This is a portion of a 1858 map of property lines along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The map reminded the author of shotgun houses -long, narrow houses with all the rooms stacked in a line, one behind another. Is there any relation between the two? Maybe the odd property shapes point to the fact that every landowner wants a bit of riverfront. See the entire (enlargable) map at Strange Maps. Link

A team of psychologists showed video footage of male dancers to 37 young women who rated them, and used the results to pinpoint what makes a man a good dancer or a bad dancer.

Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.

But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.

"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.

"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."

The article includes a video of a dancing avatar demonstrating "bad" dancing and "good" dancing. Next research needed: the science of getting a man to even try dancing at all. Link -via Metafilter

In this guest post, Marty McGuire, who shot the video of the Humboldt Penguins Chasing a Butterfly, tells what happened after the video was posted on Neatorama. He also has a new video for us!

Wow, what a fun and exciting viral video trip this has been (a first for me)! As soon as I recorded the Philadelphia Zoo's Humboldt penguins chasing a butterfly, I knew I had something special that would make some people smile. Little did I know that almost 1.6 million views later, I made a lot of people smile, which feels really good. Since I visit Neatorama daily, I knew where I had to send the link first. :)

From there, it seems like the whole internet pays attention to what Neatorama posts! I sat staring at the YouTube video view counter going up and up, laughing with my wife as she jokingly dismissed it early on.

Within a couple of days a CNN.com producer emailed me and asked me to upload it to my iReporter account- the next day it was among the featured "Editor's Choice Top Picks" on their homepage for more than 2 days, and I quickly became a CNN iReporter "Superstar". Who's laughing now? (I was, feeling like the King of the World, getting my 15 minutes of fame.) I even got an email from the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) requesting permission to include it in a internet-video TV show (I think). They'll send me a DVD of the episode after it airs- that should be fun.

Then my friends told me they saw it on Yahoo's homepage too! Wow! But they ripped the video somehow into their own player and didn't give me any credit. Boo! It was also ripped to numerous other video sites- so I learned that you can't always keep your content as your own. I work for a big company, and my amateur video got more views than the professionally created ones which cost a LOT more money. For a couple of minutes I thought I had my next gig all lined up... but viral videos don't last long.

So with all of this, the Philadelphia Zoo was of course pleased with the additional coverage/mentions of their zoo, so I asked if we could pay a return visit to see the penguins with my family and help with a feeding. Doesn't hurt to ask, right? So we visited on Labor Day 2010 and had a lot of fun. Please forgive my video editing skills as they're not great, but hopefully more penguin cuteness makes up for it!

(YouTube link)

Feeding penguins: checked off my bucket list. I'd like to feed a shark someday... Marty McGuire

Update: Thanks, Marty! Neatorama was mentioned in the followup report today on CNN's iReport Blog.

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Karrackoo)

Westminster Palace on the Thames river in London is the place where the parliament of the United Kingdom meets, both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The palace, along with Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's Church, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also a must-see for anyone visiting London. The first palace on the site was built in the eleventh century as a residence for royalty. A fire almost destroyed the palace in 1512. After that, the King or Queen lived elsewhere and parliament met in the rebuilt structure. Another large fire ruined much of the complex in 1834. The rebuild after that disaster (which incorporated surviving parts of the original palace) gave the Palace of Westminster the look it has today. The construction took decades. In 1844, parliament decided the new palace should have a bell tower with a clock, which became the iconic tower we all recognize.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jon McGovern)

The nickname "Big Ben" is specifically for the clock's hour bell (officially named the Great Bell), the largest of the five bells, but in common use also refers to the clock faces and the tower itself.



However, the proper name for the tower is the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster. It is also called St. Stephen's Tower, a name given to the tower by Victorian journalists who also called the hall of parliament "St. Stephen's Hall". The Chapel of St. Stephen was originally built inside Westminster Palace as a private church for the king in the 13th-14th centuries (it took 70 years to complete). In 1547, parliament moved in and the chapel became the Commons Chamber. The House of Commons met there until the fire of 1834, which explains the use of the term St. Stephen's Hall as used by journalists.

