Last summer David Byrne of The Talking Heads converted an entire building, the Camden Roundhouse in London, into a musical instrument! He connected every pipe, pillar, and beam to a keyboard, from which you can make them vibrate and produce their individual sounds. This is one only of several large and different musical instruments made out of structures such as silos, a tower, a synagogue, and more at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
In the Spotlight this week, we were delighted to feature a book by National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, called RARE: Portraits of America's Endangered Species. The photographs are gorgeous, the stories of they were taken are surprising, and the animals are sadly, becoming more rare.
To celebrate his birthday, Jill Harness wrote The Divine Dali Drama, a peek into the surreal life of Salvador Dali. He would have been 106 this month.
At NeatoBambino, we featured an excerpt from the book Love, Mom by Cynthia Baseman, "a rare glimpse into the normally private world of a grieving mother" who has experienced the heartbreak of stillbirth. In a more upbeat post, we got a look at the delicious way the Neatokids are learning about the alphabet.
Attention science fiction fans! At NeatoGeek, you're invited to participate in the Question of the Day. It's a forum to share your opinions and read what others think, and will help us know what you are interested in seeing at NeatoGeek.
We had an exclusive excerpt from the bookGeekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Insensible, and Solving the Unsolvable by Dr. Graham Tattersall. In it, we learned how to mathematically estimate how many flies it would take to pull a car. Talk about alternative energy!
From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, we read about The Origin of Levi's, how America's favorite pants were developed and promoted.
The Quiz Play Day contest ran all week long. We were in the lead for a while, but then Boing Boing pulled out the big guns. Still, we rallied and came close! Thanks to everyone who played, donated, and voted for your favorite blog! The promotion raised almost $2K $2,443 for various charities. We'll announce the prize winners as soon as we have them.
The What Is It? game came around on Thursday. Please be aware that often Alex will award prizes for both the correct answer and the funniest wrong answer (like this week), so it could pay off to play even if you have no idea what it is.
Geeks Are Sexy unveiled a contest in which you can win a prize from the NeatoShop, and all you have to do is leave a comment!
We are heading into the final full week of the competition at the Upcoming Queue. It's not too late to get involved by creating your own Neatorama posts. Even if you aren't competing, we invite you to help us out by looking through the submissions, checking out the links, and voting for those posts you think are Neatorama-worthy.
Schools are finishing up for the year all over the country. A big hearty congratulations to graduates who are picking up diplomas from high schools and colleges from all of us at Neatorama!
It's a day of birthdays and anniversaries at NeatoGeek. Two cultural touchstones are turning 30, and a guy who turned 26 got a cake. You won't believe how awesome those stories are until you read them all at NeatoGeek. Link
Of course you enjoy board games, but there are so many you might have trouble identifying the game from just a card or a piece. Or maybe you know them so well you can ace today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored only 57%, because it's been so long since I played some of these that the actual hardware has been updated. Link
There have been many instances of online communities banding together to help someone in the real world. The latest incident involves Metafilter members who kept two Russian girls from becoming sex slaves when they arrived in the US yesterday. They were promised jobs from a questionable source who directed them to a strip club for an interview. Mefi members went into overdrive to investigate, stop the meeting, and get the girls official assistance despite the insinuation of threats from their contacts. The thread at Ask Metafilter unfolds like a movie script.
Your friend has become a victim of human trafficking. Her 'hosts' know that her fear of immigration authorities may prevent her from seeking help. That fear makes it possible for them to continue selling women into sexual slavery. (And yes, that's exactly what it is. Your friend's passport will be taken, she will be raped, she won't be paid and she may never have the opportunity to contact the outside world again). But i promise you, if you contact the police, they will be far less concerned about the immigration status of two Russian women than they will be about potentially bringing down a human trafficking ring. Some jurisdictions even have specific amnesties which protect the victims of human trafficking in return for information about their traffickers. If your friend won't contact the police, you should call them yourself. posted by embrangled at 6:02 PM on May 19
Flickr user Ambrosia Voyeur found a fascinating map published in 1927 that Hollywood studios used to find relatively nearby locations to film far-away places. As you can see, certain spots in California were considered good for filming places like Siberia, Sherwood Forest, the Sahara Desert, and other movie settings. The source is The American Film Industry by Tino Balio. According to the book, the variety of available geography in southern California is one of the reasons Hollywood became the center of the film industry. Link to image. Link to book. -via Buzzfeed
Are figs really full of baby wasps? It sounds like an urban legend, so the answer may surprise you. Wasps burrow into figs to lay their eggs.
While these images may not be all that appetizing, there's no reason to swear off figs quite yet. Those little insects are fig wasps, and they play an essential role in the fig's life cycle as the plant's only pollinator. That means that for pollen from one fig plant to reach another plant, fig wasps must do all the leg work. In return, the plant provides fig wasps with their only sources of food and shelter.
This arrangement is called mutualism. Both plant and wasp depend on the arrangement to survive, and without one, you wouldn't have the other.
But what happens when it's time to harvest the figs? Are the wasps still inside? Do the food companies scrape them out before they turn figs into jam? Or were the 12-year-olds right all along -- are we really eating a mouthful of sweet baby wasp paste?
How Stuff Works lays out the entire story. Link -via Holy Kaw!
