I've been alluding to new things coming from Neatorama, and this week a couple of those things made their debut.

We launched a new weekly distraction for you called Neato-Puzzles! Every Tuesday you'll get a new puzzle in collaboration with Conceptis Puzzles. The first one is a fairly easy sudoku puzzle. There are puzzles of all kinds with different levels of difficulty coming in the weeks ahead.

We also presented a new giveaway contest called Name That Weird Invention. Come up with a name for Steven Johnson's strange concept of the week and win prizes! In the first contest, congratulations go out to to Evan who won Steven Johnsons's book What The World Needs Now. Congratulations also to runners-up Trevor and heaterc who won T-shirts from the NeatoShop! Their winning suggestions are at the contest post. Look for a new invention on Monday.

Stacy took a look back at the first Gordon Gekko movie in Movie Trivia: Wall Street to prepare you for the sequel in theaters now.

David Israel visited The New Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and got an exclusive interview and tour as the museum prepares to open later this month.

Jill Harness wrote about both the brain and the body this week with Hacks to Help You Stay Healthy and Tricks Our Minds Play On Us. She also brought us The Real Life Inspirations For 14 Simpsons Characters.

Thursday was the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the first prime-time animated TV series, so I looked up 10 Neat Facts About The Flintstones.

Steven Johnson had some futuristic (and yet peculiarly retro at the same time) ideas for Automated Dining to add to the Museum of Possibilities.

Over at the Spotlight Blog, you can get an up close and personal look at Mark Racop's awesome Authentic 1966 Batmobile® Replicas.

You probably didn't know about The Limburger Cheese War before you read this week's article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The folks at the Annals of Improbable Research brought us an Ig Nobel Libretto: “Chicken versus Egg”, and also awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes this week.

Mental_floss magazine gave us The 411 on 911: A Brief and Incomplete Timeline.

Even though we have new puzzles and contests, our old giveaways are still here! Congratulations to kantoboy, who won Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with the caption "Dear Mal, You have won the Island Getaway Sweepstakes. Congratulations!" Kantoboy gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

And we had the What Is It? game as well. I'll add the winners' names here as soon as I get them.

In case that's not enough to keep you busy this weekend, check out what's going on at NeatoBambino and see what's new at the NeatoHub!

Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something's missing from his strange gadgets: names. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name (along with proposed use of such strange object - the weirder the better) will win a free copy of Steve's autographed first edition book What The World Needs Now. Two runner-ups win free T-shirts from the NeatoShop.

Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don't select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!

Update 10/9: Congratulations to first place winner redfi5e who suggested we call this invention "Flures." Second place winners are Carolyn Bahm ("Dive-Thrus") and ernest ("Flap-jerks"). Carolyn was the only one who followed stated a t-shirt preference as per the contest rules, so she gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

The artist, Steven Johnson, said, "I was blown away by the cleverness of many of the names. I also noticed that a well-conceived name made my art seem funnier!" So he wanted to recognize these entries as Honorable Mentions: The Flopcatch, Masterbaiters, Toe Tacklers, Self Contained Underwater Baiting Apparatus (SCUBA), Flipplures, Trollfins, FlipperDippers, SCUBait, Flip-o-bait, Flip Service, Kickbait, Flipping Hookers, Toe-Bait-O’s, and Stuck in pro-bait.

Move over, Lady Gaga, this guy had a meat suit back in 1894! In fact, he'd fit right in with the internet generation because he's dressed as a side of bacon. Mmm... bacon. Link -via Buzzfeed

This Tumblr blog collects only the worst of the worst -but there seems to be no shortage of bad postcards! Some lend themselves well to caption contests. Link -via J-Walk Blog

I hope that you don't rely on your GPS to the exclusion of your common sense. This guy followed his navigator's instructions to "a glorified goat track." and had to be rescued by a helicopter crew!

Driver Robert Ziegler, 37, found himself stranded near the peak at Bergun, Switzerland, unable to go forward or turn around to go back the way he came.

Rescue workers scrambled a heavy lifting helicopter to carry the van and its driver to safety after he dialed for help on his mobile phone.

"I was lost and I kept hoping that each little turn would get me back to the main road. In the end it told me to turn around but of course I couldn't by then," the driver told police.

