Anthropologist Pierre Pica has spent ten years studying the Munduruku tribe of the Brazilian Amazon region. Their language has no tenses, plural forms, or numbers greater than five. Pica described life in a society where quantification was largely unnecessary:

To get to the Munduruku, Pica had to wait for some locals to take him to their territory by canoe.

"How long did you wait?" I inquired.

"I waited quite a lot. But don't ask me how many days."

"So, was it a couple of days?" I suggested tentatively. A few seconds passed as he furrowed his brow: "It was about two weeks."

The more I pushed Pica for facts and figures, the more reluctant he was to provide them. "When I come back from Amazonia, I lose sense of time and sense of number, and perhaps sense of space." This inability to give me quantitative data was part of his culture shock. He had spent so long with people who can barely count that he had lost the ability to describe the world in terms of numbers.

The rest of the article describes at length how people understand numbers cross-culturally.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The oath of office for officials in the State of Kentucky includes an affirmation that the person has never fought a duel:

Typically, a judge and honoree stand facing each other, right hands raised. The judge recites the oath of office with its words proudly repeated.

Then comes this reference: "I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending, so help me God."

Some legislators want to remove this part of the oath. No, not because they want to start challenging enemies to meet them with saber or pistol, but because it seems so weird to modern America.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124616129&ft=1&f=1003 -- thanks, Larry Saunders! | Image of Hamiton/Burr duel, University of South Florida | Previously on Neatorama: Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Atlanta-based photographer Erik Dixon got a tattoo illustrating the inverse square law, which "...is the physics equation for the fall off rate of light radiating from a source point. Something I use every time I shoot. This also applies to gravity and sound."

If you were to get an intellectual tattoo, what would it be?

Link | Photo: Erik Dixon/Geeky Tattoos

The Monty Hall Problem is a common mathematical fallacy based on Monty Hall's game show Let's Make a Deal. It works like this:

Imagine that you’re in a game show and your host shows you three doors. Behind one of them is a shiny car and behind the others are far less lustrous goats. You pick one of the doors and get whatever lies within. After making your choice, your host opens one of the other two doors, which inevitably reveals a goat. He then asks you if you want to stick with your original pick, or swap to the other remaining door. What do you do?

It's counterintuitive to many people, but switching doors will double your chances of winning:

The problem is that most people assume that with two doors left, the odds of a car lying behind each one are 50/50. But that’s not the case – the actions of the host beforehand have shifted the odds, and engineered it so that the chosen door is half as likely to hide the car.

At the very start, the contestant has a one in three chance of picking the right door. If that’s the case, they should stick. They also have a two in three chance of picking a goat door. In these situations, the host, not wanting to reveal the car, will always pick the other goat door. The final door hides the car, so the contestant should swap. This means that there are two trials when the contestant should swap for every one trial when they should stick. The best strategy is to always swap – that way they have a two in three chance of driving off, happy and goatless.

The bad news is that according to a scientific study, pigeons are better as this task than we are:

Each pigeon was faced with three lit keys, one of which could be pecked for food. At the first peck, all three keys switched off and after a second, two came back on including the bird’s first choice. The computer, playing the part of Monty Hall, had selected one of the unpecked keys to deactivate. If the pigeon pecked the right key of the remaining two, it earned some grain. On the first day of testing, the pigeons switched on just a third of the trials. But after a month, all six birds switched almost every time, earning virtually the maximum grainy reward.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Library of Congress

(YouTube Link)

The above video shows Stirling engine enthusiasts motoring around on the River Thames. This engine, invented in 1816 by Robert Sterling, consists of, at minimum, two pistons, one of which is heated. Karim Nice of How Stuff Works explains the cycle:

1. Heat is added to the gas inside the heated cylinder (left), causing pressure to build. This forces the piston to move down. This is the part of the Stirling cycle that does the work.

2. The left piston moves up while the right piston moves down. This pushes the hot gas into the cooled cylinder, which quickly cools the gas to the temperature of the cooling source, lowering its pressure. This makes it easier to compress the gas in the next part of the cycle.

3. The piston in the cooled cylinder (right) starts to compress the gas. Heat generated by this compression is removed by the cooling source.

4. The right piston moves up while the left piston moves down. This forces the gas into the heated cylinder, where it quickly heats up, building pressure, at which point the cycle repeats.

The Stirling engine never caught on as well as internal combustion engines did, but has in recent years caught the attention of solar energy developers.

Information Link and Fanclub Link via View from the Porch

Dutch designer Mieke Meijer compresses and bonds old newspapers so that the print is still legible, but the resulting product has the grain and feel of original wood:

Every day, piles of newspapers are discarded and recycled into new paper. Mieke Meijer has come up with a solution to use this surplus of paper into a renewed material. When a NewspaperWood log is cut, the layers of paper appear like lines of a wood grain or the rings of a tree and therefore resembles the asethetic of real wood. The material can be cut, milled and sanded and generally treated like any other type of wood.

