One reason we like artistic redesigns of movie posters is that the real posters are so much alike. In fact, there are really only 13 Hollywood movie posters that are used over and over with the names and faces changed.

See how movie posters tend to fall into certain patterns, compiled by Christophe Courtois. The site is in French, but the graphics speak for themselves. Link

(YouTube link)

Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider perform a medley of the pop songs of summer 2011. If you didn't know the individual songs, you'd think this all belonged together. The mp3 is a free download. http://www.mediafire.com/?1685t7l33h3p3gc -via The Daily What

Today is a busy day -especially if you have a lot of clocks to set! Daylight Saving Time ends for most of the U.S. at 2AM Sunday morning. Remember, spring forward, fall back, so set your clocks back before you got to bed tonight. And enjoy the extra hour of sleep! If you work overnight, be sure there is a procedure to make sure you are paid for the extra hour. Learn more about the time change in the post Neatolicious Fun Facts: Daylight Saving Time. The 5th of November is also Guy Fawkes Night, celebrated in England something like this. And because it's the fifth of November, today is Bank Transfer Day, which unfortunately falls on a Saturday when your bank may not be open, or might only be open until noon. At any rate, after you've gotten the clocks set, check out the exclusive features you might have missed this week here at Neatorama.

Monday was the predicted date for the population of the earth to pass seven billion people. To mark the occasion, we posted a photo gallery from National Geographic called 7 Billion at the Spotlight Blog.

Eddie Deezen brought us the story of The Guy Who Died on a TV Talk Show.

Our final Halloween feature this year was The Wolfman at the Movies from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

We got a good look at the new book from the folks at Cake Wrecks in the photo post Wreck the Halls: Cake Wrecks Gets "Festive."

The Annals of Improbable Research gave us Mathematicians on Ham Sandwiches.

How to Sneak a Cobra Past Customs was from mental_floss magazine.

Adrienne's debatable points posts were about a fat tax on junk food and whether places can contain emotional residue.

Another project we've got going is the NeatoShop Contest: Create a Neatorama Bingo Card! The t-shirt winners drawn from the comments are kkirkpat and Jefferson. Congratulations to both! The Neatorama Bingo Card is coming soon.

In this week's What is It? game, no one knew what the mystery item was (although quite a few came somewhat close). It’s a saw oiler. Pulling the trigger released some oil to lubricate the saw. You can see the patent application sketch at the What Is It? blog. The funniest answer submitted was one of those close-but-no-cigar answers, from Randall.

It is a saw handle, useful for handling saws. Before its invention, using saws was very dangerous to the fingers, so people used trained beavers. This little invention put hundreds of beaver trainers out of work, and they congregated in Wisconson, drinking from dusk to midnight, then going out on ‘Beaver-runs,’ causing untold destruction. Finally, the Wisconson National Guard was called out and the hooliganism ended. Wisconsin is now known for its calmness and cheese.

So Randall wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

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.

Of course you remember the game Twister. Everyone wanted to play it at parties just to get close to someone of the opposite sex. And win or lose, you ended up looking so ridiculous everyone had to laugh! But how did this ingenious idea come about?

“The game that ties you up in knots” sprang from the imagination of a St. Paul-based ad man / inventor named Reyn Guyer in 1965. Guyer’s firm, the Reynolds Guyer Agency of Design, was hired to do a local back-to-school promotional display for Johnson brand shoe polish. As Guyer tinkered with a colored polka dot paper mat to highlight kids’ shoes, he realized he might be onto something bigger – a game where people acted as the game pieces. Guyer first called his invention King’s Footsie, testing it out on some fellow artists and designers. The fun that four people were having while crammed into provocative shapes onto a 4 x 6 mat was all Guyer needed to see.

But that's just the beginning of the story. Twister didn't sell well at first, but eventually became a classic board game without a board. Link

The city of Kiryu, Japan employs the the E-KomiBus, a tiny electric vehicle that carries solar panels to charge the batteries during sunny weather.

The E-KomiBus (which, for reasons unknown, bears the nickname “MAYU”) is a totally electric and tiny little bus. It’s only 173” long (shorter than a 2012 Honda Civic), and runs on lithium ion batteries, which have a range of about 25 miles after charging 8 hours. With a top speed of 12mph, it’s ideally suited for driving through the narrow back streets not covered by conventional bus routes.

The university hopes that senior citizens and tourists (the two groups least likely to own driver’s licenses in Gunma) will use the E-KomiBus, which seats 10.

Link

(Image source: Yomiuri Online)

If you've heard someone say "honey badger don't care" and you haven't seen the viral video it comes from, you might be wondering about the origin of the catchphrase. You can see that video at National Geographic News, with all its NSFW language. The original honey badger video, without the hilarious replacement commentary, is from a NatGeo wildlife program. Colleen Begg, the researcher who shot the footage, clears up some questions about the honey badger.