Link -via the Presurfer

The first Monday in October (October 4th this year) is designated by the UN as World Habitat Day, a day to raise awareness of housing needs globally and in our communities. Habitat for Humanity is participating, as they do every year, with a variety of events.

Habitat for Humanity’s 27th annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project is a World Habitat Day  event  this year.  It will be held Oct. 4 – 8 in six cities in the United States.  Held in a different location each year, Habitat’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project is an annual, internationally-recognized week of building that brings attention to the need for simple, decent and affordable housing.  This year, the Carters will work alongside volunteers in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore and Annapolis, Md.; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; and Birmingham, Ala. to build, rehabilitate and improve 86 homes.

Habitat for Humanity has a schedule of events, and suggestions for ways you can become involved with providing housing to those who need it in your community and around the world. Link -Thanks, Liza!

This mental_floss quiz is not questioning your patriotism, and you don't even have to be American to take it. But it will test your knowledge of some obscure facts about American history. And it's all on one page! I scored 95%, but that's only because I research these kinds of things in my job. The current average score is 42%. Link

Ben Zimmer has an article at The New York Times addressing a person using the word "we", sometimes referred to as "the royal we", when speaking or writing. When it's not clear who the person is speaking for, it can sound downright pompous. A New York senator, Roscoe Conkling, once said, “Yes, I have noticed there are three classes of people who always say ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ They are emperors, editors and men with a tapeworm.”

What is it about the presumptuous use of we that inspires so much outrage, facetious or otherwise? The roots of these adverse reactions lie in the haughtiness of the majestic plural, or royal we, shared by languages of Western Europe since the days of ancient Roman emperors. British sovereigns have historically referred to themselves in the plural, but by the time of Queen Victoria, it was already a figure of fun. Victoria, of course, is remembered for the chilly line, “We are not amused” — her reaction, according to Sir Arthur Helps, the clerk of the privy council, to his telling of a joke to the ladies in waiting at a royal dinner party. Margaret Thatcher invited mocking Victorian comparisons when she announced in 1989, “We have become a grandmother.”

Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom, but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance. As the fiery preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage wrote in 1875: “They who go skulking about under the editorial ‘we,’ unwilling to acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than the position of public educators.”

I have to admit I have done this here at Neatorama, and I assure you that it is only in circumstances where I am speaking on behalf of the blog, meaning that Alex and I, and sometimes others as well, are in agreement. Forgive me? Link -via Carl Zimmer

(YouTube link)

Filmmaker and professional gamer Freddie Wong produced this fantasy sequence starring himself and Shenae Grimes. It's violent, but there's an even bloodier version available. -via b3ta

Our friends at the Annals of Improbable Research bestowed the 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes at a festive ceremony at Harvard University last night. The prizes are for achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think, which this year included research into whale snot, bat sex, and swearing. Honors were bestowed by previous Ig Nobel winners and a few actual Nobel prize winners.

ENGINEERING PRIZE
Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

MEDICINE PRIZE
Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

PHYSICS PRIZE
Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

PEACE PRIZE
Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE
Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

ECONOMICS PRIZE
The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE
Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE
Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

BIOLOGY PRIZE
Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

Eight of the ten winners attended the awards last night. The Public Health prize winner could not travel due to ill health, and no one wanted to accept the Economics prize. The theme for the awards ceremony was "bacteria", and entertainment included the premiere of the Bacterial Opera, about a woman and the microbes that live on her teeth. This year's trophy was designed to resemble a Petri dish. Link

(Image credit: Charles Krupa/AP)

Imagine being hit in the head by a heavy object falling at around 100 miles per hour. Hailstones kill, and sometimes they kill many people at a time.

In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons.  That summer, ice melt revealed even more skeletal remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake's edges. Something horrible had happened here.

A National Geographic team set out to examine the bones in 2004. Besides dating the remains to around 850 AD, the team realized that everyone at the "Skeleton Lake" had died from blows to the head and shoulders caused by "blunt, round objects about the size of cricket balls."

This eventually led the team to one conclusion: In 850 AD this group of 200 some travelers was crossing this valley when they were caught in a sudden and severe hailstorm.

