The Daily Telegraph has assembled what it considers to be the twenty strangest ads ever placed on Craigslist. These include a chair that Ralph Nader once (possibly) sat in, a drunk clown, and a woman who would like to rent out her bathroom. Here's one for a vast collection of papal mitres -- Pope hats:

"Because of this terrible economy, I'm having to shut down my business. I have OVER 1300 Pope hats (replicas) that I REALLY need to get rid of. The pope hats came from China and are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the REAL POPE). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat or maybe a nice dog would wear one."

Link via Hit & Run

Image via flickr user Beechwood Photography used under creative commons license.

David Derbyshire writes in The Daily Mail that ancient Britons may have developed a sophistated land navigation system among various sites and markers. Amateur archaeologist Tom Brooks has analyzed 1,500 prehistoric sites and found a pattern:

He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles - these are triangles with two sides the same length.

This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.

For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.

Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
Mr Brooks added: 'The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.

At the link, you can see a map illustrating Brooks' hypothesis.

Link via Gizmodo

Image by flickr user Danny Sullivan used under creative commons license.

Photo: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photograher who takes pictures of electrical charges. His exhibit "Lightning Fields" is currently on display at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to directly apply electricity to film. The above image is entitled "Lightning Fields 128, 2008."

Artist's Website

Link via Gizmodo

Previously on Neatorama: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Henry VIII Photos

(YouTube Link)

Courtesy of the British Medical Asssociation, Wired has a collection of seven videos from the 1930s showing common surgeries. They're good demonstrations of what has changed and what hasn't in the past seventy years of medicine. The video above is of a Caesarean birth. Others include brain, ovarian, and tonsil surgeries. Note that these videos are medically graphic and not for the squeamish.

Link

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a Mississippi woman blind for the past nine years can see 20/70 after one of her own teeth was surgically implanted in one of her eyes:

To begin the months-long process, doctors removed one of Thornton's canine teeth—aka an eyetooth—along with part of the jaw and cut it all down to a shape small enough to replace the cornea. The doctors then drilled a hole into it to insert a lens. In order for the tooth to bind to the lens sufficiently, the implant spent a couple months in the patient's body. In Thornton's case, it was implanted near her shoulder.

To prep the eye to receive the tooth and lens, the doctors placed a cheek graft over the eye to promote moisture. The final tooth-lens product was removed from Thornton's shoulder and placed in the center of the eye, in line with the retina.

The MOOKP procedure was developed in Italy in 1963, and has been more common in Europe and Asia, but only about 600 operations have been undertaken. Given the small number of treatments, its safety remains unconfirmed, and other doctors have their reservations. "It requires a sizable team and several operations," Ivan Schwab, of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told CNN. "It's just an extreme variation on techniques we're already doing."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=an-eyetooth-for-an-eye-a-rare-trans-2009-09-17

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

(YouTube Link)

The Webby Awards have been given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996 for achievement on the Internet. Winners are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. The above video is a compilation of some of those concise and occasionally funny speeches. If you had only five words to say to the world, what would they be?

Via The Presurfer

A company called GreenSun Energy is developing solar panels that absorb particular parts of the light spectrum available even when the sun is not shining directly at them:

They say the key is the bright colors in hues to capture different parts of the sun's light spectrum.

GreenSun, the company behind the technology, says unlike conventional solar panels, these can produce electricity without direct sunlight.

It says the colored panels don't need to face the sun and can absorb dispersed light.

This means they can also harness energy on a cloudy day, although with less efficiency than on sunny days.

The company says production costs are kept to a minimum because they require less silicon.

There's a video at the link and it will play automatically when you click on it.

Link

Sarah Zielinski writes in The Smithsonian that Jupiter, as the largest planet in our solar system, occasionally pulls comets into its orbit. Sometimes, as with comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 (pictured), Jupiter's gravity will even pull a comet into a direct impact. Zielinsky writes:

Astronomers from Japan and Northern Ireland, presenting their findings today at the European Planetary Science Congress, used observations of Comet Kushida-Muramatsu—from when it was discovered in 1993 and when it returned in 2001—to calculate the comet’s path over the previous century. They determined that the comet became a temporary moon when it entered Jupiter’s neighborhood in 1949. It made two full, if irregular, orbits around the planet, and then continued its travels into the inner solar system in 1962.

The researchers also predict that Comet 111P/Helin-Roman-Crockett, which circled Jupiter between 1967 and 1985, will again become a temporary moon and complete six loops around the planet between 2068 and 2086.