Betty White has had a great year so far, starring in the TV series Hot in Cleveland, hosting Saturday Night Live, and appearing in scads of TV ads. Now she's conquered another medium -comic books!

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bluewater Productions will publish a comic book based on her life. It’s the latest in a series of Great Woman comic bios. (Other issues have been written about Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama, so expect the comic to be a shameless cash-in on its subject’s current popularity interesting.)

Link -via the Daily What

Fungi come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and their range of habits and habitats is just as diverse.

It's fungi's ability to grow just about anywhere that makes it so amazing. If you name a hostile environment there's more than likely some form of mushroom or yeast that will not only grow there but prefer it over anywhere else. An extreme version of this is when researchers stuck their instruments into one of the most poisonous places on earth and found not only a species of mushroom growing there but one that actually appears to be feeding on the toxicity. How nasty is this place? Well, all you need to say is one word to shudder at the thought: Chernobyl.

But strangeness and fungi don't end with radiation-feasting mushrooms, for there are quite a number of them that feast on other things -- including animals. Nematophagous fungi, for instance, grow miniscule rings that, if a nematode happens to squirm into one, rapidly contract, trapping the unfortunate lunch ... I mean 'worm.' If this makes you a bit nervous take a bit of consolation in that the popular oyster mushroom is also a nematode killer – and it's also tasty, so while it eats them we also eat it.

See some beautiful and scary fungi at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Lebrac)

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is a continuation of the popular TypeFace/Off series in which you identify something by its distinctive font. We've tried movies, TV shows, board games, and now video games. Can you recognize them from the typeface, even if the actual words are different? Link

An experiment using the hallucinogen psilocybin on terminally ill cancer patients found that it helped to ease their anxiety.

The study included 12 patients who took a small dose of psilocybin -- the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" -- while under the supervision of trained therapists. In a separate session, the participants took a placebo pill, which had little effect on their symptoms.

By contrast, one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group's average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

In follow-up interviews with the researchers, some patients said their experience with psilocybin gave them a new perspective on their illness and brought them closer to family and friends.

"We were pleased with the results," says the lead researcher, Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, in Torrance, Calif.

Another study using larger doses of the drug is planned. Link -via reddit

Howie Woo, whose whimsical crochet creations have been featured on Neatorama previously, was inspired to create this crocheted scene by a sad, strange news item from 2001. Shirley Stockdale of Cape Coral, Florida got her arm caught in a sofa bed and could not reach the telephone. She died two days later. Woo was haunted by the disturbing story, and crocheted Ms. Stockdale's last moment before the accident. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Edward Nino Hernandez of Bogota, Colombia has been named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. The 24-year-old Hernandez is 27 inches (70 cm) tall and weighs only 22 pounds. The previous record holder was He Pingping of China, who was slightly taller than Hernandez and died last March. Hernandez is currently working as a actor in a Colombian film in which he plays a "drug thug."

Doctors never could explain why Nino is so small, his parents say.

"They never gave us a diagnosis," his mother, Noemi Hernandez, said during an interview in the family's sparely furnished apartment in Bosa, a mostly poor district of southern Bogota.

Hernandez, 43, said Nino weighed just 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) at birth and was 15 inches (38 centimeters) long.

She said doctors at the National University studied him until he was 3, then lost interest. She and her husband, a security guard, lost a daughter who was similarly small in 1992 when she was about to complete a year of life.

The couple's youngest child, 11-year-old Miguel Angel, stands 37 inches (93 centimeters) tall and has facial features similar to Nino. The other three boys are of normal height and appearance.

"I feel happy because I'm unique," Nino said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.

Link

Remember Meowmania, the site that make our cats go crazy? The creator, Jacqueline Steck, is back with Birdmania, which you can click and click to make your home or office sound like an aviary. Link -via Metafilter

by Bethany Halford (“BH”) with an Introduction and Commentary
by Steve Nadis (“SN”) Followed by a Rejoinder by the Aforementioned BH

EDITOR’S NOTE: The unusual format and to some degree the content of this article, including personal and even interpersonal commentary, reflects the persistent, entangled nature of the subject.