Arlas Obscura has more stories of killer hailstorms from ancient times to the 21st century. Link -Thanks, Dylan!

On September 30th, 1960, Americans sat down to watch the premiere of a prime-time animated series called The Flintstones. Fifty years later, Fred and his gang are remembered as our favorite cavemen. The Hanna-Barbera production ran for six seasons and is still a part of our pop culture landscape.



1. Today's Google doodle honors The Flintstones anniversary. After today, you'll find it in their archives.

2. The characters of The Flintstones were greatly influenced by the 1954-56 hit TV series The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney as working class neighbors. Blowhard Fred Flintstone was very like Gleason's character Ralph Kramden, goofy sidekick Barney Rubble resembled Carney's character Ed Norton, and their wives Wilma and Betty had the practical personalities of the wives in The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason considered suing Hanna-Barbera, but did not want to go down in history as "the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air".

3. The show's gimmick, besides being a rare prime-time cartoon, was that the Flintstone family had everyday modern situations set in prehistoric times. There was no electricity, no internal-combustion engines, and no shoes, but the characters still had modern conveniences like dishwashers and phonographs. All these appliances were powered by captive animals (including dinosaurs). The heavy equipment Fred and Barney worked with was powered by pulleys, and their cars were powered by "the courtesy of Fred's two feet."



4. Most of the series' comedy came from puns about rocks. The Flintstones lived in the town of Bedrock. Fred worked for a boss named Mr. Slate. Guest stars on the show had "rock" names.

And who can forget the celebrities? "Cary Granite" (Cary Grant), "Stony Curtis" (Tony Curtis), "Ed Sulleyrock/Sulleystone" (Ed Sullivan), "Rock Pile/Quarry/Hudstone" (Rock Hudson) and "Ann-Margrock" (Ann-Margret) all had cameos.

(RIP Tony Curtis)

The exception was Tuesday Weld, whose "Bedrock" name was Tuesday Wednesday.

5. The show had some interesting casting: the man of a thousand voices, Mel Blanc played Barney Rubble for most of the series' run, and provided the sounds of Fred's pet dinosaur Dino. Actress Bea Benedaret, who you might remember as the owner of the Shady Rest Hotel on Petticoat Junction and cousin Pearl on The Beverly Hillbillies did the voice for Barney's wife Betty Rubble. Funnyman Harvey Korman joined the cast in 1965 as the voice of The Great Gazoo.

6. In the first two seasons of The Flintstones, the opening theme was different from the theme song you remember (Meet the Flintstones). The original song, which had no lyrics, was called "Rise and Shine", and was also used for the show's closing credits.

(YouTube link)

7. The show contained several breakthroughs for network television. It was the first prime-time animated series on American television. After the Flintstones' daughter Pebbles was born, Betty Rubble was depressed about her inability to conceive a child. This was the first time an animated show addressed the issue of infertility. The Rubbles then adopted their son Bamm-Bamm. The "first" that most people associate with the show was the fact that Fred and Wilma slept in the same bed. However, this was not the first American depiction of such sleeping arrangements; that was in the 1947 sitcom Mary Kay and Johnny, which few people saw, considering how many people owned TV sets in the 1940s. However, Fred and Wilma were the first couple to sleep together in a cartoon.

8. While under development, the series had several names. First, the show was going to be called The Flagstones. Then it was The Gladstones. Finally, it was The Flintstones, and couldn't be changed after the series premiered. However, an episode called The Flagstones was made to demonstrate the idea to potential financial backers.

(YouTube link)

9. Flintstones Vitamins are a childhood staple now, when I was a child, every kid wanted Chocks. Bayer produced Chocks, the first chewable children's vitamin in 1960. The Flintstones line of vitamins began in 1968 when Chocks took on the shapes of the characters from The Flintstones TV series. Everyone noticed that Betty Rubble was missing, and the company did not add her to the vitamin lineup until 1995! Two cereals, Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles, were named after the daughter the Flintstones gave birth to during the series. They are still sold in grocery stores.

