore on Trafalgar road in Oakville, Ontario, Canada:
Some very creative person noticed the shadow the crosswalk box made resembled Batman's head so they added in his face to complete it. Very neat street art to come across while walking home at night!
Hypnotizing Animals Ever seen pigeons in trance? How about a hypnotized alligator? Turns out humans aren't the only ones that can be hypnotized - some animals can be put in a weird trance-like state. Now if only they'd talk about their mothers ... Link
The Men in Black ... with a Ukulele! Here's Stefan Raab of German's TV Total and Will Smith singing the theme song to The Men in Black. Unplugged. With a ukulele!
Lil' Jukebox Hero You're gonna see a star in the making. He's got the lipsynching technique down COLD! Here's a cute little kid singing to Jukebox Hero. And remember, you saw him on VideoSift first! Link
Grapes of Wrath We've seen bad things happened to reporters on live TV before on Neatorama, but this is a first: being attacked by grapes!
Love how the anchor just ignored the whole thing (and hope that the dude is okay) Link
How to Stop a Row with Your GF in 30 Sec Men, let's end with something practical. Here's the secret to stopping an argument with your girlfriend in 4 easy steps. You'll thank me later.
By now you've all probably been playing with Google Chrome, the search engine giant's new browser (well, unless you're on a Mac or Linux, that is). Well, Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped blog who broke the news on the whole thing has a really neat list of tips and pointers on Chrome.
Well, I say there's something else. See that glowing blue eye? It's absolutely, positively from SAL 9000, the Earthbound twin of the HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Huh? There are two of 'em? Yep: HAL has a red eye, SAL has a blue eye.)
And here's a YouTube clip of SAL 9000 (voiced by Candice Bergen, actually) from 2010: The Year We Make Contact (based on Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two)
Sometimes the most amazing abilities of the human brain
are revealed exactly when things go wrong with it. Take, for example,
savants - people who have mental abilities that could only be characterized
as superhuman (like having photographic memory, playing music perfectly
after hearing it just once, or doing complex mathematical calculations
in one's head) but otherwise severely disabled in every day cognitive
functions and social interaction.
Does the human brain have latent savant-like abilities? Does our higher
cognitive functions somehow block these abilities, and why? And can we
have savant-like abilities without the accompanying autism and/or developmental
disabilities? One
intriguing study by Dr. Allan Snyder of the Centre for the Mind suggested
that temporarily impairing the left fronto-temporal lobe in healthy subjects
by low-frequency magnetic pulses could result in savant-like mental abilities
(see, for example: article in New York Times "Savant
for a Day")
Most savants are born with their abilities (and unfortunately, their
developmental disorders), but not all: severe brain injuries can, in very
rare instances, cause savant-like abilities to surface (see, for example:
The
Case of the "Sudden" Savant). One noted savant (Daniel Tammet,
see below) is a highly functioning autistic savant who can perform amazing
mental feats but does not have significant developmental disabilities.
There are a few savants in the world (called "prodigious savants")
whose abilities are so exceptional that they would've been classified
as phenomenal with or without cognitive disabilities. Let's take a look
at 10 savants with superhuman mental skills:
1. Kim Peek, the Real Rain Man
Even
though you've never heard of Kim Peek, chances are you've heard the movie
Rain Man. Kim was the inspiration for the character played by
Dustin Hoffman in the movie.
Kim Peek was born with severe brain damage. His childhood doctor told
Kim's father to put him in an institution and forget about the boy. Kim's
severe developmental disabilities, according to the doctor, would not
let him walk let alone learn. Kim's father disregarded the doctor's advice.
Till this day, Kim struggles with ordinary motor skills and has difficulty
walking. He is severely disabled, cannot button his shirt and tests well
below average on a general IQ test.
But what Kim can do is astounding: he has read some 12,000 books and
remembers everything about them. "Kimputer," as he is lovingly
known to many, reads two pages at once - his left eye reads the left page,
and his right eye reads the right page. It takes him about 3 seconds to
read through two pages - and he remember everything on 'em. Kim can recall
facts and trivia from 15 subject areas from history to geography to sports.
Tell him a date, and Kim can tell you what day of the week it is. He also
remembers every music he has ever heard.
Since the movie Rain Man came out, Kim and his father have been
traveling across the country for appearances. The interaction turns out
to be beneficial for him, as he becomes less shy and more confident.
Leslie Lemke didn't have a great start in life. He was born with severe
birth defects that required doctors to remove his eyes. His own mother
gave him up for adoption, and a nurse named May Lemke (who at the time
was 52 and was raising 5 children of her own) adopted him when he was
six months old.
As a young child, Leslie had to be force-fed to teach him how to swallow.
