If you've ever eaten sushi, then you'll know that a little dab of wasabi (or Japanese horseradish) goes a looooong way.
Now, a company in Japan has created a prototype silent smoke alarm for people with hearing disabilities. It sprays a mist of wasabi essence (from spray can wasabi!) into the air.
The pungent smell succeeded in waking up 13 out of 14 test subjects within 2 minutes. One deaf subject woke up in a mere 10 seconds.
After Juergen of Random Good Stuff blog moved to Valencia, Spain, he started a new blog about the city.
This photo above is from the annual competition of lights, where the residents of a street named Calle Sueca apparently went over the top to create the best-est street lights evar!
Not being a big drinker and all (I can count with my one hand how many alcoholic drinks I've had last year), I was surprised that I scored pretty darn high on The Booze Test.
If you can tell your vodka from your gin, then you'll ace this web test for sure! http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/booze - via Aramax
CBS has just launched webisodes of Star Trek: The Original Series seasons 1, 2, and 3. They're all full-length features, all you have to do is sit through an occasional 30 second ad before the launch of the clip.
Also available at the time of writing: MacGyver (season 1), The Twilight Zone (seasons 1 and 2), Hawaii Five-0 (season 1) and Melrose Place (season 1).
If you missed these shows on TV, here's a chance for you to catch up for free!
Link - via Who Tends the Fires
(CBS also has select full episodes of more recent TV shows, just click on the "Shows" link on top of the page and select the TV show you'd like to see - some have full webisodes, some don't.)
Found at Oobject | Wikipedia entry
If only all microcars are this cute! That's the Brütsch Mopetta, a single seat, 3-wheeled roadster that can zoom up to 45 km/h (28 mph). Only 14 were ever made.
The prize for this week's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game is Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's neat book book
Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. (Congrats to v.dog who won the last game... today, it just may be YOUR turn!)
The book features the adventures of Kitteh and Pip (in over 250 comic panels’) and includes comments from Aloysius Koford and never-before-seen drawings. If you like Adam’s old-timey LOLcat cartoon, this is the book for you!
Easy peasy contest rules: Place your caption in the comment section - one caption per comment, please. You can (and should) submit as many funny ones as you can think of.
Good luck (and if you don’t win, you can still get Adam’s book at Lulu). Oh, and by the way, Adam got a new job as a story artist for a video game production studio - congrats Adam!
Update 3/19/08: Congratulations to Wincey who won with this caption:Gonna sue that damn carwash for shrinkage.
Does Neatorama look different? That's because we've just completed an upgrade to Neatorama's look and feel (it went pretty smoothly, thanks Wordpress!)
Hopefully you guys will like these two new features:
Well, that's it for now. We're still moving little things around, but if you guys catch any mistake, please let me know (and thanks in advance!)
Xie Xiaoxing won "Best Camera Image" in the Fujian regional heat for Miss China contest. The contest organizers thought that Xie was a woman - but it turned out that he was a man ... on his way to become a woman!
The organisers assumed he was female - but he had only had the first phase of surgery to turn him into a woman.
Mr Xie says the Fashion Beauty Plastic Surgery Hospital in Fuzhou city had offered him a full sex change in exchange for him advertising its services.
"After the first phase of surgery, I stopped for a while to deal with some personal issues, and when I came back last autumn they'd gone bankrupt," he said.
Mr Xie says he isn't sure now whether he's a man or a woman and can't even get a job because he can't confirm his gender.
Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, visited a state hospital in Ukraine 15 years ago to give a series of lecture. What he saw was so appalling that he began volunteering his time to do surgery and teach the doctors there.
Here's what happened in a typical Ukrainian brain surgery:
Henry Marsh, a senior consultant at St George’s hospital in Tooting, south London, has used the Bosch 9.6 volt battery-operated hand tool to open up the skulls of his patients to remove life-threatening tumours. Occasionally the battery has gone flat halfway through.
The operation is performed with the patients fully awake – a technique that fell out of use in Britain 50 years ago. Marsh said that Ukrainians could withstand such a practice because they were “very tough”.
The 58-year-old consultant travels to Ukraine twice a year to perform free operations at a clinic run by a fellow surgeon, Igor Petrovich. The handyman drill was used because the local doctors could not afford state-of-the-art equipment.
Link | Main Article - via Arbroath
Open Doors is a neat little Flash game by Kongregate user soapaintnice.
The object of the game is simple: use the arrow keys to move a square box to its destination through a bunch of doors. The trick is, some doors don't open the way you expect 'em to.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/soapaintnice/open-doors/?referrer=Jayisgames - via AQFL
Belgium Beer Flag
Brazil Beer Flag
Japanese Beer Flag
Arnold Worldwide ad agency created this cheeky "A World of Beer" flag ads for Sunset Grill and Tap in Allston, Boston - via Ads of the World
If Mario was real, thas one creepy plumber. Created with Photoshop CS2 and a bunch of random faces pasted over a 3d render of Mario from Nintendo.
Link - via digg
Oh, the sacrifices scientists will do for science! University of New Mexico psychologist Geoffrey Miller "tapped the talent" at local gentleman's club (read: strip club) to find out what factor fertility plays in the showgirls' income.
Here's what he found out:
Over two-months, the dancers recorded their menstrual phase, whether they were taking the Pill, and how much they made.
First, the bad news: Birth control pills are a bummer for business. Pill-taking lap dancers, whose fertility is always suppressed, made substantially less money across the board.
Miller can't say for sure that pheromones make the difference, but the results were interesting. During the most fertile days of their cycle, NON pill-popping lap dancers pulled in nearly twice as much as they made when they were menstruating.
Links: The Loh Down on Science (by Sandra Tsing Loh) | Psychology Today (Photo: rileyroxx [Flickr])
Are you bored? Got nothing to do? If you think that boredom is something to
be avoided - read this. It turns out that boredom may actually be a good thing:
But are we too busy twirling through the songs on our iPods -- while checking e-mail, while changing lanes on the highway -- to consider whether we are giving up a good thing? We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love.
"If you think of boredom as the prelude to creativity, and loneliness as the prelude to engagement of the imagination, then they are good things," said Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Sudbury psychiatrist and author of the book "CrazyBusy." "They are doorways to something better, as opposed to something to be abhorred and eradicated immediately."
Here's an interesting article by Carolyn Y. Johnson for the Boston Globe (kind of long, but if you're bored reading it, don't blame me, mmkay?) : Link
Photo: Globe Staff / Yoon S. Byun
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote an article titled 10 Sites For Finding Wonderful Things, and guess who made it to the list?
Yup - it's this lil' blog! Here's what he said about Neatorama:
Neatorama is a lot like BoingBoing, but a lot less high-brow and a little more fun. Regular games of "What Is It?" challenge readers to identify photographs of old and unusual objects. The whole site is almost a clearinghouse of weird and it's a much quicker read than BoingBoing.
"Clearinghouse of the wierd," now that's a tag line! (And do people really think Neatorama is like Boing Boing?) See who else made the list: Link
