Flickr user Nadia Prigoda-Lee snapped this picture at a Modest Mouse concert in Toronto. Two of her commenters say that it's the lyrics to the Björk song "Bachelorette" written in Braille.

Link via Flavorwire

Sean Bonner reasoned that human beings have evolved without soap, and therefore it's unnatural to strip away the dirt, oil, and grime of daily life with it. As an experiment, he stopped using soap and shampoo for a year. Although Bonner still showers on a regular basis, he uses just water. He's written about his experience so far, and why he's decided to give up on soap permanently:

As I just mentioned, my skin feels better than ever before. Not that it ever felt bad, really, but it feels awesome now. Still no stink at all, I swear even when I'm really active and sweating I don't notice any B.O., and I used to be über self-conscious about this and would think I was stinking if I walked up a flight of stairs too quickly. So this is a huge improvement for sure. And with the exception of changing climates drastically, even the dandruff is history. My previously wavy and mostly unmanageable hair now seems much more willing to bend to my will, a dream of mine since I first looked in a mirror, brush in hand, then tried and failed to make any sense of that monster. So I approve for sure.

And speaking of hair, that was actually a perfect test. Sometime mid-summer I stopped by a barber and before I'd realized it he'd squirted a glob of shampoo onto my head. It was too late to protest, so I just sat through the scrubbing. For the following 2 weeks my hair was a mess: full of dandruff and totally uncontrollable. Once things balanced back out to the previously established no-soap norms, all was good again.

Link | Bonner's Website | Photo by Flickr user aonecrafts used under Creative Commons license

John Pilley and Alliston Reid, researchers at Wofford College in South Carolina, wanted to know how large a dog's vocabulary could get with extensive training. After three years of work, they stopped teaching one border collie who developed a thousand-word vocabulary:

The authors demonstrated that their dog, Chaser, learned the names of 1,022 objects -- no upper limit is apparent -- they stopped training the dog after three years due to their time constraints, not because the dog could not learn more names. This study demonstrates Chaser's ability to learn the names of proper nouns, and her extensive vocabulary was tested repeatedly under carefully controlled conditions. The authors admitted that she remembered the names of each of her 1022 toys better than they could. Chaser's ability to learn and remember more than 1000 proper nouns, each mapped to a unique object, revealed clear evidence of several capacities necessary for learning receptive human language: the ability to discriminate between 1,022 different sounds representing names of objects, the ability to discriminate many objects visually, an extensive vocabulary, and a substantial memory system that allowed the mapping of many auditory stimuli to many visual stimuli.

Their second experiment demonstrated that Chaser really understands that these are names, and not commands to fetch the object. In order to test independence of meaning of nouns and commands, the authors randomly combined nouns with commands to see if Chaser would produce the correct behavior toward the correct object in each trial. Without special training, Chaser responded to each combination correctly, even on the first trial, demonstrating that Chaser understood that the commands and proper-noun names had independent meanings. The dog understands that names refer to particular objects, independent of the action requested involving that object.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user flash62_au used under Creative Commons license

16-year old Tove Sjöholm captured this amazing shot in Mute, Sweden. A spooked female moose jumped in such a way that it looked like it was jumping over a car. Here's Google Translate's rendering of a news article on the event:

It is not unusual for family Sjöholm, who lives in Mute outside Rolfstorp, is visited by the king of the forest in his garden. Tove has a certain respect for the powerful animals.

"Sometimes they stand and nibble on our apple tree. I've always been inside the house when I saw them. They are quite large and tend to be close to the house, so I had been outside, I had perhaps been a little afraid, "she says.

Link via Jalopink

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This clever two-minute advertisement for the computer company Intel shows a beautiful and deadly secret agent on the run from her enemies. They chase her through many windows for a wide variety of computer applications scrolling across a computer screen. The film, entitled "The Chase", was directed by Venables Bell and shot in Prague.

Link (auto sound) via reddit

Sometimes scholarly journals, particularly in the natural sciences, call for critiques from readers and responses to those critiques by article authors. Pictured above is one such response to a critique from a 1963 issue of The Journal of Geology. This is the comment to which the authors responded:

It is obvious that this error in presenting sedimentation rates has no effect whatever on the ages given in the paper. Therefore, the main body of the paper and the conclusions reached by Rosholt et al. require no modification.

