The servers at Amazon had some technical problems this week that affected a lot of sites, most notably reddit. Neatorama always welcomes poor lost internet surfers in when their favorite networking site is down. It's the least we can do! If you weren't with us all this week, here are our exclusive articles you might want to catch up on.

Jill Harness brought us The History of The High Five in honor of National High Five Day on Thursday.

And she also found us 10 Things You Didn't Know About IKEA.

From Uncle John's Bathroom reader, we learned about the movie Robot Monster: The Ultimate Golden Turkey. The full movie is also embedded in the article.

How to Cater a Roman Orgy is a classic article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

Mental_floss magazine gave us How an Island Full of Landmines Led to a Thriving Penguin Population.

Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy came around on Wednesday. The winning entry is from Alan: “Be careful; someone started a flame war between mac and pc users and it’s a long way down.” However, Alan did not select a t-shirt.

In the What Is It? game this week, ladybuggs was the first of many with the correct answer. This is a National Cash Register Stamping Phone, used in bigger department stores. It was for clerks to get approval from “credit specialists” in the back room for customers to charge their purchases. Read more about them here. Ladybuggs wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from next2exits, who declared that this is a Wisconsin voter polling station. The handset allows the governor to call you and tell you who to vote for. But next2exits didn't select a shirt.

There are more ways to get your Neatorama fix: If you aren't checking our Facebook page every day, you're missing out on extra content, contests, discussions, and links you won't find here. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what's going around the web in real time. Have a wonderful Easter, everyone!

The Making of a Fly by Peter Lawrence is a well-regarded reference book on fruit flies used by those who study genetics. You can get a used copy for about $35. But recently a new copy was spotted on Amazon for the price of $1,730,045.91! Michael Eisen was intrigued, and looked into why it was so expensive. He found there were two vendors selling the book new, bordeebook  and profnath, and they seemed to be in a price war of sorts, with the prices rising daily by a steady algorithm. Profnath's price was always lower, but both sellers raised their price automatically in response to the other's price change.

The behavior of profnath is easy to deconstruct. They presumably have a new copy of the book, and want to make sure theirs is the lowest priced – but only by a tiny bit ($9.98 compared to $10.00). Why though would bordeebook want to make sure theirs is always more expensive? Since the prices of all the sellers are posted, this would seem to guarantee they would get no sales. But maybe this isn’t right – they have a huge volume of positive feedback – far more than most others. And some buyers might choose to pay a few extra dollars for the level of confidence in the transaction this might impart. Nonetheless this seems like a fairly risky thing to rely on – most people probably don’t behave that way – and meanwhile you’ve got a book sitting on the shelf collecting dust. Unless, of course, you don’t actually have the book….

My preferred explanation for bordeebook’s pricing is that they do not actually possess the book. Rather, they noticed that someone else listed a copy for sale, and so they put it up as well – relying on their better feedback record to attract buyers. But, of course, if someone actually orders the book, they have to get it – so they have to set their price significantly higher – say 1.27059 times higher – than the price they’d have to pay to get the book elsewhere.

The price went as high as $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on April 18th when someone apparently noticed, and manually adjusted the price. Read the whole story at Eisen's blog. Link -via reddit

Private First Class Rupert Valero took his toy-making hobby with him -all the way to Afghanistan! Valero is near the end of his year-long deployment, and took time for an interview with blogger Newton Gimmick, in which he talked about making toys out of recycled materials for the local kids, among other things.

I love to create and inspire. Plus, I love kids. So the hobbyist in me started making highly durable and colorful toys for local kids whenever we roll out the FOB. Toys are universal. They bring out happiness and joy on so many levels. Kids here have nothing but rocks and bad habits. I paint on hearts the toys I make for them to associate that with the heart patches sewn on 101st airborne units’ helmets. So when kids who get these toys see the same hearts on US Soldiers, it will click in him ‘these are friends.’

Read the rest at Infinite Hollywood. Link -via Metafilter

See more of Valero's works in his Flickr stream. Link

Painted Eggs is a memory game appropriate for the Easter season. You'll be shown a colored egg. All you have to do is remember what color(s) it was painted and then reproduce them. But it gets harder as you go along! http://www.gameonade.com/en/game/29/painted-eggs -via Look At This

In the 1920s, architect Hermann Soergel had a wild idea to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, drain water into the Sahara Desert, and form lots of new land in the Mediterranean basin to colonize.

The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”:  American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa.  And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with "thousands" of canals and become semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea.  This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future.

