Furball Fables shows us how to celebrate Easter as a crazy cat person. You don't really have to be crazy, just have cats and no children to make baskets for. I really like how she puts catnip into eggs and then has the cats hunt for them. It won't take long for an apex predator to find them by smell!
One part of the Cat's Guide to Easter is making the greeting card. That appears to be the most difficult task, since there are five cats and getting them to pose for a picture is like... well, it's like herding cats.
Common sense tells us that we cherish rain more after a drought, we appreciate a steady paycheck more when we know what financial stress is, and we take more pride in accomplishments that don't happen often. The same is said for happiness; how can we be truly happy if we never experience unhappiness? We sometimes employ psychological tricks to tell ourselves we are happy, but the real rush comes from novelty, meaning a change in happiness level. We know all this intuitively, but it's nice to have a breakdown from a neuroscientist. Professor Indira M. Raman explains that this novelty factor goes all the way down to our neurons. They don't so much measure all incoming stimuli equally, but the changes in those signals at the molecular level. When a stimulus is equal over time, it tends to be ignored.
The ability to get used to and ultimately ignore incoming information that is static, familiar, predictable, and non-harmful turns out to be helpful behaviorally; in other words, it offers an evolutionary advantage. Continuing to notice sensations like the light touch of our clothes on our arms or the mild fragrance of the laundry detergent we used to wash them would be distracting, to say the least, and might even interfere with our ability to detect and respond to a signal that mattered, like a tap on the shoulder or our toast burning. In fact, an inability to predict and thereby adapt may be a contributing factor to conditions like autism spectrum disorders.12 Besides, it’s wasteful to send brain signals to report information we already know about. When all those ions flow in and out of cells to send signals within our brains, they cannot just remain on the opposite side from where they started. It literally consumes energy to pump sodium back out of neurons and potassium back into them, so it is most efficient not to generate action potentials that don’t carry worthwhile information.
A surefire formula for a viral video is to put all the cool things you can think of in a hat and pull two out. Combine them, and you've got a hit. Jetpack Samurai surely fills the bill.
Japanese designer Shota Mori came up with the sport he calls Jet Samurai and gives a demonstration of it to his technology class. While it seems like it may be a little dangerous, Jet Samurai could instantly have leagues and tournaments if jetpacks were a bit more available. -via Laughing Squid
Finnish YouTuber Lauri Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) spends a lot of time dreaming up new ways to impress us with cool machinery. In this video, he checks to see if a jackhammer is better to break through a frozen lake than the usual chainsaw. But you know what would be cooler? If he heated up the hammer part. If you want to skip ahead to the fun part, the heating-up is at about four minutes in.
I don't want to give anything away, but it doesn't go exactly as he thought it would. Vuohensilta follows that with more ice stunts with the jackhammer, chainsaw, and axe. -via Digg
April Fools Day falls on Easter Sunday this year, not a day you want to wet someone's clothing, hide the dinner entree, or mess with a child's Easter basket. But if you are determined to pull a fast one on someone, somehow, let's try some ideas aren't harmful or permanent to prank family and friends with. However, they can be temporarily annoying. For example, this person "subscribed" their friend to Daily Llama Images, which may or may not exist, but in this case it's just something they cobbled together for April Fools Day. It appears that the prankee didn't mind much; he'd just prefer his llamas to wear hats. I wonder how long they kept it up. There are 16 other April Fools Day prank suggestions at Buzzfeed.
Sadie Burkhalter of New Hope, Georgia, will never forget the day that a plane carrying 81 passengers and four crew members crashed in front of her house. The plane had hit ground about a mile away and skidded to her front yard, taking out cars, power lines, and gas station pumps along the way.
On Monday, April 4, 1977, Sadie was a young mother of three boys living in the small community of New Hope, Georgia. That lovely spring afternoon, she stood in her living room and witnessed a scene almost out of a horror film. A man was running across her front yard toward her, frantically waving his arms, his clothing ablaze. Behind him, downed electrical wires snaked around charred bodies. A traumatized young man with red hair and badly burned hands had taken refuge in the yellow Cadillac parked in Sadie’s driveway. Another man, engulfed in flames, was running blindly toward the creek behind her house. In the midst of it all, a shimmering blue line painted on a fragment of metal was all that remained to identify the mangled fuselage of a Southern Airways DC-9-31 passenger plane that had just crashed into the Burkhalters’ quiet front yard.
