This past January, Timothy Ryback wrote in The Times about the books that Adolf Hitler kept in his private library. 1,200 books that he retained at his residences in southern Germany are now warehoused by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Ryback suggests that one might gain insights into the mind of a man by the books that he collects. Among Hitler's favorites:

He ranked Don Quixote, along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gulliver’s Travels, among the great works of world literature. “Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself,” he said. In Robinson Crusoe he perceived “the development of the entire history of mankind”. Don Quixote captured “ingeniously” the end of an era. He was especially impressed by Gustave Doré’s depictions of Cervantes’s delusion-plagued hero.

He also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather, with a gold-embossed eagle, flanked by his initials, on the spine.

Hitler considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller. While Shakespeare had fuelled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories of midlife crises and sibling rivalries. Why was it, he wondered, the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?

Link | Image: Calvin College

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Stanford University's robotics lab has built autonomous cars for several years. Recently, it established a land speed record for a robot car -- 140 mph in an Audi TT-S nicknamed "Shelly". But their next goal is even more ambitious: to have Shelly race the twisted dirt road that leads up to Pike's Peak. Chris Dannen writes in Fast Company about the changes that allow the car to safely navigate sharper turns at higher speeds:

The new autonomous TT-S is markedly different from Junior, however. Junior was environmentally-aware; it had cameras that could see objects and road features, and it paired that data with GPS data. All that processing required two on-board Linux computers running quad-core Pentium chips and programmed in C and C++.

The new TT-S, unofficially dubbed "Shelly," uses a different system. It has no cameras, only GPS, and a smaller, less powerful computing box running Sun's Java Real Time System running on Solaris. Why? Despite Junior's speedy processors, it still takes the car between 20-50 milliseconds to react to inputs from its sensory equipment. Because the TT-S "Shelly" is traveling at much higher speeds--the team has pushed it over 140 mph--even 20 milliseconds is too much of a delay.

You can view more videos of the project at the link.

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Since he was a young boy, Anthony Toth has seen the first class cabin of an old Pan Am 747 as the very quintessence of luxury. So he has spent the past twenty years building a simulation of that environment in his garage. In addition to spending $50,000 on the project, he's traveled widely just to find vintage equipment. Candace Jackson writes in The Wall Street Journal:

To find artifacts from the airline, which ceased operation in 1991, Mr. Toth spends his vacations trekking out to an area in the Mojave Desert known as the airplane boneyard, where retired aircraft are stripped for parts. When he can't buy an original Pan Am item in good condition, like seat covers, he recruits professionals to create suitable stand-ins.

Julie Fisher, a friend of Mr. Toth's, says one time she got a call from Mr. Toth saying he'd heard about a source for headsets in Bangkok. A few days later, the two of them hopped a plane to Thailand for the weekend to track them down. (As an airline employee, Mr. Toth can usually fly himself and a friend for free if space is available.)

There's a slideshow of Toth's work at the link.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Brian L. Frank for the WSJ

Katie Liljenquist of Brigham Young University led a study that suggests that clean-smelling environments subtly encourage people to avoid abberant behavior. From Science Daily:

The study titled "The Smell of Virtue" was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness.

As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic "trust game." Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.

Link via Instapundit | Image: flickr user rq?

Image: Erin McKean

Erin McKean is a Chicago-based lexicographer who writes at the blog A Dress A Day. There she opines on various dresses that she sees and makes. Her most recent creation is a dress inspired by the classic video game Tetris. You can view more pictures at the link.

Link via Geekologie | Interview with McKean

Atlas Obscura has compiled pictures and information about twelve different churches and shrines decorated with human bones. The picture above is from a wall at the Chapel of Bones at the Royal Church of St. Francis in Portugal. Due to a land shortage, in the Sixteenth Century, the resident monks decided to clear out nearby cemeteries and relocate the bones to the chapel:

However, rather than interring the bones behind closed doors, the monks, who were concerned about society's values at the time, thought it best to put them on display. They thought this would provide Evora, a town noted for its wealth in the early 1600s, with a helpful place to meditate on the transience of material things in the undeniable presence of death. This is made clear by the thought-provoking message above the chapel door: "Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos," or: "We bones that are here, for your bones we wait." The immediate view as you enter the Chapel gives you some idea of its scale and the sheer number of bodies that are interred here - some 5000 corpses. Among them, in a small white coffin by the altar, are the bones of the three Franciscan monks who founded the church in the 13th century. Also included are two desiccated corpses hanging by chains from the wall next to a cross. One is that of a child.

