This poster is obviously a dig at the movie Battleship in the board-game-to-feature-film category. Still, redditors are only too happy to fill in the details with comments. Link

(YouTube link)

The video title calls him a ferret, but commenters called him a short-tailed weasel, a white weasel, an ermine, and a "smelly meat slinky." Whatever the little guy is, he's having a hard time getting out the door with his big stolen roll! -via Buzzfeed

If you are looking for the shortest place name in the world, there is a tie among many, because you can't get a name shorter than one letter or character. In fact, there are seven villages in Norway named Å (one is pictured here) and 13 in Sweden! The World Geography has a look at six places with only a single letter for a name. Link -via Boing Boing

Kalvin and Leah Greuel of Hawley, Minnesota, adopted Tommy soon after he was born to a woman that Leah met at Walmart. That in itself is a story, but then Tommy suffered from a mysterious condition that caused his head to grow too fast.

At 6 months old, it was off the charts for his age group. At 9 months, it was nearly the size of a 5-year-old’s. No one they consulted had seen anything like it. The Greuels started looking for specialists and for answers.

On June 26, 2010, before they found the latter, Tommy had a seizure that lasted more than six minutes. Leah took him to the emergency room, where tests showed bleeding in the brain, hemorrhages in both eyes and a fluid build-up in his skull.

They were symptoms of Tommy’s condition, exacerbated by everyday bumps and stumbles. His connective tissue was weak, particularly around his eyes, and his brain was bruised from bumping into the inside of his own skull.

The Greuels didn’t know that yet. Neither did the hospital staff, who instead saw his symptoms as telltale signs of something else: shaken baby syndrome.

The hospital called Clay County Social Services, which said the injuries were evidence of child abuse – and that Kaylee was in danger as well.

And one day in early July, the agency took both children away.

The story continues with the Greuel's struggle to get their children back, and an even bigger struggle to get medical help for Tommy while the state had custody. See, the social service agency didn't think Tommy needed to keep his appointments with specialists because they already knew that the problem was shaken baby syndrome. Read the entire story so far at InForum. Link to part one. Link to part two (with video). -via Minnesota Public Radio

Jim C. Hines, who earlier threw his back out posing like women on book covers, has recovered enough to try it again, this time posing like men on book covers. His aim was to determine whether men's poses objectify them the same way women's poses do. The answer: yes and no. Among the list of conclusions,

5. Male poses do not generally require a visit to the chiropractor afterward.

Both experiments are a hoot! Link -via Metafilter

The bigger they are, the harder they are to keep up, tear down, or reclaim. Urban Ghosts looks at very large abandoned buildings around the world, including a factory, a mansion, skyscraper housing, a church, and an office complex. Shown here is Chateau de Noisy in Belgium, which has been a home, a Nazi facility, and an orphanage before abandonment. See the inside of it at the post, as well as the other massive empty buildings. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Paul-Henri S)

 



Richard Haughton builds and repairs thatched roofs in Scottow, Norfolk, England. But when he works, all eyes are on his dog Axel, who's right there on the roof with Haughton and his crew. The 5-year-old Newfoundland mix has been climbing the ladder to be with his master since he was a puppy, and now has quite a reputation among customers, who love the rooftop dog. Axel climbs up well, and doesn't mind spending all day on the roof, but still cannot climb down on his own. He'll wag his tail to let the work crew know he needs to be brought down. Link (with video) -via Arbroath

Previously: Bubba the Ladder-climbing Roof Dog

(vimeo link)

The animated short SubWars warns us to respect our elders, because that old man on the subway just might be a Jedi master. Directed by Sean Soong. Contains plenty of cartoon gore. -via The Daily What Geek

Works for me! This Twaggie was illustrated by Mitra Farmand from a Tweet by @hipstermermaid.  See all the new Twaggies, and remember, you can get any you like printed on a t-shirt! Link

Professor Lipscomb, together with fellow Nobel Laureate, Rich Roberts and the Nicola Hawkins Dancers, performing in the premiere and only performance of the ballet “The Interpretive Dance of the Electrons” at the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Photo: Alexandra Murphy.

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff

Very sad news. My good friend and longtime collaborator William Lipscomb died this past April (2011) after a period of ill health.