Notes Of A Humble Grail Watcher Regarding New Hope On The Horizon, by Steve Nadis (“SN”)

For the past 15 years, I’ve been tilting at windmills bearing the name “Holy Grail”—words that are all too familiar in the scientific literature and other realms of hyperbolic prose. I have made it my life’s work to scour scientific periodicals for references to said term in order to show the extent to which it has been misused, overused, and abused, with the ultimate hope being that scientists and science journalists alike will show more restraint in the future when describing “revolutionary new breakthroughs” or lofty, elusive goals not yet attained.

This is not a field for those eager to get rich quick. There’s not much money to be had in the grail-hunting enterprise, nor much glory to be found either—except in extremely rarified circles among those in the know. Indeed, most civilians fail to recognize the value of my preoccupation, nor do they consider it a valid occupation or even an avocation.

For most of this time, it has been a solitary pursuit laced with private curses, ad hominem remarks (at my own expense), and self-congratulatory chuckles. I even dislocated my shoulder once patting myself on the back. Putting it in literary terms, I have been Don Quixote without Sancho Panza. In dance terms, I have been Fred Astaire without Ginger Rogers. And in terms of refreshing alcoholic beverages that are perfect for the casual get-together or formal office party, I have been Martini without Rossi. (Or Rowan without Martin, or Martin without Lewis, or Lewis without Clark).

But slowly things have been changing for the better, perhaps a result of frequent announcements regarding the grail in this very journal, the Annals itself.¹ They say it takes a village, and although a village is not taking shape here, a community is. In the past couple of years, it seems that some people are finally “getting it”—people like Charles Petit, who wrote in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker in 2007: “What is it with any and all holy grails as ever-potent catnip for metaphor-hungry science and medical writers? How is it that French poetry, British Arthurian literature, and the romance of knights off on quests—one that not even Monty Python’s satire could cure—took such deep root in the imaginations of some writers in their youths (and of their sources)?”

Petit’s tirade was spurred by a BBC news story that described the development of artificial blood vessels as “one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine.” Is it, Petit asked, “just one of several such grails? And this in just one subspecialty? Well, one takes one’s holy grails where one finds them. Somebody should do a survey. There must be scads of them. How many holy grails does it take to make them, you know, plain old grails?”²

In 2008, Guardian columnist Tim Radford wrote: “British journalists have invoked the holy grail more than 1,000 times in the last 12 months. I have, almost certainly, evoked the same divinely-touched chalice, rightly celebrated in Arthurian legend, in some inappropriate context. We are all guilty... Grail imagery occurs with astonishing frequency in the scholarly press. Somewhere in the medical literature, I suspect, lurks a paper about the holy grail of hip replacement.”³ (And, yes, Mr. Radford, you are correct. But there is not one paper about the holy grail of hip replacement, my cher comrade in arms. There are many.)

(YouTube link)

How do you make Star Wars prequels better... or at least more tolerable? Shorten them to six minutes altogether and put it behind a parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody". -via The Daily What

Isabella Blyth of Gorgie, Scotland turned 106 years old on Saturday. She looks much younger, and attributes her long and healthy life to the fact that she's never been romantically involved.

The plucky pensioner, who celebrates her birthday tomorrow, has no regrets about living a life of abstinence and in fact believes it has made her physically and mentally strong.

Miss Blyth's niece, Sheena Campbell, who visits her aunt a couple of times a week, said they would mark the day with a cake, champagne and a reminisce about the past.

She said: "Isa is an amazing character and you wouldn't believe she was 106.

"She says that she has never felt the need for a romance and has never had time for a man. She had a high-powered job as a private secretary with North British Distilleries, which meant she was always busy.

This reminds me of an old joke in which the punch line reads, "Why would you want to?" Link -via Arbroath

Etsy seller swelser creates custom wedding invitations and save the date cards made to resemble vintage comic book covers! You can picture yourself as not only soon-to-be-married, but as a crime fighting adventurer as well. Link -via Rue the Day