What could be cooler than a compilation of nuclear cooling towers undergoing demolition? Those towers imploding with surprised faces drawn on them! It's an ad from Ecotricity, a wind-power advocacy group. -via Geekosystem
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
As many films as there are available on TV and for home viewing, they are only a small percentage of the movies that have been made. Most of the others will never be available on DVD, for one reason or another. Some sound just plain awful, while others could be called intriguing, like the 1969 film Troika!
There are 24 films in this list at io9. Link -via mental_floss
In the film's final segment (which sounds awesome) an eight-foot high insect wandering a Martian landscape is attacked by blue-skinned aliens (led by NBA All-Star Nate Thurmond) as a cowboy plays Wabash Cannonball.
There are 24 films in this list at io9. Link -via mental_floss
Elderly bloggers and internet junkies in the year 2062 reminisce about the good old days of social media and social networking. I'm not sure how they get the idea of "hipsters" out of these folks. This video was produced to promote Social Media Week 2012. Link -Thanks, Lauren O'Neil!
This blog has the tagline "an illustrated introduction to criminal law and procedure." It's part webcomic and part law class, and all interesting. Author Nathaniel Burney breaks down criminal culpability into small pieces so we can understand some of the many facets of crime and the justice system. In the latest post, there are quite a few people who hate "you," but they have different intents and take different actions. Which ones are guilty of attempted murder? The concepts are laid out in logical order from the beginning of the blog, but it's not totally necessary to read them in order. Link -Thanks, Wiseayse!
A cat makes a great listener, and therefore makes a great sidekick for pop culture characters. How well do you know feline sidekicks from movies, and TV? The challenge at today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is to match 10 kitty sidekicks with the main character he/she goes with. I only got half of them correct. You will do better! Link
Andy Lewis performed a slacklining routine during the Super Bowl halftime show, and amazed the audience. If slacklining is new to you, you can find out all about this extreme sport (or is it an art?) in an interview with climbing legend Dean Potter at National Geographic News Watch. Oh, yeah, that's him in the picture, at Yosemite Falls. See a video of Potter's trip across the abyss at NatGeo. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
Nine-year-old Jonny Mizzone can play the banjo! On fiddle, you hear his 12-year-old brother Robbie, and 14-year-old Tommy accompanies them on guitar. The song is Ralph Stanley's "How Mountain Girls Can Love." You can see more of the brothers at the YouTube channel Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. Link -via reddit
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
The incredibly strange life of Boston Corbett.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th U.S. president, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. He died the next day. Okay, what is this, a history class? Everybody knows that! But who shot Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Well, let's find out by looking into the life of one of the strangest, little-known men who had a part in United States history. Let's look at the strange life of Boston Corbett. Thomas Corbett was born in England in 1832. He immigrated to Boston where he became a born-again Christian. He adopted the city's name in honor of his conversion. But Corbett wasn't your normal convert. His religious zeal knew no bounds. Fearing temptation by prostitutes, he used a pair of scissor to castrate himself. After which, he casually attended a prayer meeting (he did receive medical attention afterwards). Corbett had been married earlier, but his wife died in childbirth. During the Civil war, Corbett became a Cavalry sergeant. After the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln, his unit took part in the search for John Wilkes Booth. On April 26th, his unit surrounded the barn where Booth was hiding and set it on fire. Corbett saw Booth through a crack in the barn and fired a single shot, mortally wounding him. "Providence guided my hand," Corbett told his commanding officer. By an odd coincidence, Corbett's bullet had struck Booth in the same spot Booth's shot had hit president Lincoln. When told of this, Corbett said, "What a fearful God we serve." His reward money for killing Booth was $1,653.84, the exact same amount as every other man in his unit. Corbett instantly became famous as "Lincoln's Avenger." He was flooded by requests for autographs and cheered when he walked the streets. But fame, once hot and heavy, gradually died down. Boston Corbett started suffering from severe delusions. He imagined John Wilkes Booth's men were stalking him and thought he was in grave danger. He fled to Kansas. In 1887, he was given a job as doorman to the Kansas House of Representatives. One day he showed up waving a gun, declaring the House adjourned. Corbett was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The following year he escaped, and no one ever heard of Boston Corbett again. He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minnesota. There is no conclusive proof of this, but the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1894 lists a "Thomas Corbett" on the list of the dead or missing. Corbett was a hatter by trade. The mercury used to cure beaver pelts is thought to have contributed to his madness. Visit guest author Eddie Deezen at his website.
