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Meet computer H14, a Jim Henson creation from 1963. The film was commissioned by AT&T to be shown at a corporate get-together, to spread the word that the company's new computer systems that actually communicated with each other were the wave of the future, and nothing to be frightened about.

The Muppet was funny in that unmistakably Henson way — equipped with exhaust pipes and a flashing red light and some sort of rotating mechanical arm reminiscent of a railroad crossing — and it had already worked the seminar circuit, appearing at shows in Germany for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Information Agency, the government organization that once spread U.S. propaganda overseas. Plus, Jim Henson understood the task at hand.

Henson and his partner Jerry Juhl “were certainly intrigued by technology and the development of computers,” says Falk. “But they also felt very strongly about the difference between man and machines. There was a celebration of technology, but also a recognition about its lack of human qualities, like understanding and creativity.” Henson gives H14 the superhuman ability to digest “vast oceans of information,” but it still needs humans to wind him up — and repair him when he explodes into tiny pieces.

Read the entire story, and see a second video featuring H14 interacting with a computer repairman at Wired. -via Digg

Previously: Cookie Monster's 1967 debut as The Computer Monster.

Let's see what happened in this day 521 years ago… Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the New World, which gave us American history textbooks. Many of us were taught that Columbus "discovered" America, despite the fact that there were plenty of people already here, and he wasn't even the first European to come. What Columbus did was to open the floodgates for immigrants who came here and established new nations, including the United States. Meanwhile, those who were already here suffered enormously. Five hundred years later, Columbus Day is a federal holiday in the US, but you won't notice it as the federal government is undergoing a shutdown. It's not even observed on the 12th anymore, but the nearest Monday. We "observe" Columbus Day more than we "celebrate" it, mostly using it as a time to examine the legacy of Columbus' journey and what came after. But it gives the Neatobot another opportunity to dress up. In case you've been busy, here's some of the highlights from the past week here at Neatorama.

Jill Harness brought us some spooky stories in 5 of the Most Haunted Places on Earth. 

She also showed us the lighter side of Halloween with 24 Animals (That Aren't Dogs) In Costumes.

John Farrier wrote 10 Wonderful Ways to Eat Pigs' Feet.

Eddie Deezen gave us Don't Make a Grown Man Cry: Men Who Have Cried in Their Movies.

Alex brought us two posts on the Spotlight blog with Teenager Teenager and Here's What You Need to Know About the New $100 Bill.

The Origins of River Names was brought to you by Uncle John's Bathroom reader.

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us The Reviewer, not written by Edgar Allen Poe.

Paint by Numbers was from mental_floss magazine.

Jill unveiled a new feature called Great Pics of The Week, with this week's column Are You Ready for Halloween Time? We are looking forward to more!

Wanna t-shirt? You Can Win A NeatoShop T-Shirt of Your Choice! the contest is open through Monday, so get your entry in now!

Hy Conrad gave us another Whodunit with the story of Big Daddy Brown.

Our riddle from Pzzlr this week was Family Reunion. Did you figure out out? I was hoping someone would also guess who the family in the accompanying picture was.

In the What is It? game this week, the pictured item is a fusible plug for a boiler. If the temperature gets too hot, the tin plug in the middle will melt and release pressure. There's a more detailed explanation at the What is It? blog, but we were looking for humorous answers this week. Ladybugs got ♥s for her answer: "It's the loose screw of the U.S. Congress in dealing with the budget crises." Makes perfect sense! And Chris Stevens had good one, too: "The holidays are coming, and Iron Man has been known to spend a little too much time at the buffet. Sometimes the suit needs to be 'let out' a little, and these babies are just the hardware to do it!" Those both win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

In our polls this week, more of you want to see "meme" (as a verb) added to the Oxford Dictionary than any other word they're considering, and you think that a 7-year-old should be given credit for recognizing a "fart" as a gas. Also, you are pretty sure the Ping Pong Knife-Throwing Trick is fake, and schools have no business banning romance between students. There's a new poll in the post Huge Secret Tunnels Found Beneath the Ice of Antarctica, where so far your suggestions are more interesting than the poll options.



