John Farrier's Blog Posts

The Sharpsicord Is an Enormous Pin Barrel Harp


(YouTube Link)


Sound engineer Henry Dagg built an enormous pin barrel harp with 11,520 holes that can be selected for different compositions. He calls it the "Sharpsicord." Here is his performance of Paul McCartney's "The Long and Winding Road."

Link via Urlesque

First Knee Replacement on a Cat

A British cat that was run over by a car has received the first complete feline knee replacement surgery. After twelve weeks of hospitalization and unprecedented veterinary procedures, Missy the cat is back at home with her family:

The new total knee replacement implant for the other leg was designed by Dr Fitzpatrick, Professor Gordon Blunn and Mr Jay Meswania of OrthoFitz Implants.

It is made of two parts which are linked together with a hinged mechanism so that the knee ligaments - which had all been shredded - would no longer be required and the knee could no longer dislocate.[...]

The three-inch long implant is made out of stainless steel and is bonded to the thigh bone and the shin bone using cement


The design phase was particularly challenging for the prosthetist because human knee replacements need only accommodate walking, but a joint for a cat must assume that the user will try to run and jump.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Bancroft Media

Charlie Brooker on How to Report the News


(YouTube Link)


Charlie Brooker is a journalist and comedian. In this video, he pokes fun at the former profession by illustrating how television news is structured according to a standardized style that tries to impress the viewer without necessarily being informative. Content warning: some NSFW language.

via reddit

15 Big Cheats and Fakers Who Won

Manolith has a list of fifteen people the editorial team says cheated and faked their way into fame and fortune. Some of them have been in the news in the past few years, but others stretch back into history. Among their choices (to no small degree of disagreement in the comments) is Bill Gates, whom Monolith alleges:

The problem is, Bill Gates was never successful in his attempt to build an operating system back in 1980. He paid a man named Tim Paterson $50,000 for his shaky but working operating system, QDOS, which was a rough clone of an already established OS called CP/M, written by Gary Kildall. Gates polished QDOS into a finished product, renamed it DOS, slapped Microsoft on the disk labels and licensed it to IBM in what would become the start of a very lucrative career for an individual of very mediocre technical talent. The rest is blue-screened history.


http://www.manolith.com/2010/01/27/15-big-cheats-and-fakers-who-won/ via Digg | Photo: Corbis

How to Suck at Facebook



Cartoonist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal describes nine people that are unfortunately on Facebook. He's been on a roll lately, adding new content to his archive of cartoons about every four days.

Link via reddit

Putting Weird Things in Coffee



Putting Weird Things in Coffee is a food blog about one man's quest to find tasty and unusual ingredients to put in coffee beyond the traditional cream and sugar. These include salmon, blue cheese, and peanut butter. Pictured above is a mixture that he did not invent: juustoleipä, a Finnish cheese made from reindeer milk, that is often dipped in coffee before eaten.

What unusual things have you mixed in your coffee?

Link via Amanda Bensen (who notes that her family used to brew coffee with reindeer bones)

Never Use Google Translate to Generate the Text of Your Tattoo



Good advice, right? Because you wouldn't want a typo in something permanent. J. Harker, a graduate student in the classics, often gets requests for English to Latin translation by people who want to get tattoos. He has a blog post describing the various errors that people make when attempting to translate a language that they don't understand, and pictures of the inked results. The text above translates as "He is better as I appear hated on behalf of what I am than as I appear I like on behalf of what not I am."

Link via reddit

Is Meat Grown in a Petri Dish Kosher?

So scientists can now grow meat in a laboratory -- that is, animal muscle tissue without starting with an actual, living animal. This has brought up all sorts of interesting ethical questions, particularly among vegetarians. But here's the angle that Tim Barribeau of io9 took: is artificially-produced meat compliant with Jewish food traditions?

We talked to Rabbi Arnold Bienstock of Congregation Shaarey Tefilla, a Conservative Synagogue in Carmel, Indiana, and asked his opinion on the matter. "The way any religious issue comes down, in the Jewish community, is the more traditional, pious Orthodox Jews have a hard time accepting change, the Reform embrace it, and the Conservatives fight about it," said Bienstock, with dry humor. So it will vary greatly along the various degrees of observation.

