The particularly American form of cooking we call the barbecue has a long history -in fact, it was well established long before Europeans arrived. Since the early explorers passed the technique around to colonists, different styles sprang up, now loosely categorized as Carolina, Texas, Memphis, and Kansas City. The differences can be traced to what was available and what flavors one's ancestors liked. For example, Southerners often insist that real barbecue is made of pork. It's tradition.
Unlike cows, which required large amounts of feed and enclosed spaces, pigs could be set loose in forests to eat when food supplies were running low. The pigs, left to fend for themselves in the wild, were much leaner upon slaughter, leading Southerns to use the slow-and-low nature of barbecue to tenderize the meat. And use it they did. During the pre-Civil War years, Southerners ate an average of five pounds of pork for every one pound of cattle. Their dependence on this cheap food supply eventually became a point of patriotism, and Southerners took greater care raising their pigs, refusing to export their meat to the northern states. By this time, however, the relationship between the barbecue and pork had been deeply forged.
But Texas is a different story. And barbecue sauce reflects the traditions that immigrants brought from the Old World. Read how these factors came together at Smithsonian's Food and Think blog. Link
A new species of dinosaur has been uncovered in Utah. It was named Nasutoceratops titusi, which means means "big-nosed horned face." An apt name.
A University of Utah grad student discovered the first specimen in 2006 in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the high desert of southern Utah. At 15 feet long and 2.5 tons, the quadrupedal herbivore belonged to a family called ceratopsids, a group of dinos from the Late Cretaceous period that had beaks, horns and frills, like the Triceratops.
Nasutoceratops' unusually elongated, forward-facing horns likely served as a sign of dominance and, if necessary, weapons in the competition for mates.
Nasutoceratops is estimated to have lived 76 million years ago. Link -via the Presurfer
Wired magazine brought a 9.5-foot-tall, 400-pound mech to Comic Con. In this video, the robot tries to make friends with a little girl at the convention. You can read more about the robot, and see more video at Wired. Link
A White Night is when the sun only dips a bit below the horizon and then comes back up. This happens in midsummer in places that are near the Arctic Circle. Redditor uspn took this photograph at 1AM local time, and explained that dusk and dawn are at the same time, so the night never got completely dark. The lake is named Lysvatnet, on the Norwegian island of Senja. The original photograph is much larger. Link
John proposed to Sarah with a little help from Spud. “So whaddya reckon?” is a good enough way to say "Will you marry me?" I suppose, when you have a big diamond ring delivered by man's best friend. And I would like to think that "Asshole" is term of endearment in the Australian dialect. -via Daily of the Day
Honeybees are pretty talented, but they didn't come up with the hexagonal design of the honeycomb. That's just physics. What bees do is build cells in a cylindrical shape and stack them together. The wax then just naturally formed a hexagon.
A regular geometric array of identical cells with simple polygonal cross sections can take only one of three forms: triangular, square or hexagonal. Of these, hexagons divide up the space using the smallest wall area, and thus, for a honeycomb, the least wax.
This economy was noted in the fourth century ad by the mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, who contended that the bees had “a certain geometrical forethought”. But in the seventeenth century, the Danish mathematician Erasmus Bartholin suggested that the insects need no such forethought. He said that hexagons would result automatically from the pressure of each bee trying to make its cell as large as possible, much as the pressure of bubbles packed in a single layer creates a hexagonal foam.
Engineer Bhushan Karihaloo of the University of Cardiff managed to catch honeybees in the act of cell building wax cells. The newest cells were circular, and as they got older, they settled into hexagons, aided by the slight warmth of the worker bees bodies. Read more about how that happens at Nature. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
The adorable species called Little Penguins are a big tourist draw on Australia's Phillip Island. THe penguins stage the nightly "penguin parade," when they emerge from the water and waddle off to their burrows.
As I discovered when I visited Phillip Island earlier this month, the entire spectacle is like witnessing a herd of humans coming home from work, only with a lot more feather cleaning, wing pinwheeling, and general OMG-I-want-to-cuddle-now-ness.
And that's the problem. Since the early twentieth century, people have been flocking to Phillip Island for both its natural beauty and the so-called Penguin Parade. Vacation homes were built in the areas where penguins dug their burrows. Excited humans would run around picking up Little Penguins as they came in from the sea, sometimes destroying the waterproof seal on their feathers. So many people crowded the beaches to witness the cuteness that the penguin population on Phillip Island was threatened. In the 1970s, their numbers were plummeting.