Our readers' costume parade continues on the Halloween blog, with a new costume featured every day! You can join in, too: send us a picture of a memorable Halloween costume from your past, whether it's awesome, clever, embarrassing, or just plain fun. Tell us the story behind it, and we'll post it on the Halloween blog, just like these folks! The best pictures t-shirts from the NeatoShop. Send your pictures to tips@neatorama.com and then look for it on the Halloween blog! Even if you don't send one, you'll want to see all the featured costumes so far, and check back every day on the Halloween blog for more.

The (non-contest) post with the most comments this week was The Saddest US Government Shutdown Photo, followed by Guess Whose Birthday It Was Yesterday? and a tie between Man Sawed Own Leg Off Because He Couldn't Afford Hospital's Amputation Bill and Inside Miss Cellania's House/Bunker/Blogging Factory.

The comment of the week was when Eddie Willers saw the new hundred dollar bill: "There's a hundred dollar bill? Wow, the things you miss out on when you have kids…" I know what you mean!

The most popular post was Guess Whose Birthday It Was Yesterday? Coming in second was 25 Funny and Unique TV-Inspired Halloween Costumes, and 32 Awesome And Ridiculous Children's Halloween Costumes was third.

The two posts that people ♥ed most were 6-Year Old Writes a Letter to a US Navy Admiral about Ninjas, Gets a Response and Elephant Family Reunion (a tie), and Cats Love Babies came in third.

The most emailed post was The Ping Pong Knife-Throwing Trick followed by Cats Love Babies.

There was so much more here this past week. If you are looking for a particular post and can recall any relevant words, you can enter them in the search field at the top right of each page and pull it up. If you are browsing Halloween decorating ideas or costumes or scary stories, you'll see them all together on the Halloween blog. The recipes and food posts go into the blog Neatolicious, unless it was specifically for Halloween. If the post you're looking for involved parenting or children, look through NeatoBambino. And if you are jonesin' for something adorable to look at, the easy way to find plenty of that is to check out the blog Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly.

The NeatoShop has a huge selection of Halloween costumes, accessories, decorations, and party supplies! You can order until October 23rd for delivery in time in the US, but don't wait until what you want is sold out. Visit the Halloween store today!

Music researcher Chris Chafe and neurologist Josef Parvizi, both of Stanford University, have collaborated to turn the data from an EEG into audio signals with a device called a "brain stethoscope."

Parvizi, an associate professor, specializes in treating patients suffering from intractable seizures. To locate the source of a seizure, he places electrodes in patients' brains to create electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of both normal brain activity and a seizure state.

He shared a consenting patient's EEG data with Chafe, who began setting the electrical spikes of the rapidly firing neurons to music. Chafe used a tone close to a human's voice, in hopes of giving the listener an empathetic and intuitive understanding of the neural activity.

The data comes from more than 100 electrodes in the brain. You can hear the seizure trigger, rise into a "storm" of brain activity, and gradually trail off as the seizure is exhausted. Chafe and Parvizi hope to use the technology for further brain research and for practical applications such as training non-medical caregivers (parents, etc) to recognize when a seizure is imminent. -via Dangerous Minds

(Image credit: Petter Kallioinen)

How about some diet tips from the early 20th century? The Week has some excerpts from various books on the subject of dieting and nutrition. Most of them basically tell you to exercise, go outside, and don't eat so much. But then there's some weird advice from Helen Follett Jameson in her 1899 book The Woman Beautiful.

Do not drink much water. A little lemon juice added to it will make it less fattening.

There's this from Countess C, in the 1901 book Beauty's Aids: Or, How to Be Beautiful.

First and most important, drink very little, as little as possible, and only red or white wine, preferably Burgundy, or tea or coffee slightly alcoholized.

