Sean and Lynn recorded how they broke the news to his mom with a stunt in which Grandma had to find her "birthday present" hidden somewhere in the kitchen. The moment it registers is priceless! Bonus: Yakety Sax. -via Viral Viral Videos
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
There are 600 million housecats in the world -give or take a few- making them the most popular pet worldwide. It wasn't always so. How did the world become so cat-obsessed? Cats as we know them are descended from the African wildcat Felis sylvestris, shown here. It doesn't look so different from a housecat, except for those dangerous-looking fangs.
There’s a very similar saying among researchers that dogs were domesticated, but cats domesticated themselves.
While not strictly true in terms of dogs (oh, I can go off on dog domestication do not get me started) this is pretty much on the money for cats. Humans didn’t grab cats and make them start hunting mice. In fact, that would be incredibly difficult, as wildcats are extremely shy. Cats simply heard the rodents squeaking around in whatever the ancient version of a silo was and went after them. And the humans certainly had no reason to discourage them (once they figured out what was going on, I presume- I imagine the first human opening a door and spotting a cat inside shrieking “THE MICE HAVE GROWN HUGE SAVE YOURSELF”)
Flight distance refers to the distance an animal is willing to let you approach it before it flees. African wildcats today have a pretty massive flight distance- you are extremely lucky if you see one before it spots you and jets. Those first cats attacking the mice in human granaries would have had a big disadvantage if they were running every time they spotted a human within thirty feet. So, they adapted. Their flight distance shrank from generation until eventually they were able to tolerate humans within feet of them. Think of the behavior of squirrels in suburban areas. They aren’t going to let you pick them up, exactly… but they’re definitely not afraid of you.
But this relationship underwent a big change when Egyptians went nuts about cats. Koryos at Newt in the Throat tells us the history of the domestic cat in an entertaining and understandable way, with lots of cute pictures. Link -via Metafilter
How do you capture video of a pride of lions up close? You send in a robot! A little video robot that will remind you of Wall-E or a roomba moved among the lions, who treated it as a kind of cat toy. Enjoy a series of looping videos of many facets of a pride's life -click to the right to start the next video at National Geographic. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
Were you a jock, nerd, druggie, goth, or a plastic in high school? Students are often labeled by the crowd they hang with, or by their activities, or by their choice of fashion or music. Educational psychologist Bradford Brown has been studying adolescent social labels since the 1980s, and talks about how those terms have changed over time. For one thing, as schools get bigger, there are more labels.
We also know that crowd labels in middle school differ from those in high school. Early in middle school, kids call each other names like “the runaround crowd,” “the door crowd,” “the skip rope crowd”—a map of concrete activities that go on at recess. But, Brown said, by the time they’re in high school, they use their relatively more mature brains to map their social worlds in more abstract terms. The result are true crowd labels—“jocks,” “punks,” “brainiacs”—that don’t refer to actual individuals in the lunchrooms and hallways, but to categories that teenagers carry in their heads. Using a crowd label as a kind of mental shorthand explains why idiosyncratic ones might not happen that often—the more generic the name, the more usable it is.
My high school was so small that we each had to wear more than one label. Read about the research into high school tribes and their labels at The Morning News. Link -via Digg
The name of the British TV game show 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown made more sense when host Jimmy Carr brought in two baskets of kittens. They were quite a distraction! After all, eight out of ten kittens decided they wanted out of the baskets. -via reddit
Would you want to know? In this video by Michael Mohan, a machine tells people how they are going to die. It does not say when. They still can't see it coming. And once you think you've got them figured out, it turns out that you won't see it coming, either. -via Laughing Squid
Sometimes, an alligator just has to sing! According to an Arabic translator at reddit, the lyrics are Saudi YouTube member Temsa7LY 2 bragging about getting 100 million views on his channel, which is better than certain competitors he names. The singer/musician is AlaaWardi. I just like the melody. -via Daily of the Day
Where does the time go? It was eight years ago, August 9, 2005, that Alex published the very first post on his new blog, Neatorama. And eight years later, the link is still good! (However, it could use some ♥s.) Starting out, he vowed to post at least five items a day, and put so much time into it that Tiffany referred to the site as "Crack-o-rama." Eight years and three children later, Neatorama is still going strong, with a totally individualized blogging platform, a few writers along for the ride, and a growing gift shop to support it all. Alex even got Tiffany to join in! And best of all, the site has a great gang of readers we call Neatoramanauts, some who've been around for years, others just joining us, but all are welcome to be a part of the community. What? Today's the tenth? Oh well, we'll do what parents of any eight-year-old would do: celebrate the birthday on the nearest Saturday, so everyone will come to the party! Considering this anniversary, I guess it's appropriate that we had a bonus number of feature articles this past week. In case you missed any of them, here's a chance to catch up.
