The major league baseball playoffs begin today. While you're watching the games, check out the patterns cut into the grass. Red Sox groundskeeper David Mellor is considered the top grass artist in baseball. He has even written a book on the subject: “Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports”.

“Mowers have been making patterns since 1830, when the first mowers were built,” Mellor said.

He was an assistant groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1993 when a concert badly damaged the grass in the outfield. With the support of the head groundskeeper Gary Vanden Berg, Mellor mowed a busy pattern to serve as camouflage. The design, not the damage, was all anyone noticed.

“I still think that was the coolest pattern he ever made,” Vanden Berg said.

Mellor found himself with a niche, and others followed. The striping side effect of mowing has been creatively rearranged into pop art. With few exceptions — one is San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where all the grass is usually mowed in a single direction to keep the slate clean and old-fashioned looking — baseball is played atop an increasingly busy backdrop.

Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: J. Gunther/New York Times)

In honor of the company's tenth anniversary, Google has enabled its oldest search engine available, the 2001 version. The results are linked to the Internet Archive cache of the sites as they appeared in 2001. Using this, only 3 results came up for "Neatorama", and they were all adjectives used to describe other sites. There were no results for "Miss Cellania", so you can rest assured I am an original. Link to article. Link to search. -via J-Walk Blog

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This is Romeo, a Siberian lynx. In this video, he is three months old and nursing on a sheet. Look at the size of those paws!

Impersonating an imperial storm trooper gets a lot more comfortable with a hoodie from Mark Ecko. The front zips up to look like a mask, but I can't tell if you'd be able to see out of it or not. Also available in Bobba Fett style. Link -Thanks, Max!

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Being a guinea pig for the British government's Common Cold Unit in 1946 was very popular with students. They saw it as a cheap holiday: getting free accommodation in spacious flats fully equipped with books, games, radio and telephone, and spending your leisure time playing table tennis, badminton, or golf. You even got paid three shillings a day.

The students were instructed to maintain a distance of at least 9 metres from all unprotected persons, other than their flatmates. The unpleasant part of the experiment began when the participants had to spend half an hour in a draughty corridor after taking a hot bath, had to wear wet socks for the rest of the day, and were infected with nasal secretion from a cold sufferer.

This was the experiment that contradicted what your mother told you: the common cold is not caused by cold temperatures, but by infection. This is just one of nine of the oddest experiments ever, detailed at New Scientist. The last one is a hoot! Link -via Digg

From the late eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries, Vikings invaded community after community across Europe and even parts of Asia and the western hemisphere. According to a new study published in the current issue of Antiquity, the reason behind all that travel is -a shortage of wives!

An intriguing archaeological clue is that much of the bounty plundered from Britain — particularly from monasteries — wound up later in the graves of Viking wives. The items included precious metals, fine cloth, jewelry and other handicrafts.

Barrett's analysis of Nordic historical records found that Scandinavian men often served as warriors, frequently forming "military brotherhoods," until they were able to marry and establish their own households, which were key to prestige and power.

The Vikings themselves may have caused the shortage, by practicing female infanticide. Link -via Metafilter

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Artist John Chiara thinks big. He built his own box camera, and made it as big as a room. Chiara takes it to a location on a trailer and puts it together on site. One benefit is that the camera never wiggles! He must also develop his own film, because the photographs are huge, too. -via the Presurfer

French street artist JR, best known for his technique of photographing inhabitants of an area & pasting the resulting imagery up on grand scale around the community has taken to the favelas of RIO DE JANEIRO in a grand project to honor the residents of one of the world’s biggest slums. The scale of this project never siezes [sic] to amaze me. One day we will plan on doing something of this level.

See more pictures at DNA Imagery. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

I had never heard the argument that the moon orbits the sun, but it does go around the sun as it revolves around the earth. The question, which does it orbit more? Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Blog lays out the argument and explains.

Turns out, it orbits the Earth, despite these claims. The above claims are true, but are not important in this argument. Instead, you have to look at something called the Hill sphere. Basically, it’s the volume of space around an object where the gravity of that object dominates over the gravity of a more massive but distant object around which the first object orbits.

OK, in English — and more pertinent to this issue — it’s the volume of space around the Earth where the Earth’s gravity is more important than the Sun’s. If something is orbiting the Earth inside Earth’s Hill’s sphere, it’ll be a satellite of the Earth and not the Sun.

The derivation of the math isn’t terribly important here (and it’s on the Wikipedia page if you’re curious), but when you plug in the numbers, you find the Earth’s Hill sphere has a radius of about 1.5 million kilometers. The Moon’s orbital radius of 400,000 km keeps it well within the Earth’s Hill sphere, so there you have it. The Moon orbits the Earth more than it orbits the Sun. In reality it does both, and saying it orbits one and not the other is silly anyway.

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If you become famous enough, someone may want to keep at least a part of you around after you die. This list looks at ten body arts: brains, fingers, even a bladder, that were preserved for posterity. Or study. Or reverence. The leg bone shown belonged to Civil War general Dan Sickle. http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-famous-preserved-body-parts.php -via Look at This

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss deals with the TV show CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). You'll be presented with 14 guest stars. Do they play: 1) a suspect, 2) the killer, 3) the deceased, 4) a law enforcement member, or 5) they never even appeared on the show. Although I've seen CSI, it's been years ago, so I scored 29%. You will do better! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18766

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SpaceX has succeeded in their attempt to launch the Falcon 1 rocket into space. The company, headed by eBay co-founder Elon Musk, had made three unsuccessful tries before yesterday's launch.

The tensest moment came just before stage separation. At that critical juncture, the third launch attempt had failed. This time, it worked out perfectly.

Eight minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station.

"I don't know what to say... because my mind is just blown," said Musk, during a brief address to his staff after the successful launch. "This is just the first step of many."

The feat is a giant leap forward for privately-funded space ventures, and follows the spectacular 2004 suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/space-x-did-it.html

Slime and mold are two words guaranteed to send a shiver down many a spine. However, plasmodial slime molds, fungus - like organisms with about eight hundred and fifty species worldwide - possess a strange beauty that you might not expect. Come and take a look at a few, thanks to some exquisite macro photography. You may never look at slime mold in the same light again.

Shown is a mold named Hemitrichia calyculata. Link -Thanks, RJ Evans!

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Two great tastes that some say taste great together. Find the recipe for Bacon Cinnamon Rolls at Bacon Today. If you try these, let us know what you think! Link -via Cynical-C

If you've ever had the hankering to wear a squid on your head, now you can do just that. Etsy seller Josh Freeman has squid hat/pillows in lavender, red, blue, and other colors. Link -Thanks, Lotta!