What do you do -should you call an electrician or a plumber? Good luck getting either one to touch this! -via reddit
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Designer Matteo Civaschi of Studio H-57 made a series of movie pictograms that spell out the entire plot.
"This new set of stories shows our passion for the great, super-popular movies of all time," Civaschi tells us. "You have the movies that made the world cry (E.T.), scream (Alien, The Shining), think (The Matrix), hope (Robin Hood), and so on. Each movie, if it's really great, can create a whole new world, tell a story that's never been told before, and give life to unforgettable characters.
"Squeezing all of these things into a few icons is fun. In the case of particularly long movies or sagas (like The Lord of the Rings), the final result is even funnier."
Yes, they all contains spoilers, but they are all classics. In the off chance you haven't yet seen the movies, you probably wouldn't understand the pictogram anyway. See the rest at My Modern Met. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
If you are trying to avoid the flu, simple math tells us that placing all your faith in hand sanitizer is a mistake. Randall Munroe at xkcd even did the math for you! Wash your hands, cover those sneezes, and get a flu shot. Link -Thanks, Ned Scioneaux!
Artist Anna Dabrowska, who goes by Finnabair, creates lovely collages by reusing discarded computer parts, mechanical leftovers, and other objects that an imaginative mind can find useful.
The fantastic textures seen in these works of art are created by pasting the assorted pieces and parts onto canvas. The artist then skillfully colors her work using a mixture of inks and sprays. With these collages, she manages to transform recycling from a practical, mundane activity into a process for creating objects of beauty.
See a selection of Finnabair's works at the new site Tech Graffiti. Link
Everyone plays basketball with the laundry hamper occasionally, but it's so much more fun when you have an agile kitten to complete the layup! -via Arbroath
Polly the cat was found after riding 1,700 miles around England and Wales in the undercarriage of a train. It is thought that she stayed in the undercarriage for at least two days in fear after badly mangling her front limb. Train manager Emily Mahoney-Smith found the cat when she heard meowing at a stop on the way to Cornwall.
Emily took her on board and fed her tuna from a sandwich from the train's buffet and put her in a box in her compartment.
She then asked controllers to alert the RSPCA and the charity got in touch with on-call vet Matthew Berriman in Penzance.
Matthew, 34, said Polly was in such a bad state he thought she was a stray and was preparing to put her down.
But she used up her final life when he decided to check if she had been microchipped - and found she had.
The chip gave the details of the cattery in Plymouth who had looked after Polly before giving her a home with retired train driver Arthur Westington, 84, and his wife Louisa.
Polly's owners had not seen the cat in three weeks and thought she was gone for good. They gave permission for her limb to be amputated. Polly is recovering well and will be returned home soon. Link -via Arbroath, where you can see a video.
Bike manufacturer SRAM bought a unique storage building in Chicago. It was formerly a ten-story freezer for Chicago’s Fulton Market District. All that freezer space had to be defrosted before it could be used for anything else!
After decades of use, the building literally had to be defrosted like an old freezer. See the Time Lapse Video (courtesy of Sterling Bay Companies.) At the: 24 second mark, you can see the large propane heaters brought in to accelerate the melting process.
See more pictures at Perkins+Will. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Gary R. Jensen, courtesy of Sterling Bay Companies)
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) was the greatest boxer ever to lift a glove. Heavyweight boxing, without his amazing presence, is nowadays dull and almost completely uninteresting. Can anyone name the current heavyweight champion of the world? Ali turns 71 today, and in his honor, here are ten facts about "The Greatest."
1. He never turns down an autograph request.
As a young boy, Cassius Clay asked his idol, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson for an autograph. Robinson rudely told the boy "I don't got time." Young Cassius never forgot how hurt he was by Robinson's rejection. To this day, he has never once turned down a request for an autograph. He even has a special P.O. box for anyone who wants his autograph.
2. He used to race the school bus.
As a kid growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius didn't ride the bus to school like other kids. Instead of riding, Cassius would literally race the bus to school every morning.
3. A stolen bicycle started his boxing career.
Why did Cassius Clay become a boxer? As a 12-year-old boy, he was given a beautiful new bicycle as a gift. The bicycle was stolen, and when Cassius went to the local police department to report the theft, he met officer Joe Martin. Martin introduced Cassius to the world of boxing, and this was the beginning of his boxing career. Also Cassius vowed that he was "going to whip whoever stole his bike," but the stolen bicycle never turned up.
4. He only wore Elvis' robe once.
The security team at Verizon had a case study about a guy who outsourced his own job and then spend all day at work having fun on the internet. There was no mention of what company was involved.