Alex told us about the recent spate of Fast Food Workers Gone Wild.
Then later, he showed us 10 Amazing Cat Structures.
Alex was very busy this week, as he also gave us the 9 Most Outrageous Things Ever Faked in China.
Jill Harness introduced us to 6 Fictional Holidays You Really Should Be Celebrating.
John Farrier, a librarian and teacher in his non-Ferengi life, wrote How Teachers Can Use Neatorama. That's for a specialized audience, to be sure, but everyone knows a teacher to sent it to.
Eddie Deezen wrote "Stairway to Heaven" -The Greatest Rock Song Ever?
Nobel Thoughts: Murray Gell-Mann came from the Annals of Improbable Research.
For Shark Week, we had A Shark's Deadly Equipment, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Raeder.
And mental_floss magazine gave us Steven Spielberg's Jaws.
Hy Conrad returned with another Whodunit, titled The Wayward Will.
David Israel stirred up a conversation with his fairly new weekly column Questions In Need of Answers, asking What Foods Have the Longest Shelf Lives?
In this week's What Is It? game, the cast iron knight is a fireplace tools holder, for hanging a poker, shovel, and tongs. Lots of people knew that, but this week we are looking for wrong but entertaining guesses! One winning guess came from Paul Hitchmough, who said, "It's a tool used by knights to make three-strand woven friendship bracelets for their BFFs, but has the masculine design to keep up appearances. Those Crafty knights." The other winner is Sunfall, who guessed it to be a "a Knight Light. Just plug the prongs into a high-voltage outlet and watch its soothing red-hot metal glow. Your kids will love it! (Use only if children are fireproof.)" Those are both worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to everyone who entered. See the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
The NeatoShop's Dream Picnic Pin to Win Contest is in full swing! Pinterest users, both established and brand new, can compete to win a whole slew of great prizes from the NeatoShop. The contest closes on August 25th, so go here to get complete contest instructions. Good luck!
We had one reader poll this week, in which the vast majority of Neatoramanauts agree that Shark Week has Jumped the Shark. At least on the Discovery channel -we still have a great time with it on the internet!
Speaking of Shark Week, in the Tournament of Sharks, the Great White won, as expected. The Goblin Shark, the Hammerhead, and the Whale Shark all made the final four.
The (non-giveaway) post this week that received the most comments was Questions In Need of Answers: What Foods Have the Longest Shelf Lives? Then Doctor Who: Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor came in second, with Oprah Walks Into a Store ... in third place.
The comment of the week came when Soulfly responded to the post 10-year-old Saves Family with Mario Kart Skills by saying, "Good thing he didn't play Grand Theft Auto." Ha!
The most popular post was 9 Most Outrageous Things Ever Faked in China, followed by Fast Food Workers Gone Wild and coming in third was 10 Amazing Cat Structures.
The post with the most ♥s was Post No Bills followed by The Ultimate Catwalk and The Thirsty Tree of Chapel Rock.
The most emailed post was 10 Amazing Cat Structures. Coming in second was Push-up Bra, and Yoga With His Dog was third.
It's back to school time! That's why lunch boxes and backpacks are on sale at the NeatoShop. Send your kids back to school with something special no one else will have!
And don't forget, we have extra content and fun at our Facebook page every day! You are also invited to follow Neatorama on Twitter and Pinterest, too! And mobile users: Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama.
I hope the next eight years are as fun as the last eight have been!