Do honey badgers have bad attitudes?

Absolutely! But they need to, because they’re often surprised.

Honey badgers are very vulnerable. Often they’re digging—they’re quite small [weighing 10 to 20 pounds), they don’t see very well, their noses are in the ground—and they’re completely oblivious to what’s going on around them. When they eventually realize that the leopard is standing right behind them, they just put on this incredible show to try to protect themselves. They do the same in reaction to humans.

So that is where the bad attitude comes from. It’s a protective mechanism.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

These Apple-themed cake pops will be part of the Steve Jobs Inspired Cake Shop, a fundraiser in London next Wednesday for the organization Pancreatic Cancer UK. It's part of series of events called Internet Week Europe. Oh yes, they'll have candied apples, too! Find out more at Cakehead Loves Evil. Link

(YouTube link)

On October 26th, explosives opened the Condit Dam in Washington State to allow the free flow of the White Salmon River after 98 years. The reservoir took about two hours to drain, shown here in time-lapse. Read about the dam dismantling project at National Geographic. Link -via the Presurfer

For 50 years, farmers, scientists, and homeowners have looked for a way to get rid of kudzu. The invasive plant native to Japan grows at such an astounding rate that people in the southern U.S. joke about closing their windows at night to keep it out of the house. Another invasive species should teach us to be careful what we wish for. Megacopta cribraria, an insect that hitched a ride to Atlanta on a plane from Asia in 2009, eats kudzu. The kudzu bug could eat away a third of the kudzu covering several states within a decade.

"I'm all for it," says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.'s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. "Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of." The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep.

But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia.

"Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem," says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. "But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem."

Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)

(YouTube link)

Conan O'Brien officiated a same-sex wedding on his TV show last night. Whether that is big news or not, the way the story has been covered shows how much television news depends on someone else to write their scripts news copy. There's another video at Laughing Squid that synchs the newscasts so they repeat the phrase in unison. Link

Have you ever felt like you are in over your head, that you don't have nearly the competence to be doing the job you're doing, and that sooner or later, others will find out you're faking it? Maybe it will help to know that those other folks sometimes feel the same way. It's called Impostor Syndrome.

“They used to call it an inferiority complex. You’re convinced you’re not good enough or smart enough to do this. Impostor syndrome. The only thing holding you back is you.” I wish I could say this call changed everything, but it didn’t. My second Master’s degree was worse than ever. Studying in a profoundly theory-heavy program, I felt hopelessly lost in every class, every day. I was convinced at any moment uniformed thugs would burst into my seminar to unmask me and drag me out. Obviously I did not belong here, as I understood maybe one tenth of what I was reading, and was frequently confused even by the comments of my own classmates. It seemed so easy for them. Surely I had made yet another mistake. It never occurred to me that I was there to learn, or that other students might be feeling the same way.

Read more about Impostor Syndrome and how to deal with it at xoJane. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: Flickr user madamepsychosis)

Heterochromia means eyes that come in two different colors. Complete heterochromia means the color of the left eye is completely different from the color of the right eye. In cats, this most often occurs in white cats or cats that have the white-spotted gene, but can occur in any color of cat. See a collection of beautiful odd-eyed cats at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user P!XELTREE)

I learned this morning from reddit that the Google search page will do a barrel roll if you tell it to. That's far from the only neat tricks Google has embedded in their sites for those who have the time to find them. For those who don't, Buzzfeed has a list of ten you might have fun checking out. Link

(vimeo link)

Thomas Beg animated the Lifecycle of a Mushroom for the Spectacular Science collaboration project in the style of the cartoons of the 1920s. Link -via Dangerous Minds

A group of artists and game designers, plus a teenage apprentice, built a one-of-a-kind video game for a restaurant in Eugene, Oregon called Off The Waffle. The tale of how it was born all hinged on the sign at the Orian brothers' restaurant that says, "We Barter."

Richard Hofmeier saw the sign a little over a year ago when he first visited the restaurant, then located in the Orian brothers' home in Eugene's funky Whiteaker neighborhood. Hofmeier wondered if the Orians would be interested in anything he had or could make.

Hofmeier, 28, was constantly bringing projects back to his Eugene gallery, Ink Thirsty, and the cast of characters who worked or hung out there. They'd done video games before - if there's a hulking lump under a drop cloth at Hofmeier's place, that's probably an arcade cabinet. This time he had a wild idea for the guys.

'Let's make a video game and see if we can get free waffles for life.'

Did they succeed? Find out at Kotaku. Link -via Metafilter

And after you read the story, you'll want this recipe. Link