In 1880, German seamstress Margarete Steiff began making stuffed animals for children. The first stuffed bear she made is called model 55 PB, and may be the earliest teddy bear in existence. Her nephew Richard Steiff registered the design in 1903. A New York toy vendor ordered 3,000 of the bears, and the Steiffs built a factory to fulfill the order, but the bears disappeared! Toy bear expert Leyla Maniera explains:
"The order was definitely made," says Maniera, "We have samples of the boxes so we know they were boxed up and shipped.
"The archives have copies of orders right from the beginning. We do know the orders were made, they were packed and shipped, but sadly to this day we don't know what happened to the 3,000 bears."
So how about that theory about the bears being lost at sea? Gunther Pfieffer, author of four books about Steiff bears, does not believe it.
"The mystery first appeared in 1953 with the 50th anniversary of the teddy bear. A clever employee of the marketing department was writing a little festival book and that's the first time this story came up.
"So I guess it was just a good marketing idea, nothing else."
But if they were shipped, why have none ever appeared in attics or auction houses?
Read the whole story at BBC News, then look in your attic to see if you might have a 55 PB. They are worth a ton of money! Link -via the Presurfer
Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal reports on the current State of the Web. Not only does he have new developments, sales and mergers, new products, websites, and software, but he also gives us his opinions on all of it. The big story is, of course, the ups and downs of social networking sites. Some text is NSFW. Link -via The Daily What
No matter where you go, it's hell. All this needs is a "You are Here" marker! Or maybe not. This image of hell is brought to you by Jeff Wysaski of Pleated Jeans. Link
Neatoramanaut Naimul brings us video of an event that happened at his workplace, WCG in San Francisco. A thief brazenly cuts through a bike chain and takes off on the bicycle, right in front of the office windows. The first one out the door is a designer named Kristen.
People have complained that we didn't beat him up, but the truth is, it was pretty scary—the guy was kinda big, and when we called office security on him, he pulled a knife on the security guy (the dude in the shorts with the badge that walks down at the end of the video). We obviously didn't know the guy had a knife, but living in SF you hear stories about deadly bike thieves.
I think stopping the theft was enough bravery for the day. -Thanks, Naimul!
You can put yourself into the experience of witnessing the final mission of the space shuttle program with the shuttle Atlantis in a multimedia post at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Read about what it was like to be there at liftoff. Listen to the roar of the shuttle and the crowd that saw it launch. See a collection of beautiful photographs covering the preparations, the launch, and the final landing. It's all there in Neatorama's tribute to the ending of the space shuttle program. Link
Novels, movies, cartoons, tattoos... everything is better on the second draft.
1. THE CATCH IN CATCH 22: The Edit that became an idiom
In 1961, author Joseph Heller finally submitted his manuscript for Catch-18 to his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Although Heller had spent seven years perfecting the story, Gottlieb saw room for improvement. The editor taped the pages to his office wall and restructured the novel, giving more emphasis to the now-famous Major Major character and instructing Heller to delete entire 60-page sections. But most importantly, Gottlieb wanted to change the title. Earlier that year, writer Leon Uris had released Mila 18, and Gottlieb didn't want any confusion between the two books. What followed was an exchange of frantic letters in which Heller and Gottlieb considered and rejected various numbers for the title. They decided 11 didn't work because of Ocean's 11; 14 was an "unfunny number;" and 26 just didn't feel right. "I've got it!" Gottlieb blurted out one night in a eureka moment. "It's Catch-22! It's funnier than 18." The edit stuck, and a major, major idiom was born.
2. AN AFFAIR TO FORGET: The Edit that Changed Hemingway's Life
The turmoil of Ernest Hemingway's personal life continued long after his death thanks to the publication of his autobiography, A Moveable Feast. Released in 1964, three years after his suicide, the book was uncharacteristically poignant and sentimental. It even included a tender apology to his first wife, Hadley, whom Hemingway had cheated on with his second wife, Pauline. Yet, for decades, few people knew the apology existed. That's because it was edited out of the text by Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary.
As the author's literary executor, Mary prepared the work for publication, and she removed the apology out of spite. Mary had always resented Hadley for being the literary giant's favorite spouse, and Hemingway confirmed that belief in A Moveable Feast when he wrote, "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her."
Decades later, in 2009, Hemingway's grandson Sean reinserted the apology into a new edition of the book. But that wasn't the only serious edit he made. Sean also scrapped passages about his grandmother, Pauline, whom Hemingway blamed for ruining his first marriage. Of course, literary historians were quick to criticize Sean's selective whitewashing. They claim that while Hemingway may have wanted to cut Pauline out of his life, he never intended to cut her out of his life story.