9. The success of The Flintstones led directly to the creation of another Hanna-Barbera prime-time cartoon, The Jetsons. The comedy was just about the same as The Flintstones, except the main characters were set in a futuristic world of flying cars and robot maids instead of foot-powered cars and animal appliances. As The Flintstones were seen as a copy of The Honeymooners, this new animated series was seen as a copy of the comic and movie series Blondie. The Jetsons premiered in 1962, but only 24 episodes were produced. Those same 24 episodes were later shown on Saturday morning TV, over and over, for many years.

(Reconstruction by Kennis and Kennis, photgraph by Joe McNally/National Geographic)

10. National Geographic has a roundup of links on Neanderthals for the 50th anniversary of The Flintstones. In 2008, they did an extensive article on Neanderthals which included reconstructions of what they might look like. The NatGeo staff nicknamed this one "Wilma", in honor of Fred Flintstone's wife.

Deviant Art member Kalapusa, who gave us the Super Mario Bros. Piranha Plant Sculpture, has created a "realistic" yet very alien version of Pac-Man. See more pictures at Geekologie. Link -via Holy Kaw!

Faulders Studio has designed a building called GEOtube that, if built in Dubai, would develop its own outer surface from salt! The building plans include a lattice of pipes on the outside, which would grow solid from salt deposits over 15-30 years.

The GEOtube building is covered in a vascular pipe system following a grid of structural lattice and is situated in a salt-water pond, carried to the building from the adjacent Persian Gulf via an underground viaduct. Utilizing floating solar panels for power, the seawater is pumped from basement level to the rooftop and is then gravity-fed through the vascular system.

The lace-like skin forms once the seawater, misted onto its exposed mesh, evaporates and leaves a layer of salt behind. Because the Persian Gulf has the world’s highest salinity for oceanic water, the salt deposits accumulate quickly, making the transparent skin take on a new crystalline appearance.

Once the building is covered, salt could be harvested for other uses. Of course, this project is just a concept for now. Link

Pre-1869 A HEARSE WITH NO NAME




Long before ambulances hit the scene, hearses served as the first responders to emergencies. The people who decide if a critically-injured patient goes to the hospital or the morgue are, for the most part, funeral directors and morticians.

1869 DOCTORS GET ON BOARD




New York City's Bellevue Hospital becomes the first hospital to put doctors in ambulances, which also come equipped with tourniquets, bandages, handcuffs, a straitjacket, and a quart of brandy.

1966 THE UNITED STATES BECOMES LESS DANGEROUS THAN VIETNAM

The National Academy of Sciences publishes a landmark study, "Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society," which shows that U.S. Soldiers in Vietnam are more likely to survive an injury than drivers on American highways. The study prompts Congress to create the Department of Transportation, to regulate mobile emergency services across the country.

1968 AMERICANS LEARN TO DIAL 911

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Dhscommtech)

In conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T announces that 9-1-1 will be the new number for emergency services everywhere in the United States. The digits are chosen because they're easy to memorize, and because 9 and 1 are far apart on the dial of a rotary phone, making misdials less likely.

1970 HELP FROM ABOVE

(Image source: FH1100 manufacturing Corp.)

As part of a new government program, critically ill patients in remote areas of the United States are transported to hospitals in military helicopters. Many of the pilots are returning Vietnam vets, some of whom can't get enough action. After dropping off patients, a few pilots pull dangerous stunts, such as landing in football stadiums, flying under bridges, and buzzing neighborhood pools.

2001 MAN TAKES DIRECTIONS FROM MACHINE, WITH MIXED RESULTS

(Image source: TeleNav)

Global Positioning Systems quickly become standard in ambulances across the country. But during the next few years, the novelty of GPS fades. Several accounts emerge of the devices giving faulty directions, leading ambulance drivers minutes-or even hours-off course. (Although GPS is still widely used today, most ambulances also keep good, old-fashioned neighborhood maps in the front seat, just in case.)

2005 TRULY MOBILE UPLOADS

More and more ambulances begin using cell phones to transmit their patients' EKG heart-monitor readings to ER doctors before they reach the hospital. The new technology significantly improves the time it takes to diagnose and treat heart attack patients, but unfortunately, it's also vulnerable to the ill-timed dropped call.

__________________________

The above article by Maggie Koerth-Baker is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!