Link via Marginal Revolution

Previously: Blank Peer Reviewed Journal Article

When Chinese computer geek Hu Chuang, 26, logged off for the last time, his family decided to erect an appropriate gravestone:

Chuang, 26, from Chongqing, south west China, was so potty about computers his family had a headstone carved for him in the shape of a monitor giving his dates of birth and death.

Stonemasons also included a keyboard, mouse and a camera with a picture of tragic Chuang to complete the tombstone tribute.

http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2011-01-04/29472/i-Bod:_Logging_Off via Great White Snark | Photo: Europics

Axe Cop is a webcomic drawn by a 30-year old artist and written by his 6-year old brother. So the stories are very wild and creative but presented with professional-grade artwork. In one recent episode, Malachi, the writer, and Ethan, the artist, switched roles. "The Moon Warriors Go Camping" was written by the 30-year old and drawn by the 6-year old. Link via Comics Alliance

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Here's actor Michael Caine on the ITV interview show Parkinson taking about impersonations and offering his own of a few actors, including himself as a GPS navigation computer voice.

Which actor would you like to have as your in-car navigator?

via Kottke | Show Website

Artist Luke Jerram once designed a projector wedding ring for himself. Before that, he made one for his bride, Shelina Nanji. It's made of silver and engraved with a 20-second message that is audible when played on a special phonograph:

100 lbf/in² of pressure was required to cut the silver ring, using a vibrating diamond stylus. The ring is also a homage to Thomas Edison who made the first sound recording machine - the phonograph in 1877.

Using the ring, I proposed to Shelina in a hot air balloon over Bristol in 2005. We've since got married and had 2 children Maya and Nico.

You can see a video of the ring being played at the link.

Link via Make | Photo: Luke Jerram

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This itsy bitsy puppy owned by YouTube user samcjung doesn't want to get up. He's far too busy dripping with adorableness.

via Geekosystem

Ben Butler sculpts and assembles deliciously shaped wooden sculptures, such as the above cedar piece entitled "Furrow". He has an exhibit that opens tomorrow at the Zg Gallery in Chicago.

Link via Dude Craft | Gallery Website

Actually, all of these cards by Owen Parsons could apply to gamers in general and not just people who play Magic: The Gathering. One nitpicking point: the gaming store employee depicted in these cards is unrealistically skinny.

Link via Nerd Bastards

Cartoonist Mike Hawthorne made this scene from a different sort of Archieverse -- one in which Archie Andrews and his gang are doing hard time. Here's a passage from Hawthorne's backstory for the comic:

Teen age pregnancy caused Archie's life to start to slide into the wrong direction. Veronica, coming from a wealthy family, was pressured into an abortion. Betty gave birth to Archie Junior. Archie would have to skip college, and take menial jobs to get by. Reggie would rub it in every chance he got, which would lead to a fight with Reggie. Archie would end up killing him in the process.

Jughead, not being able to bare the idea of his friend going to jail, tries to help Archie hide the body. When they're finally caught, both were given long jail sentences for Reggie's murder. In prison Jughead and Archie would expand on their volatile relationship.

Link via Popped Culture

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Real librarians sometimes silently cringe at the shockingly-poor reference interviews conducted by librarians on television and in the movies. But Andy Priestner, head business librarian at Cambridge University, isn't going to hide under the reference desk. He's come out swinging against Jocasta Nu, the librarian over the Jedi Archives depicted in the Star Wars franchise. As the above video illustrates, Nu really doesn't know how to discern and meet customer needs. Priestner writes at length about Nu's dubious use of space and access policies and concludes:

Those shelves and shelves of e-books and those access restrictions still bother me though, but wait… what’s this, I’ve just found out that librarian Jocasta was eventually killed by the young Darth Vader himself for not providing the information he wanted, clearly a very dissatsified library user, and on the evidence of the approach largely taken, who can blame him?

I'd like to add that the lack of clearly-posted Internet usage and unattended child policies in the Jedi Archives is just asking for trouble.

Link via blastr