Isabelle Dansereau makes arty but protective felt sleeves for iPads, Macbooks, and Kindles. Besides the cat and fox, check out the wolf, elephant, owl, and more! See the rest of the critters at her Etsy store, Boutique ID. Link -via Laughing Squid
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Isabelle Dansereau makes arty but protective felt sleeves for iPads, Macbooks, and Kindles. Besides the cat and fox, check out the wolf, elephant, owl, and more! See the rest of the critters at her Etsy store, Boutique ID. Link -via Laughing Squid
How to use a light saber in a completely ineffective manner in order to draw out a fight scene which should have ended in seconds. -via reddit
Veterans are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries. That's bad enough, but the number of veterans suffering from back injuries is much bigger. VA social worker Carroll McInroe says the strain put on the backs of young soldiers is making them into old men -and women- way before their time.
The Houston Press has an extensive article on veterans, their pain, and the problems they have getting treatment. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Brian Stauffer)
McInroe started to ask each and every vet who came through his office if they were suffering back pain. Just about all of them had pain, he says. "I would say 70 percent of them. And not just a little. I'm talking chronic stuff here — misaligned vertebrae, bulging discs, herniated discs, the whole list of back problems." At national conventions, he would share his informal findings with his counterparts at other VA facilities. They told him much the same situation prevailed in their offices. He called around to military hospitals and asked the nurses what their most common complaint might be. Back pain, he was always told.
He saw nothing like that among his cohorts in Vietnam. Since grunts have humped heavy packs since Napoleon's day with no resulting epidemic of back woes, McInroe believes that modern body armor is to blame. "It's too heavy. You can't just put 120 pounds on a 19, 20-year-old musculoskeletal system, 14 hours a day, 365 days a year and not create some real serious problems."
And in his view, this is a real serious problem indeed. If McInroe's estimate — that 70 percent of returning veterans have moderate to severe back problems — holds true across the nation, the costs to America's taxpayers will be enormous, and the bill will do nothing but grow and grow over the next 50 years.
The Houston Press has an extensive article on veterans, their pain, and the problems they have getting treatment. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Brian Stauffer)
Okay, so only one entry showed up, but he's well worth watching by himself! -via The Daily What
We posted a comic about people charging their mobile devices at an airport, and it made me wonder how long it would be before the airport started charging money for this service. Technology is working toward that glorious day.
I don't know about years away, when there's money to be made, the introduction of new technology seems to travel in light speeds. It may appear sooner than you think! Link -via Geekosystem
Sony is building a new kind of power outlet that raises a not entirely pleasant prospect—in the future, plugging a phone into a public wall socket might require authentication and take a chunk out of your bank account. But the technology will have many important uses, Sony says, from managing payments for recharging electrical vehicles to avoiding blackouts by intelligently regulating the use of power.
Announced by Sony last month, and demonstrated today in a video posted by Tokyo news site DigInfo TV, Sony's authentication outlet manages electricity use on a per-user and per-device basis with NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tools.
The technology may be years away from commercial release, but a prototype demonstration shows a handheld dryer being plugged into an outlet that has the ability to authenticate devices. The dryer doesn't need to be modified because it attaches to the outlet through a plug containing an NFC chip.
I don't know about years away, when there's money to be made, the introduction of new technology seems to travel in light speeds. It may appear sooner than you think! Link -via Geekosystem
In this age of the celebrity chef, recipes and cookbooks are cranked out constantly, at a pace no single chef can keep up with. So they have a retinue of cooks, writers, and other support staff who work behind the scenes. Julia Moskin writes about what it's like to stay in the shadows, and talks with other ghost writers.
Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Owen Smith)
In his first assignment, another writer I know had to produce a book on Japanese cuisine based on two interviews with a chef who spoke no English.
“That,” he said, “was the moment that I realized cookbooks were not authoritative.”
“Write up something about all the kinds of chiles,” one Mexican-American chef demanded of me, providing no further details. “There should be a really solid guide to poultry,” a barbecue maven prescribed for his own forthcoming book. (After much stalling, he sent the writer a link to the Wikipedia page for “chicken.”)
At the most extreme level, a few highly paid ghostwriter-cooks actually produce entire books, from soup to nuts, using a kind of mind-meld that makes it possible not only to write in the voice of another human but actually to cook in his or her style — or close enough. One recent best-selling tome on regional cooking was produced entirely in a New York apartment kitchen, with almost no input from the author.
Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Owen Smith)
There is no propaganda so persuasive as Saturday morning cartoons. Especially cheaply animated cartoons featuring superheroes and anime. -via mental_floss
Happy St. Patrick's Day! Sorry, kids, you won't get any points for wearing green to school because it's a Saturday. But that just makes the adult parties a little easier to do! Americans like to celebrate everyone's holidays: Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick's Day, etc. and there's always talk about cultural appropriation and how we tend to do the food and costumes without understanding their real meaning and the culture the holidays came from. Hey, it's in our nature to try and celebrate the kaleidoscope or the melting pot that the nation is made of. But still, while you are preparing for a green beer bash, you might take some time to read up on St. Patrick and Ireland and how the Irish celebrate their national holiday today. And you can catch up on all the neat stuff you may have missed during the work week here at Neatorama.
Wednesday's date was 3/14, which is significant, so Jill gave us 14 Pi Pies For National Pi Day.
Eddie Deezen wrote about The Day John Lennon Met Paul McCartney.
We learned a bit about building skyscrapers from The Fearless Wonders, from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research brought us The Second-Hand Effects of Bitching.
And mental_floss magazine gave us the story of Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
Over at NeatoBambino this week, we had posts on difficult pregnancy, summer fun for kids, a toddler car theft, and a creative video birth announcement. Check them all out!
In this week's What Is It? game, the pictured object is a Pro Pitch Gauge, made by The Classic Company, for measuring the angles in the holes of bowling balls. Steve Pauk had the right answer with the very first comment! However, he did not select a t-shirt. StilesJM wins the prize for the funniest answer: Phrenology gauge used by sororities, applied to the cranial midline of a prospective member to determine how much of a pitch she really is. That wins a t-shirt! See the answers to all this week’s mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
The most commented-on post of the week was The Surface Area of Nothing. Coming in second was The Death of Manners, and Will Eating Red Meat Kill You? is in third place. However, the recent post Millennials: The Most Selfish Generation Ever? will probably end up having a lot more comments before it slips into the archives.
Want more? Be sure to check our Facebook page every day for extra content, contests, discussions, videos, and links you won't find here. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what's going around the web in real time.
A report on a silent but deadly threat. You know what they say: a mime is a terrible thing to waste. -via the Presurfer
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, with Lucille Zimmerman and G. Neil Martin
YAVIS is a term psychotherapists use to describe the profession's favored type of patient. YAVISes are the patients who most benefit, in the eyes of therapists, from seeing the therapists. Here is a quick primer on the subject.
The letters in YAVIS stand for "Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful." This charming acronym is little known to the public. Within the professional psychotherapeutic community, it is discussed guardedly. Initially it was used as something of a wry criticism:
Later, though, many came to take it as less of a criticism, and more of a common sense guideline for professional success.
Psychotherapy is a difficult undertaking, in which success is hard to define, and nearly impossible to predict. Even now, the most reliable predictor of psychotherapeutic outcome -- some say the ONLY reliable predictor -- is whether or not the patient is a YAVIS.
The components of the phrase YAVIS are slightly fungible. Some common variants are:
There is, by the way, an opposite for the term YAVIS. It is HOUND, the explanation of which is perhaps best given on page 202 of Winfried Huber's classic work, "Les Psychothérapies: Quelle Thérapie Pour Quel Patient?" (1993, Paris, Nathan). The flavor is most piquant in the original French:
Continue reading
YAVIS is a term psychotherapists use to describe the profession's favored type of patient. YAVISes are the patients who most benefit, in the eyes of therapists, from seeing the therapists. Here is a quick primer on the subject.
The letters in YAVIS stand for "Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful." This charming acronym is little known to the public. Within the professional psychotherapeutic community, it is discussed guardedly. Initially it was used as something of a wry criticism:
In 1966 it was already a cliche that the patients who did best in psychotherapy were those who did not need it. The YAVIS criterion was an inside joke. Young, attractive, vital, intelligent, successful individuals benefit best from psychotherapy. In other words, the patients we work best with are the ones who need us least.[1]
Later, though, many came to take it as less of a criticism, and more of a common sense guideline for professional success.
Psychotherapy is a difficult undertaking, in which success is hard to define, and nearly impossible to predict. Even now, the most reliable predictor of psychotherapeutic outcome -- some say the ONLY reliable predictor -- is whether or not the patient is a YAVIS.
