It looks like an ordinary baseball cap. But slip steel inserts into the Sap Cap, and you have a weapon. "Beat on muggers like you are The Skipper and they are Gilligan."

Link via Hell in a Handbasket

Michael Westmoreland-White sees the Star Trek universe as a liberal or progressive vision of the future, featuring things such as racial and gender equality, free universal health care, and an absence of imperalism. I'm neither liberal or progressive, but I think that he's right.

But I do think that Star Trek is a fairly progressive/liberal science fiction franchise. It’s a basically hopeful vision of the future. It offers up a future earth that has survived war, terrorism, and ecological disasters and forged a global government of representative democracy (we are never told this, but it must be some form of federalist system to avoid tyranny). Hunger and poverty have been overcome. Most diseases have been conquered and high quality universal healthcare is available for all. Education is free and the world is highly literate with most people going beyond secondary education. It’s a clean energy society that is eco-friendly. (In Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew in their stolen Klingon ship actually go back in time to the 20th C. to keep whales from going extinct–and in the process save the earth of their future.) There is finally global racial harmony. And, despite the micro-mini-skirted uniforms that reflected the fact that the original series was made in the ’60s, we finally have gender equality, too.

Link

Image by Flickr user Tim Williams used under Creative Commons license

Blogger Signaltheorist decided to evaluate the efficiency of the Roomba by tracking its movements:

I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it's thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it's cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!

http://signaltheorist.com/?p=91 via J-Walk Blog

Just in time for Mothers' Day! It's the Zombie Stomper Heel, which the seller describes as "Perfect for stompin’ on zombies..and men’s hearts."

Link via Double Plus Undead

Leptotyphlops carlae was discovered by biologist Blair Hedges in a jungle on Barbados last year. It's only four inches long as an adult and as thin as a strand of spaghetti.

Link

A cafe in Knoxville, Tennessee is offering a new caffeinated delight.  It's coffee made from beans that have been, shall we say, processed through the digestive tract of a small Southeast Asian mammal prior to brewing:

Kopi luwak is named after the animal that gives the coffee its … uh … full body. The bright-red coffee cherries are eaten by the luwak, which is a cat-like relative of the mongoose in Southeast Asia.

After a few hours of digestion, the beans come out the other end. They’re picked up off the forest floor, cleaned and roasted. Because of this “all natural” processing, the coffee is said to have a rich and heavy flavor, with hints of caramel or chocolate.

“It’s delicious, amazing,” said the coffee shop owner Sharif Harb. “There’s no other coffee like it — rich, almost syrupy.”

Link via Instapundit

In 1914, Austrian watchmaker Georg Grabner created the Kolibri -- the "Hummingbird" pistol. The smallest autoloading pistol ever made, it fires a .11 caliber bullet. He marketed it as a self-defense firearm for women to carry in their purses. More pictures and history at the link.

http://www.hellinahandbasket.net/2007/01/float-like-a-hummingbird-sting.htm

In 1988, artist James Sanborn was commissioned to create an outdoor sculpture to adorn the CIA's facility in Langley, Virginia. So he created Kryptos, a 10-foot high scroll of copper filled with letters. Its 865 characters contain, the artist asserts, a coded message. But even the best CIA cryptologists have been unable to crack all of it. One of the four sections remains a complete mystery. At the link, you can read about Sanborn's extensive study of cryptology while planning the sculpture and the passion that it has inspired among devoted codebreakers.

Link via Instapundit

From Bloomberg News:

Half a glass of wine a day may add five years to your life, a new study suggests. Drink beer, and you’ll live only 2 1/2 years longer.

Dutch researchers followed 1,373 men for more than four decades, noting their eating and drinking habits. Men who had about 20 grams of alcohol daily — equivalent to a half a glass of wine — had 2 1/2 years added to their life expectancy at age 50, compared with men who didn’t drink at all, according to the research published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Men who consumed only wine had twice as much added longevity.

Link via Alphecca

Your assignment: in the comments, devise rules for a Neatorama-themed drinking game.

Image via flickr user rpeschetz

This is excellent news for my wife. Psychological researchers have discovered that women gain a health benefit by living with neurotic men:

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Conscientiousness is a good thing in a mate, researchers report, not just because it's easier to live with someone who washes the dishes without being asked, but also because having a conscientious partner may actually be good for one's health. Their study, of adults over age 50, also found that women, but not men, get an added health benefit when paired with someone who is conscientious and neurotic.

This is the first large-scale analysis of what the authors call the "compensatory conscientiousness effect," the boost in health reported by those with conscientious spouses or romantic partners. The study appears this month in Psychological Science.

Link via Instapundit

Image via flickr user Mr. Greenjeans

Way back in the day when I was in library school in Ohio, there was a slowly dying tradition in rural libraries of hosting "library cats." These were cats that lived full-time in libraries, most public. Well, Gary Roma of Iron Frog Productions has created a worldwide historical archive of library cats and organized them around an interactive map, giving the names, locations, and dates of residents for individual cats. It's a work in progress, so if you know of a cat that isn't mentioned, be sure to let him know.

Link

Image via flickr user TVLshac

Shatnerquake is a novel by Jeff Burk. Here's the premise:

It's the first ShatnerCon with William Shatner as the guest of honor! But after a failed terrorist attack by Campbellians, a crazy terrorist cult that worships Bruce Campbell, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.

This is so Shatnerific that I'm having a screaming Shatnergasm right now.

http://bizarrocentral.com/book_detail.asp?bookID=97 via Topless Robot

In 1979, an anonymous group erected a massive stone structure in Elbert County, Georgia. This modern-day stonehenge is more than twenty feet tall and arranged to serve as a calendar and a clock. Its slabs have instructions in eight languages for reconstructing society after the collapse of civilization. The instructions are more philosophical than technological, but perhaps nonetheless prudent:

PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS. LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES IN A WORLD COURT. AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS OFFICIALS. BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH SOCIAL DUTIES. PRIZE TRUTH—BEAUTY—LOVE—SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE INFINITE. BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE.

If you were composing brief instructions for survivors of the collapse of civilization, what would you write?

Link via Instapundit

Leaving aside the Neatorama Civil War, I thought that I'd turn our attention to a controversial article by Mark Penn.

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters [...] For now, bloggers say they are overwhelmingly happy in their work, reporting high job satisfaction. But what happens if they, too, lose work; are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America's Newest Profession.

I'm incredibly skeptical of the 2 million number, but Penn has provided a follow-up explaining his methodology.  Here at the Neatorama corporate HQ compound, we certainly don't anything approaching that number of pro bloggers.  We do have a ridiculously high number of Blackwater contractors, but Alex insists that such security is necessary for "Stage 3", whatever that is.

Link via Instapundit

Image via flickr user alexanderljung

Writing for Popular Mechanics, Claire Martin has a list of jobs that she thinks can only face increased demand in future decades, including undersea welder, digital detective, and battery engineer. Here's the rationale for the latter:

Today, Gardner leads a team that designs, builds and tests batteries for hybrid electric cars at A123 Systems, a fast-growing firm based in Watertown, Mass. A123’s clients include Chrysler, GM and automotive upstarts Think and Better Place, and the company’s staff has jumped from 150 to 2000 in the past three years. Ann Marie Sastry, who directs the University of Michigan’s master’s program in energy systems engineering, says, “The DNA of the automobile is changing, which means the composition of the workforce has to change.” Sastry also runs her own battery company, called Sakti3. “We’re hiring,” she says. “It’s a great time to be a battery guy.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4314253.html via Instapundit