(YouTube link)

Six famous thought experiments explained humorously in a minute each, by David Mitchell of the BBC's That Mitchell and Webb Look. Produced by The Open University. -via The Daily What

These sculptures of flames by artist Herb Williams are an outdoor installation at the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas. The name of the work is "Unwanted Visitor, Portrait of Wildfire." But take a closer look -the flames are made of crayons! As the suns hits them, temperatures rise and fall, and the wind blows, the sculptures will melt, move, and change considerably, as they are designed to do. Link -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Ashton Thornhill)

(YouTube link)

When you only have one phone call, you'd better make it a good one! -via the Presurfer

The Dole Air Race of August 16, 1927 was from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, for a prize of $35,000. Fifteen planes were registered. Eleven qualified to start. Two crashed on the way to the starting point, and another crashed during a test flight before the race. Things only got worse once the race began.

On the morning of August 16, the eight remaining planes queued up for their opportunity. They drew lots for flight order and took off one by one. As people cheered, things went bad in a hurry.

One plane, the El Encanto, simply shot off the edge of the runway, and tumbled over her wing. Another the Pabco Flyer got into the air... until she didn't, landing some 7000 feet away in a marsh. Three more planes took off only to promptly return with technical difficulties.

Of the fifteen planes that had entered the race, only four planes, the Golden Eagle, Aloha, Woolaroc, and Miss Doran, were actually able to attempt the journey. The results of the ill fated race would soon be known.

The carnage didn't stop there. Nor did it stop once the race was over. Read more about the deadly Dole Air Race at Atlas Obscura blog. This story is part of a regular feature they call Morbid Monday. Link

(vimeo link)

Kevin Parry took a year to complete this stop-motion animation at Sheridan College. Filmmaker Tim Burton called it "a cross between 2001 and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." And then he said it was "really cool." -via reddit

For the first time in my life, I went to a Black Friday sale. It was a sight! I was naive enough to think the madness you see in the news wasn't applicable to my tiny little town... wrong! The available inventory of the one item that tempted me was completely claimed by people who had lined up 24 hours early. There's no way I'd give up Thanksgiving with my family to buy something (besides, I was working). So I saved even more money by not buying it. My Christmas shopping will entail getting smaller, more unique, and personal items by mail order. How about you? Are you having a relaxing or a frantic holiday weekend? If you've got a little time, you'll want to catch up on what's been happening here at Neatorama.

As the new Muppet Movie opened this week, Jill Harness gave us A Short Look At The Muppet's Long History.

Eddie Deezen gave us some interesting holiday reading with How Straight-laced were the Pilgrims?

The Annals of Improbable Research found a gem among registered patents and brought us A Device to Deter a Bear.

The Meanest Towns in the West were ranked by Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

From mental_floss magazine, we had The Quest to Solve the Hardest Math Problem in History (and the Minds that were Lost Along the Way).

The biggest post of the week was the one about the Cherpumple, called A Cherry Pie, an Apple Pie and a Pumpkin Pie, Each Cooked Inside a Separate Cake, and Then All Cooked Together inside Another Cake. It received the most views, the most comments, and the most links from other sites. Now, if we could only get statistics on how many people actually tried this at home...

The What Is It? game took a Thanksgiving holiday this week, but contests continue at Google+, like this caption contest. Leave your captions at the G+ post, or vote by giving a +1 to captions already posted. Keep up with our social networking feeds, like Facebook and Twitter as well as G+, and catch competitions and giveaways you won't see here at the main site.

In the coming week, get your Christmas decorations and ornaments ordered from the NeatoShop so you'll have time to enjoy them. As far as Christmas gifts go, you don't have to worry about shipping time (yet). What you need to worry about is that popular items may sell out! But isn't it wonderful to be able to buy everyone something different, funny, useful, or just plain neat without having to go shopping?

The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John's 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.

In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.

The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”

(Image credit: Polihale at en.wikipedia)

SALE PENDING

The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kameha­meha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Eliza Sinclair

History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.

Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great Mahele (“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.

HEDGING HER BETS



The Sinclair/Robinson Family

After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands…but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)

CHANGES, CHANGES, EVERYWHERE

When King Kamehameha V signed ownership of the island over to the Sinclairs, he told them, “Niihau is yours. But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now. When that day comes, please do what you can to help them.” The Sinclairs, it turned out, were more than just the owners of an island—they were also the rulers of the Hawaiians who lived on Niihau…at least those who chose to stay on the island after it changed hands. Having their land sold out from under them was a bitter blow to the Niihauans, and many moved off the island. By 1866 the native population of Niihau was half of what it had been in 1860.