Soergel's purpose in this plan was political: to unite Europe and Africa (and the Americas) against Asia. Of course, this plan was never more than an idea, which Soergel published in 1929. Link -via io9

Inspired by the xkcd comic "Heaven," GUD magazine made a playable version of Tetris that occasionally sends a piece "from heaven" that's exactly what you need to fit in with the rest of your blocks. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

Kelly Lee Barrett, Kaycee Krieg, Jeff Wysaski, and Car Nazzal collaborated to recreate famous movie scenes using Easter eggs! This one is, of course, from the movie Say Anything. Check out Jaws, Kill Bill, and others at Pleated Jeans. Link

What do you do with your life after you've ruled a nation with an iron fist? There are plenty of examples from history of dictators who were offered a chance to live out their lives, just as long as they did it somewhere else. But where? The Shah of Iran had a hard time finding a country to take him in after he was overthrown in 1979. Initially refused by the US, he lived in Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico.

Finally, in October 1979 he was allowed into the U.S., where he was treated (unsuccessfully) for advanced lymphatic cancer at Cornell Medical Hospital in New York City. His friendly reception in the U.S. sparked outrage in Iran, where radical students retaliated by taking over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and holding embassy workers hostage for 444 days. Hoping to take political pressure off the U.S., the dying ex-monarch next traveled to Panama, a U.S. ally with modern medical facilities. But the Panamanian government was ambivalent, and even considered extraditing the Shah to Iran to face charges of murder and torture during his reign. Hoping to avoid this final indignity, the Shah returned to Egypt, where he died in Cairo on July 28, 1980.

Read more about the Shah and seven other dictators in exile at mental_floss. Link

Kyle Munkittrick encountered a story of a family who was encouraged to give their son growth hormones so that he would grow taller than the predicted 5' 5", which is just slightly taller than his parents. One parent thinks that may be a good idea; the other is appalled at the idea of treating a child for a normal condition.

Crack open any text on bioethics and I can almost guarantee that the “is shortness a disability” example will be somewhere among the pages. Shortness (and deafness, which The Dish is also exploring at the moment) sits right in the blurry space among disability, disease, and normal. How short is “too short?” Why is 5’2? too short for a man, but not a woman? The answer is pretty much: because we think it is. Human height does fall along a bell curve, but it varies around the world and throughout history. Yet, at some point, being short goes from a relative and descriptive term (e.g. I am shorter than Yao Ming) to a normative one implying a disability.

Growing taller than you would normally can have its advantages, but its all relative to the height of others around you. What would you do in this situation? Munkittrick looks at how we define "disability" at Science Not Fiction. Link

Gaby Rodriguez of Toppenish High School in Washington state spent most of her senior year pregnant. Except she wasn't. The 17-year-old wore a bulge of wire mesh and fabric as an experiment to see how other students reacted for her senior project. Read more about this story at NeatoBambino. Link

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University of Dundee student Tim Pryde built a robot for his fourth year Product Design project. He named it DON-8r because its purpose is to ask for contributions to the Dundee Science Centre. This video shows a test run.

Forgot to mention, there’s no hard feelings towards the girl who breaks DON-8r at the end of the video. It was user testing after all and clearly the head was not secure enough! DON-8r has since been repaired and recapitated

Read all about the project at his blog. Link -via b3ta

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Simon's Cat encounters a bunny in this new animation from Simon Tofield. Could it be the Easter Bunny? -via The Daily What

In her latest post, Allie Brosh goes into the mind of her simple dog, which appeared to be wiped clean by a small adventure.  The emptiness she sees may be terrifying to contemplate, but more likely will provoke a laugh. Link

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A cat momentarily gets into a fight with himself. It may be a case of temporary loss of body awareness, or what some of us call a brain fart. -via Cynical-C

Will Foreman used the power of math to beat speeding tickets before three different judges. The tickets were automatically issued by traffic cameras. Foreman used the photographs themselves to raise a reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the speed sensors.

The camera company, Optotraffic, uses a sensor that detects any vehicle exceeding the speed limit by 12 or more mph, then takes two photos of it for identification purposes. The photos are mailed to violators, along with a $40 ticket.

For each ticket, Mr. Foreman digitally superimposed the two photos - taken 0.363 seconds apart from a stationary point, according to an Optotraffic time stamp - creating a single photo with two images of the vehicle.

Using the vehicle’s length as a frame of reference, Mr. Foreman then measured its distance traveled in the elapsed time, allowing him to calculate the vehicle’s speed. In every case, he said, the vehicle was not traveling fast enough to get a ticket.

So far the judges have agreed.

A representative for the company that installed the cameras (and which receives a portion the fines they generate) said that the vehicles' speeds are measure before the pictures are taken. Foreman said he doubted the cars slowed that much afterward, since the pictures do not show brakes lights on. Link -via Fark

(Image credit: Rod Lamkey Jr./The Washington Times)