Der Spiegel has an image gallery of "Trummerfrauen," or "rubble women" who were charged by the occupying Allies with cleaning up the wreckage of German cities bombed during World War II. There weren't enough German men left to do the job, and the women had to use their bare hands and whatever equipment they could round up on their own. The job still took years. Recovered materials were sorted to be reused. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

This week we welcomed a new contributor and a new contest -all in one! Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy is a caption contest using custom-drawn panels by comic artist Stephen McCranie, the creator of the webcomic Mal and Chad. Congratulations to the first winner of the new contest, Wrexlabs!

"You Think I'm Mad, Don't You?" from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us the lowdown on the mad scientists portrayed in ten recommended films.

From mental_floss magazine, we had 6 Common Baby Names that Might Hurt You. They didn't do so well for others.

Over at NeatoBambino, Tiffany has some tips for packing your preschooler's backpack, in case you are sending your baby off to school for the first time.

This week's post A Non-Math Look at Math Shapes is the requested followup to A Non-Math Look at Math Objects from a couple of weeks ago. I suppose you think it's funny to put a non-math person through this.

A post at NeatoGeek, Jonathan Archer, Badass, contains some spoilers if you haven't seen the entire TV series Enterprise. However, the comment thread turned into a debate about the merits of the last Star Trek series.

The latest acquisition in the Museum of Possibilities is Might Toilets Be Placed Anywhere in The Home?

We'd like to welcome painter Michelle Banks to the Art Blog. Check out her gallery of heart rhythms, bacteria, and dividing cells rendered in beautiful watercolors.

Congratulations to marcintosh who won a t-shirt from the NeatoShop in this week's NeatoGeek Caption Contest. See the winning caption at the link.

The winner of the What Is It? competition this week was Augie. Congrats!

For more Neatorama fun, check out our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter! They both have extra stuff you won't see on the blogs.

This music video relates the history of the Soviet Union with a clever song set to the Tetris theme (Korobeiniki), both the music and the game itself. Music by Pig With The Face Of A Boy. Honestly, it's awesome. Link

1. Naaktgeboren

When Napoleon seized the Netherlands in 1810, he demanded that all Dutchmen take last names, just as the French had done decades prior. Problem was, the Dutch had lived full and happy lives with single names, so they took absurd surnames in a show of spirited defiance. These included Naaktgeboren (born naked), Spring int Veld (jump in the field), and Piest (pisses). Sadly for their descendants, Napoleon's last-name trend stuck, and all of these remain perfectly normal Dutch names today.

2. Batman




Venezuelans are among the world's most creative namers, In fact, according to their own government, they're too creative. In September 2007, after hearing about babies named Superman or Batman, state authorities urged parents to pick their names from an approved list of 100 common Spanish monikers. Those conventional names (such as Juanita and Miguel) quickly acquired a patrician ring, ironically giving rise to more novel names, like Hochiminh (after the Vietnamese guerilla) ad Eisenhower (after the president). There are also at least 60 Venezuelans with the first name Hitler.

3. Eclipse Glasses

(Image source: Eclipsers)

In June 2001, a total solar eclipse was about to cross southern Africa. To prepare, the Zimbabwean and Zambian media began a massive astronomy education campaign focused on warning people not to stare at the Sun. Apparently, the campaign worked. The locals took a real liking to the vocabulary, and today, the birth registries are filled with names like Eclipse Glasses Banda, Totality Zhou, and Annular Mchombo.

4. Vladimir Ashkenazy

The people of Iceland take their names very seriously. The country permit no one-not even immigrants-to take or keep foreign surnames. So what happened when esteemed Russian maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy asked to become an Icelandic citizen? Well, the government finally decided to make an exception. Vladimir Ashkenazy is now on the short list of approved Icelandic names.

5. Yazid

Imam Husayn ibn Ali is one of the holiest figure of the Shi'ite Muslim faith. In the 7th century CE, he lost his head on the order of the Sunni caliph, Yazid, and the decapitation initiated the biggest schism in Islamic history. While the name Yazid remains common among Sunnis, it is disdained throughout the Shi'ite world. The stigmas attached to it is equivalent to naming one's son Stalin or Hitler. Speaking of which...

