Is there something special about the theme to the TV show Law & Order that particularly affects dogs? See thirty-five different dogs singing along to the opening credits. Yes, thirty-five of them. Link -via Metafilter

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Better than dominoes any day! Tim Fort set off 2,250 sticks in this awesome world-record stick bomb {wiki} chain. -via Boing Boing

Ken Bannister, founder of the International Banana Club Museum, is selling out. The price of the museum has dropped from $45,000 to only $15,000! Before you snap up that bargain, be aware that the museum includes only the banana artifacts but no real estate, as the museum has been housed in rented space.

Bannister told the Victorville Daily Press that he decided to liquidate the collection after the Hesperia Recreation and Park District told him that he would no longer be able to rent space at the Harrison Exhibit Building in Hesperia, California where Bannister exhibited his thousands of banana goodies. He did not have another location set up and does not want to put the items in storage.

The Guiness Book of World Records says that the museum is the world's largest collection devoted to any one fruit. Since the 1970s Bannister has done many interviews on his unique collection and has appeared on television shows including the "Tonight Show" featuring Johnny Carson. Bannister hopes that someone or some company will buy the museum and display it somewhere.

Link to story. Link to auction. -via J-Walk Blog

New York City has big plans for Coney Island. The Brooklyn neighborhood will soon have new thrill rides and other amusements designed to bring back the glory years when Coney Island was known as "the People's Playground" after years of decline.

Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride's global debut.

Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan's Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America's concept of fast food.

By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.

Other plans include shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and 5,000 new housing units for the area. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iSlMm8ZtPhwWEzvFcJhHICzt1OHQD9DTIT180 -via Fark

(image credit: AP/NYC Economic Development Corp.)

I always have to laugh at the reactions when people discover the awful recipes of the 1950s and 60s. At the time, many women stayed home with their time-saving appliances and and used that spare time to save the money they didn't make in the workplace. Industry helped by publishing new and bizarre recipes that would stretch a family's budget and sell newfangled food products like Spam and Jell-O. Behold, the Pickle-stretcher Salad.

"The Pickle Stretcher Salad gave me the most visceral reaction I have ever had to a food-like item. I love olives, dill pickles and just about anything limey, but combining the three left me with a shiver that wouldn't stop traveling my spine. One bite, and I'm sure I will never, ever forget the texture of slime and crunchy, the taste of ammonia and acid."

The pickle salad was chosen as an example here because it was the most appetizing picture in the post. Read about twenty such recipes and the reaction they get from modern diners. Link -via Digg

Is it luck or a curse that causes German speed skater Daniela Anschutz-Thoms to finish in fourth place? Not once, not twice, but fifteen times in the Olympics, the World Championships, and the European Championships. At each competition, medals are awarded to the top three only. It happened again in Vancouver.

Right up until the last lap, Germany's unluckiest Olympian looked set to break the mold and grab silver in the women's 3000 metre speed skating race.

But eventually the 35-year-old fell short, losing out on third place by just three hundredths of a second.

No matter how hard poor old Daniela tries, she just can’t escape fourth place.

Anschutz-Thoms will have one more chance at a medal, in the 5,000 meter race next week. Link -via Digg

Is there something in our brains that make humans see the same geometric patterns during drug use, illness, or near-death experiences? Even pressing on our eyes can induce the same spirals other people see. Research by professor of Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience Paul Bressloff and his colleagues at Oxford shows that these patterns are formed in the first visual field of the brain, or V1.

An object or scene in the visual world is projected as a two-dimensional image on the retina of each eye, so what we see can also be treated as flat sheet: the visual field. Every point on this sheet can be pin-pointed by two coordinates, just like a point on a map, or a point on the flat model of V1. The alternating regions of light and dark that make up a geometric hallucination are caused by alternating regions of high and low neural activity in V1 — regions where the neurons are firing very rapidly and regions where they are not firing rapidly.

A closer look at the types of specialized neurons in the V1 field and how they interact with each other explains the geometric patterns.

Bressloff and his colleagues used a generalised version of the equations from the original model to let the system evolve. The result was a model that is not only more accurate in terms of the anatomy of V1, but can also generate geometric patterns in the visual field that the original model was unable to produce. These include lattice tunnels, honeycombs and cobwebs that are better characterised in terms of the orientation of contours within them, than in terms of contrasting regions of light and dark.

That's about as simple as I can make it in a short blurb; the entire article explains it better. Yes, there is math involved. Link -via Metafilter

In any movie, witnessing a murder will surely lead to a chase scene. In Pivot, the animation is what makes the chase special. Until the ending. Designed and animated by Kevin Megens, Floris Vos, Arno de Grijs, and Andre Bergs for the KORT! 2009 project. http://pivotthemovie.com/ -via Digg

Sure, you know some famous Canadians, but those people you know aren't on this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You'll be given fifteen names, and you determine if those people were born in Cnada or not. It's harder than you think! I scored 73% (11 out of 15), but I would have done better if I knew who all these celebrities were. Link

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The couple in Maryland who made the fire-breathing snowman have their own dragon busy at work melting snow. Wouldn't you love to have neighbors like this? -via Gizmodo

Someone mentioned that John Coker's homemade rockets looked like crayons, so he ran with the idea. His crayon rockets were launched all together from a crayon box! Well, OK, half of them worked. See how he made them in this account of the adventure. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It's called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.

Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn't the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?

"We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments," says Jacak. "The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we're trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature."

The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg

Photographer Cédric Delsaux (previously at Neatorama) began the project Dark Lens with the intent of photographing suburban decay in Dubai, but the addition of Star Wars characters made it something special. Link to pictures. Link to article (en Français). -via Dark Roasted Blend

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Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration by T.J. and the Revo is a parody of the song Apologize by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic. A perfect video for President's Day. Link -via reddit

The Mathias quadruplets of Lexington, North South Carolina captured our hearts by laughing in unison in a clip featured on America's Funniest Home Videos. Grace, Emily, Mary Claire, and Anna will turn ten years old on February 16th, and they are still laughing. The four girls are identical quads, which are very rare, and have been featured on many TV shows as well as three appearances on AFHV, and they've been in commercials as well. http://www.thestate.com/local/story/1153648.html -via Arbroath

(right image credit: Renee Ittner-McManus)