What to do? In the mid-'80s, a project was begun to save the penguins without losing the tourists. It involved designing a park completely around the penguins and their needs, habits, and lifestyle. The result is that the Phillips Island penguins have bounced back from less than a thousand birds to around 30,000 today. Read how they did it at io9. Link -via Phenomena
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad featuring Sherman Oliver Holmes, a mysterious crime solver and great-great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes. Can you solve the crime?
"My regrets, Wilson. I have no idea who killed him."
"What?" Sergeant Wilson thought he would never hear Sherman Holmes say those words. He wasn't too happy about it, either. "Okay, okay, calm down." Wilson sounded close to panic himself. "Mr. Boren, maybe you should review the facts."
Sherman and the sergeant were in the downtown offices of Boren Technologies, a designer of handheld computers. Arvin Boren sat at his desk, eyeing the professional detective and the eccentric amateur. "Someone's been stealing our designs. My vice president, Don Silver, and I kept the problem secret. And we narrowed the suspects down to three." He pointed out the window of his private office to where a skinny kid in shirtsleeves was stuffing yellow envelopes into a mail slot.
"That's Wally Bell, an intern from City College. He does a lot of our copying and binding, so he has access to our priority documents. The heavyset guy sitting outside my office, that's Solly Booke, my assistant. He's sending his son to private school. I don't know where he gets the money.
"The third possibility is Inez Kendal." A young woman in a tasteful, expensive suit was tacking a newspaper article to a bulletin board right next to the elevators. "Inez is director of public relations. She has the most contact with our competitors."
Sherman nodded. "Was it Mr. Silver's idea to try to trap the traitor?"
"I'm afraid so," Boren sighed. "We're developing a new version of our Wrist 2002. Don left the plans lying conspicuously on his desk. The thief never took originals, only copies. Don planned to hide in the copy room and catch the guy. Only the guy must have caught him."
Sergeant Wilson took over the narrative. "Silver was killed in the copy room by a blow to the head. Mr. Boren and an associate found the body almost immediately. All three suspects were immediately sequestered and their possessions searched. We haven't been able to locate the plans."
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad featuring Sherman Oliver Holmes, a mysterious crime solver and great-great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes. Can you solve the crime?
No one knew where Sherman Oliver Holmes came from or how he'd gotten his money. One day, Capital City was just your run-of-the-mill metropolitan area. The next day, a short, rotund millionaire in a deerstalker cap began showing up at crime scenes, claiming to be the great-great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes and offering his expert opinion.
Sergeant Gunther Wilson of the Major Crimes Division was irritated by how often this eccentric little man with the southern drawl would appear within minutes of a grisly murder and stick his nose into official police business. What disturbed Wilson even more was the fact that this eccentric little man was nearly always right.
"The loony should be committed," Wilson had been heard to say on more than one occasion. "He always has some outlandish theory. I'd sign the commitment papers myself — if I didn't have a soft spot for him." But Wilson didn't have a soft spot. What he did have was a phenomenal record for solving cases, thanks in large part to his "loony" friend.
To his credit, Sherman wasn't much interested in taking credit. As far as the public was concerned, the Capital City police were simply doing a better job than ever before. So Sergeant Wilson decided to swallow his pride and befriend the exasperating, unique little gentleman who had nothing better to do than pop up like a fat rabbit and do the work of an entire detective squad.
When the detective business was slow, the great Sherlock Holmes had spent the long, empty hours playing the violin. Sherman Holmes did the same, but with less soothing results. "Maybe I should take lessons," he would think as he sawed back and forth across the strings. When things got really slow, Sherman switched on one of his police band radios.
After two boring days of drizzle and inactivity, the detective intercepted a call reporting a murder victim found in a car. Sherman happened to be driving his classic Bentley at the time and made a quick turn up High Canyon Road.
He arrived to find Gunther Wilson standing between his patrol car and a white sedan parked beside a panoramic view. The sergeant actually looked glad to see him. "I'm a little out of my depth on this one," he said. "It's a celebrity, Mervin Hightower. Shot at close range. I'm waiting for forensics and a tow truck. On top of being murdered, his car battery's dead."
The whole city knew Mervin Hightower, a newspaper columnist who specialized in scandalous exposes. Sherman walked around to the driver's side. An arm extended out the partially open window, propped up on the glass edge. The hand was made into a fist, except for the index finger, which was straight and firm with rigor mortis.