Bienstock thinks the Conservatives will be hesitant to adopt artificially raised meat, unless it's seen as something completely different to its original form. The Rabbi compared this to two previous cases with kosher food: cheese and gelatin. Both contain animal products which may not be kosher, so specific variations have to be made for people who are strictly Orthodox. On the other hand, the Conservative movement viewed these objects as being so far changed and removed from their original source, that they don't need to be kosher. Says Bienstock, "these elements are re-defined as not really being meat, as the substance is so incredibly transformed. So using [this technology] the Conservative movement might say it's not really meat because it doesn't come from an animal."


Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Google Earth Guys


(Video Link)


When we last left the Google Street View Guys, the pair had the simple task of photographing every address on every road on earth. Their new assignment is for Google Earth: to photograph everything on earth from every angle and every altitude. Animation by Dan Meth. Content warning: NSFW language.

The Zero-Rupee Note Is Very Valuable



Fumiko Nagano of the World Bank writes that petty bribery is a normal part of government bureaucracy in India. If you need some license or form or permission, you'll probably have to pay a bribe. An organization attempting to reform this practice has begun distributing rupee notes with a designated value of zero, to be offered to government officials when they ask for money:

According to Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.


Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: 5th Pillar

Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt Now Official T-Shirt of New Hampshire

State officials have declared the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt the official t-shirt of state economic development. The shirt was designed by a firm in the town of Keene, so the state is claiming it as its own:

"The Mountain's Three Wolf Moon is a true New Hampshire success story," said Steve Boucher of the Division of Economic Development. "What started off as a tongue-in-cheek take on a cool T-shirt has resulted in worldwide acclaim for a very creative and growing Granite State business."[...]

Boucher said that regardless of the truth of the claims of mystical properties possessed by the shirt, he's optimistic about the effect it will have on New Hampshire's economy.

"If it can generate half of the results that Amazon shoppers are experiencing, we're in awesome shape," he said. "Every CEO should be wearing this shirt."


Link via Urlesque | Photo: WUMR

Previously on Neatorama:
Three Wolf Moon Shirt
Three Wolf Moon Shirt Parodies
Three Keyboard Cat Moon Shirt

Also: a good video about the shirt from College Humor

The Phone Book Sculptures of Alex Queral



Philadelphia-based artist Alex Queral carves the faces of celebrities into phone books, then coats the results with acrylic:

For me, the human head was a natural choice of subject matter because of its inherent expressiveness. I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.

In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I’m celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.


Gallery at the link.

http://www.projectsgallery.com/Queral.htm via The Presurfer | Photo: Projects Gallery

Book Holder For Your Bike



Bike riding can get a bit boring after a while. So why not read a book while you're at it? The Performance Book Caddy attaches to your bicycle's handlebars, letting you focus on your text while riding. What would possibly go wrong?

http://www.performancebike.com/bikes/Product_10052_10551_1028751_-1_64000_20000_64513?PID=3640241&cm_mmc=CJ-_-2617611-_-3640241-_-NEW+-+America%27s+Best+Selection+At+PerformanceBike.com+#ReviewHeader via DVICE

Fans Campaign for Heavy Metal to Become a Recognized Religion

In the country where "Jedi" appears as a category on the census (and there are 390,000 adherents), heavy metal music might likewise become a recognized religion. British fans have mounted a political campaign for official status:

Rock magazine Metal Hammer launched its campaign last week and has already attracted nearly 10,000 followers to a Facebook group.

It has even gained the backing of a metal figurehead, Saxon frontman Biff Byford, whom the magazine says will become the proposed faith's ''world metal peace ambassador'' if the campaign proves successful.


Link | Photo: PA

What Is This Thing in the Sky?



The Geekologie writer suggests that this mysterious object in the sky of a Google Street View image is the hole from which the "Four Unicornmen of the Apocalypse" will emerge. It's from outside of Porto, a city in northern Portugal town in western Spain.

What do you think that it is?

Link via Geekologie

UPDATE: There is a city in northern Portugal called Porto and a town in western Spain called Porto. Which one is it? A ferocious debate rages in the comments.

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Profile for John Farrier

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