Clive Thompson of Wired's Games Without Frontiers blog was wondering why Weight Watchers very well work for some people who want to lose weight and came up with this conclusion: Weight Watchers is not a normal diet ... it's an RPG!

Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.

It's an RPG.

The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That's why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life's drudgery more bearable. [...]

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

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There are trucks and then there are monster trucks. The same principle applies to other modes of transportation, like the Segway, for instance.

Behold, the Monster Segway! Link [embedded YouTube cli]

What to get your beloved Apple fanboi who already has everything? How about a Steve Jobs bobblehead iPhone charger? Link - via Gizmodo

If you wear a gold ring on your finger, write with a gold-tipped fountain pen, or have gold in your portfolio, then chances are you're connected
to child labor in Africa.

Here's a disturbing article by Rukmini Callimachi and Bradley S. Kalpper of the Associated Press:

These hardscrabble miners include many thousands of children. They work long hours at often dangerous jobs in hundreds of primitive mines scattered through the West African bush. Some are as young as 4 years old. [...]

Wait - but surely you didn't buy any gold from Africa, right? Wrong.

Precisely which products contain child-mined gold, no one can say for sure. Unlike a diamond, gold does not keep its identity on its tortuous journey from mine to market. It passes through 10 or more hands. And when it is melted, usually several times, and mixed with gold from other sources, its address is effectively erased.

Jewelers and retailers that buy gold through UBS include Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA, the firm that makes Montblanc pens, Piaget's luxury watches and the jewelry of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Gold processed by Metalor has been used by these brands as well as in discount jewelry sold at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and luxury jewelry sold by Tiffany & Co.

These companies expressed concern about child labor and frustration that they can't certify their products are free of it. Because bush mines, where child labor is ubiquitous, supply a fifth of the world's gold, the companies realize their supply lines may well be compromised.

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(Photo: Rukmini Callimachi / AP)

Photo: Marianne Mancusi

WebUrbanist has a really neat post about 15 of the world's strangest themed restaurants. This one above is a photo from the Vampire Cafe in Tokyo:

Continuing the creepy, otherwordly themes is the Vampire Café in the Ginza section of Tokyo, where the interior is almost entirely blood red. Guests are ushered down a long hallway with red blood cells superimposed on the floor. Inside, the décor includes heavy velvet drapes, black coffins dripping with red candle wax, skulls and crosses. Many of the meals are vampire-themed, and diners drink red cocktails from martini glasses.

Check out the rest of the list: Link

In his blog Springfield Punx, artist Dean T. Fraser draws superheroes and other comic characters in the style of The Simpsons cartoons. So far, he's done some characters from Batman, Spider-man, Star Trek TOS, etc.

Check it out: Link - via Super Punch

Darned scientists and the things they do in the name of science! Can't they leave a poor copepod doin' its bidnis alone?

The marine biologists on the Galathea expedition intruded on the privacy of this copepod - all in the name of science, mind you - as it ... went poo! Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Somewhere on the I-80 Highway between Iowa City and Davenport is the World's Largest Truckstop, which comes complete with a dentist's office, a movie theater, and more. Lots more.

Our own StacyBee (she also writes for our pal mental_floss blog) investigates:

The I-80 truck stop didn’t start as such a behemoth, though. It opened in 1964, when I-80 was still in its infancy, or at least in its toddler stages. It was just a tiny white building stuck smack in the middle of a cornfield – two diesel pumps and a restaurant.

It grew as I-80 grew and now employs 450 people. [...]

Here are just a few of the delights that this wonder offers:

• Several full-sized vehicles. I counted at least five –
one semi with a mural painted on it, one semi cab, one old-timey car in the restaurant, one truck and another old-timey car hanging from the ceiling. There may have been more.
• A dentist’s office.
• A movie theater.
• A chiropractic clinic.
• A barber shop.
• A custom shop, so you can trick out your truck with embroidery, custom vinyl and laser engraving.
• 24 private showers.
• A restaurant that serves about a million cups of coffee and 90 tons of meat every year.
• A car wash for semis (so, technically a semi wash?) that even cleans the engine. A 15-minute wash will set truckers back about $50.
• 75,000 unique items to bring home to your loved ones.

Links: Article at mental_floss | More pics at Stacy's I Met a Possum blog (and what's up with that creepy doll pic at the end?)

Hah! This concept is so obvious that I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. Behold the R2-D2 projection alarm clock from Wesco Ltd. (So far it's only going to be available in the UK starting in October - Boo! Wesco, boo!)

Link

Now this is darned neat: a performance by Pilobolus "shadow art" dance group for Late Night with Conan O'Brien: Link (embedded YouTube)

(Note: yep, they're the same guys that did the Hyundai Santa Fe ad and the 2007 Oscar performance, previously on Neatorama here)

The Human Marvel blog has an interesting post about Annie Jones (better known as the Esau Woman), who traveled with P.T. Barnum's circus as the bearded lady:

When she was little more than a year in age, Annie was brought to New York City to be featured in Barnum’s museum as ‘The Infant Esau’. The name ‘Esau’ was often applied to hirsute wonders and was in reference to the biblical grandson of Abraham, brother of Jacob. Esau's name in Hebrew means ‘hairy’, and, according to Genesis 25:25, it is a reference to his hairiness at birth.

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No, I won't tell you the story behind this strange photo to the left - that's
for you to find out when you follow the link - but I will tell you that the guy isn't dead. Nope, he's very much alive. Too much, if you ask me.

The next time you men see a bench in the park, you'll think of this story, I promise.

Link

Spiders are often solitary animals (some of them are even cannibals that eat their own species, so they tend to stay as far away as possible from each other).

But in the case of Anelosimus eximius spiders, the more, the merrier. Here's why the social spiders prefer social networking by living in giant colonies:

The ability to work together and capture larger prey has allowed social spiders to stretch the laws of nature and reach enormous colony sizes, UBC zoologists have found. [...]

“The size of organisms tends to be constrained by a scaling principle scientists call ‘surface to volume ratio,’” says Leticia Avilés, lead author and associate professor in the UBC Dept. of Zoology. While organisms typically have energetic needs proportional to their volume, they must acquire nutrients through their surface.

“As the organism grows, this surface to volume ratio declines. In a way, this is how nature keeps the sizes of various species in check.”

The same principle may apply to social groups. The surface area of the three-dimensional webs social spiders use to capture prey does not grow as fast as the number of spiders contained in the nests; so number of incoming prey per spider declines with colony size. But Anelosimus eximius, a species of social spider notable for its enormous colony size – some total more than 20,000 individuals – have gained the ability to stretch that law by cooperating and thus capturing increasingly large insects as their colonies grow.

“The average size of the prey captured by the colony increased 20-fold as colony size increased from less than 100 to 10,000 spiders,” says Avilés, who studied the spiders in the wild in Amazonian Ecuador with undergraduate student Eric Yip and graduate student Kimberly Powers.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: Arachnophobia City! Thousands and Thousands of Spiders | Giant Spider Web

COLOURlovers blog has neat photo gallery and interview with Johanna Lundberg, Jenna Sutela and Timo Koro of thisissand.com, a Flash website that lets you play with colorful digital sand (remember that toy now?).

Link | This is Sand Blog | Play This is Sand [Flash: click anywhere on the screen to start, or the small gray box on the upper lefthand corner for instruction]