UK artist Tom Hardwidge makes intricate steampunk insect sculptures he calls Arthrobots from recycled materials, including deactivated ammunition and watch parts. Some of these delicate artworks are for sale!

Link | Artist's site -Thanks, John!

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Amy from Very Culinary made a trailer for her site that mirrors the Inception trailer exactly, except that it's about cooking. She also posted a shot-by-shot comparison in case you want to see how closely the two trailers match. Link -via The Daily What

Happy Alfred Hitchcock Day! In honor of the great filmmaker, here are five things you may not know about the legendary director, courtesy of Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

1.  Alfred Hitchcock never won a Best Director Oscar, yet sixteen of his films garnered fifty nominations, his 1940 classic Rebecca won Best Picture, and he was nominated as Best Director for Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Lifeboat, Rear Window and Psycho. “Always a bridesmaid,” he philosophized, “never a bride.”

2.  Although Hitchcock, who once called actors “cattle,” was not considered an “actor’s director,” such stars as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Robert Walker, Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren gave some of their finest performances in his films.

3.  Hitchcock admired the work of fellow directors F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, but he also repeatedlywatched guilty pleasures Smokey and the Bandit and Benji; the latter 1974 stray dog hit reportedly made the dog-loving Hitchcock cry.

4.  Hitchcock married his screenwriter-editor-assistant director wife Alma in 1926 and they remained constant companions and working partners until he died in 1980.  Their only child, actress Patricia Hitchcock appeared on Broadway and in her father’s Stage Fright, Strangers On a Train and Psycho.

5.  Hitchcock was famed for his wry, very British sense of humor which often expressed itself in practical jokes: pretending to lose the key to the handcuffs that bound together for an entire day his The 39 Steps stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll; giving an elegant dinner party at which every course, from soup to dessert, was bright blue; and switching off the lights on the set of Strangers On a Train and stranding his daughter Patricia for three hours at the top of a Ferris wheel.

Stephen Rebello is a screenwriter, journalist, and the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which has been bought by Paramount Pictures and The Montecito Picture Company for production as a dramatic feature film. Get more Hitchcock news from Rebello on Twitter at @HitchandPsycho.

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She loves playing Dungeons & Dragons, but she wants more. Can true love drag a nerd out of the basement long enough for a dinner date? The animation by Brad Jonas accompanies a song by the Doubleclicks. -Thanks, A Seventy!

After reading these notes to anonymous troublemakers -and every office has one or two of those types- I realize how glad I am to work from home, despite the relatively minor annoyances. At least now when someone steals my lunch, its someone I have to feed anyway. See 39 more of these notes that you will probably relate to. Link -Thanks, Jane/Sierra!


Update 10/30/11 - These are from Passive Aggressive Notes - Thanks Kerry!

A rather large solar flare occurred on February 14th, which signals the beginning of cycle of flares that will reach its peak, called a solar maximum, in about two years. How bad can they get? The worst solar flare on record occurred in 1859 and was named the Carrington Event, after the scientist who studied it.

The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.

Such a flare today could disrupt our cellular signals, internet, GPS system, satellite transmissions, and even our electrical grid. Read all about it at National Geographic.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(Image credit: SDO/NASA)

In the Cajun communities of western Louisiana, Mardi Gras is celebrated a little differently from the parades and balls held in the cities. People have just as much fun participating in the Courir de Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday run.

Starting at 6 a.m. on fat Tuesday, more than 2,000 runners gather in the center of Eunice, La., wearing colorful frayed costumes, masks made of wire mesh and pointy hats called "capuchons," for the annual "Courir de Mardi Gras" -- the Mardi Gras run.

From the center of town, they climb on horses and flatbed trucks for a daylong drunken adventure through the countryside. Traditionally, people went from house to house gathering ingredients for a grand gumbo (today, they just make the gumbo downtown) fit for carnival. The runners will sing, dance and make a general spectacle of themselves to collect food.

Sometimes, the gift comes in the form of a live chicken thrown into the field for participants on foot and horseback to chase. The result is less than orderly, because a beer truck is flanking the run at all times.

Read about the origins of chicken chasing at AOL News. Link

You might not be able to fly down to Rio for Carnival, but you can hear and feel a “bateria,” a samba school drum section, in this web toy from Brazil. Enjoy the rhythm, or toggle on and off the sections to hear how each instrument sounds: shaker, cuica, agogo, tambourine, snare drum, repique, and bass drum. Use the menu at the top of the site to see the actual instruments played or see how a samba parade is conducted. Link -Thanks, Alessandro Manoel!

