Bill and Amarins Harrison and their three children are on a lengthy family vacation. They plan on riding their custom-made bicycle to Florida, and thence to Alaska and back again:

They departed Renfro Valley on Saturday. Their immediate destination is Oak Ridge, and then on to the Atlantic Coast by way of the Carolinas. From there, they’ll travel to Florida, head to the Southwest by way of the Southeast (hoping to spend the winter months peddling through warmer environs) and will eventually travel up the Pacific Coast to Alaska.

They figure on arriving in Alaska in August 2010. They’ll stay there for one year, then head back to Renfro Valley, arriving back home sometime in late 2012....

“Risk-taking is what made this country great,” he says. “It wasn’t politics or religion. It was about risking to go around the next bend in the river or over the next mountain. If we still took those risks today, this would be a better world.”

http://tnhunting.com/cumberlands/?p=1834 via Instapundit

(College Humor Video Link)

Deceptive Deceptions is Dan Meth's latest short film, this time tying together all modern conspiracy theories.  What do the JFK assassination, actor John Candy, NASA, and Wyoming have in common?  This video explains it all.

Films by Dan Meth previously featured on Neatorama:
Toy Movies
Association Professionals Through the Ages
Internet People

Hershel McGriff, an old NASCAR champion from yesteryear, started racing at the age of 17 in his family's sedan and last competed in 2002. But he just returned and competed at Portland International Raceway, finishing 13 out of 26:

The odds were against him before the race started. Although he automatically qualified as one of 26 drivers in a race that had 28 spots, he had to start at the back of the pack and one lap down because of changes he made to the car after the qualifying session. He replaced the carburetor.

"I really didn't have a lot to lose," he said. "I did not want to go out there and flop around."

He certainly didn't, said Inglebright.

"There were a lot of other cars out there that were a lot slower," the winner said. "He did a great job."

Inglebright suggested that any concerns about an 81-year-old's reaction time in a dangerous sport do not necessarily apply to the youthful McGriff.

"I followed him for a little while and I couldn't get around him," Inglebright said.

Link via Ride Fast & Shoot Straight

At the recent DefCon hackers' convention in Las Vegas, a fake ATM deceived many hackers in attendance:

An organizer for the conference said security authorities seized the device. It’s not known how long the ATM was in the hotel or whether it was placed there by a DefCon attendee to catch his fellow hackers or simply by an outside criminal group trying to target conference attendees.

Witnesses say the kiosk was well-placed to avoid surveillance cameras....

Markus said it was clear to him the ATM was fake when he looked at the smoked glass on the front of the machine and noticed something funny about it. When he beamed a flashlight through the glass, instead of seeing a camera behind it, he saw the PC that was set up to siphon card data.

The ATM had been placed right outside the hotel’s security office.

Link via Crunch Gear

Craftster user UpKnitCreek created this Legend of Zelda-inspired Link outfit for a friend's baby shower. For authenticity, she (he?) even put leather soles on the booties and wrapped the whole thing in a wooden chest that looks like one from the game. More pictures at the link.

Link via Crunch Gear

How will the world end in the immediate future? Slate has a both serious and fun look at this question, allowing users to suggest up to five of one hundred forty-four possible problems that could bring about the end of America and/or the world. These include alien invasion, a swine flu epidemic, and Vermont achieving independence, among many other options.

The application focuses primarily on the United States and its demise, but many problems you could throw into your chosen apocalypse would impact the entire world (e.g. asteroid collision).

What nightmare scenario do you choose?

Interactive Feature Link

Article Link

Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds, statisticians at the University of Vermont, analyzed song lyrics, blog posts, and speeches for certain emotional keywords in order to discern the collective moods of the American people over time:

Still, the University of Vermont study presents what could be a complementary measure, and it provides a few decent cocktail-party nuggets along the way. Dr. Dodds and Dr. Danforth downloaded the lyrics to 232,574 songs by 20,025 artists released between 1960 and 2007, from the Web site hotlyrics.net. From another site, wefeelfine.org, they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009. They also analyzed State of the Union speeches going back to George Washington’s. They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25).

Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was predominant.

Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day.

Link via Hit & Run

Dodds and Danforth's Peer-Reviewed Article

(YouTube Link)

Forty-one people gathered at a Bensons for Beds furniture warehouse in Tewkesbury, UK to break the mattress dominoes record. That means leaning on an upright mattress and then falling over backwards, causing someone behind you on a mattress to fall over backwards, and so on.

Link via The Corner

The Toy Zone has pictures and descriptions of fifteen weapons or defensive systems that historians have found sketched in the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. These include a tank, cluster munitions, and mobile walls. The picture above is of a pivoting radial barrage canon found in the Codex Atlanticus.

Link via Ace

From the people who brought you There, I Fixed It, Don't Judge My Hair is a photoblog of disasterous hairstyles, cuts, and colors.

Link via Double Plus Undead

For years, medical supplies have been sent into remote areas of Kenya on the backs of camels for the needs of the rural population. But seeing this system as inefficient, the Nomadic Communities Trust of Kenya is partnering with an American university and an art school to develop a modern medical laboratory and dispensary that can be mounted on a camel:

A multifunctional system was developed made from bamboo to provide a lightweight, durable ergonomic saddle along with a saddleback structure that holds a compartmented refrigerated unit and solar power generator. The saddles improve the efficiency of the loads carried over rugged terrain. The crystalline solar panels can also be deployed by the mobile clinics for lighting and refrigeration in the field.

Link

This spectrum (I take it) is supposed to classify Internet memes by whether they provoke OMG or WTF reactions by netizens -- and all gradations in between. Bacon vodka, for example would be OMG, whereas human-eating robots would be WTF.

Link via Urlesque

Weighing in at 30,000 pounds, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator of the US Air Force will become the largest air-dropped non-nuclear bomb ever built:

The MOP is 20 feet long and can penetrate bunkers up to 200 feet before exploding. At 15 tons, the MOP is a third heavier than the previous "mother of all bombs", the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, which was only 10.5 tons. The MOP also packs a whopping 5,300 lbs of explosives, which is 10 times the amount its predecessor bunker-buster, the BLU-109, carried. Basically, it's massive.

The push for accelerated deployment is due to the increased perceived nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea. It's believed that many of their nuclear programs could be in development underground, below levels of current bunker-busting bombs' range. The Pentagon intends the rapid deployment to send a message that the United States is tweaking strategies to address new threats. And nothing is more American than advertising the sheer size and tonnage of the bombs hanging below our jets.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-08/pentagon-wants-deploy-largest-non-nuclear-bomb-next-year

Having trouble keeping the Ten Plagues of Passover straight? These finger puppets for Blood, Frogs, Gnats, Wild Animals, Pestilence, Boils, Hail, Locusts, Darkness, and the Angel of Death are a fun way of remembering divine wrath in its many colorful and felt-like manifestations.

Link via Ironic Catholic

The Mind Trainer Loo Roll is packed with puzzles, brain teasers, and Sudoku on every sheet. Create a game for yourself: you don't get to use a sheet until you've solved the puzzle on it.

Link via The Presurfer

Previously on Neatorama: The Puzzle Game Toilet Dispenser