And from the 1892 book Beauty, Its Attainment and Preservation:

In America the number of fat people is growing larger every year and the suffering endured by this usually good-natured class of people is tremendous. As a matter of fact, a great deal of this discomfort might be avoided if people would not drink such an inordinate quantity of ice water and could be made to understand that thirst does not lie in the stomach and that it is not satisfied by pouring down water by the glassful.

The theory of water being fattening makes you wonder how much of what we "know" today will be laughed at in another 100 years. Read lots more at The Week.

Scientists love to to study the brain functions of people while they are performing various tasks, such as playing a musical instrument. Considering the configurations of fMRI scanners, this is not so easy to do. But a team from the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal have designed a special cello that can be played inside a scanner! It's small, without the wide body of traditional cellos, and it has no metal parts, which are forbidden in a highly-magnetic scanner.

“An opto-acoustic cello has been designed to investigate the neural correlates of cello performance using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Through the design of specialized optical sensors, for the first time, we are able to synchronously capture a cellist’s acoustic performance and musical gestures within the MRI scanner.”

The designers released a paper on the project. No, they haven't done any scanning of cello players yet; the paper is about designing the instrument. But those studies are possible now. Read more about the instrument at Improbable Rsearch.

When you're a mashup artist, you don't have to invest the time or energy that a regular archaeologist like Indiana Jones does to unearth ancient treasures, nor must you risk your life. However, this way takes talent. Artist Josh Ln has found evidence of super heroes and spacemen from the future rendered in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics! The pop culture figures include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers as well as comic book super heroes. See seven of the artworks in large size at Geeks Are Sexy, or click on each image at Ln's Society6 gallery to buy a print in several available sizes.

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Andy Martin is continuing his series of Handymartian's Illustrated Aliens, in which he designs a new planet, complete with life forms, every month. Planet Nine is now completed. In the video here, you see the planet's pixelated youngsters showing off their individual super powers. You can see each of Martin's daily aliens at the project site, and get the recap of each previous planet on the Andy Martin blog.

Martin is now working on Planet Ten, which has appropriately spooky ghost-like aliens for October. He posts one alien a day, until there's enough "types" to populate a planet, and then at the end of the month, we'll see what the planet itself looks like, and each ulitmately has a video to show how these aliens act in their natural environment. -via b3ta

Redditor CraftyIntentions decorated for Halloween with awesome cutouts in the windows a couple of years ago. Here's what it looks like in daylight:

The materials include contact paper, tissue paper, modge podge, cardboard, paint, and imagination! The house looks so good that it gets reposted occasionally, and it is now part of a roundup at Buzzfeed called 20 Houses That Are Clearly Winning At Halloween. You'll see giants, dinosaurs, spiders, scarecrows, UFOs, pop culture references, and of course, excess in all its forms. The list has some great decorating ideas for your house, if you have the time and the will to pull it off!

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Cats large and small love pretty much any box (as we've seen before). That joy is multiplied when there are lots of cats with lots of ways to get into a box! These kittens are lucky to have a deluxe handmade fort just for them! Watch as they explore (and chew on) their new toy. -via Arbroath

Today is the International Day of the Girl Child, as it was last October 11th. For the second year, the United Nations has designated a day to call attention to the plight of inequality that girls around the world face. Lack of education, child marriage, and unequal rights are just the beginning. Mental_floss has more in the article 6 Reasons Today is International Day of the Girl, with videos from various international entities that are working to help young women achieve their potential.

(Image credit: 10x10)

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At first, you might think that this video is about the danger of leaving a dog in a hot car, but that's not what this is about at all. The setting must be cold weather, because the guy is wearing a sweater.

The animation has a lesson in it, however: Never underestimate dogs. It's also a good idea to avoid teasing dogs who are menacing you, no matter the distance. This is the first animated video from Birdbox Studio in over a year; it's good to see them back at work. -via Viral Viral Videos

See more animated shorts from Birdbox Studio.

