Does this look like it would deter any bicycle thief whatsoever? See a collection of lock and logic failures for both bikes and bigger vehicles in a collection at Locksmiths-R-Us. Link -Thanks, David!

Instead of reprinting the studio posters, film distributors in some eastern European countries commission new posters for movies, and many are works of art. Monster Brains has a collection of Polish and Czech posters for Japanese monster movies, including this awesome Czech illustration for the film Monster from a Prehistoric Planet (Daikyoü Gappa). Oh yes, there are lots of variations on Godzilla, too! Link -via Pink Tentacle

Louis Mantin inherited a fortune and became a patron of the arts and of high living. He constructed a fine mansion in his home of Moulins, France and filled it with custom woodwork, relics from antiquity, and art. Mantin died in 1905, and had stipulated in his will that his home should become a museum in 100 years.

Mantin only had a few years to indulge his aesthetic fantasies. Knowing that his death was approaching, he made a will in which he made sure his treasured house would be saved.

"In the will, he says that he wants the people of Moulins in 100 years time to be able to see what was the life of a cultured gentleman of his day," said assistant curator Maud Leyoudec.

"A bachelor with no children, he was obsessed with death and the passage of time. It was his way of becoming eternal."

When the 100-year mark passed, the house remained abandoned and in no shape to open to the public. Isabelle de Chavagnac, a descendant of Mantin's, threatened to exercise her right to inherit the mansion if it didn't open as a museum. She didn't really want the estate, but her actions forced the local government to allocate funds for renovation. The house then opened as a museum, as Mantin wished, in 2010. BBC News has a video tour of the home. Link -via Gizmodo

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Nicolas Cage has played roles in 66 different films so far, and his roles have an extraordinary range. So does his hair! For proof, watch this video compilation by Harry Hanrahan. See a list of the films used at Pajiba. -via The Daily What

The latest story from Allie Brosch will remind you of a horror film -one in which you are being chased through a dark forest by a horde of demons intent on devouring you. Never mind that the horde of demons is a group of six-year-old girls at a birthday party!

Benny had severely underestimated our hunting and maiming capabilities.  We were not like ordinary little girls who frittered away their time hosting tea parties and pretending to be princesses.  We had spent countless hours out in the forest, sharpening our hunting tactics on imaginary prey and we finally had an opportunity to put all of our practice to use on a real thing that would run away from us and struggle for survival.  Unfortunately for Benny, we had not yet developed the ability to empathize with the pain and suffering of other people, and his terrified fleeing was pretty much the most fun thing that had ever happened to us.

It was a party no one, especially Benny, will ever forget. Link

We've already posted twice about Amy Chua's essay "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", so is it any wonder that a new image meme has grown up around the backlash? Note: the image used in the generator is not Amy Chua; it's a stock photo. Link -via Buzzfeed

It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is for? You'll have to state a specific purpose for this one.

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: Robert McLaughlin was the first to correctly state it is a canary cage for a coal mine -here's an explanation. Among many humorous guesses, The Professor wins a t-shirt for "This is the server used by Facebook to keep users' private information secure!"

The blog named Let's Get Jiggy with Civil War Dudes! features individual soldiers of the Civil War, highlighting their magnificent names, their accomplishments, and their manly facial hair. Pictured is Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox.

He lived during a time when mustaches could be mustaches, and not simply a means to mask a scrawny hipster’s weak chin and acne scars.

Behold the awesomeness of Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana, Bushrod Johnson, Absalom Baird, John Sappington Marmaduke, and others. All feature links to further information. Link -via Metafilter

The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

Figure1. A reflex hammer. It was used to mechanically stimulate the subject’s skull.

An fMRI Study
by Kai M. Schreiber
Dept. of Physiology, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In 1796, Franz Joseph Gall described the cerebral organs that he believed were responsible for certain character traits.1 Since then, thanks to neural imaging studies, we have acquired detailed knowledge of the parts of the brain engaged in many cognitive functions.

So far, however, no one has attempted to locate the cortical seat of ignorance. Ignorance is arguably the most pervasive, mental attribute, and the one that makes us truly human. Unfortunately, ignorance is difficult to measure using common, imaging techniques, because the sophisticated machinery tends to saturate the ignorance system even before any stimuli are presented.

Here, I use functional mechanic resonance imaging, a technique developed specifically for this study, to locate the seat of ignorance in the human cortex.

First, I present evidence that there is a well defined neural ignorance system.

“General Ignorance,” Objectively Determined and Measured

While comparing the scores of random Joe Shmoes on a set of personality measures I had devised over the last few hours, I noticed strong positive correlations between some of them. I discarded the non-correlated ones and came up with the table shown here as Figure 2.

Experts tell me that the positive correlations of these measures must mean that there is some underlying general principle behind them, effected by some physical body. I call this underlying general principle General Ignorance (GI). The following set of numbers demonstrates how simple it is to assign numerical measurements that correspond to General Ignorance:

Figure 2. This set of numbers demonstrates how simple it is to assign numerical measurements that correspond to the qualitative quantity called General Ignorance. For an interpretation of the numbers, consult Figure 3.

It is unnecessary to assign labels to the chart, as the meanings and significance of the numbers are obvious.

Functional Mechanic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

To overcome the aforementioned problems in imaging ignorance, I employed the following strategy. First, the subject was seated with a friend in the university cafeteria. During that first stage the conversation of the subject was recorded from a neighboring table using an HB pencil and letter-sized blank paper (80g/m). The subject then was brought into the experimental room.

For the fMRI experiment, the subject was seated comfortably and one of two texts—either her original conversation (baseline) or lines from a Shakespeare play (signal) —was read to her. It can be assumed that the subject was non-ignorant regarding her own previous utterances, whereas the Shakespeare quote had a high probability of eliciting an ignorance signal. This was confirmed by the subject’s self-report. [For some details about the procedure, see the accompanying article box called “fMRI on the Go - Try It Yourself!”]