Bill, also known as “The Colonel” because he was a Kentucky Colonel, was a great scientist. A prize grad student of Linus Pauling, Bill went on to himself be awarded a Nobel Prize and later still to see several of his own students and mentees be given Nobel Prizes. He was also perhaps the best and funniest performer in most of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies (the photo here shows him in the 1994 ceremony, dancing in “The Interpretive Dance of the Electrons”) and in many other adventures we had together (some of which you can see in video form, on the www.improbable.com web site.).

Improbably photogenic, he was a frequent cover model for the Annals of Improbable Research—indeed, he was the most frequently pictured person there. Other magazines splash supermodels, singers, or politicians on their covers; we usually chose, instead, the man whose image was more compelling than that of a mere movie star. It was nearly impossible to see Bill performing, or even a photo of him in performance, and not be entranced.

He was the prize in the very first Win-a-Date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest, at the 1993 ceremony. We subsequently gave him away numerous times, including last year, 2010, when he made his final Ig Nobel appearance. By that time he had trouble walking, but gleefully insisted on being part of the show. He and his wife, Jean, issued a kind and firm invitation to hold our opera rehearsals at their home prior to the ceremonies in 2009 and 2010.

At the 2008 ceremony, Professor Lipscomb and Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of the mathematical concept of fractals, evaluate something or other, each in his own way. Photo: Kees Moeliker.

Professor Lipscomb in His Own Words
I interviewed Bill several times for this magazine and for its predecessor (of which I was the editor for several years), and now wish I had done it many more times. These were not just interviews but performances, usually with only ourselves as an immediate audience. Bill was both himself, Professor Lipscomb, and, at the same time, a slightly heightened version of himself that we both came to know as “Professor Lipscomb.” The character carried over to the stage each year at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and occasionally in other public settings.

Here’s part of an interview he and I did in 1996. It appeared that year in vol. 2, no. 2 of the magazine.

 



About half of the states of the USA have official state beverages. The Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss today will only ask you about nine of them, but who knows this kind of stuff? I only knew which state two of the drinks went with, but got four right by the luck of guessing. I hope you can do better! Link

Unreality magazine posted a list of ten alpha males on TV, of which I have seen exactly two. I went out of my way to see the show Justified because I was born in Harlan County. And I've seen Star Trek, but I have the feeling it was included to ward off commenters, because James T. Kirk must be included in a list of TV alpha males. Otherwise, all the shows are from the past ten years or so. Where is Marshall Dillon? Where is J.R. Ewing? Where is Napoleon Solo? Arthur Fonzarelli? Tony Soprano? Thomas Magnum? Anyway, the list at Unreality is a good one insofar as recent TV is concerned. Go take a look and you may find a show you'll want to start watching. But who else would you include from older TV shows? Link

Hey! Wanna learn how to cut an apple so your kids will think you're some kind of genius? Head over to NeatoBambino for the full instructions. Link

Scientists off the coast of Kamchatka have spotted the first confirmed white adult orca. The white killer whale appears to be healthy. The only white orcas seen before have been juveniles.

The sightings were made during a research cruise off Kamchatka by a group of Russian scientists and students, co-led by Erich Hoyt, the long-time orca scientist, conservationist and author who is now a senior research fellow with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

"We've seen another two white orcas in Russia but they've been young, whereas this is the first time we've seen a mature adult," he told BBC News.

"It has the full two-metre-high dorsal fin of a mature male, which means it's at least 16 years old - in fact the fin is somewhat ragged, so it might be a bit older."

Orcas mature around the age of 15, and males can live to 50 or 60 years old, though 30 is more commonplace.

"Iceberg seems to be fully socialised; we know that these fish-eating orcas stay with their mothers for life, and as far as we can see he's right behind his mother with presumably his brothers next to him," said Dr Hoyt.

The cause of his unusual pigmentation is not known.

They didn't name the orca Moby Dick as you would expect, but instead it is called Iceberg, perhaps because of the recent anniversary of the Titanic incident. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: E. Lazareva/Far East Russia Orcas Project)

There is no texting on my family phone service. Not only do I want to avoid paying for it, I also want to encourage my children to talk with people, instead of talking at them, as so many of their friends prefer to do. The new methods of communication we use free us up from the annoyance of having to look at, pay attention to, or listen to other people. Sherry Turkle at the New York Times has also noticed this.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.

Many young people see the lack of face-to-face conversation as a benefit to the new communication, but as they mature they may realize that as they dispense with listening, their network connections ("friends") are not listening to them, either. Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)