Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
In the 1992 Tim Burton film Batman Returns, Danny DeVito played the hero's nemesis, the Penguin. He had all sorts of minion penguins as well. Now we get to see some of the early concept art for the steampunk-ish and heavily armed penguins. See a collection of those drawings at Unreality. Link
Remember BigDog, the robot that Boston Dynamics developed for the military to use as a mechanical pack animal? Now it can throw cinder blocks! This may have been designed as a show of strength, but it's even more liable to provoke nightmares than ever. Are you ready to welcome your new robot overlords? Link -via Metafilter
Previously: More BigDog videos.
Seeing all those clothes hanging out before dryers became common, you have to wonder if everyone really did their laundry on Mondays, or did you see this kind of thing every day? Buzzfeed has a collection of 15 pictures of laundry day in New York City in the 1930s. Link
(Image credit: Marjorie Content)
In November of 1820, a seafaring expedition went all wrong when a whale repeatedly attacked and sank the whaling ship the Essex. The young captain, George Pollard Jr. and the crew were stranded on three 20-foot boats for months. A few of them survived.
Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue and to a missionary named George Bennet, and to Bennet it seemed like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told him. “I hardly know what I say.”
The story of the Essex crew inspired Herman Melville to write a novel about a whale hunter, which was not well received and only sold a few thousand copies in his lifetime. Read the whole story at Smithsonian's Past Imperfect blog. Link
You can't beat Japanese TV for coming up with weird competitions. This one pits different types of tires against each other to see which will fly the furthest off a ski jump. But of course the actual competition matters less than the fun of just watching tires fly through the air. Don't miss the big tire at the end! -via b3ta
Travis Clawson's life got flipped, turned upside-down. A receptionist at an eye doctor's office in Pennsylvania called 19-year-old Clawson to confirm an appointment. Instead, she got an outgoing message that alarmed her. The receptionist then called Sewickley police, who contacted the Ambridge Area High School, where officials put the school on lockdown. Police found Clawson at the school and arrested him. An investigation determined that the outgoing message on the phone was Clawson singing the theme to the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
All schools in the county were advised to lock down for about 20 minutes while police searched for a 19-year-old Ambridge Area High School student whose greeting to callers was mistakenly taken as a threat about “shooting people outside of the school.”
The actual line from the song is “And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school.” It is unclear from listening to Travis Clawson’s phone message whether he inadvertently twisted the words or it just was misheard by the receptionist from his Sewickley eye doctor’s office who sent the day’s events in motion.
Clawson was released and has not been charged with any crime, but his parents were urged to have him change the outgoing message on his phone. Link -via Fark
LittleBun makes clothespin dolls and sells them through the Etsy store. Of course, you recognize painter Bob Ross, painting his happy little trees! Other real-life celebrities include Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Bob Marley, and Frida Kahlo. Then there are the pop culture clothespin dolls like Walter from The Big Lebowski, the twins from The Shining, and the Knights Who Say Ni! You can get a clothespin doll made to order as well. Link -via Pleated-Jeans
The Schoolhouse Rock episode "Interjections!" is illustrated by the familiar characters of Star Wars in this clever mashup by One Minute Galactica. One interjection is a slightly-disguised swear word in text, so preview before sharing this with your children. Contains spoilers for those who haven't seen the original trilogy (don't laugh, there are young children who don't yet know about Luke and Leia). -via Geekdad
Graham Cansdale is a professional translator at the European Commission in Brussels. He is considered fluent in the 14 languages he uses in his work, but he has studied other languages. Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti was a linguist who died in 1849; he was said to have known between 40 and 72 languages. Is this even possible?
There are millions of people, even in the mostly monolingual US, who speak more than one language at home. Competence in three languages is not unusual, and we've all heard stories of grandmas and grandpas who had to master four or five languages on their way from the old country to the new. In India it is common for people to go about their business every day using five or six different languages. But what about 10, 20, 30, 100 languages? What's the upper limit on the number of languages a person can know?