Every year in August, the Perseid meteor shower gives us a light show like no other, as our planet travels through the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle. Peak visibility should be in the middle of the night Sunday night and Monday night -or very early Monday and Tuesday, if that's how you want to remember it. Phil Plait has tips on getting the best view of the falling stars.
1) Find a place that's dark. Some meteors are bright and easy to spot, others fainter. The darker the spot you find away from house and city lights, the better.
2) You don't really need to face Perseus (to the northeast); in fact your best bet is to have as much sky visible as possible. The more heavenly real estate you can see, the better your chances of seeing more meteors.
3) Be outside after local midnight - literally, halfway between dusk and dawn. The geometry of the shower makes it more likely to see meteors at that time. To use the car and bugs analogy again, you see more splattered arthropods on your front windshield than the rear one because you're driving forward into the swarm. After midnight, you're on the part of the Earth facing into the direction of the Earth's travel around the Sun, so you'll see more meteors then.
There's more you can read at Bad Astronomy. I recommend lying down. Take a friend who you can talk to, and relax on your back on a blanket, facing up and talk. I spent many nights when I was young doing just that and saw plenty of shooting stars even when there wasn't a meteor shower expected. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user RawheaD Rex)
Lindsey Stirling and Peter Hollens combine violin and voice to bring us the music and drama of the Star Wars saga. Without a spoken word, you can follow the basic story by recognizing the different themes from the movies. -via Viral Viral Videos
See also: More from Lindsey Stirling.
This printed menu for a week in September of 1946 doesn't look half bad. Lots of courses, three square meals, different offerings every day -at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco. Of course, anyone who has ever eaten at an institution, like a school, knows that the printed version and the actual product delivered can vary immensely. Link -via Laughing Squid
What font is your beard? Artist Christian Goldemann made this handy chart to match your facial hair style with the font that it most naturally represents. How did he come up with these?
A plain moustache like the one John Watson liked to wear gets paired with the Baskerville font because of the Sherlock Holmes connection. A Darwin style beard is font brother to the sensible and eminent Hoefler Text, which seems like a font Darwin would have liked. The Old Dutch becomes the moustache-less beard of righteous, no-nonsense Garamond, while wearing No Beard at all makes your face as bald, boring, and openly readable as Verdana.
Other pairings aren’t necessarily as obvious. For example, an Egyptian Goatee is paired with Clarendon, a font-beard combination that makes sense only if you know that Clarendon is a slab serif, or Egyptian, style font. Balbo and Bembo seem mostly paired for the pleasing typographic similarities of their names. And some combinations are hard to figure out at all: Pairing Futura with Z.Z. Top is befuddling at best.
Goldemann has more to say about it at Co. Design. Link
Two black-and-white cats gave birth at the same time, and now co-parent the eight kittens. Despite how aloof cats sometimes act towards their humans, they are actually very social animals. Just ask anyone with multiple cats, and they will tell you about certain alliances and social structures that unrelated cats form. -via Educated Insolence
Dmitry Argarkov of Voronezh, Russia, received a credit card offer from Tinkoff Credit Systems. He didn't like the terms spelled out in the contract, so he wrote up his own contract and sent it to the bank. Like most people confronted with a lot of small print, the bank didn't bother to read the contract and accepted it.
Mr Argarkov's version of the contract contained a 0pc interest rate, no fees and no credit limit. Every time the bank failed to comply with the rules, he would fine them 3m rubles (£58,716). If Tinkoff tried to cancel the contract, it would have to pay him 6m rubles.
When Argarkov went deep into debt and the bank tried to call in its usual fees, they ended up in court because Argarkov did not consider himself liable for fees not specified in the contract. And a judge agreed -Arkarov is only liable for the outstanding balance ($578), not the banks fees ($1,369). Next, Argarkov is suing to get the bank to pay HIM the penalties stated in the contract they signed. Good luck. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Tomás Fano)
Gav and Dan, known as the Slow Mo Guys, start a water balloon fight with filmmaker Freddie Wong. Wong comes back at them with 1,500 friends armed with water balloons! The exchange only takes a few seconds, but of course, it is shown in extreme slow motion. -via Viral Viral Videos
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