Crash survivors, injured, burned, and desperate for help, made their way to Burkhalter's home for refuge. The final death toll was 63 from the plane (including both pilots) and nine on the ground. Read an account of what Burkhalter saw that day from Samme Chittum, author of the book Southern Storm: The Tragedy of Flight 242 at Smithsonian.
If you didn't make it to Austin for SXSW this year, or even if you went and didn't have time for the film festival, Flavorwire has a recap. The bad part id that many of these movies won't be shown in theaters at all, unless you're in a big city. But they'll be available for those who really want to see them, so they're giving us reason to seek them out or not. Half the lineup consists of documentaries, and even one of the dramas "blurs the lines between documentary and narrative." Check out what was seen and what was thought of those films at Flavorwire.
Medieval scribes spent years upon years painstakingly copying books by hand. The thought of such work being stolen was a nightmare to them, as you can imagine. And we've seen the freedom that those scribes had, as they added personal notes and wacky art to their manuscripts. So is it any wonder that they'd also include a warning to anyone tempted to make off with their work? Quite a few of those manuscripts still exist, with warnings in the form of curses written into them, sometimes in poetic form.
2. "A WORSE END"
A 15th-century French curse featured by Marc Drogin in his book Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses has a familiar "House That Jack Built"-type structure:
“Whoever steals this book Will hang on a gallows in Paris, And, if he isn’t hung, he’ll drown, And, if he doesn’t drown, he’ll roast, And, if he doesn’t roast, a worse end will befall him.”
After the printing press was developed, such curses hung on because books were still expensive (and maybe because of tradition, too). Read some of the best (or worst) curses for book thieves at Mental Floss.
The Atacama Mummy is not an alien, as it was once purported to be, but it's not a fake, either. The tiny skin-covered skeleton is only 6 inches long. It was discovered in a small deserted town in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 2003. Experts who studied the mummy found it to be human, but were confused by test results. The bone density is that of a 6-year-old child, but how could a 6-inch body survive that long? Gene sequencing had now yielded some results.
According to the new analysis, Ata was a human girl of Chilean descent. And indeed, she was very likely still a developing fetus when she died, even though she exhibited the bone composition of a six-year old child. The reason for this, claim the researchers, is that Ata suffered from a rare bone-aging disorder. In total, the researchers identified mutations in at least seven genes that, either separately or in tandem, contributed to Ata’s odd physical characteristics, including facial malformations, bone deformities, and apparent dwarfism (known as skeletal dysplasia). Some of the genes analyzed in the study were already known to cause disease, but this is the first time that some of the mutations were linked to abnormal bone growth or other developmental problems.
Scientists were astonished at how many different genes in the mummy showed mutations. The implications for medicine may mean that health issues could be caused by more than one gene anomaly. Read more about the Atacama Mummy at Gizmodo.
The Face Licker is a custom-made lollipop made to look like your face -or the face of someone you'd like to lick. Firebox offers to use a photograph that you send them and create a life-size replica by hand in delicious tutti-frutti hard candy. It's $57, but if you've got that kind of money, it would make a great gift. You won't get one in time for Easter, however. If you're going to buy a Face Licker for me, send them a picture of Robert Redford, circa 1970. -via Mashable
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
From literary advocacy to union battles to communism claims, the origin story of the organization that publishes Consumer Reports kind of has it all.