6. Adolf

Memories of death camps and fascism have kept parents from christening their kids Adolf for quite some time. But one unlucky youngster acquired the name in 1949. He was the son of William Patrick Hitler-the dictator's nephew, who moved to America in the 1930s to fight against his uncle. It isn't clear why William preserved the name, but his four sons (including Alexander Adolf Hitler, now 57) made a pact to never have children in an effort to stunt der Fuehrer's family tree at its branches.

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The article above, written by Graeme Wood, appeared in Scatterbrained section of the Mar - Apr 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine (the excellent "The Future of Sex" issue!). It is reprinted here with permission.

Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!

We'd like to welcome the boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad here to Neatorama to host another caption contest. As the banner says, if you can think up a winning caption to go in the empty speech bubble, you'll win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you'd like with your caption submission in the comments. Just make sure your caption is kid friendly and appropriate. Need some inspiration? Tune in to Mal and Chad's comic strip adventures at malandchad.com.

Update 8/13/10 - Stephen McCranie of Mal and Chad has picked the winner. Congratulations to WrexLabs who won with "Who is ANDY?"

CarlyB is obsessed with animals, especially those animals that don't get a lot of press. So she started the blog Featured Creature, which looks at animals you might not know already. One is the adorable spotted cuscus pictured.

When first discovered, scientists believed that this was a kind of monkey due to its prosimian-like movements through the tropical rain forest canopy. However, it is actually the largest possum on Earth, as well as one of the cutest creatures on Earth if I do say so myself. Males are always spotted but females are white or grey with a woolly coat (but no spots).

See the cuscus in action at the post. Link

(YouTube link)

This old car was bought sight unseen off Craigslist because it was cheap. I think someone many years ago tried to make this resemble another famous car. What do you think?  -via Cynical-C

Ron Sveden of Brewster, Massachusetts already suffered from emphysema, and when he took a turn for the worse, he expected he might have cancer. Instead, x-rays showed a pea plant sprout growing in his lung!

For two weeks they ran tests but they all came back negative for cancer, until one doctor found the plant growing in his lung.

“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the jolly green giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” said Sveden.

Ron said he never felt anything growing in his chest, just a lot of coughing.

Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.

“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” said Sveden.

Link

Previously: A tale of a pine tree growing in a lung that was later found to have been inhaled as a branch instead of a bud.

If you love Twitter or you love the people you follow on Twitter, you can buy a coffee mug made with your Twitter friends' profile pictures on it! What else is neat is that you don't have to buy one to generate a picture. This one has my contacts on it. Link -via the Presurfer

The sad truth about witches is that you don't have to be one -or even believe in them- to be executed for witchcraft. Read about eight women in history who each paid the price for what others thought she was doing. Some, such as Catherine Monvoisin, may have been guilty of other crimes.

Also known as La Voisin, Catherine Monvoisin was a midwife and French sorceress who was a personage in the Affaire des Poisons, in which several members of the aristocracy were executed for witchcraft and poisoning. She was a well-known practitioner of medicine, provider of abortions and maker of love powders and potions, and she served many famous Parisian women. Monvoisin was burned at the stake in 1680.

Link -Thanks, Mike Vogt!

The SPCA in Victoria, British Columbia suddenly has 43 chihuahuas. General manager Penny Stone is glad they are small. She took a call from a woman who asked if she could bring in ten dogs to give away.

“When she came in, she kept taking more out of her car saying, ‘Can you take more? Can you take more? Can you take more?’ ” said Stone. “Finally, we went out to her car. She had a Mustang convertible full of chihuahuas.”

The woman dropped off 33 chihuahuas on Wednesday and nine more on Thursday morning. One of the chihuahuas gave birth to a puppy on Thursday, bringing the total to 43. All but six of the dogs are under the age of two.