While the subject was listening, her head was mechanically stimulated with short pulses delivered using a reflex hammer (see Figure 1). The locus of stimulation on the skull was varied systematically between trials. The subject’s response (verbal, body movement, threats) to each of these pulses was recorded quantitatively on a scale ranging from one to ten. A stronger response in the signal condition indicates a greater excitability of the ignorance system at this skull location. Figure 2 shows the typical result from the subject.

Figure 3. Activation of cortical areas due to mechanic stimulation of the skull. This image was created by overlaying two-dimensional gaussian patches centered on the locus of stimulation. The amplitude of the gaussians reflects the difference in strength of response between the signal and the baseline condition in each location.

Results

Figure 3 clearly shows that during perception of stimuli selective for the ignorance system, ignorance was most strongly enhanced by mechanical resonance stimulation over the frontal cortex. Therefore I conclude that the frontal lobe is the seat of General Ignorance.

It is interesting to compare GI across groups. Since the ignorance system is located in the tissue of the frontal lobe, its design must be specified in the genome. This could help explain certain phenomena of decision-making that related to politics and economy, which are a mystery otherwise. I have made up preliminary evidence, showing that bureaucrats are relatively more ignorant than Buddhist monks. If this result holds, we would have to drop all efforts to educate bureaucrats, since the effort will be demonstrably futile.

fMRI has proven to be a powerful new experimental technique, allowing the visualization of human cortical processing in vivo. While its temporal and spatial resolution both appear improvable, the simplicity and affordability of the equipment, and the continuing flow of published studies based on its output, easily justify purchase and use of the equipment.

Reference

1. For details, see “Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of F.J. Gall and J.G. Spurzheim,” Donald D. Simpson, ANZ [Australia and New Zealand] Journal of Surgery, vol. 75, no. 6, June 2005, pp. 475-82.

*****************

fMRI on the Go - Try It Yourself!

The great advantage of the fMRI [functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging] method (as described in the main text) is its flexibility. It could even be used at the bedside with clinical patients. To elicit an fMRI signal from yourself, read the following lines out loud while hitting yourself on the forehead with the open palm. If you feel dizziness or anger, you have successfully stimulated your ignorance circuits.

This double worship,
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason, where gentry, title, wisdom,
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance,—-it must omit
Real necessities, and give way the while
To unstable slightness: purpose so barr’d,
It follows, Nothing is done to purpose.

—William Shakespeare,
Coriolanus

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2007 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

We've seen some amazing photographs of snowflakes taken by microscope cameras. Did you know the first photograph of a single snowflake dates back to 1885? Wilson A. Bentley adapted a microscope to a bellows camera and worked for years before his first successful snowflake photograph.

In 1903, he sent 500 prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian, hoping they might be of interest to Secretary Samuel P. Langley. These images are now part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Bentley’s book Snow Crystals, with more than 2,400 snowflake images, was published in 1931. This photomicrograph and more than 5,000 others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines.

See Bentley's photographs, which are not on display at any museum, online at The Smithsonian Institution. Link

How can an island in the East River in New York City be forgotten? Ah, because it's a protected nesting area, and therefore off-limits to the public. Still, this particular island has quite a history.

Of all the forgotten and mysterious places in the Five Boroughs of New York City, few have histories as rich and interesting as that of North Brother Island. Situated in the Hell Gate, a particularly treacherous stretch of the East River, North Brother was home to the quarantine hospital that housed Typhoid Mary, was the final destination of the General Slocum during its tragic final voyage, and was the site of an experimental drug treatment program which failed due to corruption. Riverside Hospital, the name of the facility on the island throughout its various incarnations, treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction; after the Second World War, it housed soldiers who were studying under the GI bill. The entirety of the island has been abandoned since 1963; over a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.

The Kingston Lounge not only has more on the history of the island, but lots of pictures of the buildings in their process of decay. Link -via Breakfast Links

Your knowledge of American literature will be sorely tested in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Eleven Americans have won the Nobel Prize for literature. You get to match their names with a statement that describes him or her. I only got five right, for a score of 45%. I am so ashamed. Link

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Now I want a horn suit! Not that I could play it like Koni can... Link -via the Presurfer

In May of 2009, the missile-tracking ship General Hoyt S. Vandenberg was hauled out in the Gulf of Mexico. Planted explosives blew holes in the ship's hull, and she sank to the bottom in just a couple of minutes. You can see the process in a time-lapse video. Deliberately sinking a ship sounds like an environmental crime on the surface, but the Vandenberg was carefully prepared: ten tons of asbestos and over 800,000 feet of electrical wiring was removed before she was sunk. The sinking was part of an environmental program to create artificial reefs where sea life -from coral and plankton to game fish- can live and reproduce.

The Vandenberg is certainly not the first ship to be deliberately sunk to create an artificial reef. The waters off the Florida Keys have become the grave site of the Coast Guard cutters Duane and Bibb and the U.S. Navy landing ship Spiegel Grove, and on the sandy bottom 20 or so miles out to sea from Pensacola lies an entire aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Oriskany—the largest ship in the world intentionally sunk as an artificial reef. Dozens of World War II cargo vessels known as Liberty ships have been submerged, or to use the proper jargon, deployed, all along the Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts.

National Geographic tells us the history of artificial reef programs and how they are used to encourage marine life to flourish. Link

(Image credit: David Doubilet/National Geographic)

The ChumBuddy is a combination sleeping bag, body pillow, and plush shark. It makes for an awesome photo opportunity as well -all your friends will want to try it out! Link