"He appears to be pointing," Sherman deduced. "How long has the fellow been dead?"
"What do I look like, a clock? The forensics boys will narrow it down. I saw the car and stopped to see if he needed help, which he doesn't. I recognized him, even with the blood."
Sherman looked in to see the columnist's familiar face contorted and frozen in agony. "I presume the man survived for a minute after the attack. What do you think he was pointing at, old bean? Something that could identify his killer?" Sherman lined up his eyes along the extended arm. "What story was he working on?"
Adam Savage of Mythbusters attended Comic Con on Thursday dressed to the nines as Admiral Ackbar in a classic British naval uniform! See how effects master Frank Ippolito built the prosthetic mask at Tested. Link | Photo Gallery -via Laughing Squid
How many times have you heard the rule about genies: you can't wish for more wishes. Kids always think they are the first to think of this loophole. Barring that, they are going to look for other loopholes! This comic is from Buttersafe. Link -via Daily of the Day
Have you ever thought you'd like to take part in a race, but you just can't seem to tear yourself away from the computer? Here's a race that's right up your alley! Test your scrolling skills (and your mouse design) with the 100-meter scroll! I can scroll 100 meters in 25.64 seconds, which is pretty good, but there's ten thousand people who did it faster. Well, maybe not, just some players that did it faster ten thousand times. What's your score? Link -via b3ta
Here we are in the dog days of summer. Still two weeks before school starts, and I should be outside picking beans, but it's so hot, I just want to stay in the office and surf the net. As I jotted down the schdeule for the new school year on the August calendar, I realized that Neatorama's anniversary is coming up! What should we do that's special to celebrate eight years? I'm open to any suggestions, since we've never done much to celebrate in years past. We usually forget about the anniversary until after it's over and gone. Meanwhile, it's been an eventful week here at Neatorama, and it might help to have a list of the high points so you can catch up.
Alex brought us two, count 'em, two fantastic photographic features at the Neatorama Spotlight blog. First there was Snow + Volcano = Magic, followed by Urban Zoom.
Hy Conrad presented another Whodunit called The Unsafe Safe House. I had to stage the photograph for it -that's Mr. Cellania wearing my father's fedora behind the coat rack.
In the What Is It? game this week, the picture shows the switch matrix for the old Voice of America towers that were located next to I-75 just north of Cincinnati, Ohio. It's basically a giant switch box for the antennas. Berhard came the closest to getting it right (even though he was trying to be funny), but this week we wanted funny but wrong answers. One great answer came from tarnation, who explained, "Another superb Wile E. Coyote paint job, that the Road Runner (and probably an Acme truck) will go right on through. Of course Wile E. will then try…" That's worth a t-shirt! Samantha Simons also had a great guess: "It's a giant musical instrument. When you drive through, it makes random sounds like a cow mooing, a bubble popping, and a hedgehog hiccuping. It was originally put in the middle of a city, but the noise disturbed the locals to the point of riots. So they moved it out into country." That sounds like something someone should build! So Samantha wins a t-shirt, too. Thanks to everyone who played -we had a lot of great entries, so you should go read them all. See the answers to all of this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments was Questions In Need of Answers. Nothing else came close, except the giveaway. Do you reckon we should make this a regular column?
Over at the NeatoShop, we're fixin' to have a run on lunch boxes, pens and pencils, and backpacks. Yes, if you want to get something special and personal for your offspring amid all the everyday supplies for back to school, you need to order it early, before your favorite theme or character sells out!
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. And mobile users: Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama.
We all had a good laugh at SyFy's monster movie Sharknado, about a tornado that sucks up hungry sharks from the ocean and flings them at unsuspecting landlubbers. But ...could something like that ever happen in real life?
In real life, of course, sharks don’t fall from the sky. But fish, frogs, and alligators do—and scientists think the likely cause is a weather phenomenon called a “waterspout,” a term first coined in 1738 by traveler Thomas Shaw.
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And a waterspout might sweep up animals that dwell near the surface of a body of water and bring them to land. Vaccaro says waterspouts are somewhat like vertical rotating washers at a carwash, which circulate water and then fling it an anything in their path.
There have been accounts of fish, snails, alligators, frogs, and worms raining down on inland areas, most likely after they'd been transported by a waterspout. Read about those incidents at NatGeo's Pop Omnivore. Link-Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
