It was weird enough to see Darth Vader grotesque on the National Cathedral, and a spaceman carved on a 16th century cathedral. This gargoyle, projecting from a Scottish Abbey, looks a bit like a certain movie xenomorph we are familiar with, right? Paisley Abbey was founded in 1245, so is it possible that H.R. Geiger found inspiration in the figure? Or was it inspired itself by extraterrestrials? No.
However, following pictures of the Alien-gargoyle appearing on-line and in news reports, it has been revealed that the Abbey had some renovations in the 1990s, which included many of the original gargoyles being replaced.
See more pictures and a video at Dangerous Minds. Link
An economist, an engineer, a computer scientist, a mathematician, and a physicist have lunch together. The fun begins when it's time to pay the bill. It's an involved conversation, but here's a snippet:
Engineer: Is everyone’s money in? It seems we’re a little short…
Physicist: How short?
Engineer: Well, the total was $104, not including tip… and so far we’ve got $31.07 and an old lottery ticket.
Physicist: Close enough, right? It’s a small error term.
Mathematician: Which of you idiots wasted your money on a lottery ticket?
You can try to guess where this goes, but it goes in several directions. Read the rest, with illustrations, at Math with Bad Drawings. Link -via Metafilter
In English, we often use the term "when pigs fly" to indicate something that will never happen. It's become so common that we've managed to make flying pigs a pop culture meme. It's not the only way to say it in English, and other languages have their own colorful phrases for "not gonna happen." For example:
Israel "When hair grows on the palm of my hand"
Hungary “When it’s snowing red snowflakes”
Portugal “In the afternoon of Saint Never’s day”
There's more of these at Nautilus, and even a world map showing where more idioms are used. Link -via Phenomena
My daughter, the driving student, asked me why so few drivers use turn signals. I thought about it, and said it's because they derive no personal benefit from using them. Turn signals do not benefit the driver, only all the other drivers around them. It's like the group that could only eat with four-foot-long spoons: we only benefit when everyone acts unselfishly. Or obeys the law. That is an example of traffic psychology. Studies of the behavior of drivers show us that poor driving is caused by errors in perception and psychological quirks that make us notice bad driving in everyone but ourselves. The Guardian gives us ten examples, such as
3. We forget that other drivers are people too …
When someone accidentally walks into us on the street or their shopping trolley bumps into ours, the usual reaction is to apologise and move on. But when driving, near misses are often met with instant anger – and in the most extreme cases, road rage. Research shows that drivers more readily dehumanise other drivers and pedestrians in ways they wouldn't when interacting in person. This loss of inhibition is similar to the way some of us behave in online environments.
4. … yet we behave more aggressively to those of 'lower status'
One interesting paradox is that even though we're prone to dehumanising other drivers, we still act according to social status. Decades of research shows that prolonged honking, tailgating, and other aggressive behaviours are more likely if the aggressor believes they are the more important driver. What's particularly interesting is that these judgements can be based simply on the vehicles involved, with no knowledge of the person behind the wheel: larger cars generally outrank smaller cars and newer cars trump older ones. Drivers of more expensive cars are also more likely to behave aggressively toward pedestrians.
Read the rest and see if you are reminded of anyone you know. Link -via mental_floss
One woman notices things she would have never noticed if she had remembered her phone. Those of us who weren't born into the mobile device culture understand all too well. -via Boing Boing
The Brookfield Zoo in Chicago has announced that a snow leopard cub was born there on June 13th. The cub, a blue-eyed baby boy, does not yet have a name.
The cub, who currently weighs about 10 pounds, is the first cub born to nearly 3-year-old Sarani and her mate Sabu, 3. Since his birth the cub and his mom have resided in an off-exhibit den. Until the cub is 3 months old, he will remain there bonding with his mom before making his public debut in mid-September.
See more pictures of the cub at the zoo's Facebook page. Link -via Tastefully Offensive, where you can see a video.
Yes, distraction, and an opportunity to show off, works wonders to make a child forget her problems. That works for adults, too, it's just a little harder to manipulate. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Through most of human history, the mentally ill spoke of seeing demons, spirits, and ghosts. Those delusions are different now. The Truman Show delusion is one in which the subject is convinced that the world they perceive is not real, but is being manipulated by others for the entertainment of the masses. Just like in the movie. The argument can be made that the Truman Show delusion is not really new, but an update of classic paranoid schizophrenic delusions of the past, reflecting our technological world.
Persecutory delusions, for example, can be found throughout history and across cultures; but within this category a desert nomad is more likely to believe that he is being buried alive in sand by a djinn, and an urban American that he has been implanted with a microchip and is being monitored by the CIA. ‘For an illness that is often characterised as a break with reality,’ they observe, ‘psychosis keeps remarkably up to date.’ Rather than being estranged from the culture around them, psychotic subjects can be seen as consumed by it: unable to establish the boundaries of the self, they are at the mercy of their often heightened sensitivity to social threats.
In this interpretation, the Truman Show delusion is a contemporary expression of a common form of delusion: the grandiose. Those experiencing the onset of psychosis often become convinced that the world has undergone a subtle shift, placing them at centre-stage in a drama of universal proportions. Everything is suddenly pregnant with meaning, every tiny detail charged with personal significance. The people around you are often complicit: playing pre-assigned roles, testing you or preparing you for an imminent moment of revelation. Such experiences have typically been interpreted as a divine visitation, a magical transformation or an initiation into a higher level of reality. It is easy to imagine how, if they descended on us without warning today, we might jump to the conclusion that the explanation was some contrivance of TV or social media: that, for some deliberately concealed reason, the attention of the world had suddenly focused on us, and an invisible public was watching with fascination to see how we would respond. The Truman Show delusion, then, needn’t imply that reality TV is either a cause or a symptom of mental illness; it might simply be that the pervasive presence of reality TV in our culture offers a plausible explanation for otherwise inexplicable sensations and events.
