Poppet with a camera made this awesome Ghostbusters birthday cake featuring the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man getting zapped! See more pictures of it in her Flickr set. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: Flckr user poppet with a camera)

It's a minifig! It's a superhero! It's portable data storage! Actually, it's all of those things! Instructables member Britt Michelsen made a flash drive that looks like the Golden Age version of the comic book superhero The Flash. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Link

Okay, how would you spell Betws-Y-Coed? The Welsh village may just be the most misspelled place name on the internet. Kevin Jones runs the town's tourist website, and discovered that people have searched for the place using at least 364 different misspellings!

"I'd like to know if any other place in the UK is as misspelt," he said.

Mr Jones said he was amazed that all the people who wrote the name wrongly into a search engine had got to the website.

"Some of the names were unrecognisable," he said.

"But my criteria for counting the misspellings was that at least three people would have spelt it that way - and that they had viewed pages on the website after using them.

"I think we must be the most misspelt place names in the UK - I challenge people to let me know if we're not."

When Jones first moved to the village, he found out there were many different pronunciations of the name as well. Accompanying the linked article are some other places in Wales that you might find hard to spell. Link -via Arbroath

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This video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows plasma spinning around on the surface of the sun, looking a lot like what we'd call tornadoes. Except these whirls are as large as our entire planet and move with gusts up to 300,000 miles per hour! The action was recorded on February 7-8. Read more about it at NPR. Link -via Metafilter

Someone once told me that they made February the shortest month because it's the awfulest part of winter. I beg to differ- they made February the shortest month because if it were any longer, we'd cram even more holidays into it! But maybe both theories are right, and we tend to create February holidays because we need to cheer ourselves up to get through the last part of winter. This week is full of them! Carnival is in full swing, President's Day is Monday, Mardi Gras is Tuesday, Wednesday is, of course, Ash Wednesday, and it's also George Washington's actual birthday. Whew! But through it all, you can turn to Neatorama as a shortcut to the best things on the internet -and exclusive articles, too, like these we had this last week:

On Monday, Jill Harness gave us 15 Romantic Records Perfect For Valentine’s Day.

Eddie Deezen told us about Head: The Monkees’ Strange Movie. I hope this clears up any confusion.

The Value of Love, Using the Dylan Model was reprinted for Valentines Day from the Annals of Improbable Research.

Uncle John's Bathroom Readers brought us The First Black American Sea Captain.

And The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was from mental_floss magazine.

In the What is It? game this week, the scary-looking tool is a slater’s axe. It’s also called a sax, saxe, slate cleaver, slate cutters’ trimmer, slate trimmer, and zax. It was used to trim and punch holes in roofing slate. Anker was the first with the right answer, and so wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The prize for the funniest answer goes to marcintosh, who said, “It’s a Panel Trowel. It’s used for spreading white grout in the gaps between comic book panels. That’s why it’s shaped like a word balloon.” That one deserves  t-shirt, too! Thanks to everyone who played along. See the answers to all this week’s mystery items now at the What Is It? blog.

The most-commented-on post of the week was Dad Shot Laptop Over Daughter's Facebook Post. Coming in second was Lunch Bags Inspected for Nutrition. These stories lit up the internet this week, and there are updates: Tommy Jordan was visited by authorities who found no evidence of wrongdoing and his daughter has a job offer, and the teacher in the lunch fiasco should have just given the child a carton of milk.

If you haven't been over to our Facebook page lately, you'll find additional discussions on our posts plus extra stuff you won't find on the blog, like marvelous images with no context, such as this:



If that's not enough, check out the Best of Neatorama. Use the slider at the top to access articles from the past six seven years.

Have a Happy President's Day!

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Get a good look at the workings of the Keck Observatory atop atop Mauna Kea volcano in Hawai'i. I can't say I understand what's going on, but it sure looks impressive! The topper is the infinitely appropriate music that accompanies the action. -via Laughing Squid

When Thomas Edison hired new employees, he presented them with a 150-question quiz, containing different questions depending on the position. But often, the questions had nothing to do with the job; Edison just wanted to know how educated the applicant was. And sometimes there were other reasons behind the interrogation.

Who discovered the X-ray?
The obvious answer to this question is Wilhelm Röntgen, who, in 1895, famously noted the effects of a mysterious new kind of ray that appeared as a byproduct of his experiments with Crookes tubes. He called his discovery the “X ray,” to indicate its yet unknown properties, then went on to take a widely publicized X-ray print of the bones of his wife’s hand, and eventually won a Nobel prize in 1901 for his achievements. However, several other physicists made similar discoveries while experimenting with Crookes tubes around the same time. Among them: Nikola Tesla, Edison’s well-known rival. Edison had himself experimented with X-rays for a time, and was certainly aware of the variations in the X-ray origin story among his colleagues. This question suggests an eagerness to promote his preferred version.

Think you could pass his test? See a selection of the questions (and the answers) at mental_floss. Link

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Kirby Ferguson has released the fourth and final part of his Everything is a Remix series. This episode is called System Failure, and it's about the concept of intellectual property, patents, and copyrights. Link

Previously: Part one, part two, and part three.

Retail stores gather a lot of information on each customer. Do you use a discount card, credit card, or email address when you shop? If so, the store is able to keep track of everything you buy, and use that information to target their advertising specifically to your tastes. For example, Target hired Andrew Pole to crunch the numbers and analyze how a person's shopping habits can predict what they are most likely to purchase in the future. The data showed that certain purchases can indicate which customers are expecting a baby, and furthermore when they are most likely to deliver!

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

The New York Times has an extensive article explaining how stores gather, decode, and use your shopping habits to make more sales. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times)

Now that there are hundreds of TV channels and networks to select from, they no longer feel the need to please everyone. As they look for their own niches, they each take on a distinct personality. College Humor compares those TV channel personalities to people you know -and are possibly related to. Link

Surely you recall QWOP, the most difficult video game in history (mainly because you were busy laughing at your own ineptitude). Now the game is available for two players to compete against each other. Yes, now you can double your failure! Link -via Waxy

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We know you love movie quizzes, so here's a challenging one. This animation from Evan Seitz shows you clues to 26 films, one for each letter of the alphabet, in order. They go pretty fast, so you might have to back up or watch the whole thing more than once. If you get completely stumped, the answers have been compiled at Buzzfeed. Link

Plot holes in otherwise enjoyable movies don't bother most people -until they are confronted with them in large print, on an image macro. Unreality magazine points out more flaws in your favorite films that you'll remember every time you think about those movies in the future. Link

The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge from Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation award honors to the best images, illustrations, videos, games, and graphs of the past year that clearly communicate scientific information. Smithsonian magazine is proud to present a gallery of the winners, with an explanation of what each represents. This illustration looks like a rendering of Cthulhu, but is actually something scarier: a breast cancer cell, as it is being attacked by the green antibodies. Link

(Image credit: Emiko Paul, Echo Medical Media)

Talk about supersizing! Logan Warren set out to see how many add-ons he could order at Starbucks and how far he could run the bill up for one drink.

After about a half-hour with a laughing barista, we created the most expensive drink possible: one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup, 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavoring, banana puree, strawberry puree, vanilla beans, Matcha powder, protein powder, and a drizzle of caramel and mocha.
Price: $23.60.

But if you order this yourself, don't drink it all at once. It has a total of 1400 milligrams of caffeine! Link -via the Presurfer