Rick Reilly, a reporter for ESPN, entered the Sauna World Championship competition in Finland in 2007. In an excerpt from his book, Reilly describes his experience. It wasn't long before he realized he was in over his head.
You'd be amazed at how much fun it is to watch a grown man come apart like a $9 sweater. A Belarusian started out sane, just sitting there. Every 30 seconds a pitiless stream of water came out from a ceiling shower in the center of the sauna and splashed on the molten-hot rocks, creating a 100% humidity level in the room that would melt gold. About two minutes in our man started rocking a little. At three his eyes started blinking oddly. At four he began twitching. At five his eyes got huge. At six he started swallowing each breath like a gulp of scorching soup. Then he started glancing around wildly, as if to say to the others, Are you mad? Don't you see what's happening? They've locked us in a Crock-Pot! He started wiping his eyes and mouth. He moved his hands out toward his thighs to rub them, then realized that's not allowed and did so anyway, crazily, as though he were covered in lice. The judges flagged him once, then twice. Then he lurched for the door, and he was out.
Mark Ladner makes lasagne (that's how the article spells it) in pans that hold 80 potions portions each, using 50 layers of paper-thin pasta and 50 layers of three sauces. It's part of a nine-course meal at the New York restaurant Del Posto.
Ladner debuted this lofty lasagne a few months ago on his $500 Collezione menu, a lavish, one-party-per-service immersion into the full Del Posto experience (wine included), in which the 6-foot-4 chef serves each of the nine savory courses himself. For the lasagne course, he carries a sizeable hunk into the dining room on a silver tray, places it on a gueridon, and proceeds to carve the thing tableside. That’s right, he carves the lasagne tableside, a technique perhaps never before performed on Garfield’s favorite foodstuff.
You can also get the 100-layer lasagne for lunch the next day, fried with tomato sauce. Link -via J-Walk Blog
It's another list of fascinating facts about something you didn't even know you were interested in, from our friends at mental_floss.
1291: Switzerland is founded, and yodeling gets off to a trilling start!
Early Alpine shepherds discover how to yodel by alternating their voices between natural singing tones and falsetto pitches. Shepherds began using the distinctive calls to round up cattle and communicate with others across the Alps. But these aren't the first people to yodel. Apparently, the Roman emperor Julian was already complaining about the "wild, shrieking songs" of northern mountain people way back in the 4th century C.E. (Image credit: Flickr user carydunn)
1619: Yodeling comes to North America (but not from where you think).
While the Swiss have contributed to America's love for cheese-making and pocket knives, yodeling in the US has nothing to do with the Alps. American warbling traditions trace back to African Pygmy and Bantu tribes, who are known for their pitch-hopping songs. In fact, when people in Nairobi first hear American yodeler Jimmie Rodgers centuries later, they embrace the familiar sound and pen tribute songs in his honor.
1892: Edison records a yodeler.
Singer L.W. Lipp shows off his vocal stylings for none other than Thomas Edison in the inventor's New Jersey Phonograph Company. Whether or not the sound inspires Edison to refine his electric chair is debatable.
1927: Yodeling goes pop.
The Jimmie Rodgers song "T for Texas" sells more than 1 million copies. Jimmie, known as "The Father of Country Music", helps yodeling evolve into blues, and eventually country. He even does his part to spread yodeling to the world of jazz in 1930, when he records "Blue Yodel #9" with a young trumpeter named Louis Armstrong.
1931 Tarzan gets into the swing of things.
To prepare for the role, actor Johnny Weissmuller reaches back to his Allegheny Mountain roots and incorporates his childhood yodeling skills into what will become Tarzan's iconic wail. The sound quickly finds a home on jungle gyms and rope swings everywhere.
1992: A new world record!
On February 9th, Thomas Scholl and Peter Hinnen each yodel 22 tones (including 15 in falsetto) in one second.
2005: The Zen of yodeling.
Yodeling classes at the Zurich Conservatory of Music start attracting abnormal amounts of attention when word gets out that the yoga-like breathing exercises double as a stress reliever. The courses offer hope to 9-to-5ers who would prefer to sing rather than bend and twist their way to inner peace.
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The article above, written by Eric Alt, appeared in the Jan - Feb 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.
Wouldn't you like a Yuk-Man of your own? It might be hard to find, however. The only reference I could find for this toy was a newspaper article from 1986. You might try eBay. -via Tacky Raccoons
The female of the argonaut species of octopus produces a thin shell called a paper nautilus. You may remember these animals from the book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Scientists have pondered the purpose of these shells for thousands of years. The octopus lays her eggs inside the shell, but that couldn't be the only reason they developed this ability that is so different from other octopuses. Octopus experts Julian Finn and Mark Norman had a chance to observe argonauts in the wild and found they deliberately filled their paper nautiluses with an exact amount of air in order to keep themselves floating at a particular ocean depth.
This neutral buoyancy is a big boon for animals that live in the open ocean, because they don’t have to expend energy on keeping their place in the water column. Other cephalopods use a combination of fins, jets of water and, in the case of the actual nautilus, chambered shells. The argonauts are the only species known to use bubbles, but it’s clearly an efficient tactic. Finn and Norman observed that once they had trapped their air pockets and reached the right depth, they could swim fast enough to outpace a human diver.
See how the argonaut octopus does it in a video at Discover magazine. Link