Paranoid delusions have been turned into almost believable fiction, in movie such as The Matrix, Total Recall, and, yes, The Truman Show. And some "reality" shows do manipulate everyday people with pranks and covert surveillance for our entertainment (case in point). But "real" reality is catching up fast. In the past, people who spoke of magnetic waves in the air and secret government surveillance were considered crazy. Now those things are part of everyday life. Read more about the evolution of paranoid delusions at aeon. Link -via Digg
Have you noticed that every week, Neatorama has more and more posts that you won't find anywhere else? We're gradually ramping up our exclusive articles, testing out new ideas, and hoping to find more of what you enjoy most on the internet! For example,
Alex and David Israel visited filmmaker Freddie Wong at his studios for an interview that became a Neatorama video called A Day in the Life of Freddie Wong. It was posted along with a couple of episodes of his web series Video Game High School.
Alex posted Did This Vet Do The Right Thing by Saving the Dog Instead of Euthanizing It? accompanied by a poll. The poll results show that those with an opinion favored saving the dog's life over carrying out the owner's order, but the comments and hearts show that many consider the vet guilty of financial fraud, even if he did the right thing by the dog.
In this week's What is It? game, the mystery object …is still a mystery object. We don't know what it is! But we have a t-shirt from the NeatoShop for Paul Bryant 2, who gave us this funny answer: "It's a primitive bowling ball. Scores were marked on the side, meaning that not only was it hard to control, but only good for one game. It was quickly decided that round would be better." Yes, that that way progress is made. See the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
You've got until tomorrow to enter the NeatoShop's Dream Picnic Pin to Win Contest on Pinterest! You could win a whole slew of great prizes from the NeatoShop, but time is running out.
You can't hide anywhere these days! Honestly, we saw a lot of great jokes and puns in the comments this week -too many to mention here. You should always go and read the comments of fellow Neatoramanauts, the punniest commenters on the web.
Once you've caught up on what's going on here for the week, remember that Neatorama is much more than what's on the main page. Our sub-blogs, for specialized tastes, are available through the buttons in the gray bar at the top of the page. We'll soon be concentrating on seasonal treats on the Halloween blog, even though we've been feeding the monster continuously for over a year now. Consider it your go-to Halloween resource this year! Also, make sure you keep up on what's new at the NeatoShop, which supports everything else here. Our social media extensions include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+. Over at G+ this week, a caption request for this picture yielded a gem from Denise Yazak, as pictured here. And mobile users: Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama.
Raw honey doesn't spoil. As long as its sealed away from moisture, you can eat honey that is years, or even thousands of years old in its raw state. Why is this? It has to do with sugar, water content, and bee bellies. Amina Harris of UC Davis explains.
“Bees are magical,” Harris jokes. But there is certainly a special alchemy that goes into honey. Nectar, the first material collected by bees to make honey, is naturally very high in water–anywhere from 60-80 percent, by Harris’ estimate. But through the process of making honey, the bees play a large part in removing much of this moisture by flapping their wings to literally dry out the nectar. On top of behavior, the chemical makeup of a bees stomach also plays a large part in honey’s resilience. Bees have an enzyme in their stomachs called glucose oxidase (PDF). When the bees regurgitate the nectar from their mouths into the combs to make honey, this enzyme mixes with the nectar, breaking it down into two by-products: gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. “Then,” Harris explains, “hydrogen peroxide is the next thing that goes into work against all these other bad things that could possibly grow.”
It's the hydrogen peroxide that makes honey last longer than molasses or corn syrup, and also what gives honey its medicinal properties. Read more about the magic of honey at Smithsonian. Link
A music video by Ryan Barger, with cats dreaming of dinosaurs, fish, flying, driving, space exploration, and being rock stars. Cats dream big! -via Metafilter
Artist William Gropper created a U.S. map and placed characters from folklore into the appropriate areas. The U.S. Department of State gave these maps out abroad beginning in 1946.
The “folklore” on display in this richly illustrated map is a soup of history, music, myth, and literature. Frankie and Johnny are cheek-by-jowl with a wild-eyed John Brown; General Custer coexists with “Git Along Little Dogies.” Utah is simply host to a group of “Mormons,” in which a bearded man holds up stigmata-marked hands to a small group of wives and children, while a figure labeled “New England Witches” flies over New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
The map actually got Gropper in hot water with Joe McCarthy and he was called to testify about his political associations in 1953, but pled the Fifth. Read more about him, and see an enlargeable version of the map at Slate. Link -via mental_floss
Phil Haney went to Ray’s and Stark Bar, in the L.A. County Museum of Art, which gained some notoriety lately because they have a 23-page water menu and a "water sommelier" to advise you on which to drink. Haney and his co-workers sat down to read the descriptions and select a few to taste -with prices ranging up to $20 a bottle! Here's an example.
“This water of volcanic origin begins its life in the south of Italy. It takes ten years for the water to pass slowly through the underground rock and uncontaminated depths of this source. As it does, Ferrarelle water encounters the natural gas of an ancient and now extinct volcano gaining its effervescence…”
They ultimately bought five and give us their opinions on each, both in text and video. The bill was filed under business expenses, which is the only way any bar can charge this much for water. Link
Either Joseph researched the headhunters who are interviewing for this position very carefully, or the resume is a fake. I tend to think it's fictional. I mean, reallly, would you hire him? Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
