Take Me Back is an intriguing new web series by Joe Baron and Seth Mendelson. It's a story of a guy named "Al" who leads a pretty boring life until he wakes up one morning to find his car gone and a mysterious guy wearing a silver mask shadowing his every move ...
So far there are two chapters online - new ones get posted every Monday. http://www.tmbtheseries.com/index.php?m=1 - Thanks Joseph!
In 1999, Nicholas White took a cigarette break, and then went back up elevator car #30 in New York City's McGraw-Hill building.
Little did he know that he would be trapped in the elevator for the next 41 hours. Here's a condensed look at White's ordeal, as captured by the building's security camera: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators - Thanks Elan!
To protest the use of biometric data, a hacker club in Germany called the Chaos Computer Club has published the fingerprint of German Home Secretary Wolfgang Schäuble.
There's more:
http://www.cebit.de/newsanzeige_e.html?multi=1&back=/homepage_e&news=33069&back=%2Fhomepage_e - Thanks tim!The hackers go even further than reproducing Schäuble's fingerprint; the magazine also includes a thin film that can be taped over your finger to deceive fingerprint readers with Schäuble's fingerprint. "We recommend that you use the film whenever you're fingerprint is taken, such as when you enter the US, stop over at Heathrow , or even when you touch bottles at your local super market -- just to be on the safe side," Engling says.
The CCC says that the fingerprint it published is genuine. It says it got the fingerprint from a sympathizer who took it from a glass the Home Secretary had been drinking from during a podium discussion. The hackers then saved the fingerprint and created the dummy fingerprints from it in a meticulous process that took all night. A total of 4000 copies of the magazine were printed, more than 2000 of which are currently being sent to members of the CCC.
Remember Laika the dogmonaut .. er, Russian space dog? Well, if the Russians have their way, more animals are on their way to outer space. Here's their plan of sending monkeys to Mars:
They won't utter Yuri Gagarin's famous phrase "Let's go!" But the monkeys of Sochi have already proven their worth as trailblazers in space - and now they are being groomed for a trip to Mars.
The macaques will be the first to experience the radiation that poses a big risk to astronauts - or Russian cosmonauts - on any flight to the Red Planet.
UK photographer Nick Veasey's photographs reveal the inner beauty of every day objects ... literally! He takes x-ray photos of common objects, animals and insects to turn them into mesmerizing and intriguing art.
Link - via Newslite, thanks Simon!
Hey, this is quite useful: Jimmy Ruska created an unofficial Google Translate plug-in for Firefox. All you have to do is ALT-click on words and presto! You'll get the translation right then and there.
Link - Thanks Jimmy!
Ah, the glamour of being a TV reporter ... imagine all the fun travel and adventure you'll have reporting live. Oh, not to mention the attacks, explosions and crazy animals you'll encounter ... "Put that on the news!"
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks chris!
Here's a neat tip from Biggie of Lunch in a Box blog on how to make individual portions in freezer bags:
I operate from more of the spur-of-the-moment approach to cooking, so it’s essential to have a well stocked freezer and pantry. One drawback, though, is that if I’ve frozen food in big blocks, I can’t use just a bit quickly without defrosting the whole thing.
Enter my Japanese-language freezing books. A standard tip for freezing ground foods or thick sauces in small portions is to first put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you’ll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.
Read the entire tip here: Link - Thanks Deborah Hamilton!
We posted about the dangers of the Large Hadron Collider before (how dangerous? Like opening a tiny blackhole on Earth).
Now, some guys are suing CERN to stop the project:
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
Link - Thanks Xander!
Cracked has a funny post about the world's tiniest "countries" - it's in quotes because they're just patches of land (or an old sea fort) that some crazy guys claim as their own countries.
Take for example The Kingdom of Redonda:
Christopher Columbus discovered the island in 1493 and named it Santa Maria la Redonda (meaning "Saint Mary the round") and that's all we know before the history of this proud uninhabited nation turns into legend, fiction and drunken lies. Back in Queen Victoria's days, a guy named Matthew Dowdy Shiell claimed himself as king. Over the generations the kingship was given away and sold several times to people who loved the idea of putting "King" on their business card.
Right now, four men claim to be the rightful king of this shitty island.
You may think we say "shitty" as an insult, in which case you are half right, because it is also an accurate description. It's biggest export is shit (Guano, to be exact). Over 7,000 tons of shit came out of Redonda every year until operations ended in World War I.
Link (And yes, the photo is King Bob the Bald, one of the self-proclaimed rulers of Redonda) - Thanks Christophe!
Previously on Neatorama: 5 Smallest Countries in the World
We previously posted about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco that is infested with floating trash.
Because there isn't much in terms of video footage of this phenomenon, VBS.tv decided to investigate. Rory Ahearn of VBS.tv wrote:
At VBS.tv we had read all the articles about this environmental problem but didn't see much in the way of video. So curiosity and the challenge compelled us west to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to show what other people had only been writing about. We go all the way out ( 2 straight days on a sail boat) expecting to see a floating dump, looking for our money shot that will make us famous.
Here's the bad news, there is no money shot. What people don't get is that it's not really a patch and it's not really an island, both of which you might be able to contain and control. No, what we found is much worse. It's like a gigantic toxic stew and it's a big big problem that we need to pay attention to now.
Here's part 1 of 12 of TOXIC- Garbage Island: Link (Flash video, warning: um, strong language) - Thanks Rory!
A couple of months ago, Freakonomics Blog asked its readers to decide a new "6-word motto" for the United States. And the winner was:
Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay
Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics wrote:
I applaud your choice of winner, and I especially applaud “edholston,” the blog reader who wrote the motto. “Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay” is, while perhaps not outrightly uplifting, a wonderfully concise acknowledgment of the paradox that a capitalist democracy inevitably is: a place that is often well worth complaining about, and which allows you to complain as loudly as you wish.
Link - via Locust & Honey (Photo: JBAT [Flickr])
This isn't my idea of a vacation, but places like this abandoned Soviet mine in the Kyshtym region (which unlike other Soviet mines, at least it's not radioactive) seems to be very exciting to urban explorers.
WebUrbanist has a list of abandoned "wonders" of the former Soviet Union (from island fortresses to frozen mines): Link
Do you love There Will Be Blood? Do you wish that there's some sort of a board game to go along with the movie? Something that you can play while drinking some milkshake? Well, fret not. Here's There Will Be Monopoly.
http://www.alwayswatching.org/news/geekin-out-there-will-be-monopoly | You can try to snag it on eBay