Link via Make | Designer's Website | Photo: Atelier 29

The Chikyu research vessel is a ship with a drill that can reach deeper under the earth's surface than any other drill system in the world. At a cost of $540 million, it's capable of reaching 2,890 23,000 feet below the seabed. Popular Science has an overview of how it works:

In 2007, off the coast of Japan, it became the first mission to study subduction zones, the area between tectonic plates that is the birthplace of many earthquakes. Over the next three years, scientists will tack on at least an extra mile of drill and attempt the most ambitious mission ever: piercing the Earth’s mantle. There, scientists expect to find the same conditions as those in the early Earth—and perhaps the same life-forms that thrived then.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/deepest-drill | Image: Coherent Images

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an office within the US government that develops military technology. One of their current projects is to design a nuclear reactor that can be sustained with human and animal waste:

The military’s already working on using seawater to create fuel, but that’s more of an option for maritime operations. Without an endless supply of seawater, they’d need an alternative carbon source. Enter the massive quantities of sludge that inevitably accumulate around troop outposts. It’s been a problem for decades, according to environmental management expert Dr. James Lee. In an article for the Army’s Engineer School, he writes that the military spent upwards of $65,000 in annual fuel costs just to burn off human refuse at base camp in the Balkans.

So Darpa’s proposal would offer two major benefits: Less waste to treat and dispose of at bases, and fewer financial and tactical burdens around sourcing adequate fuel — whether to power jets and facilities or burn off heaps of odorous fecal matter. And with a single trooper stationed in Afghanistan using 22 gallons of fuel a day, that’d add up to major savings.

Link via Fast Company | Photo: US Department of Agriculture

(YouTube Link)

Sculptor Keith Newstead made this lovely brass pegasus automaton. He writes of its metal work:

As they had been cut from 1mm brass they were quite heavy and I was worried that the whole brass horse would be too heavy for the crank to lift it.

I made up the base , fitted all the parts of Pegasus together, fitted Pegasus to the base and joined up all the connecting wires.

As soon as I connected the wings I realised that because of the way they were set up they were actualy lifting the rest of Pegasus, in effect making it lighter.

http://www.keithnewsteadautomata.com/forsale/brass-pegasus and Link via Make

(YouTube Link)

We've heard the Muppets sing "Ode to Joy", "Dust in the Wind", and "Bohemian Rhapsody". In the most recent Muppet music video, a monstrous bunny rabbit and his smaller friends sing the Ben E. King song "Stand By Me".

via Nerdist | Previously on Neatorama: Stand By Me

Mark of the blog Life Support has pictures and descriptions of ten unusual medical inventions that were either pointless or dangerous to anyone who would use them. Among them is the 1935 Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge, which claims to reverse the effects of aging by counteracting the effects of gravity on the human body.

Link via The Corner

Brandon Bird's "Two Warriors Come Out of the Sky" presents The Dukes of Hazzard as a cave painting. It was created with acrylic paint and dirt on canvas. We've previously featured his Seinfeld/Bruce Lee remix and and his depiction of the death of Jennifer Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Link via Popped Culture

When Icelandic chef Fridgeir Eiriksson learned that the Fimmvorduhals volcano was erupting, he decided to use the opportunity to cook a luxurious meal using the volcano's heat:

On Tuesday, Eiriksson and three mates at the cafi of Reykjavik's luxury hotel Holt drove supplies and "lots of champagne" up to the foot of the mountain in two trucks.

The chefs set up a make-shift dining area near a lava field with a red carpet, a small table and two bolstered chairs for a customers who were to be flown up by helicopter.[...]

With mercury dipping to as low as minus 30 degrees at the mountain over the last few days and the glowing fresh lava around them the diners were offered: lobster soup, flaming lobster and monkfish and lava-cooked shallot onions and Veuve Clicquot champagne.

Link via The Daily Telegraph (larger images available) | Photo: Kristjan Jogason/Demotix Images

The biotech company Sensimed has developed a contact lens that monitors the user's glaucoma:

The Triggerfish lens is made of the same silicon hydrogel as many of the soft contact lenses currently on the market, but embedded within it is a microprocessor and a strain gauge that encircles its outer edge. When fluid accumulates in the eye, the diameter of the cornea changes, and that change is picked up by the strain gauge. Data is processed and then transmitted via radio frequency to a receiver.

This data can then be used by doctors to provide specific and timely treatments, as well as give researchers a continuous stream of data about the progress of the disease in the same patient.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Sensimed | Previously on Neatorama: Contact Lenses that Change Color to Alert Diabetics of Glucose Levels

(YouTube Link)

Two men fleeing from police in Cleveland, Ohio tried to climb a barbed wire fence. One made it over the top (getting cut in the process), only to find himself in a prison yard. He was then arrested.

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