“I think she was a very nice lady who was in way over her head,” said Stone. “She was probably in a situation where she started with one chihuahua and it had babies. People get attached to them and feel that nobody can do as good a job [caring for them], so they end up keeping them. Then other people find out she is the chihuahua lady — her boss died and gave her 12. Pretty soon, her babies are having babies and it’s out of control.”

The shelter is seeking donations for the dogs' care and looking for adoptive homes as well. http://www.timescolonist.com/life/SPCA+swamped+with+tsunami+chihuahuas/3378590/story.html -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Adrian Lam/Times Colonist)

In researching the earlier post A Non-Math Look at Math Objects, I found that there is what a non-math person like me would call an infinite number of strange terms in geometry and topology that refer to shapes, objects, and patterns both imaginary and usable in the real world. Someone who is not used to this kind of higher thinking can only absorb so many of them at a time! Here are seven more.

Hyperboloid

What mathematicians call a hyperboloid of one sheet is a really cool structure that is made up of many (actually an infinite number) of perfectly straight lines that look to us like a curved structure. First, imagine that you have a cube. Stand it on one of its corners and spin it like a top, then look at it from the side -the sides seem to be curved, but you know they aren't. Now, take a handful of uncooked spaghetti noodles. Use two hands, and twist the strands loosely. It forms the shape of a hyperboloid structure, which looks like a cooling tower at a nuclear reactor. All the spaghetti noodles are still straight, but the shape of the handful is curved. In architecture, this idea enables builders to produce curved structures by using straight line supports.

Apollonian Gasket

An Apollonian gasket is a fractal generated when you mash as many round soap bubbles together as you can. At least, that's what it looks like. The pattern is based on threes: every circle touches two other circles. As you add more circles in the smaller spaces, they also touch two existing circles (and eventually many smaller ones). The number of smaller circles that can be added is mathematically infinite. Frothing soap bubbles can help us picture the Appolonian gasket, but the analogy is flawed, because real world soap bubbles do not like empty spaces. There is a limit to the volume of soap, and surface tension will connect round bubbles and flatten them against each other. This fractal is named for the ancient Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga. The 3-dimensional fractal of this sort is called the Apollonian sphere packing, which is a pretty descriptive name for a math term.

Möbius Strip

When I was very young, first or second grade, my father told me he could make a piece of paper with only one side. Then he took a strip of paper, gave one end a half-twist, and taped the ends together. Then he showed me how he could draw one line down the strip without stopping and it covered the whole strip, no matter which way you turned it! I couldn't wait to show the Möbius strip to my friends at school. When I did, they just stared at me and told me I was weird.

Maybe "continuous plane" is a better description than "one sided paper". The Möbius strip is named for August Ferdinand Möbius who discovered it in 1858. Johann Benedict Listing also came up with the concept around the same time and actually published his work, but maybe someone thought calling it a "Listing strip" would be confusing. Anyway, the Möbius strip does have some real-world applications. For example, conveyor belts and recording tapes with a half-twist last twice as long as they would otherwise because the entire surface is used instead of just one side of a two-sided strip. It's also an attention-getter in art and even architecture.

Just how well do you think you know the fruits of the world? That's the subject of today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. It's harder than you think! I made several wild guesses, and I ended up with a score of 55%. Link

These scans of an old safety booklet for children called It's Great to be Alive! are full of gruesome injuries that befall careless bicycle riders, pedestrians, and kids at play.

In fairness, adults didn't have a lot of options in those days, so using abject fear was a common parenting tool. There were no reflective bicycle helmets or knee-pads for skateboarders, no designated bicycle lanes, many fewer supervised activities, and we didn't even have seat belts in cars until the mid-1960s. When accidents happened, they were usually pretty grim.

See more mayhem in this article from Gene Gable. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

The new movie The Expendables opens this Friday, starring every action star Hollywood could round up. Sylvester Stallone tried to do an interview on YouTube, but he didn't get to say much before everything went south. Link -via The Litter Box