“The results of our study suggests that impacts on Jupiter and temporary satellite capture events may happen more frequently than we previously expected,” David Asher of Northern Ireland’s Armagh Observatory told the AFP.

Link

Photo: NASA

Image: Jones Soda

Gourmet soda maker Jones Soda has released five new flavors inspired by the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. They are Potion of Healing, Sneak Attack, Bigby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer, Eldritch Blast, and Dwarven Draught. I hear that drinking any will add +2 to your constitution for 1d4 rounds.

Link via Geek Dad

The blog Funster Mental Floss has pictures of ten amazing playgrounds from around the world. Pictured above is the St. Kilda Adventure Playground in Port Philip, Australia. It covers four hectares of land and includes a beached pirate shipwreck and a submarine. It was built after World War II to help disadvantaged children in the area develop mentally and physically.

Link via Geek Dad

Image via flickr user Looking Glass used under creative commons license.

UPDATE 9/16/09: In the comments, Miss Cellania says that Funster copied the work of Mental Floss writer David K. Israel, so I have altered the link. Thanks for pointing this out, Miss C.

Photo: Jorge Orta, Studio Orta

Jorge Orta is a Paris-based Argentine artist noted for his work with PAE light cannons, which he uses to project images onto mountains or large buildings. The image above was projected onto the Evry Cathedral in France in 1996 and is called "Cardinal Cross." Other images at the link include projections onto Machu Picchu, inside the Aso volcano in Japan, and the Cathedral at Chartres.

http://www.studio-orta.com/artwork_fiche.php?fk=&fs=9&fm=0&fd=0&of=0 via Gizmodo

Jesse Bering writes in Scientific American that blushing may have evolved in the human race as a means of ameliorating conflict. By reducing the possibility of deception, it encouraged socially constructive behavior among early humans:

Given the possibility of being deceived, it would have been rather foolish of our ancestors to take at face value a person’s verbal or behavioral expressions of remorse. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, uncontrollable blushing would have evolved as a fairly reliable predictor of the actor’s future behavior. In other words, if the behavior or situation at issue made the person feel so uncomfortable that his or her facial veins dilated—a physiological response that for many people is attended by a somewhat unpleasant tingling sensation—the blusher would probably avoid repeating that behavior in the future. Thus, blushing seems to be an appeasement display. Interestingly, this evolutionary hypothesis is aligned with a recent argument advanced by neuroscientist Mark Changizi in his book The Vision Revolution (BenBella, 2009). Among other things, Changizi claims that our species unusually strong color vision evolved so that we could detect subtle hue changes in other peoples’ skin, thereby deducing their emotions.

Link

Image by flickr user SanFranAnnie used under creative commons license.

According to a BBC News article by Victoria Gill, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have discovered that chimpanzees will yawn after watching animated chimpanzees yawn. They hope to use this information to learn how human children process what they see on a screen, as well as how they empathize with the feelings of other people:

Although Dr Campbell doesn't think the chimps were "fooled" by the animations into thinking they were looking at real chimps, he explained that there was evidence that chimpanzees "process animated faces the same way they process photographs of faces".

He said: "It's not a real chimpanzee, but it kind of looks like a chimpanzee, and they're responding to that."....

In his future work, Dr Campbell would like to pin down exactly how these measurable behaviours are related to the more difficult to measure phenomenon of empathy.

"We'd like to know more about behaviours related to empathy, like consolation - when an individual does something nice to the victim of aggression," he told BBC News.

"So we want to see if our good contagious yawners are also good consolers."

Link via Discover Magazine

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

(YouTube Link)

This video shows a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering (1747) played forwards, then backwards, then both forwards and backwards at the same time. It was created by mathematical illustrator Jos Leys and science/philosophy blogger Xantox. This Bach piece has long intrigued mathematicians:

In each of these canons a musical line is played twice (or four times in Canon 10). The second version is always transformed with respect to the first by shifting in time, but it may also be shifted in pitch, turned upside-down, stretched, or played backwards. Each of these transformations occurs in the mathematics of elementary functions; they are examples of how new functions can be made out of old and of how a function can be tailored to fit a new situation.

Link via Boing Boing

Chris Matyszczyk explains that the laws of probability indicate when you should settle for one prospective mate, and when you should keep on looking. There's a point of diminishing returns in a succession of relationships when you should marry before your prospects start to get worse:

So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don't choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)

The "Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best" method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.

However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.

Link via The Corner

Image: U.S. Department of Energy