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
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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.
John Oliver discovered the salmon cannon, invented to help salmon cross manmade barriers on their way upstream to their spawning areas. He was impressed.
“Clearly, this is the greatest object that has ever been invented.”
So of course he had to procure one for his HBO show Last Week Tonight, and demonstrates some of the great targets you can fire salmon at. Hint: he fires it at people. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Oliver's main topic last night was State Lotteries.
BlizzCon took place in Anaheim over the weekend, and Cosplay Py won first place in the costume contest. The costume is Grand Empress Shek'zeer from World of Warcraft, which Py and her husband had worked on for two years (it even lights up!). It was to be unveiled at Blizzcon. Py and her costume did just fine for the judging Friday, but when the winners were ascending the stage to show the crowd, Py injured her ankle and had to be carried off. She tells us what happened:
On the way out of the judging room, i caught the toe of my boot in the carpet and went down. In the process, i snapped the pvc skeleton in one of the legs. This was just from the angle I fell and the force of my weight on the joint. Blizzard staff was amazing and gave us plenty of time to work out a fix. By contest time, she was 100% back up and running.
What happened at the contest is pretty much 100% separate. There were two ramps. We had practiced on some steepish ramps and had a plan of action. The first ramp was difficult, but we managed. Unfortunately, the second ramp was much more steep. When I did manage to hit the top, the weight of my thorax and bag legs (still on the slope of the ramp) literally pulled me off of my stilts. In the process I injured my ankle. At this point, there was absolutely no way for me to walk on in the costume. So, my husband and the most fabulous stage hand in the world got my costume off of me while I went into a full on meltdown.
Cosplay Py was not able to parade her costume around BlizzCon, but photographer Morten Skovgaard did a photo shoot the next day to preserve the costume at the event. The Flickr album of the shoot shows how elaborate the costume is. -via Polygon
(Image credit: Cosplay Py)
Saturday during the Disney Wine & Dine Half Marathon Weekend, hundreds of children took part in the One Mile Run. The runner that came in last got the biggest applause.
Sarah Kate Sligh was born ten weeks prematurely. She is now a 12-year-old athlete with cerebral palsy. Sarah Kate is on the school team swim and plays softball in a recreational league, and of course, she runs. Here’s her story and some footage from an earlier runDisney race.
-via Metafilter
Wikipedia archives all kinds of lists and information about its internal workings, but they are generally hard to browse unless you know exactly what you are looking for. One intriguing page lists “Deleted articles with freaky titles.” Someone spend a big chunk of their free time compiling this. Here are a few that stood out to me:
Apeism : Ape worship and the history of Apeism
Attack of the fifty foot Hitler (which exists at Uncyclopedia)
Birth defects considered snazzy by the FDA
Burying your Brother In The Pavement
Cambodian scrotum theives
Cathode Ray Tube Beef Curry
Dead prostitutes in popular culture (found elsewhere)
Death of a shoe horn in Mexico with a cat
Dying with your pants off
Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla
Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino Extra Hot With Foam Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended, One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice (found elsewhere)
And that’s only the first few letters of the alphabet. Looking through all of them could send you down the internet rabbit hole with no hope of salvaging the day. -via Boing Boing
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Most of us take modern medical science for granted. MRIs, pain relievers, and the polio vaccine might not seem like a big deal today, but if you look back a couple hundred years, it may change your mind.
MALPRACTICE
These days you can easily find dozens of effective remedies at the local pharmacy to treat anything from a sore toe to scalp itch. So it’s hard to imagine that less than 200 years ago, a person complaining to a trusted physician about a simple ailment was likely to undergo barbaric treatment that including draining of the blood, blistering of the skin, and induced vomiting.
In the 1800s, doctors were scarce and ill-trained. There were no regulations concerning the education of physicians. With just a little book learning and information passed down by a family member, almost anyone could set up shop and call himself a doctor. There were no antibiotics, no X-rays, no vaccines, and none of the diagnostic tools we now take for granted.
Surgery was often performed by barbers. Not only did they give haircuts and shaves, but they also extracted teeth, lanced boils, and bled patients. In fact, the colors of the famous barber’s pole are derived from the practice of bloodletting: red for blood and white for bandages. The pole itself was sometimes grasped by patients in order to make his veins stand out and make the bloodletting easier. In the end, the patient was as likely to die from treatment as from the illness.
KING OF PAIN
People of the 19th century accepted pain as an inevitable part of life. The aches and pains we associate with a long day of work or a touch of the flu couldn’t be quelled by popping an aspirin -that wonder drug wasn’t produced until 1899. The common rationale was that pain was a punishment from God, and to endure it was good for the soul.