Cadbury's advertising for this year's Creme Eggs brings us a game in which you use a catapult to toss eggs at Google Maps locations. After flailing about somewhat (fun in itself), I finally managed to "egg" my own house! http://www.returnofthegoo.ca/en/ -via the Presurfer

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BBC Comedy regular Misery Bear tries to cheer himself up by participating in Red Nose Day, an annual event to benefit Comic Relief. Along the way, he meets Kate Moss and we see Misery live up to his name. -via The Daily What

Vicki Lowing lives in Australia with her three pet crocodiles. She adopted Johnie, her first crocodile, fifteen years ago. Johnie is now 6 feet long! Lowing tells how the crocodile would get into bed with her and her then-husband, and even slept with her young son.

"Johnie would jump on Andrew's bed nearly every night. They were like a brother and sister," Lowing said.

Animal experts tell 20/20 there is no way to domesticate a crocodile. They are too aggressive, powerful and unpredictable. Ultimately a relationship like this may end in real tears – and not crocodile ones.

Lowing, who is now divorced, says the crocs were not responsible for the end of her marriage. But as much as she loves them, scaly reptiles who can take off a human limb with a nip are not exactly nuptial magnets.

"It's hard, I do meet nice blokes. And then when they do eventually come home and see I've got the crocodiles, they just run, they all run. If I could find a man, like another Steve Irwin, sorry Terry, but like a Steve Irwin that could take me and my animals and share the same passion, that would be wonderful," says Lowing.

Lowing is not the only one keeping crocodiles as pets. Read about more people who do in this article from ABC 's 20/20. Link -via Arbroath

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Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy, explains how a smoke detector works. It's pretty geeky, which makes me marvel at the people who designed these things. Smoke detectors are very handy! Every time ours goes off, the kids run downstairs because they know dinner must be ready. -Thanks, Bill!

The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

by Susanne Fuchs1, Melanie Weirich1, Christian Kroos2, Natalie Fecher1, Daniel Pape3,
and Sabine Koppetsch4

If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard.

Wearing a beard has a long socio-cultural tradition going at least back to the Pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians associated facial hair with the sexual, religious and social power of  the monarch. Indeed, Queen Hatshepsut wore a bodkin beard after her accession to the throne (Wietig, 2005). Lack of facial hair was long considered a sign of weakness
or divine punishment. The first recorded radical shavings were ordered by Alexander the Great to prevent Persians pulling his soldiers’ beards during hand-to-hand fighting. Another tradition relates beards with fertility.

Today, belief in bearded monarchs, male or female, has declined. The general acceptance of facial hair and specific styles of facial hair appears dependent on sex, culture, nation, and fashion. According to the American Mustache Institute, mustache acceptance is between 16 and 35% in  the U.S., though between 72 and 94% in Germany. This paper concerns the influence of facial hair on audio-visual speech intelligibility in noise. It is known that watching the speaker’s face increases the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments (Grant and Seitz, 2000). By observing the cyclical opening and closing of the visible jaw, an observer can identify the rhythmic structure of the spoken utterance or even the focus of a particular sequence (Dohen, Lœvenbruck, and  Hill, 2005).

Facial hair can cover parts of the face such as the upper lip, the teeth, and the larynx. This modifies the visible area of the open mouth, and hence facial hair is responsible for a kind of natural impoverishment of the visual speech signal. Under normal conditions such impoverishment may be marginal for the intelligibility of speech, since auditory information is fully available. However, under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party (in audiovisual speech research terms: multi-talker babble noise), visual cues may be crucial for increasing speech intelligibility (assuming that listeners want to understand their communicative partners). Based on these considerations, we hypothesize that:

(1) Facial hair hiding visible articulatory movements leads to lower speech intelligibility under noisy auditory conditions, longer reaction time, and lower confidence in recognizing the relevant target words.

(2) The shape and location of the beard is crucial for the reduced speech intelligibility in noise. A mustache hiding upper lip movement has a larger impact on visual speech intelligibility than a long chin beard, hiding the larynx only. So in terms of speech intelligibility, is it time for a shave?

It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Do you know what this thing is? Can you give us a wild guess?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

Be sure to check out the What Is It? Blog. Let your imagination run wild, and good luck!

Update: Abbey had the correct answer in the very first comment -this is a hand-forged key. Scroll down the answer page to find out more. Galen gets the award for the funniest answer: Chuck Norris' mustache comb! Both will get t-shirts from the NeatoShop.

As someone who works from home, I can vouch for the accuracy of these nuggets of wisdom posted at Buzzfeed. This one in particular, which is a concept I struggle with. You might laugh, but when you work on your own schedule, there is a constant tug-of-war between better quality and getting anything finished at all. Amirite? Link