He could not stand until he was 12. At 15, Leslie finally learned how
to walk (May had to strap his fragile body to hers to teach him, step
by step, how to walk).
At 16 years of age, Leslie Lemke bloomed. In the middle of one night,
May woke up to find Leslie playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1.
Leslie, who has no classical music training, was playing the piece flawlessly
after hearing it just once earlier on the television.
From then on, Leslie began playing all styles of music from ragtime to
classical. Like the Tchaikovsky piece, he only has to hear the music once
in order to play it again perfectly. He became famous after being portrayed
in national television shows. Before his health started to deteriorate,
Leslie gave many concerts around the world.
A DVD of Leslie Lemke performing live at the Performing Art Center
in Pittsville, Wisconsin can be ordered from:
Miracle of Love Ministries
8099 Grant Road
Arpin, WI 54410
Cost: $20.00
3. Alonzo Clemons
As
a toddler, Alonzo suffered a head injury in an accident that changed his
life. He can't feed himself or tie his shoelaces, but he can sculpt.
And boy, can he sculpt: after seeing only a fleeting image of an animal
on a TV screen, Alonzo could sculpt a perfect 3D figure of it, correct
in each and every detail right down to the muscle fibers.
Check out Alonzo's official website, where you can purchase his sculptures:
Link
4. Gottfried Mind: Cat's Raphael
Gottfried Mind's cats (For more, check out Art
Prints on Demand)
Gottfried Mind was one of the earliest savants in history. In 1776, the
eight-year-old Gottfried was placed in an art academy, where his teachers
noted that he was "very weak, incapable of hard work, full of talent
for drawing, a strange creature, full of artist-caprices, along with a
certain roguishness."
One day, Gottfried's mentor, a painter named Sigmund Hendenberger, was
drawing a cat when Gottfried exclaimed "That is no cat!" The
teacher asked whether he could do better and sent the child to a corner
to draw. The cat that Gottfried drew was so lifelike that since then he
became known as the Cat's Raphael:
In the course of his narrow, indoors life, he had worked himself
into an almost paternal relation with domestic animals, especially with
cats. While he sat painting, a cat might generally be seen sitting on
his back or on his shoulder; many times he kept, for hours, the most
awkward postures, that he might not disturb it. Frequently there was
a second cat sitting by him on the table, watching how the work went
on; sometimes a kitten or two lay in his lap under the table. Frogs
(in bottle) floated beside his easel; and with all these creatures he
kept up a most playful, loving style of conversation; though, often
enough, any human beings about him, or such even as came to see him,
were growled or grunted at in no social fashion. (Source)
5. Gilles Tréhin
Gilles Tréhin lives part-time in the city of Urville, in an island
off the Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and St. Tropez. Never heard
of it? That's because Urville exists only in his mind.
Since he was 5, Gilles taught himself to draw three dimensional objects.
By 12, he started building a city he called "Urville" (after
Dumont d'Urville, a French scientific base in the Antarctic). At first
he used LEGO, but shortly thereafter, he realized that he could expand
his imaginary city much easier with drawings.
Abbaye Sainte Marguerite des Tégartines, in Urville
Urville isn't just an idle idea - Gilles has 250 detailed drawings, complete
"history" of the founding the the city, and has even published
a
book detailing it (Sneak peak at Google
Books)
Visit Urville at Gilles' official website here: http://urvillecity.free.fr/index.Urville-ENG.htm
6. Jedediah Buxton
Jedediah
Buxton, born in Derbyshire, England, in 1707, couldn't write. By all
accounts, he has no knowledge of science or history or anything else for
that matter except for numbers. Jedediah, as it turned out, was one of
the world's earliest mental calculators and savants.
Everything was numbers to Jedediah - in fact, he associated everything
he saw or experienced with numbers. He measured the area of the village
he was born in simply by walking around it. When he saw a dance, his whole
attention was to count the number of steps of the dancers. At a play,
Jedediah was consumed with counting the number of words uttered by the
actors.
The mental feat of Jedediah Buxton was tested by the Royal Society in
1754 - his mathematical brain was able to calculate numbers up to 39 figures.
7. Orlando Serrell
Orlando
Serrell wasn't born autistic - indeed, his savant skills only came about
after a brain injury. In 1979, then ten-year-old Orlando was playing baseball
when the ball struck him hard on the left side of his head. He fell to
the ground but eventually got up to continue playing.
For a while, Orlando had headaches. When they went away, he realized
he had new abilities: he could perform complex calendar calculations and
remember the weather every day from the day of the accident.
