Thanks to the internet, people from all over the world can talk to and learn from each other. We Americans have learned that the popular image others have of us is that we are all fat and carry guns. People from other English-speaking nations are shocked that a medical emergency can cause personal bankruptcy in the U.S. But that’s all text. When people from other countries actually visit the United States, they encounter some things they aren’t prepared for. For example:

4. Tipping

The waitstaff, bartenders, cab drivers, hotel employees, and almost anyone in the service industry are tipped. The rule is to tip not less than 15% and although it’s considered as voluntary, giving less than the accepted percentage or not leaving anything at all is generally looked down upon. This is one of what foreigners often rant about when in America (and the locals do that too anyway).

5. America is Really Huge

If you plan visiting the country for a week and the places to visit you have in your itinerary include driving from New York to Miami to Mount Rushmore to Grand Canyon to Las Vegas to Hollywood, please realize that it’s impossible to happen. Remember, America’s area is 9,826,675 km² which first-timers often underestimate. Hint: Italy is just about the size of California.

You might be able to go from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas, but it will still take a few hours, and another few to Hollywood. That's equivalent to driving through several nations in Europe. Yeah, these are thing Americans take for granted. Read the rest of the list at When on Earth. -via the Presurfer

The European Space Agency (ESA) is on high alert as the Rosetta spacecraft is in the process of deploying the Philae lander to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Follow its progress live from mission control in Germany. The actual landing should happen about 11AM Eastern time, but there is plenty going on now.  

Emily Lakdawalla offers plenty of information in her timeline of the event at The Planetary Society. And look for her in the live feed.

All next week, I'll be in Darmstadt, Germany, at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), to witness the historic attempt at landing on a comet. I'm not going to lie to you: I'm going to be terrified about Philae's survival until I see ESA engineers leaping from their seats and cheering. To be clear, I have no specific doubts about the spacecraft or its designers. It's just that we have never landed on anything like a comet before. We don't really know what the surface of a comet is like -- is it a hard, crusty shell of rocky material? A diaphanously fluffy, almost cloud-like layer of highly porous dust? Gravelly? Crunchy? Crystalline? Powdery? Sandpapery? Slippery? Who knows? The last time we landed on a surface that we knew so little about was when ESA landed Huygens on Titan in 2004. But Huygens did almost all of its science on the way down, returning all its data to the Cassini orbiter in real time, so it didn't matter whether Huygens survived its arrival on Titan's surface. In contrast, almost all of Philae's science will not come until after a successful landing. It's going to be terrifying. But I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Aldo get live updates from Lakdawalla's Twitter feed. 

Phil Plait is posting pictures at Bad Astronomy as they come in.

The picture above is from the Unrealistic Comet Landing Simulator game from UsVsTh3m. Try it out after the real comet landing.

Update: I guess we can call this a success!

Update: Randall Munroe has updated today's xkcd comic to reflect the success of the mission.

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At one time, John weighed 360 pounds. But with hard work and determination, he slimmed down to the buff guy he is now. He wants you to know that his body is not perfect despite the weight loss and fit muscles: losing an enormous amount of weight will leave you with loose skin. John is insecure about it, but confronts that insecurity by showing us what his skin looks like. He does a good job of camouflaging it while dressed, and the tradeoff in health is well worth it. See more of John at Instagram. -via Viral Viral Videos

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I’d noticed in passing that Disney's Maleficent didn’t seem to be much of a blockbuster, now I know why. Screen Junkies gives the movie the Honest Trailer treatment, which seems almost like shooting fish in a barrel for this film. -via Tastefully Offensive

People will collect almost anything. It’s the thrill of acquiring something distinctive and rare, and sometimes it’s the thrill of having something other people don’t. Most people don’t have bedpans. Eric Eakin has around 250 bedpan items, both bedpans themselves and ephemera relating to bedpans. It all started out as a prank played on his mother, and when she began collecting them, he inherited her interest. At first, Eakin collected both antique bedpans and chamber pots, but let go of the chamber pots because other people collected them.

Collectors Weekly: What’s the difference between a bedpan and a chamber pot?

Eakin: Well, they’re distinctly different in size and function. Indoor plumbing only arrived in the early 20th century for most people. Before that time, if you got up in the middle of the night and had to use the toilet, you’d go in a little pot. It was usually the youngest child’s responsibility to empty all the chamber pots in the morning.

Chamber pots are about 10 inches around, often with ceramic handles, and have a lid on them. A friend of mine said he once sat down to dinner with some friends, and they were eating on fancy china. But then, they brought out the soup and served it from a chamber pot, and he didn’t have the nerve to tell them what they were eating out of. They thought it was a beautiful antique soup dish.

As with anything else, there’s a lot to know about bedpans. They were made much sturdier in the past than they are now -modern bedpans are practically disposable. There are a very few bedpan collectors in the world, but Eakin knows them and their unique stories. Learn more than you thought you’d ever know about antique bedpans at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: VCU Libraries)

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StoryCorps gives us a special story for Veteran’s Day. Marine Lance Cpl. Travis Williams tells us about his platoon as they fought in Iraq in 2005. As we honor our veterans, we must also remember the unseen scars they carry from their war experiences. And we must never forgot those who did not get to become veterans. The StoryCorps story was animated by the Rauch Brothers. -Thanks, Jason!

