What happens when someone, or some group, loses interest in maintaining their website? Maybe they take it offline. Maybe they just abandon it, and then it disappears when the bandwidth bills are not paid, the hosting service changes or goes out of business, or the site decays from lack of maintenance. But that doesn’t always happen. Some websites hang around for years, even decades, after they are abandoned, and you can still visit them. The funniest are those that promote or decry something totally obsolete, like the site Internet Explorer is Evil!

As you can guess, the site is dedicated to the evil of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s also an epic flashback to what most contemporary websites looked like – the long, long humour lists against the hypnotic, almost psychedelic tiled backgrounds, the rants, the story, the flashing header, and, of course, the obligatory button willing visitors to go get Firefox.

There’s even a walk-through and tutorial on how to remove IE…. from Windows 98. And just in case you’re really old-school, there’s a tutorial for installing Windows 95 without IE, too.

Looking through these old websites is like a trip back in time, and an archive of website design history. We’ve come a long since Angelfire! Aren't you glad that the concept of readability won out over flashing bright colors? You’ll find overviews and links to 14 of these obsolete and abandoned websites at Urban Ghosts.

Hey, y'all, it's time for another contest collaboration with the excellent What Is It? blog. Can you guess what this weird item is? This week, we are looking for funny and clever answers, not the correct one, but if you guess correctly, you'll win our undying respect. If you have one of the two funniest answers, you'll win a T-Shirt from the NeatoShop!

Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like. You have until the answer is revealed on the What Is It? Blog tomorrow.

You must give us your prize selection alongside your guess in order to win a shirt, so visit the NeatoShop and take a look around. If you don't write your prize selection, then you won't get the prize. I think you'll like the selection of funny t-shirts and science t-shirts -or even t-shirts of your favorite blogs and websites.

So let your imagination run wild! Oh yeah, you'll find another clue or two about this picture at the What Is It? blog. Good luck!

Update: When this item was posted at the What Is It blog, it was made clear that no one knew for sure what it is. But here’s a “maybe” answer:

This was found in a part of town that used to have an amusement park, so it was probably a part of a ride or sign.

Which is interesting, but not nearly as much fun as the guesses y’all came up with! We have a T-shirt from the NeatoShop for Hipshot, who had a great story to tell.

When I was a kid, my brother and I fought incessantly over who got the biggest slice of my mother’s delicious pie. One night at dinner, Momma had enough! She told my father she was not baking another pie until he solved this problem. The next day, Dad (who LOVED his pie) brought home this device. He was an engineer at NASA. During his (pie-less) lunch, he created this Exquisitely Accurate Pie Slicing Instrument: the EAPSI (pronounced “eep-see”). When placed over the entire pie and properly calibrated, EAPSI measures each slice down to a single micron. My brother and I no longer fight about who got the biggest slice. Now, we fight over who gets to operate EAPSI!

And another goes to sandyra, for this:

OMG! It's my really old chastity belt because I am really old. Does anyone know where the key is? Please?!?

Thanks for all the great guesses! We’ll do it again as long as the What is It blog gives us more mystery items.

In this charming animation, a goat herder takes his flock across the countryside and they eat everything along the way. Oh, more stuff happens, but I won’t give it all away.

(vimeo link)

This award-winning video by Will Rose is beautifully animated, and made me smile -and even laugh in a few places! Read about the inspiration behind the video at The Kid Should See This.

If you had a time machine that could take you back one minute, it would be like an instant “undo” button for your life. As soon as you recognize a mistake, you got get a do-over. Great, right?

(YouTube link)

The thing is, every minute is another opportunity to do or say the wrong thing. That’s the whole idea behind Devon Avery's short film One-Minute Time Machine, an official selection for the Sploid Short Film Festival. Contains NSFW language. -via reddit 

This home concept from Open Platform for Architecture is embedded in a cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. The entire house, called Casa Brutale, was designed around the breathtaking view. It is almost flush with the ground- all you see is the pool and a descending staircase. The pool has a glass bottom, so it doubles as a skylight. The entire front is glass, so the sea can be viewed even from the loft bedroom.

After marveling at the stunning design, you have to wonder about the utilities -especially water and sewer. Where do you put your cars? Is there any storage space? What if someone else moved nearby? Would you ever let children in that pool? Who's going to wash the window? How hard would it be to throw someone over that little balcony? See lots more pictures of Casa Brutale at My Modern Met. -via mental_floss

Risk is a board game that allows you to go to war, invade countries, and take over the world -if you win. It’s the perfect platform to harness the conflicts in the TV show Game of Thrones. Now HBO and USAopoly are in partnership to produce a licensed Game of Thrones version of Risk. Rally your troops to conquer the Seven Kingdoms and gain the Iron Throne! This game has 650 pieces, two playing boards, and several ways to play.

