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This dog is determined to get the ball and bring it back, no matter what! -via Arbroath

This Twaggie was illustrated by Kevin Coffee from a Tweet by @yaelbt. You can get this printed on a t-shirt, as well and any other Twaggie you like! Link

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Who thinks up these things? YouTube user VanBullock, that's who! -via The Litter Box

Ktarian Chocolate Puffs were described in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation as having 17 different kinds of chocolate in them. The blogger bananamondaes took that as a challenge (or possibly an excuse to buy many kinds of chocolate), and created a recipe that actually uses that many in a cream puff. It doesn't look easy, but we are assured that the results are worth it! Link -via @johncfarrier

The picture is funny enough, but in the discussion at reddit, I learned that in Minnesota, they don't play the game by saying "duck, duck, goose," but instead it's "duck, duck, grey duck!" OuchoGroucho told us:

I remember that with Duck, Duck, Grey Duck one can play with the tiniest bit of subterfuge. The person that was "it" would always draw out the first syllable slightly when saying "grrrrreen duck." Sometimes it would cause confusion, and one could slip in "grey duck" and get a slight head start. We would also say many fun colors as we went around. Moving from red duck, blue duck to lavender duck, beige duck, grrrrrassy duck.

Link

Bill Gates is only 56 years old, but he stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft a decade ago. He'd still be the richest man in America if he and his wife Melinda hadn't been so busy giving money away. And instead of just donating, they did the research to determine how they would get the most bang for the buck. As it turns out, those bucks get a lot of bang when you use them to buy simple vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has gone through 25 billion dollars to not only get vaccines to children who need them, but to change the way that vaccines are developed, manufactured, and distributed globally.

The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.

“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.

Read about how they did it at Forbes. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

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This is Quaver, a baby Pygmy goat, learning to jump and climb. Her mother is on the left. -via Nag on the Lake

The Kathputli Colony is a community of performers: formerly itinerant magicians, puppeteers, acrobats, and others that settled into an area in West Delhi about 50 years ago. Most are poor.

But amidst the squalor is a remarkable tale of slum dwellers who have lived lives of the lowest degradation and of the highest luxury. Perplexing as it may sound, the Indian government bandies the community's greatest puppeteers and magicians around the world anytime they needs to showcase the cultural excellence of India.

As the filmmakers tell us, "you'll sit in someone's ramshackle home and watch as they flip through photo albums where they are pictured alongside [former Prime Minister] Rajeev Gandhi or Laura Bush."

But now the land has been sold to a developer who plans to bulldoze the slums and set up a shopping mall. The plight of the Kathputli Colony is shown in a video called Tomorrow We Disappear, which you can see, along with more pictures, at Atlas Obscura. Link -Thanks, Seth!

(Image credit: Joshua Cogan)

Dr. Levin's golden grid.

A mathematical gauging of a smile

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Dr. Eddy Levin of Harley Street puts a golden ratio, not just golden teeth, into his patients’ mouths. Dr. Levin has been at this for a while. It was he who in 1978 wrote a study called “Dental Esthetics and the Golden Proportion,” which graced pages 244–52 of that year’s September issue of The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry.¹

The golden ratio is a special number that has caught the eye and imagination of mathematicians, of artists, and now, thanks to Dr. Levin, of dentists. Some call it the “golden mean” (philosophers, though, use that phrase to mean something else). Some call it the “golden section.” Some Germans call it, evocatively, the “goldener Schnitt.” Almost everyone calls it beautiful.

The golden ratio is the number you get when you compare the lengths of certain parts of certain perfectly beautiful things (among them: snail shell spirals, the Parthenon in Athens, and Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”). You’ll find that the ratio of the bigger part to the smaller equals the ratio of the combined length to the bigger. That ratio, that number, is always the same, ever so slightly bigger than 1.6180339.

If doing sums causes you pain, just go find someone who has perfect teeth and who won’t mind you staring into his or her mouth.



Dr. Levin explains on his website² that many years ago he was both studying math and trying to find out what made teeth look beautiful. “It was at a moment,” he writes, “like when Archimedes got into his bath, that I suddenly realized that the two were connected — the Golden Proportion and the beauty of teeth. I began to put this into practise and started testing my ideas on my patients. My first case was a young girl in a hospital, where I was teaching, whose front teeth were in a terrible state and needed crowning. Despite the scepticism of the other members of staff and the unenthusiastic technicians with whom I had to work and whose co-operation I depended upon, I crowned all her front teeth, using the principles of the Golden Proportion. Everybody, including the young lady herself, agreed that her teeth now looked magnificent.”

Most important, in Dr. Levin’s reckoning, is the simple tooth-to-tooth ratio: “The four front teeth, from central incisor to premolar are the most significant part of the smile and they are in the Golden Proportion to each other.”

Dr. Levin created an instrument called the “golden mean gauge.” Made of stainless steel 1.5 millimeters thick, and retailing for £85, it shows whether the numerous major dental landmarks “are in the Golden Proportion,” and it is suitable for autoclaving.

Dr. Levin also offers a larger version that is “useful for full face measurements” and “useful to measure larger objects or bigger pictures of furniture etc.”

(Thanks to Stanley Eigen for bringing this to our attention.)

References

1. “Dental Esthetics and the Golden Proportion,” E.I. Levin, Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, vol. 40, no. 3, September 1978, pp. 244–52.