There comes a time in every kid’s life when he wants to build his own little space in the living room -a fort! When Dad is an architect, he can’t help but observe how his kids discover the joy of creation, and he can’t help but analyze the situation and offer some building advice. Architect Ben Pell has some basic tips for constructing a pillow fort, which parents can pass along to make fort-building a family project. Here’s a sample that corresponds with the illustration.

Choose From The 3 Basic Fort Types

    Buttress Fort: Furniture is used like a primary retaining wall and the fort is built off of that.

    Tunnel Fort: Furniture – usually the couch – is built into the fort itself, which runs the length of the furniture.

    Compound Fort: Multiple pieces of furniture are connected with a series of “rooms.”

Read more about building a fun but sturdy pillow fort at Fatherly. -via Digg

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Devin Supertramp’s extreme sports videos show us thrilling activities we’ve have never thought of. This one looks fun -NOT! Imagine jumping out of a hot air balloon, tied to a rope, so that you’re swinging through the air alone. And don’t drop the GoPro camera! You’d kind of want to be not too high off the ground, but you’d certainly not want to be too near the ground, either. I couldn’t help but wait for something to go wrong, even though I knew that a tragedy wouldn’t have made it into the final cut. -via Viral Viral Videos

#kidfood #kidsfood #foodart #cat #anne2matthew #lunch #dinner

A photo posted by Anne Widya (@anne2matthew) on Oct 10, 2014 at 9:24pm PDT

#foodart #kidfood #kidsfood #anne2matthew #lunch #dinner #krupuk.It's chicken playground

Anne Widya makes dinner into works of art for her four children. She started out with simple shapes, but when she posted a picture of a meal on Facebook, she received lots of encouragement. Since then, Widya has made food art her hobby, to the delight of her children. Continue reading to see more.

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Move over, keyboard cat! Wyatt’s on the drums, and he’s ready to rock! No matter that Wyatt is only eight months old and has yet to walk or talk, here he drums along to “5 Minutes Alone” by Pantera. He’s going to be dangerous when he’s old enough to sing! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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Will Reid has third episode in his series of instructional videos for his teenage children. This one is about how to hang up a wet towel. He starts out by saying the videos have been somewhat effective or at least annoying to his children, but we see that they have yet to learn how to load toilet paper onto the holder. I have to disagree with Will about one thing -if a towel is wet, I do not want the kids to fold it. But I don’t have a heated towel rack, so what do I know?

However, I have just recently warned my daughters about the dangers of treating their towels in a dormitory bathroom the way they do at home: theft, mildew, other people's filth, insufficient laundry money, etc. They’ll learn one way or another. -via Tastefully Offensive

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The latest episode of Epic Rap Battles of History pits fictional characters against TV stars as the four Ghostbusters strut their supernatural superhero status against Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who’s main advantage is that they are real. Who won? It really doesn’t matter; it’s all about the sick rhymes. -via The Daily Dot

This is just adorable. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. However, you can make the water look good to the horse if you use your noggin. Anna Paterek’s horse Magic was apprehensive about walking into the river, so she got off and showed him that it was okay by wading in herself. Once she got Magic to try it, he had a grand old time! Notice he mimicked her movements exactly, so be careful of the example you show. -via Viral Viral Videos

I always enjoy Cliff Pickover’s approach to mathematics, which he conveys with a sense of awe, mystery, and a bit of fun, too! Cliff is a prolific author of such popular past works as The Math Book and The Physics Book.

His latest book is The Mathematics Devotional: Celebrating the Wisdom and Beauty of Mathematics. Every page of this yearlong devotional features an intriguing quotation about math, alongside a beautiful artwork relating to mathematics: fractals, optical illusions, architecture, and more. The quotes range from Pythagoras to Feynman to Churchill. At the end of the book is a brief biographical dictionary that provides additional curiosities. 

Neatorama is proud to present some of the beautiful images and quotations from The Mathematics Devotional.

“Blindness to the aesthetic element in mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book... Contrariwise, appreciation of this element makes the subject live in a wonderful manner and burn as no other creation of the human mind seems to do.”

 -- Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, 1981

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.”

 -- Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1918

If you’ve been reading Neatorama for a while, you know we’ve posted quite a few of the adventures of travelers Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell, who live and blog from a different part of the world every three months in a project called For 91 Days. When they were in Turkey, they also set up a side project called Daily Cat Istanbul because they took so many pictures of the cats of the city.

Jürgen and Mike are finding that cats are photogenic everywhere, so they’ve started a new Tumblr blog called The Cosmopolitan Cat, in order to share pictures and videos of cats everywhere they go. So far, there’s only the cats of Macedonia (plenty of them), but there will be more cats added as they are found. Each picture list scrolls horizontally.