There was no anesthetics, either. Until the 1840s all surgeries were performed without it. For this reason, not to mention the real possibility of death from blood loss, surgeons had to be quick. Records show that during the Battle of Bordello, Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), a surgeon in Napoleon’s army, performed 200 amputations in the first 24 hours. Even at that speed, the mortality rate was almost 100% due to shock or infection. Septicemia, or blood poisoning, was an ever-present danger. Surgeons traveled from dissection room to operating room, never once changing their coats or washing their hands.
If you live in a small town (as I do), you may have turned to the Topix forum for your area at one time or another. You may see posts about something for sale, or you may find yourself in a ruthless gossip-fest about people you know. It can make you very uncomfortable. Imagine that scenario played out nationwide, or even globally. The podcast Serial, from the creators of This American Life, follows a true murder case that happened in 1999, in which Adnan Syed was convicted of murdering Hae Min Lee. Syed insists he is innocent, and many questions still surround the case. The podcast has become a hit, with an average of 850,000 downloads per episode, and fans are gathering on the net to discuss the show -and the case. Fifteen years is not a long time ago, and the witnesses, family members, and investigators are still around. Many of them have an online presence. One forum discussing Serial is the subreddit serialpodcast, where Jacob White is a moderator. It started out as a fan site, with people discussing the show, but devotees also want to investigate the crime themselves. As posters began identifying people involved with the case, moderators found themselves stomping out fires to protect their privacy. And then there were posters who identified themselves as knowing the principles of the story.
The subreddit was among the first things I found when I started googling, and I immediately ended up getting drawn into a post by someone claiming to have known Syed within the Baltimore Muslim community. His post diagnosed Syed as a liar with a mental disorder.
But his personal view of Syed was less arresting than the comments below it. There friends and relatives of Syed’s came out of the woodwork to insist first that they knew who the poster was, and that that his account was hyperbolic and untrue. They all, I saw, had verified Reddit accounts. White explained to me that early on, when the moderators saw people claiming personal knowledge of the story, they set up a process by which they would verify users as being who they said they were. The range of proof goes from sending the moderators a scan of a photograph in a yearbook to a marriage certificate.
And in fact when the moderators tried to verify the identity of the person who put up this post about Syed, it didn’t work out. Whoever he was, he said he “feared retribution”.
An article at The Guardian says that the producers of Serial seemed unprepared for amateur sleuths on the internet getting involved in the case. Although this kind of thing has always happened for notorious crimes, we now have an opportunity to watch it play out in real time on our computer screens, whether that’s a good thing or not. Where does global freedom of speech cross over into a witch hunt? How can someone protect themselves against anonymous libel or charges of libel? Will anything constructive come out of the story in the end? Read the account of the podcast that is spilling over into real life at The Guardian.
How do you get your music video to cross cultural borders? Make the music catchy and danceable. Make the video silly -the sillier, the better. If you can’t decide whether girls in chicken costumes or animated chickens are funnier, use both! Remember, the language of the lyrics doesn’t matter if there aren’t many of them -and in this video, it’s mostly barnyard sounds, anyway. The Chinese pop song “Chick Chick” by Wang Rong Rollin has all those things going for it. -via Viral Viral Videos
Garfunkel and Oates have a song for all the losers. I love this, because it embodies so much of what I tell my kids, as they apply to super-selective colleges, try out for scholarships, and look for part-time jobs. I tell them to always make your reach exceed your grasp, because otherwise you’ll never know how far you can go. Besides, you learn more from your failures than you ever learn from your successes. This song contains mildly NSFW lyrics. -via Laughing Squid
There’s a cat stuck in a very tall but not too sturdy tree somewhere in Russia. A crowd gathers, offering plenty of advice about what to do. What they end up doing is a little extreme -kind of like swatting a fly with a bazooka. -via Dark Roasted Blend
Anecleto “Clet” Abraham is a French artist living in Italy who decorates street signs with stickers all over Europe, and recently in New York City.
Clet hand-draws his designs, then has them digitized and made into vinyl stickers, which he calls adhesives. He carries around dozens at a time and brought them with him to New York. The signs in New York, he notes, are less varied and more minimalist than those in Europe. “A difference is that in New York, there’s fonts on the signs,” he adds.
Continue reading to see more of Abraham's art.
Welcome to the world of work. My kid spent most of the summer working as a nanny, and was amazed at the “huge” amount of money she ended up with. She bought school clothes, a couple of tanks of gas, and a few movie tickets, and now she’s broke until she finds another job. That’s one of the biggest lessons about becoming an adult -how hard you work for money, and how fast it goes away. This comic is the latest from Sarah Andersen.
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