The Varieties of YAVIS
The components of the phrase YAVIS are slightly fungible. Some common variants are:
* Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful
* Young, Attractive, Verbal, Insightful, and Successful
* Young, Attractive, Vital, Intelligent, and Successful
* Young, Affluent, Verbal, Insured, and Single (or, in "German: Jung, Wohlhabend, Sprachgewandt, Versichert, und Alleinstehend")
There is, by the way, an opposite for the term YAVIS. It is HOUND, the explanation of which is perhaps best given on page 202 of Winfried Huber's classic work, "Les Psychothérapies: Quelle Thérapie Pour Quel Patient?" (1993, Paris, Nathan). The flavor is most piquant in the original French:
HOUND (c'est à dire casanier, vieux, sans succès, verbalement et intellectuellement peu doué) vous donnerait moins de chance d'être accepté par un psychanalyste et même tout simplement d'être pris en psychothérapie.
Whence YAVIS?
The following article is from the book Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
The Beats were America's first hipsters. But what were they, like, really about, man?
THE OTHER SIDE OF AMERICA
One night in 1948, two students at new York's Columbia University, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac, were hanging out talking about what they thought was wrong with the modern world -the constant threat of nuclear war, the hollowness of suburbia, and the stifling academic mainstream. At one point, Kerouac remarked, "This really is a beat generation."
What did Kerouac mean? It was something he'd heard a few years earlier from someone he'd met in Times Square, a street hustler named Herbert Hunche. According to Kerouac, Hunche told him that "beat" meant that "you're exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise."
Holmes' and Kerouac's clique consisted of a handful of equally disenchanted artists, writers, and academics, all with (un)healthy interests in drugs, booze, and urban culture, including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs. This was the Beat Generation, and they found their escape in the underexplored and often seedy side of American life. And they expressed it in what would come to be highly influential written works.
SEX, DRUGS, BEBOP
img class="size-medium wp-image-62610" title="beats" src="http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/beats-500x326.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="326" />
Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.
The Beats thought the way to enlightenment and artistic fulfillment was to go out and experience the world, especially the fringe elements. They hitchhiked around the country, befriending (and emulating) hobos and outlaws (like Hunche), and they experimented with marijuana, Benzedrine, and morphine.
Continue reading
The Beats were America's first hipsters. But what were they, like, really about, man?
THE OTHER SIDE OF AMERICA
One night in 1948, two students at new York's Columbia University, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac, were hanging out talking about what they thought was wrong with the modern world -the constant threat of nuclear war, the hollowness of suburbia, and the stifling academic mainstream. At one point, Kerouac remarked, "This really is a beat generation."
What did Kerouac mean? It was something he'd heard a few years earlier from someone he'd met in Times Square, a street hustler named Herbert Hunche. According to Kerouac, Hunche told him that "beat" meant that "you're exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise."
Holmes' and Kerouac's clique consisted of a handful of equally disenchanted artists, writers, and academics, all with (un)healthy interests in drugs, booze, and urban culture, including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs. This was the Beat Generation, and they found their escape in the underexplored and often seedy side of American life. And they expressed it in what would come to be highly influential written works.
SEX, DRUGS, BEBOP
img class="size-medium wp-image-62610" title="beats" src="http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/beats-500x326.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="326" />
Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.
The Beats thought the way to enlightenment and artistic fulfillment was to go out and experience the world, especially the fringe elements. They hitchhiked around the country, befriending (and emulating) hobos and outlaws (like Hunche), and they experimented with marijuana, Benzedrine, and morphine.
Italian designer Davide Bonanni designed a small four-wheel vehicle that can travel on rails or on the ground by pedal power. Called the "O," it is shaped just like that. The idea is to make it easier for people to explore abandoned railways. Hey, I think this would be fun just to pedal around the neighborhood! Read more about the O at Urban Ghosts. Link
(Image credit: Davide Bonanni)
The YouTube title of this video is Dogs Match Music Notes Perfectly, which is a bit misleading because several times the dogs hit a note before the ocarina player does. I'm not sure exactly how this was accomplished, but it's cute. -via Buzzfeed
All My Friends Are Still Dead, the new illustrated book (no, not a children's book) by Avery Monsen and Jory John is the sequel to their very successful book All My Friends Are Dead. Link -via Laughing Squid
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