Photo: NATO Exercise Cooperative Osprey 1996, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

Bryan Finoki of Subtopia blog has an interesting post about "mysterious simulacrums of urban space":

... ghostly MOUT (Military Operation on Urban Terrain) training facilities where entire pseudo landscapes and quasi architectures are designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered, over and over again to help prepare the armed forces for counter-insurgency warfare in cities abroad--life inside a simulative architectural loop; landscape as militaristic prop.

The article goes on to talk about the "Mecca" of military urban training: a mysterious camp called CAMOUT being built deep in the middle of nowhere, USA:

So, what will a quarter of a billion dollars get you? Well, reading on we learn CAMOUT, if completed as planned, will include 1,560 buildings (some as high as five stories) in seven separate districts: the urban core (as previously described), east and west stadium districts, a hospital district, an ‘old town’ which will actually be modeled on Sadr City (a suburb of Baghdad), and finally an industrial district as well as a diplomatic district. “A city like no one has ever seen,” it will be “bisected by a river, already in place, that’s up to 80 feet wide in some spots,” even though in reality we are told it will contain absolutely no water. “Some areas will have buildings that have been reduced to rubble and there will be shanty towns around the city” ...

Link

This is a familiar experience for most of us: getting stuck in a traffic jam only to find out later that there is no obvious cause (like accident, construction work or bottleneck).

Well, Japanese scientist Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University has finally found the answer: the traffic jam is caused by ... too many cars!

In the New Journal of Physics a study by his group explains why we're occasionally caught in jams for no obvious reason.

The real origin of the snarl up often has nothing to do with obvious obstructions such as accidents or construction work but is simply the result of there being too many cars.

The team discovered the importance of traffic density by applying techniques to model the movements of lots of particles to real-life moving traffic. The research shows that even tiny fluctuations in car-road density cause a chain reaction which can lead to a jam.

The team also studied cars driving around a circular track with a circumference of 230m. They put 22 cars on the road and asked the drivers to go steadily at 30km/h (19mph) around the track. While the flow was initially free, the effect of a driver altering his speed reverberated around the track and led to brief standstills.

Prof Sugiyama says, "Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways. When a large number of vehicles, beyond the road capacity, are successively injected into the road, the density exceeds the critical value and the free flow state becomes unstable."

Link

That's the Space Odyssey room in FantaSuite Hotel in Burnsville, Minnesota. It's a recreation of a Gemini Space Capsule, with a custom 10-sided bed and a "moon crater" tiled whirlpool.

The FantaSuite Hotel, as its name implies, specializes in themed hotel rooms, like Castle, Cave, Pharaoh's Chamber, Sherwood Forest for adults to ... um, act out their fantasies. Yeah. That's it.

http://www.fantasuite.com/room_themes.asp?LocationId=1 - via Blog Like You Give a Damn

In Michel Gondry's film Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black accidentally erased the videotapes at his friend's (played by Mos Def) VHS store. To make up for it, they "sweded" or remade classic movies into funny short films starring themselves

David Chen of Always Watching blog has compiled the top 10 fan-made "sweded' homemade films - from Predator to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings.

Some of them are better than the original movies! http://www.alwayswatching.org/features/top-10-sweded-films - Thanks David! More fan-made sweded videos here: Link

We posted a tip on how to lose weight by eating breakfast before on Neatorama, but I think it's safe to say that if you eat this, then all bets are off.

Behold the Lady's Brunch Burger by none other than Paula Deen of Paula's Home Cooking at the Food Network TV channel. And yes, that's a meat patty, egg, and bacon in between glazed donuts.

Link | Recipe - Thanks raphael!

Are you unhappy at your job? Ever wonder what it's like to have the job of your dreams? Here's VocationVacation, a service that match people with established mentors to let them "test drive" their dream jobs, from winemaking to TV producing:

In 2003, Kurth's VocationVacations opened with a small stable of mentors that's now 300 strong. Mentorships last a few days and cost
anywhere from $600 (animal therapist, brewmaster) to $2,000 (music producer, race car pit crew member).

The most popular? Brewmaster, cheesemaker, sports announcer and comedian. Mentors pocket a small fee -- and may even meet their next hire: A few adult interns have left the stint with a job offer.

"To answer that nagging 'What if?' without losing the time and cash that switching careers usually takes is huge," says Kurth, whose book, "Test-Drive Your Dream Job," encourages readers to answer that question. For a relatively small investment, he says, "people walk away with peace of mind."

Some people find out that the dream jobs they've always wanted are as good as they thought they would be. But some find out that the jobs are actually nightmares:

Henry Yamamoto, who'd spent days at his software job daydreaming about running a canine daycare, needed that reality check. "I'd been thinking, 'I'll get to spend all day around a bunch of dogs,'" he says.

After a VocationVacations mentorship at Seattle's Dog Day Out, he realized "it's like running a preschool: 25 dogs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., all getting revved up and tired at different times ... and they all poop."