The story goes a little something like this. A developer at a US-based critical infrastructure company, referred to as “Bob,” was caught last year outsourcing his work to China, paying someone else less than one fifth of his six-figure salary to do his job. As a result, Bob had a lot of time on his hands; in fact, during the investigation, his browsing history revealed this was his typical work day:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
5:00 p.m. – Go home.
If Bob were the CEO of a company, he'd get a promotion for such money-saving ingenuity. But Bob is not a CEO, and the communication with his consultant in China involved some serious security breaches. What ultimately happened to Bob is unknown, but you can read how they caught him at The Next Web. Link -via Digg
Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Ball in 1865 was a lavish affair for 4,000 people with a midnight buffet. Which didn't turn out quite as planned.
Oysters, roast beef, veal, turkey, venison, smoked ham, lobster salad and a seemingly endless display of cakes and tarts spread across a table 250 feet long. The hungry crowd charged the food, and the lavish event devolved into a food fight of sorts. “In less than an hour the table was a wreck…positively frightful to behold,” wrote the New York Times. Men hoisted full trays above the masses and took them back to their friends, slopping stews and jellies along the way. “The floor of the supper room was soon sticky, pasty and oily with wasted confections, mashed cake, and debris of fowl and meat,” reported the Washington Evening Star.
The menu itself seems odd to modern diners, as half the offerings were meat and the other half sweets, which is explained by the caterer being a confectioner. But where are the vegetables and bread? Some dishes aren't seen much anymore, like smoked tongue, stewed terrapin, calf's foot and wine jelly, and burnt almond ice cream. Read more about these dishes at Smithsonian. Link
Salome was not just a dancer, but apparently a contortionist as well, at least according to this early 14th-century illumination. We know it's Salome because the accompanying illumination shows her with John the Baptist's head on a platter, which you can see at Retronaut. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user George Hatcher)
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, AIR Staff
Interpretive Illustrations by Marian Parry
In April [1998], it was my privilege to attend the joint convention of the Western Psychological Association and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association (WRMPA). The four-day event took place at the Albuquerque Convention Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wandering from room to room, I found many surprising and delightful things.
Terror
For me, the highlight of the convention was a lecture—a prestigious "invited presentation"—by Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. The topic was "Managing the Terror of Being Human: Theory and Research". The man knows his subject cold, as you can see from this description he wrote in the convention guidebook:
Biography
My terror began in the Bronx in 1954. It was amplified by my undergraduate experience at Penn and my graduate training at SMU and the University of Kansas. It has continued to grow over my 15 years at the University of Arizona.
Ignore the Face
I also enjoyed a lecture by Joseph J. Campos of the University of California at Berkeley. Campos raised the question, "Does the Face Really 'Express' Emotions?" His answer was a ringing No, "except under very special conditions."
Fluid Meaning
I accidentally touched off a minor incident the day after Georgia Tech professor Randy Engle gave a presentation on the topic "Working Memory Capacity, Controlled Attention and General Fluid Intelligence". I asked nine experienced psychology professors to define the phrase "general fluid intelligence". None of them could, although one did opine that "the lecturer probably knows what it means."
Before the industrial revolution, many armies -and civilians- would wrap cloth around their feet to cushion them against shoes. But the practice lingered a bit longer in the Russian Army.
Near the end of World War II, Soviet and American soldiers met at the Elbe River in Germany. Lacking a common language, they compared their boots.
The Americans wore socks and lace-up boots. The Russians wore something that boggled the minds of their allies from the West: pieces of cloth twirled around their feet and inserted into bulky, knee-high boots.
The cloth strips, called portyanki, have been a signature element of the Russian military uniform since the 16th century. On Monday Russia’s minister of defense issued an order for a militarywide switch to socks.
“I have an instruction for you,” the minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said to a gathering of the equivalent of the chiefs of staff and regional commanders in comments broadcast on NTV television news. “In 2013, or at least by the end of this year, we will forget foot bindings. I’m asking you, please, if there is need we will provide additional funds. But we need to finally, fully reject this concept in our armed forces.
Socks actually began to be phased in for Russian troops in 2007, but the switchover should be complete this year. The lag behind just about every other country in the world, and the recent reform, tells a lot about the structure of the Russian military. Read more, and also see videos on how to wrap portyanki, at the New York Times. Link -Thanks, Daniel Kim!
Look at this huge limestone pillar -and there's a little church on top! The only way to get there is by ladder. It's in the village of Katskhi in western Georgia (the European one). There are many monoliths like this around the world, and for some reason, people always want to build something on top. See ten such sites at The World Geography. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Serge LAROCHE)
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