The two custom game boards display the “Game of Thrones” Known World, and offer three different ways to play. There is a War of Five Kings game in Westeros for 3-5 players that features the Houses Martell, Stark, Baratheon, Lannister and Tyrell. A 2-player game allows you to contest the rule of Ghiscari slavers in Essos, featuring Houses Targaryen and Ghiscari. Finally, combining the two maps with seven players allows one to combat all seven Houses.

Player boards will be customized for each House and allow you to track your progress in terms of territories, ports, castles and victory points.

Character cards will let you use the battle skills of four of the most powerful members of each house. For example, a Daenerys Targaryen card can be played when declaring an invasion, and lets you replace all 6-sided dice with 8-sided dice. The Cersei Lannister card can be played if you conquer three or more territories in the turn, and allows you to draw an extra territory card.

There are more features in the game you’ll learn about at Speakeasy. Risk: Game of Thrones will be available to purchase next month. -via Time

Our friend Cliff Pickover’s latest book is The Physics Devotional: Celebrating the Wisdom and Beauty of Physics. This book is a companion to his previous The Mathematics Devotional. Every page of this new yearlong devotional features an intriguing quotation about physics, alongside a curious artwork or photo relating to physics. Wisdom by notable physicists, educators, novelists, and diverse thinkers -including Isaac Newton, Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, and even Vincent van Gogh- is featured along with marvelous photographs and illustrations of force fields, galaxies, machines, and more. You’ll also find micro-biographies of some of the most influential physicists in history, whose birthdays are highlighted throughout.

Neatorama is delighted to present some of the intriguing images and quotations from The Physics Devotional.

* * *

“As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands.  When major theories are overturned, what we thought was certain knowledge gives way, and knowledge touches upon mystery differently.  This newly uncovered mystery may be humbling and unsettling, but it is the cost of truth.  Creative scientists, philosophers, and poets thrive at this shoreline.”

-- W. Mark Richardson, “A Skeptic’s Sense of Wonder,” Science, 1998.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”

   -- Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 1991

Well, I’ve found another free online game that I will have to bookmark and then resist the temptation to play instead of working. Arrow Hero by Jérémy Graziani is supposed to be a little like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero for sedentary office workers. Your four arrow keys are color coded, and you have to press the right one when it comes around to score points. But really, you only have to press when the arrow changes. It’s not nearly as easy as those instruction would imply, because it goes pretty fast. With a little practice, my score could be much better… but then again, I could lose hours of my life. -via Boing Boing

Willet’s Point, often called The Iron Triangle, is a neighborhood in Queens, New York, filled with corrugated metal quonset huts and automotive junkyards. Between Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, and Arthur Ashe Stadium, mechanics and car parts dealers had made their living in Willet’s Point since the 1930s. The city stopped providing services, such as sewers and road repair, decades ago. The blighted neighborhood covers extremely valuable real estate, and the city has tried to move the mechanics out several times. Over the last few years, plans were made and deals struck to move the entire neighborhood to the Bronx, demolish the existing structures, and build high-rise residences and shopping and entertainment complexes in their stead.

Under an agreement with the administration, the city’s Economic Development Corporation would actually give the mechanics $4.8 million to facilitate moving the entire Willets Point community to the South Bronx. The would-be developer of the site, the Queens Development Group, was going to kick in another big chunk of cash, almost a million dollars, to help out as well. The money wouldn’t just pay for the move, it would pay for a legal team at the Urban Justice Center to make sure everything would run smoothly.

And it wasn’t just the money that would be helping the workers of Willets Point. Free English classes and GED classes were offered, along with job training and placement for people who wanted new careers, and referrals to immigration services for those trying to obtain legal status.

Six-hundred and thirty workers eventually signed up for the program, and it was considered, by most (though most certainly not all) accounts, a success.

Not only was the future going to come to Willets Point, but it had already made almost everyone happy before it even got there.

So why were the proprietors and employees of 48 different auto shops now going on their fifth day with nothing but water and occasional mug of herbal tea?

It was a low-level bureaucratic snafu, of course, that stopped all progress. One that would go months without correction, and leave the mechanics in place past their June first move-out deadline. The weak point of the intricate plan ended up dropping the heaviest load on those with the least power to fix it, hence the hunger strike, which at least generated publicity. Read the entire story, including a vivid description of the ugly yet historic Willet’s Point area, at Jalopnik. -via Metafilter

The hit song “Uptown Funk” goes perfectly with a dance number from the 1992 Disney musical Newsies. Hoodathunkit? No, really, who thought of this? That would be salliethesalad.

(YouTube link)

The only problem with this mashup is that it’s too short. That’s a rare complaint in viral videos. -via Uproxx

My little brother once had a memorable meltdown because he couldn’t see his favorite TV show as it didn’t come on for a few more hours. That was in 1963. Thirty years later, he found his own children were completely used to picking out what TV shows or movies to watch on their own time, as many times as they wanted, on home video. Now the next generation uses hand-held devices to not only watch what they want at any time, but to play games, find new entertainment, and interact with friends -instead of the people in the same room with them. Miner & Co. Studio conducted research on the viewing habits of children, and have shared their findings.    