Link via io9 | Image: flickr user Tiago Ribeiro

Photo: Elite Choice

Oddee has pictures of twelve unique bathtubs, such as the one pictured above, which was made out of 18-karat gold. Its estimated value was $1 million, which is probably why it was stolen out of a Japanese hotel in 2007.

Other bathtubs at the link include one that looks like a high-heeled shoe and one inspired by the works of Le Corbusier.

Link via The Presurfer

Yu-Ying Wu, a graduate student in industrial design at a Taiwanese university, created a foam block that turns into a chair when compressed. The holes in the block aren't random -- they're carefully shaped and selected to fold into a specific pattern when the user sits on the chair:

Wu added that her other inspiration for a chair with holes came from plant cells. The appearance of the holes makes people believe that the chair can breathe. Moreover, for the movement of either sitting down, being seated or standing up, the chair can transform in accordance with sitting posture, acting as if it were breathing.

Click on the link for larger images.

Link via DVICE | Images: CCTV

Image: Gabriel Cañas

Mexican industrial designer Gabriel Cañas created this fiberglass Tetris-inspired chair. So far, it's one-of-a-kind, so it's not yet available for retail. Follow the link to Cañas' portfolio for more odd furniture.

Link via GearFuse | Previously on Neatorama: Tetris Furniture

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Meredith Woerner of the sci-fi blog io9 suspects that this video might be viral marketing for the next Star Trek movie. Ostensibly, it's a Klingon military recruiting commercial. I'm not sure what is the original language, but thankfully it's been dubbed into Klingon for your convenience.

via io9

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Five artists from the art collective Cube Works in Toronto recreated Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper out of 4,050 cubes, in all measuring 8.5 by 17 feet. The work was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records and sold to a collector in Florida.

Link via Popped Culture | Artists' Website (Warning: self-starting audio)

Image: Ryan Dunlavey

Artist Ryan Dunlavey has created several comic strips mixing science fiction franchises with classic comics, such as the above mashup of Family Circus with The Fantastic Four. Others include He-Man with Garfield, Peanuts with X-Men, and Alien vs. Predator with Spy vs. Spy.

Previously on Neatorama: Dunlavey's Action Philosophers comic book series.

Link via io9 | Artist's Website

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The Harvey Awards are given annually by the comic book industry. This promotional video for them is a parody of Alec Baldwin's sales rant from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. The corporate office sends Val down to talk to the dregs in the sales department: Garfield, Heathcliff, Dagwood, Charlie Brown, and that guy from B.C. The message is simple: sell newspapers or you're fired.

First prize is a Harvey Award. Anybody want to see Second prize? A can of spinach. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? ... You've got a readership. The syndicates paid good money. Get them to buy the newspaper!

Here's the original scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. Content warning: adult language in both videos.

via Popped Culture | Harvey Awards

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Researchers at at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working since the 1990s on helicopters that can navigate indoor spaces autonomously. This one won the 2009 AUVSI Aerial Robotics Competition. Laser scanners and cameras allow it to move through a building on its own. Potential applications include industrial inspection and disaster rescue in hazardous locations.

Contest Page via Popular Science

Image: Edgadget

Look at the picture. When the man moves his joystick to the left, the helmet on the girl's head pulls her left ear, signally that she should go left. When he moves his joystick to the right, the opposite occurs.

Thomas Ricker of Engadget speculates about the most obvious application for this device from Kajimoto Laboratory: a navigation aid for the blind. With a GPS system added, it could be used to give the visually impaired greater independence.

Four years ago, Alex wrote about a similar gadget.

Link (Google Translator version) via Engadget