Last year, a consumer advocate showed up in the most unlikely place: On YouTube, the home of the no-questions-asked unboxing channel. Cody Crouch, aka iTwe4kz, reviewed a set of earbuds from a company called Kanoa. In a Nike hat and a Puma sleeveless shirt, Crouch (who was clearly frustrated) trashed the earbuds at length and questioned the behavior of the company that was banking on him to give a good review. The company, blaming Crouch’s bad review for spooking investors, shut down, with thousands of paying consumers left in the lurch. However, it’s now widely believed that the company was running a scam, only made a few pairs of headphones, and used Crouch’s review as an out. Now, there’s talk of class-action lawsuits. This might sound like a crazy story, but it’s nothing compared to the tale that gave us the modern consumer advocacy movement. Strap in and we’ll get to testing.
The standards nerds who formed the basis of the consumer rights’ movement
The thing about watching a video from a guy like iTwe4kz is that you’re watching, really, for his opinion, which is likely to be loud, brash, opinionated, and not entirely impartial. That’s not a knock on him. That’s just the way YouTube works—we watch videos for the opinions shared.
But the problem, of course, is that biases swing in all directions, and in a world where you’re getting marketing at every single second. A lot of people read this in their inboxes. And a lot of the messages surrounding it are often promotional or marketing in nature.
And the problem, over the years, has gotten worse. How do you rein it all in?
Barnaby Dixon (previously at Neatorama) can make a puppet out of anything. He does just that in this video, fashioning a dancer out of a fluorescent silicon furry ball, and has another puppet narrate the process.
If you have a Marvel superhero movie you've looked forward to but haven't seen yet, this video might spoil some really great scenes for you. But if you are caught up on them, and have a firm control of your suspension of disbelief, it's cool to see what went on before the special effects were added.
A huge part of what you see in theaters was created by people working on computers. This look behind the scenes from Looper gives us a new respect for the actors who had to deliver lines with a straight face when everything going on around them wasn't really going on around them. -via Tastefully Offensive
In 1912, Norma Pfeiffer, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, discovered a new species of plant growing in the wetlands near Chicago's Lake Calumet. It spent most of its life living off underground fungi. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in the United States, but there were similar species in the tropics. Pfeiffer named it Thismia americana, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on it.
Pfeiffer was excited to uncover much more about her mystifying botanical outlier. In her thesis, she expressed hope that she could grow the plant in laboratory settings.
"Up to date, the few attempts at germinating the tiny seeds have been fruitless. It is to be hoped that a larger harvest may give a better opportunity for positive results," she wrote.
But two years later, T. americana vanished, a disappearance that coincided with the building of a barn in the vicinity. It has not been spotted since.
Pfeiffer's plant has never been spotted in the wild again, but it left many mysteries behind. With only tropical relatives, how did it ever come to be in Chicago? How long had it been there? What made that particular wetland a good environment for it? And why did it go extinct in 1914? You also have to wonder about how many other species evolve and then go extinct before we ever find a trace of them. Read about the mysterious T. americana at Real Clear Science.
(Image credit: Norma E. Pfeiffer/Botanical Gazette via JSTOR)
In 1844, John W. Jones escaped a plantation in Virginia and walked to New York, dodging slave catchers, with four other men. He settled in Elmira, traded work for an education, and became a sexton caring for his church's cemetery. Jones worked with the Underground Railroad, helping around 800 enslaved people escape to Canada. During the waning days of the Civil War, Elmira sprouted a prison camp for captured Confederate soldiers.
Elmira was never supposed to have a prison camp; it was a training depot for Union soldiers. But when the Confederacy began refusing to exchange African-American soldiers—who it considered captive slaves, not prisoners of war—the Union stopped participating in prisoner exchanges. “Both sides started scrambling for places to expand, and that’s how Elmira got caught up in the web,” says Terri Olszowy, a Board Member for the Friends of the Elmira Civil War Prison Camp.
The rollout was ill-planned, Olszowy explains. When it opened in July 1864, the camp had no hospital or medical staff. The first prisoners were already in rough shape and deteriorated quickly. Latrines were placed uphill from a small body of water called Foster’s Pond, which quickly became a cesspool. A shelter shortage meant that hundreds of soldiers were still living in tents by Christmas. During spring, the Chemung River flooded the grounds. Rats crawled everywhere. When authorities released a dog to catch them, the prisoners ate the dog.