This really should have been posted last night, while the running theme was coffee, but better late than never. Artist Gwyneth Leech paints paper coffee cups. Over 700 of the finished cups are on display in an exhibit titled "Hypergraphia: Gwyneth Leech, the Cup Drawings, Studio in the Prow" at the Sprint Flatiron Prow Artspace in New York City. Leech herself is on exhibit, too, as she sits in the window with her cups and paints more cups five days a week from 10AM to 2PM through February 18th. Link -via Laughing Squid
Not just "a" raven, but "the" raven that inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the poem The Raven, is on display now at the Free Library of Philadelphia as part of their Dickens collection. The bird, named Grip, was author Charles Dickens' pet, and was enshrined in more than one classic work of literature.
Link -via The Daily What
The Free Library of Philadelphia is celebrating Charles Dickens' 200th birthday all year long. Link
The raven appeared as a minor character in Dickens' book Barnaby Rudge, which Poe reviewed and criticised for the bird's small role.
Four years later, in 1845, he penned his immortal and haunting poem The Raven.
It told of a talking raven visiting a distraught man whose lover had just died, arriving 'as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door'. The paragraphs then trace the man's slow descent into madness.
The carefully preserved and stuffed raven is one of the more unusual items in the Philadelphia library's valuable Dickens collection.
Link -via The Daily What
The Free Library of Philadelphia is celebrating Charles Dickens' 200th birthday all year long. Link
A mysterious box appeared in a parking at Erie Community College campus in Amherst, New York, Friday afternoon. The state police bomb squad responded and took an x-ray of the sealed box, which showed a cat inside! Police turned the cat over to the local SPCA. Gina Browning of the Tonawanda SPCA says the cat is okay.
If found, the persons responsible could be charged with animal cruelty. Even Erwin Schrödinger never wanted to try his famous thought experiment on a real cat. Link -via Arbroath
"The cat was not malnourished, not dehydrated, didn't need any kind of veterinary care. So, it had a happy ending. What concerns me is the people capable of doing this might be capable of doing something worse," Browning said.
Just who would put a cat in a taped up box and leave it in a parking lot remains a mystery at this point.
Capt. Camilleri said, "Right now it doesn't appear there's really much to follow up on. It didn't have any identification on the box or anything like that."
The upside to this is that the cat, named "Truffle," is fine, healthy and back with her owner. Tracking down the person responsible is unlikely, if not impossible.
If found, the persons responsible could be charged with animal cruelty. Even Erwin Schrödinger never wanted to try his famous thought experiment on a real cat. Link -via Arbroath
Have you ever seen a plane being washed? It's just like washing a car, except it takes a bigger crew with rain gear and fire hoses. Here you see a plane getting spruced up before an inspection. -via the Presurfer
The 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, although beautiful, was 82 minutes long with no dialogue or narration. Wyatt Hodgson sped it up 1552% to fit into five minutes, which is a treat for the eyes you surely have time for. The music is "The Holy Egoism of Genius" by The Art of Noise. -via I Am Bored
compiled by Tenzing Terwilliger, Improbable Research staffwith instructive illustrations from the book Penmanship, Theoretical and Practical, Illustrated and Explained by Benjamin Franklin Foster, Souter and Law, London, 1843.
Doctors often find themselves the butt of jokes about their supposedly horrendous, illegible handwriting. These four studies suggest that, except in one department in one hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, the reputation may be deserved.
“Deciphering the Physician Note,” E.A. Kozak, R.S. Dittus, W.R. Smith, J.F. Fitzgerald and C.D. Langfeld, Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 9, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 52–4 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02599144). The authors, at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, explain:
Objective information about legibility of physician handwriting is scant. This retrospective chart review compared handwritten general medicine clinic chart notes from internal medicine faculty and housestaff with their typed counterparts. The written counterparts took 11 seconds (46%) longer to read and 5 seconds (11%) longer to answer comprehension questions. The authors’ comprehension measure (developed specifically for ambulatory clinic notes) was only slightly higher for typed notes. The legibility of physician handwriting is not as dismal as assumed; physicians can effectively communicate on paper.
“Reputation and the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting in Situ,” G.A. Cheeseman and N. Boon, Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, June 2001, pp 79–80. The authors, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, report:
Our study evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates how legibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospital notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doctors and 10 nurses, unaware of the true nature of the study, wrote out lists of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors’ handwriting was significantly less legible and they wrote significantly quicker. However a small minority of the doctors was responsible for the majority of illegible words written by that group.