Link - Thanks Tiffany! (Photo: mio_pls [Flickr])

Today's collaboration with What is it? blog brings us this gruesome looking object. If you can guess what it is, there's a free Neatorama T-shirt in it for you.

Contest rules are easy as pie: place your guess in the comment section, one guess per comment, please. You can submit as many as you'd like. Please post no URL - let others play. The first correct guess will win the T-shirt (old design), but if no one guessed right, then the funniest one will win instead.

Good luck! For more clues and pics, check out What is it? blog.

These were placed onto the head of a calf when they wanted it to stop nursing on the cow, the cow would get poked by the spikes and push the calf away, patent number 1,882,232. An easier solution would be to put them in separate pens, but apparently that wasn't always an option.

Nearly every year, uncontrolled rushing of crowds fleeing a burning building or a riot scene led to people being trampled and even killed.

Now, thanks to a computer simulation developed by Paul M. Torrens of Arizona State University, planners will be able to drop thousands of virtual people to create a virtual mob for a particular scenario:

The specific scenarios Torrens creates could show firefighters how to save the most people, tell architects where to place exits or barriers in stadiums, and guide police forces in corralling unruly mobs.

While most traditional crowd simulations treat individuals as purely physical, with no social or emotional reactions, Torrens's model turns each individual into an "avatar" with an artificial mind. Avatars can plan their own route, adjust their path on the fly, and even respond to the body language of fellow cybercitizens who may be jostling them.

Link [Flash] - Thanks Lizzie!

Nestography is a project by Adam Mathes where he took screenshots of retro 8-bit video games and caption them with poignant, witty, and yes, even snarky comments.

I like this one, from the Nintendo Duck Hunt game I used to play when I was a young boy. http://trenchant.org/nestography/index.html - via Ample Sanity, Thanks Bot!

Neatorama reader Aubrey introduced us to the Chiditarod. It is the urban equivalent of the Iditarod, except instead of dogs and sleds, it's dawgs (humans) and shopping carts.

This year's race, held on March 1, 2008, was done for the charity Burners Without Borders:

When I first arrived, I saw what appeared to be a logistical nightmare unfolding before my eyes. Vikings, Pirates (a lot of Vikings and Pirates), Pac-men, Knights of Camelot, Baseball Furies, Mario Brothers, Where the Wild Things Are, Pilots, and Ninjas among others. 83 teams consisting of an average of 3 to 5 people each in costumes ranging from utilitarian to elaborately awkward trying to squeeze onto a small lot covered with ice and mud.

http://www.ninetyninetyfour.org/2008/03/chiditarod.html - Thanks Aubrey!

Photo: Dave Bullock

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska famously referred to the Internet as a "series of tubes," and got ribbed for it. But here in the Meet Me Room in a business building in downtown Los Angeles, Sen. Stevens ain't that far off.

From Dave Bullock's article at Wired:

In the bowels of the world's most densely populated Meet-Me room -- a room where over 260 ISPs connect their networks to each other -- a phalanx of cabling spills out of its containers and silently pumps the world's information to your computer screen. One tends to think of the internet as a redundant system of remote carriers peppered throughout the world, but in order for the net to function the carriers have to physically connect somewhere. For the Pacific Rim, the main connection point is the One Wilshire building in downtown Los Angeles.

If this facility went down, most of California and parts of the rest of the world would not be able to connect to the internet. Tour one of the web's largest nerve centers, hidden in an otherwise nondescript office building.

Link - Thanks Dave!

How does Simon Allison, a senior food technologist responsible for pet produce for British retailer Marks & Spencer, select food to carry for the store? Why, he taste-tested them, of course:

"You have to chew it a bit.

"I have trained my palate to look for materials that we will not allow in the recipe, such as tripe - pet owners react badly to the smell of tripe. "I'm looking for a patè texture, almost to the point where you could spread it on crusty bread."

His favourite is the organic luxury chicken dinner with vegetables for cats. "It has the taste and aroma of chicken and some of what you call the red flavours - things like heart and liver; gutsy, savoury notes. "Then you get a mealy, green pea, pulse aroma and occasionally a sweeter note from the carrot."

Link - via Wrongorama (a neat new blog "where what shouldn't be is." It's like Neatorama but for things that are just ... well, wrong.) - Thanks Alex!

Photo: rhinny [Flickr]

All right, guys, it's time for this week's Neatorama and Hobotopia's Caption Monkey game. Today's prize is Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's excellent book Meet the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. (Congrats to Andini who won the last game, will it be your turn today?)

In this book, Adam compiles the adventures of Kitteh and Pip (over 250 comic panels' worth) alongside comments from Aloysius Koford and never-before-seen drawings. If you like Adam's old-timey LOLcat cartoon, this book is a must-have.

Contest rules are darned simple: To win, simply submit the funniest caption. Place your caption in the comment section - one caption per comment, please, but you can submit as many as you can think of.

Good luck (and if you don't win, you can still get Adam's book at Lulu)

…that my mom is on her way to pick me up