This odd chart by Stephen Wildish (previously at Neatorama) tells us all the ways you can cut toast. It seems amusingly OCD to assign names to each pattern, and do people really cut toast this many ways? Restaurants cut toast diagonally so the pieces fit aesthetically on a breakfast plate. I used to cut French toast into bite-size pieces with a pizza cutter when my kids were small. Mainly, I just tear mine in half at the breakfast table, or I eat toast whole at my desk (preferably in a bacon sandwich). Now I wonder if I am supposed to cut my kids' sandwiches in half before packing them in their lunch -one child prefers toasted bread. Do you cut your toast? Which of these patterns do you use? -via Foodbeast

You might think your Hummer costs a lot to drive, but it's small potatoes compared to the world's top ten! Jalopnik assembled a list of the ten most expensive vehicles to operate, ranked by cost per mile. There are quite a few factors that go into that figure.

For example, the Queen Mary II cruise ship costs $245 per mile, but if you divide that by the number of passengers it carries, it's actually pretty cheap transportation (so many passengers is also the reason I don't care to go on a cruise). The NASA crawler that moved the space shuttle to and from the launch pad is very expensive because it traveled a very short distance with an extremely heavy cargo -it gets 42 feet per gallon. An aircraft carrier has decent fuel usage, but they are expensive to build and it takes a lot of personnel to operate it.

Try to guess what other vehicles would be on the list, and how they would rank, before you go see the list at Jalopnik. Hint: there is only one street-legal car on the list. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. Fifth Fleet)

Camera traps are a great way to observe wildlife species that would normally avoid humans -or hurt them. An infrared sensor trips the camera, so moving animals are captured in digital imagery with no human interaction required. But it's still a waiting game, and wildlife biologists have learned some tricks to get those animals to pose for the camera. In the case of jaguars, a dab of perfume helps. According to biologist Miguel Ordeñana, the big cats are particularly attracted to Calvin Klein Obsession for Men.

What’s so special about this particular scent mixture? “It has civetone and it has vanilla extract,” he says. Civetone is a chemical compound derived from the scent glands of civets, smallish nocturnal cats native to the Asian and African tropics, and it’s one of the world’s oldest perfume ingredients. “What we think is that the civetone resembles some sort of territorial marking to the jaguar, and so it responds by rubbing its own scent on it,” he explained to me. And the vanilla might set off the cats’ curiosity response. No matter which compound is responsible for jaguars’ interest – or both – the key is that the scent gets them to stick around long enough to activate the camera’s shutter.

Keep that in mind when you pack for your next wildlife safari. Read more at Scientific American. -via Boing Boing

The canned masterpieces were a massive flop -until one genius applied a simple step-by-step marketing plan.

In March 1951, shoppers of all ages descended on Macy's in New York City's Herald Square. Though the holidays were long over, eager customers packed in for a glimpse of the first in-store demonstration of a new craft project called paint-by-number. They swarmed the demonstrators and bought multiple sets without hesitation. Anyone present could see that the kit has mass appeal. As word of the frenzy reached the annual New York City Toy Fair taking place a few blocks away, orders began pouring inform retailers around the country.

There was just one problem: The customers were fake. Or mostly fake. The creators of the phenomenon would never know for sure. The rush on Macy's was part of one of the most brilliant publicity stunts in the history of art or business. But the product itself was inspired by a different genius -Leonardo Da Vinci.

When Dan Robbins, the 13th employee of Detroit-based Palmer Paint Co., read that Da Vinci taught his apprentices the basics of painting by using numbered patterns on a canvas, he suspected the idea might have wider appeal. So he worked to put out a new product that would delight aspiring artists of all ages.

Unfortunately, no one wanted his Craft Master paint-by-number kits. Most retailers feared customers wouldn't get the concept or wouldn't want such a remedial art project. Finally, S.S. Kresge (later Kmart) took a chance and placed a big order. But due to a packaging snafu, the paints for two kits got swapped. Colors intended for "The Fisherman" anded up in boxes for "The Bullfighter." Hobbyists stared at the blue-caped matadors battling green bulls, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Hit with demands for refunds, Kresge canceled all future orders.