Michael Erard, in his fascinating book Babel No More, travels around the world in search of hyperpolyglots, people who study and learn large numbers of languages. He sheds light on the secrets of their success, and explains why it can be hard to put an exact number on language knowledge.
Mental_floss introduces us to seven hyperpolyglots, although how many languages they know depends on the meaning of "know," as there are different levels of fluency. Of course, only a polyglot would really understand how different those levels are. Link
The trend in junk mail lately is to make the advertising look like something important that you really feel the need to open. There are quite a few tricks in the array of disguises an envelope can take, and Windell and Lenore at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have been collecting examples to share with you. How many different types of these "important" envelopes have you seen? By the way, "registered documents" is nothing like "registered mail." Link -via Boing Boing
As medical marijuana gains acceptance across the country, one scientist thinks LSD should be next.
Long before he was a scientist, long before he wrote more than 100 journal articles, held six patents, or became an investigator for the NIH's Alzheimer's Disease Research center, Juan Sanchez-Ramos was an acid-dropping street artist. He had come to Paris in 1967 from Venezuela, intent on soaking up all the jazz and culture the city had to offer. His father, his two uncles, and his older brother were all doctors, and Sanchez-Ramos was expected to follow the family blueprint. Instead, he chose art. When student riots in Paris shut down his school and his father cut off his funds, a defiant Sanchez-Ramos decided to stay, hawking tourist portraits across Europe for pocket money and immersing himself in the psychedelic counterculture of the era. That's when he took his first hit of LSD.
For Sanchez-Ramos, dropping acid was an intensely intellectual experience. He was fascinated by the vivid Technicolor hallucinations, warped perception of time and space, and the temporary dismantling of the ego. "You see the relationship between time and matter, body and soul," he recalls. But what intrigued him most was his brain's chemistry. "I was extremely curious about how the brain generated consciousness, how images occur in [the visual system of] the brain," he says.
Since casual experimentation wouldn't answer his questions, he grasped for the science. As others of his generation "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out," Sanchez-Ramos's mind-altered state inspired him to drop into graduate school in pharmacology, landing him right back on the academic track his parents had wished for him.
Today, Sanchez-Ramos is a clinical neurologist who's been studying neurodegenerative disorders for more than 30 years. Slim and youthful, his dark hair streaked with gray, you can still see hints of the Latin playboy he once was. He delights in regaling visitors with tales of his youthful adventures. And he brings the same exuberance to his work.
Although research on psychedelics still hovers on the fringe of social acceptance, Sanchez-Ramos has never yielded to popular sentiment. Instead, the artist-turned-scientist has aggressively pushed for the study of illegal drugs, hopping to force regulatory agencies to acknowledge the the million suffering from neurodegenerative diseases deserve every chance at a cure. "Our whole drug policy is fundamentally mistaken in that it tries to ascribe good or bad qualities to the drugs themselves and ignores the relationship people have with these drugs," says Rick Doblin, one of Sanchez-Ramos's colleagues and the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. It's not the drug that matters -it's how it's used.
The bite of this centipede can be very painful. It grows up to eight inches long. It is very fast. It eats mice, lizards, and the occasional bat. And it has a cousin in the United States. Sweet dreams, everyone! You can follow future episodes of the Three-Minute Species series at YouTube. Link -Thanks, A.J. Fleming!
"Ten facts" is a phrase that begins an awful lot of internet articles, because people love to learn things, they want to learn things in bite-size pieces, and if it's a list, they want to see how many of these facts they already know. See, there's three facts already, and only one of them appears on this list of ten things about lists at the Guardian. How meta can you get? Link -via Digg
Well, that's what happens when you live near a nuclear reactor. Redditor IrishmanErrant works at MURR (the University of Missouri Research Reactor). He and a co-worker built this snowman. Or is it snowmen? Link
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