Mobile devices are so popular with kids that nearly half of the 800 parents quizzed by Miner & Co. reported that they confiscate their kids' tablets when they act up and make them watch TV instead, thereby fostering a sort of Pavlovian response that equates TV with punishment. (That these parents simply don't restrict their kids' access to video altogether when they misbehave suggests that they're raising a generation of spoiled content junkies, but that's another story.)

Some kids are so obsessed with the small screen that they'll even forego treats for another few minutes with their portable video device. When given the choice between spending quality time with the tablet or having dessert, 41% of the parents surveyed said their kids would pick the screen over the snack.

These findings may explain the drop in Nielsen ratings for children’s television shows this year. You can read more about the study at Ad Age, and see the accompanying video here. What I’d like to see is a study that contrasts these results with families in which children do not own their own tablets and smartphones. Considering the costs, there are surely many families like that still around.

(Image credit: Flickr user redagainPatti)

On Monday, a bear at the Minnesota Zoo picked up a big rock and slammed it over and over against the glass that separated the bears from zoo visitors, shattering it. The five-layer safety glass did not fall apart, however, and no one was hurt. The bear exhibit has been closed since then, and the zoo will have to shell out “tens of thousands of dollars” to replace the pane.  

Robin Ficker, a visitor from Maryland, said he was watching “the bears wrestling with each other and looking at the people” shortly after the zoo opened at 9 a.m. Then one of the animals “picked up from the bottom of the pool a rock that had to weigh 50 pounds. And while many people were standing there, he slammed it against the glass several times,” Ficker said.

[Zoo animal collections manager Tony] Fisher said he’s not sure which of the three bears is responsible for breaking one of pane’s five layers, but he suspects it was Kenai, a nearly full-grown male. Grizzlies typically top out at 800 to 900 pounds.

Kenai is “usually the clown out there, fooling around in the water,” Fisher said. “He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just being a bear.”

Oh, really? Do grizzly bears in the wild ever throw rocks? This could be the beginning of a revolt, as bears learn to use tools to gain their freedom. And the last thing we need are free grizzly bears teaching each other how to use big rocks to get what they want. Read more on this story at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. -via Digg

(Image credit: Robin Ficker)

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

Incarnations Around the World and on Other Worlds
by Earle E. Spamer

This is a list of geographical and artificial features named, in some or other fashion, “Grand Canyon.” It includes names formal and informal, current and archaic; some are off-the-cuff descriptive terms. Copies of references are in Spamer’s files. Anyone wishing further details can consult Spamer, who will consult his files if time and patience permit.

An early, much shorter, version of this list was published as “Doin’ the Canyon Shuffle,” by Early C. Corax and C. V. Abyssus (pseudonyms of Earle E. Spamer and Richard D. Quartaroli), in Boatman’s Quarterly Review (vol. 9, no. 3, Summer 1996, pp. 6-7). Some sources were originally taken from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System and from gazetteers published by the Defense Mapping Agency. Since 1996, the list has been greatly expanded, the additions coming from other published sources, from ephemera, and substantially from websites.

The earliest known use of the term “Grand Canyon” for a geographic feature was in 1846 by James William Abert, in the Journal of Lieutenant J.W. Abert from Bent’s Fort to St. Louis, in 1845: “At noon we reached the Grand Cañon, which is referred to by Gregg is his Commerce of the Prairies, as a source of great annoyance to early travelers.” (The Gregg mentioned here did not himself use the term.) This reference probably refers to what today is Mills Canyon, along the Canadian River in New Mexico.

As far as I am aware, the earliest appellation “Grand Canyon” in reference to Arizona’s Grand Canyon of the Colorado River appeared in 1859, a decade before John Wesley Powell solidly established the name as a part of American culture and science. In the February 1859 issue of the Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 41-5) there appeared a slightly abridged reprinting of Joseph C. Ives’ preliminary report of his 1857-8 exploration of the Colorado River. There the title and an introductory paragraph were apparently written by the editor of the journal, but who he was is not indicated in that issue, nor has his name been found in record searches. The name “Grand Canyon” appears to have been applied to the entire system of canyons in the lower Colorado River, between present-day Black Canyon and Grand Canyon, the region explored by Ives’ party; and thus, significantly, it embraces “Big Cañon” of Ives’ and other contemporary usage.

Little girls want to be fashionable, toy companies want the success of Barbie, and the ‘70s were a mad scramble of clothing trends that did not age well. What this combination brought us are some very odd vintage doll clothes, courtesy of the many Barbie knock-off dolls. Carmen Varricchio & Gerardo Somoza have published the book Doll Junk: Collectible and Crazy Fashions from the ’70s and ’80s, and are celebrating its release with a slideshow of fashion doll abominations of the ‘70s you can see at Collectors Weekly.

Artist Henry Hargreaves has given us plenty of food art in the past, and now he a new project to unveil- Yellow Submarine, a series of The Beatles in Jello!