Those Niihauans who moved away soon discovered that change was coming to all the islands, not just to Niihau. And few of the changes would be to their benefit. In 1887 a group of armed American and European landowners forced King Kalakaua to sign what has become known as the Bayonet Constitution, which stripped the king of much of his power and denied many native Hawaiians the right to vote. According to the new constitution, foreign-born landowners were allowed to vote, even if they weren’t Hawaiian citizens.

Kalakaua died in 1891, and his sister Liliuokalani became Queen. In 1893 she tried to replace the Bayonet Constitution with one that restored the power of the monarch, but her attempts had the opposite effect and she was overthrown in a coup organized by the foreign landowners. The Republic of Hawaii was declared in 1894, and in 1898 Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John's 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

The real-life story of a small ball of plutonium, the people it killed, and the researchers who blew it up.

THE BOMB

On the evening of Tuesday, August 21, 1945, American physicist Harry Daghlian was working at the U.S. government's ultra-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He was performing a very delicate experiment: Daghlian was placing brick-shaped pieces of metal around a chunk of plutonium, the highly unstable fuel used in most nuclear bombs. And he was making it more unstable with every brick he placed around it.

Daghlin (pronounced "DAHL-ee-an") was part of the government's Manhattan Project, which since 1942 had worked to develop the world's first atomic bombs. And they succeeded: Just a few weeks before Daghlian's experiment, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs had killed at least 100,000 people immediately, and many tens of thousands more in the days that followed. Less than a week after those bombings Japan surrendered to Allied forces, ending World War II.

For Daghlian and his fellow scientists, that meant there was much more work to do.

NEW AND IMPROVED

The United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons at the time, but the government knew that wouldn't be the case for long. If America was going to survive in a world with nuclear-armed enemies, it was reasoned, the nation was going to have to keep producing these weapons, and make them even more effective. This was precisely the reason that Daghlian was doing the particular work he was doing that night at Los Alamos.

Harry Daghlian was just 24 years old. He'd been brought into the Manhattan Project in 1943, while he was still a physics student -and an exceptionally brilliant one- at Indiana's Purdue University. He had helped in the development of the bombs used in Japan, which, their devastating effects aside, were actually not very good nuclear bombs. They were, after all, only the second and third ever exploded (one test bomb had been detonated in New Mexico just three weeks before the two in Japan).

One of the chief issues for the scientists was determining how to take full advantage of the bomb's nuclear fuel. Amazingly, both bombs used in the attack on Japan used only tiny fractions of their fuel to produce their explosions. (Imagine if they had used it all.) And using a bomb's fuel efficiently is all about the neutrons.

THE NEUTRON DANCE

The most common type of fuel used in nuclear weapons is a type of plutonium known as plutonium-239, or Pu-239.

* Pu-239 is naturally radioactive, meaning that its atoms naturally emit particles from their nuclei. Some of those particles are neutrons. (This is known as neutron radiation.) Neutrons are very large, as atomic particles go -so large that if a neutron emitted from one atom happens to strike another atom, it can actually "break" it, and cause the second atoms to eject some of its own neutrons. (This is the "split" in "splitting the atom,"and scientifically, it's known as fission.)



* This process happens normally very slowly, because most of the radiating neutrons just fly off. The whole idea behind nuclear weapons is to contain those neutrons within the plutonium, thereby speeding up the splitting process -with neutrons smashing atoms, causing more and more neutrons to be emitted, smashing more and more atoms- until it is completely out of control.

* The numbers involved in this chain reaction are almost too big to fathom: In a nuclear bomb explosion, atoms of the nuclear fuel are split by neutrons trillions and trillions of times ...in hundreds of billionths of a second. Because each split of each atom releases energy, the combined splitting of trillions of atoms in such an impossibly short amount of time releases an absolutely phenomenal amount of energy -hence the power of atomic bombs.

And that small box that Harry Daghlian was building that night in August 1945 was all about containing the neutrons.