2. Golden Mean Gauge

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The article above is from the May-June 2009 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.

by Ernest Ersatz, Improbable Research staff

Although people say that “a penny’s not going to kill you,” that’s not strictly true. Sometimes a penny will kill you.

There are several cases on record where ingesting a penny has killed a child,1 but, this report deals only with adult misadventures. Children have respect for pennies. Too often, adults do not.

Yen and A Quarter

Pennies are not uniquely a source of danger. There are two notable and curious cases,2,3 which I will not go into here except briefly, of other kinds of coins being involved with death.

[caption id="attachment_55490" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Sectional view of the nose, mouth, pharynx, etc."][/caption]

A 50-yen coin and/or a 100-yen coin can kill you, as researchers at Osaka University Medical School handled discovered. As they describe it:

A 28-year-old male was found dead on a bed in a hotel. He had two electric wires, the ends of which were fastened to each coin (50 and 100 yen); the coins were attached to a left hypochondrial region and a left side of the chest. The other ends of the wires were connected to a time switch, which had been connected to a plug top (100 V, 60 Hz alternating current).... The cause of death was thus judged to be suicidal electrocution. It seems that suicide was influenced by a “Manual Book of Suicide,” which was found in his bag.

However, it appears that a quarter cannot kill you, at least not if you are already dead. Investigators at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department made that discovery, which they describe thusly:

A 69-year-old Chinese woman... was found at autopsy to have a quarter in her air passages. Inquiry showed that her family had placed the coin in her mouth at the time of death according to traditional Chinese funeral practices. This practice is apparently not widely known among forensic pathologists.

Other than these two cases, however, the scope of the current investigation is limited to pennies.

Penny Potency

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He's done it to cows and sheep; now cats get the fractal treatment from Cyriak Harris. -via Boing Boing

Previously: more of Cyriak's animations.

Colonel Doolittle (second from left) and his flight crew.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.

After Japanese air power struck a stunning tactical blow to the U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, a retaliatory strike against the Japanese was a priority for president Frankin D. Roosevelt, who challenged his general staff to devise a way to attack the heart of Japan.

PAYBACK PLANS

By mid-January 1942, a carrier-based air strike against Japan was accepted as the most plausible solution to FDR's request. When Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of Naval Operations, was asked to evaluate the possibilities, he passed the idea to General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, who then asked Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle to work out the details with the Navy. In the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, service rivalries took a back seat to striking a blow against the enemy.



After preliminary test flights, the North American B-25 Mitchell bomber was selected for the mission. Eighteen B-25s flew from their Oregon home base to Indiana for modifications. The range of the unmodified Mitchell was only 1,300 miles on a favorable day, so additional internal tanks were added to allow for more fuel. At the last second, 10 five-gallon cans of gas were stowed in the radio operator's seat. The heavy guns were removed, along with the highly secret Norden bombsight, whose classified technology couldn't fall into Japanese hands. In the planned scenario, the Norden bombsight wouldn't have been very accurate at the low altitude that would be flown anyway, so it was replaced with a simple metal aiming sight. Aircraft radios were also removed, since the mission would be executed under strict radio silence. These changes allowed each aircraft to carry just over 1,100 gallons of usable fuel, which under typical flight conditions would allow for a range of 2,400 miles. After all of these radical modifications, four 500-pound bombs barely fit into the bomb bay.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

The incredibly happy marriage of Wyatt Earp and Josie Marcus.

Wyatt Earp a Jew? Well, no, but he is buried in a Jewish Cemetery. Why? Read on...

In 1867, Josephine Sarah Marcus moved with her observant, immigrant, German-Jewish parents from Brooklyn, New York to San Francisco. She said her prayers every day and was taught a by-the-books good Jewish education. In 1879, young Josie was exposed to the romance of the San Francisco gold rush era.

After seeing the Gilbert and Sullivan play H.M.S. Pinafore at the age of 18, Josie caught the show biz bug. She ran away with a friend and joined the company touring the U.S. When the troupe played Tombstone, Arizona, she fell in love with the corrupt city marshal Johnny Behan. Ironically, it was Behan who introduced Josie to Wyatt Earp.

Josie and Wyatt were to soon fall in deeply in love and be married for some 50 years. The marriage was, by all accounts, a joyous one.

While we know much, factually, of Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp, while a true legend, had a checkered, disputed, and much-debated life history. While it is certain that Wyatt, then a U.S. Marshal, participated in the legendary "gunfight at the O.K. Corral" in 1881, the facts of that historic day remain foggy.

Wyatt, along with his brothers Morgan and Virgil and friend Doc Holliday, did participate in the shooting of the Clanton gang. The fight injured both Morgan and Virgil, while three of the Clantons were killed. The Clantons claimed it was a deliberate set-up  and that the Earps waited for them and drew first, while the Earp side claimed the Clantons drew their pistols first.

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In 2008, Czech master glassblower Michal Zahradník built a steam engine entirely out of glass! There are no seals here, just snug-fitting glass. This is a replica of an early locomotive steam engine designed by George and/or Robert Stephenson. If you're anything like me, you will watch this entire video waiting for something to blow up or break (which happened often, according to the video description). -via the Presurfer

One reason we like artistic redesigns of movie posters is that the real posters are so much alike. In fact, there are really only 13 Hollywood movie posters that are used over and over with the names and faces changed.

See how movie posters tend to fall into certain patterns, compiled by Christophe Courtois. The site is in French, but the graphics speak for themselves. Link