What makes Orlando Serrell so unique is that he may indeed hold
the key that unlocks the genius in us all. Orlando Serrell did not possess
any special skills until he was struck in the head by a baseball when
he was 10. And his extraordinary gifts seem to be his only side effect.
Could this mean once a key hemisphere in the brain is stimulated, we
can all attain the level of genius Orlando posses and beyond? Only time
and research will tell. Until then we will do well to keep our eyes
on Orlando and learn what we can from his experience.
8. Stephen Wiltshire, the Human Camera
As a young child, Stephen Wiltshire was a mute - he was diagnosed as
autistic and was sent to a school for special needs children. There, he
discovered a passion for drawing - first of animals, then London buses,
then buildings and the city's landmarks. Throughout his childhood, Stephen
communicated through his drawings. Slowly, aided by his teachers, he learned
to speak by the age of nine (his first word was "paper.")
Stephen has a particularly striking talent: he can draw an accurate and
detailed landscape of a city after seeing it just once! He drew a 10 meter
(~33 ft) long panorama of Tokyo following a short helicopter ride.
Like Leslie Lemke, Ellen Boudreaux is a blind autistic savant with exceptional
musical abilities. She can play music perfectly after hearing it just
once, and has a such a huge repertoire of songs in her head that a newspaper
reporter once tried to "stump Ellen" by requesting that she
played some obscure songs - and failed. Ellen knew them all.
Ellen has two other savant skills that are unusual. First, despite her
blindness, she is able to walk around without ever running into things.
As she walks, Ellen makes little chirping sounds that seems to act like
a human sonar (See also our
post on Ben Underwood, a blind teen who uses echolocation to "see").
Second, Ellen has an extremely precise digital clock ticking in her mind.
To help overcome her fear of the telephone, Ellen's mom coaxed her to
listen to the automatic time recording (the "time lady") when
she was 8. From then on, Ellen knows the exact hour and minute, any time
of the day without ever having seen a clock nor have the concept of the
passing of time explained to her.
At first glance, you won't be able to tell that Daniel Tammet is anything
but normal. Daniel, 29, is a highly functioning autistic savant with exceptional
mathematical and language abilities.
Daniel first became famous when he recited from memory Pi to 22,514 decimal
places (on 3/14, the International Pi Day, of course) to raise funds for
the National Society for Epilepsy.
Numbers, according to Daniel, are special to him. He has a rare form
of synesthesia and sees each integers up to 10,000 as having their own
unique shapes, color, texture and feel. He can "see" the result
of a math calculation, and he can "sense" whether a number is
prime. Daniel has since drawn what
pi looks like: a rolling landscape full of different shapes and colors.
Daniel speaks 11 languages, one of which is Icelandic. In 2007, Channel
Five documentary challenged him to learn the language in a week. Seven
days later, Daniel was successfully interviewed on Icelandic television
(in Icelandic, of course!).
When he was four years old, Daniel had bouts of epilepsy that, along
with his autism, seemed to have brought about his savant abilities. Though
he appears normal, Daniel contends that he actually had to will himself
to learn how to talk to and behave around people:
As he describes in his newly published memoir, “Born on a
Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”
(Free Press), he has willed himself to learn what to do. Offer a visitor
a drink; look her in the eye; don’t stand in someone else’s
space. These are all conscious decisions.
Recently, some friends warned him that in his eagerness to make
eye contact, he tended to stare too intently. “It’s like
being on a tightrope,” he said. “If you try too hard, you’ll
come off. But you have to try.” (Source)
There is a big difference between Daniel Tammet and all the other prodigious
savants in the world: Daniel can tell you how he does it and that makes
him invaluable to scientists trying to understand the savant syndrome:
Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian
National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular,
and international, scientific interest. "Savants can't usually
tell us how they do what they do," says Snyder. "It just comes
to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why
he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone." (Source)
I'll be the first to admit that we have only scratched the surface of
the fascinating topic of savant syndrome. If you are interested, here
are some suggested websites by Darold
A. Treffert, the world's foremost expert on savant syndrome, for further
reading:
Savant
Syndrome, Darold Treffert's website at the Wisconsin Medical Society
Islands
of Genius [PDF], a Scientific American article by Darold Treffert
and Gregory Wallace
Overnight, a huge mechanical spider appeared on the side of an office building set to be demolished in Liverpool, England:
The 37-tonne beast heralds the start of a five-day piece of street theatre as part of the Capital of Culture year. It has been built by French company La Machine, which in 2006 brought the streets of London to a standstill with the Sultan's Elephant.
The spider is believed to be "waking up" on Friday.
It will descend from its current position on the side of Concourse House on Thursday to be moved to the city's new arena, before coming to life on Friday. The creature will then begin exploring the city later that evening.