Doc Pop spent seven hours creating this LEGO diorama featuring Lt. Pike pepper-spraying a line of protesting UC Davis students. It was installed in one the many abandoned newspaper bins in San Francisco. Someone removed it less than four hours later, but the photographs remain. Link -via Boing Boing

The early bird catches the worm, and mother birds are up early to catch the worm, or insect, or other foods that baby birds need. Envitonmental Graffiti has a gallery of baby birds of many species clamoring to be fed. In the picture shown, a reed warbler is feeding a relatively huge baby cuckoo whose mother laid an egg in the warbler's nest. Link

(Image credit: Per Harald Olsen)

If you went to the Black Friday sales last night (or early this morning, depending on the store) you may be sick of the retail experience right now, but you can sit down, relax, have a nice drink, and read about how your favorite and not-so-favorite stores got started. Considering that most started out small and spread across the country, a store could be a pretty big deal before you ever got a chance to hear about it, much less shop there. For example, the business that became Toys "R" Us started back in 1948!

In 1948, 25-year-old World War II veteran Charles Lazarus began selling baby furniture in his father’s bike shop in Washington, DC. Recognizing the demand for children’s toys, Lazarus soon broadened his inventory and renamed the store Children’s Supermart. He opened Baby Furniture & Toy Supermarket in 1952, using backwards R’s in the sign to grab attention. Five years later, he opened Children’s Bargaintown, which became the first Toys “R” Us, in nearby Rockville, Md. The store’s giraffe mascot, Dr. G. Raffe, was renamed Geoffrey shortly before Lazarus sold Toys “R” Us to Interstate Stores in 1966.

Mental_ floss has the lowdown on this and ten other big box stores. Link

(Image by Flickr user dcmaster)

What do you get for the person who has needs nothing? Instead of something that will collect dust, you can show your love and appreciation by helping those who do need something -in the name of your loved one. Help a third-world family start a business. Contribute to the building of new homes. Do your bit for disaster relief. Bring clean water to a community. Protect an endangered species. You can even give a gift card that can be used at a variety of charities. Web Ecoist has a list of 14 organizations that will channel your gift money to those who need it most, and notify your gift recipient about what you've done. Link

From Delta Force to The Empire Strikes Back, Danger Room skewers eight war films for their inaccuracy, political bias, poor strategy, or all-out cheesiness. Take Rambo III, for example, which did not age well. John Rambo goes to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen who are fighting the Soviets.

This is 1988, back when the exigencies of anticommunism rendered Afghan holy warriors the "good guys." One of them even refers to the U.S. as "the free world," bless his heart. Rambo's Afghan guide recites a graveyard-of-empires aphorism about how invaders would pray, "May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghans." Rambo translates: "You guys don't take any shit." Watching Rambo III in 2011 is awwwwwwwkward.

And not just because of Rambo's muj-ness. The camp invasion is crazy. Watch the Soviet helicopters overrun their own base while Rambo turns one of the Russkies' anti-aircraft guns against Ivan. Why do the Soviets have anti-aircraft guns when they're not facing an airborne threat? Because it's badass, that's why! Later in the film, Rambo magically becomes an expert in flying Russian Mi-24 attack helicopters. Must be his faith in Allah.

Videos clips are included; some scenes may be NSFW. Link -via Metafilter

Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, Italy is famous for a flock of "monsters" on top of its garden walls.

The house was built in 1715, and immediately hailed as an architectural achievement, and one of the finest works of Sicilian Baroque on the island. But the Villa didn’t acquire the strange touch which made it world-famous until 1749, when the deranged Prince of Palagonia ordered a set of gargoyles to line its garden walls. Legions of dragons, soldiers, hunchbacks and freaks of nature look down on visitors from atop stony perches. According to legend, the most freakish faces are meant to caricature the many lovers of the prince’s promiscuous wife.

Get a closer look at these eccentric works and get a tour of the villa at For 91 Days. Link -Thanks, Juergen!

Carolyn Eakins has a goal to lose 100 pounds. To accomplish this, she is copying the diet of wartime rations from the 1940s. For a year.

The 1940s Experiment is a personal journey and social experiment living for one year on a wartime ration book diet to conquer obesity.  100 wartime recipes will be recreated with photos as well as experiences of living on a 1940s WW2 ration diet… 1 authentic wartime recipe will be re-created for every 1 lb lost.

My highest ever weight was 345 lbs… I started the 1940s Experiment at 315 lbs and today I am 277 lbs. I’ve had a few stops and started along the way but now I’m committed to seeing this through…

My goal is to shift 100 lb in one year using a 1940s ration diet as my foundation….. at the moment I am also vegan.

Eakin is now two months into the experiment. You can follow her progress and learn more about the wartime diet at her blog. Link -via Nag on the Lake