“The Facts on the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting,” H. Goldsmith, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 12, September 18, 1976, pp. 462–3. The author writes:
A large number of people, both doctors and others, were tested. The handwriting of each participant was graded and four different statistical tests were performed on the results. In all of these tests the doctors’ handwriting came out significantly worse. Thus the only conclusion which could be established from these results was that doctors’ handwriting is indeed less legible than others.
“Legibility and Completeness of Physicians’ Handwritten Medication Orders,” E.H. Winslow, V.A Nestor, S.K. Davidoff, P.G. Thompson and J.C. Borum, Heart and Lung, vol. 26, no. 2, March–April 1997, pp. 158–64 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0147-9563(97)90076-5). The authors, at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Texas, report:
OBJECTIVE: To assess handwritten medication orders for legibility and completeness, legibility of physician signatures, and presence of date and time the orders were written. SETTING: Three patient care units in one hospital in Texas. METHODS: Six experienced nurses evaluated medication orders and signatures for legibility using a rating scale developed for the study... RESULTS: Twenty percent of the medication orders and 78% of the signatures were illegible or legible with effort. Twenty-four percent of the medication orders were incomplete. Date was omitted on 18% of the medication orders, and time was missing on 58%.
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Doctors often find themselves the butt of jokes about their supposedly horrendous, illegible handwriting. These four studies suggest that, except in one department in one hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, the reputation may be deserved.
Legible Handwriting in Indiana
“Deciphering the Physician Note,” E.A. Kozak, R.S. Dittus, W.R. Smith, J.F. Fitzgerald and C.D. Langfeld, Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 9, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 52–4 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02599144). The authors, at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, explain:
Objective information about legibility of physician handwriting is scant. This retrospective chart review compared handwritten general medicine clinic chart notes from internal medicine faculty and housestaff with their typed counterparts. The written counterparts took 11 seconds (46%) longer to read and 5 seconds (11%) longer to answer comprehension questions. The authors’ comprehension measure (developed specifically for ambulatory clinic notes) was only slightly higher for typed notes. The legibility of physician handwriting is not as dismal as assumed; physicians can effectively communicate on paper.
Illegible Handwriting in Scotland
“Reputation and the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting in Situ,” G.A. Cheeseman and N. Boon, Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, June 2001, pp 79–80. The authors, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, report:
Our study evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates how legibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospital notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doctors and 10 nurses, unaware of the true nature of the study, wrote out lists of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors’ handwriting was significantly less legible and they wrote significantly quicker. However a small minority of the doctors was responsible for the majority of illegible words written by that group.
Illegible Handwriting in Australia
“The Facts on the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting,” H. Goldsmith, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 12, September 18, 1976, pp. 462–3. The author writes:
A large number of people, both doctors and others, were tested. The handwriting of each participant was graded and four different statistical tests were performed on the results. In all of these tests the doctors’ handwriting came out significantly worse. Thus the only conclusion which could be established from these results was that doctors’ handwriting is indeed less legible than others.
Illegible Handwriting in Texas
“Legibility and Completeness of Physicians’ Handwritten Medication Orders,” E.H. Winslow, V.A Nestor, S.K. Davidoff, P.G. Thompson and J.C. Borum, Heart and Lung, vol. 26, no. 2, March–April 1997, pp. 158–64 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0147-9563(97)90076-5). The authors, at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Texas, report:
OBJECTIVE: To assess handwritten medication orders for legibility and completeness, legibility of physician signatures, and presence of date and time the orders were written. SETTING: Three patient care units in one hospital in Texas. METHODS: Six experienced nurses evaluated medication orders and signatures for legibility using a rating scale developed for the study... RESULTS: Twenty percent of the medication orders and 78% of the signatures were illegible or legible with effort. Twenty-four percent of the medication orders were incomplete. Date was omitted on 18% of the medication orders, and time was missing on 58%.
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The article above is from the March/April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Here it is, our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Tell us what this object is, if you know. If you don't, make a wild guess!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. We'll have two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
There are more pictures of this thing at the What Is It? Blog. Have fun and good luck!
Update: the exact purpose for the item in question was never actually verified, but Rob at the What Is It? blog thinks it might be "a form for a medicine ball." Since we don't know for sure, we are awarding t-shirts for the TWO funniest answers this week. One came from meiao, who said it’s the ball for Mortal Tetherball. Another good one was from Steve Pauk, who said it was a Rubik's globe! Those are both worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop. See the results for all the mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
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