3. HALL MARKS: The Edit that Resulted in Two Masterpieces
Cable TV channels and networks merge and split and rebrand and just plain change. How well do you keep up with those changes? Find out in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I remember when we used to watch the Lifetime channel to see surgical procedures, but that's been a long time -and many changes- ago. Still, I scored 67%; better than I expected. Link
Canadian robot enthusiast DJ Sures built a working Wall-E! He started with a Wall-E toy, but replaced the works inside.
Wall-E is built around an EZ-B Bluetooth Robot controller. All the software functions are handled with the complementary EZ-builder software. All this isn’t revolutionary – our Lego Mindstorms RCX from 1998 could handle object tracking with the Lego camera. Wall-E has 5 servos inside of him as well as an eBay 2.4 GHz wireless camera.
See a video of Wall-E in action at Hack-a-Day. Link -via The Daily What Geek
by David L. Dickinson, Dept. of Economics, Appalachian State University, and Todd McElroy, Dept. of Psychology, Appalachian State University
People differ in their diurnal (time of day) preferences: some are morning-types and others are evening-types. These differences are explored in a unique experiment design in which subjects are randomly assigned to produce paper airplanes at either 8:00 a.m. or 10:00 p.m. Our results show that evening-types, at their optimal time of day (10:00 p.m.), produce planes that fly statistically significantly further than those produced by morning-types at their optimal time of day (8:00 a.m.). Evidence also indicates that planes produced by evening-types fly straighter.
Background Paper airplane flight design is a competitively pursued endeavor that boasts a key role in the world of aeronautical engineering.1 The current world record holder for time aloft of a paper airplane (27.9 seconds), Takuo Toda, is part of a funded research team preparing to launch paper airplanes from the International Space Station.2 Paper airplane competitions are hosted by many student branches of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Red Bull sponsored the Paper Wings World Finals 2009 competition, which included over 37,000 competitors from several hundred qualifying tournaments from around the globe.
Paper airplane flight distance is a commonly considered outcome measure in the world of paper airplanes, though not the only one: other measures include time aloft, flight stability, and aerobatics. Our experiments examined how one’s diurnal preferences (i.e., morning-types versus evening-types) affected the flight distance and accuracy of the airplane they constructed. Modern society often requires performance at non-preferred times-of-day (e.g., evening- types in the early morning), and some limited research has shown that such “circadian mismatch” affects decision- making (Bodenhausen, 1990; Kruglanski and Pierro, 2008; Dickinson and McElroy, 2009).3 Thus, we hypothesize that circadian mismatch may deplete cognitive resources and harm important paper airplane outcome measures.
[caption id="attachment_49963" align="aligncenter" width="494" caption="Figure 1: Data generation diagram. Sample flight. NOTE: Airplane shown in figure is classic “dart” design. Lightning bolts are for illustrative purposes only, and were never witnessed during our research flights."][/caption]
The Experiments Our experiment design was aimed at examining decision effects of optimal versus suboptimal times-of-day. A prescreen survey utilized a validated reduced-form questionnaire (Adan and Almiral, 1991) to score the diurnal preferences of each respondent (see Horne and Ostberg, 1976). We then randomly assigned morning- and evening- types to be recruited for a morning (8–9 a.m.) or evening (10–11 p.m.) experiment session. Thus, our 2x2 experiment design includes morning-type subjects both matched (8 a.m.) and mismatched (10 p.m.) to their optimal time-of-day, and similarly for evening-type subjects. Subjects were compensated for participation and for other task outcomes unrelated to the paper airplane task. They were informed in advance that their airplanes would be saved, flown later, and the data would be collected from the flights. Subjects were given up to two minutes to make their paper airplane from a single 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper, on which the experimenter wrote the subject’s ID code. No add-ons (e.g., tape, paper clips,) were allowed. All airplanes were stored loosely and safely until “flight day”, when each airplane was flown three times by different research assistants utilizing a standardized flight technique. All planes were flown at late afternoon times when the flight hallway was largely clear of foot traffic. Each plane flight generated data on flight distance from origin to final resting spot, as well as distance off-center, as described in Figure 1.4
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory announced today that they have observed a rare property in a special class of metals called multiferroics: they have both magnetic and electric properties, which normally don't happen in the same material. Ferromagnets are, of course, magnetic metals, and ferroelectrics are materials that have a permanent electric polarization.
Now, scientists have found a new way that electric and magnetic properties can be coupled in a material. The group used extremely bright beams of x-rays at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) to examine the electronic structure of a particular metal oxide made of yttrium, manganese, and oxygen. They determined that the magnetic-electric coupling is caused by the outer cloud of electrons surrounding the atom.
“Previously, this mechanism had only been predicted theoretically and its existence was hotly debated,” [Brookhaven physicist Stuart] Wilkins said.
In this particular material, the manganese and oxygen electrons mix atomic orbitals in a process that creates atomic bonds and keeps the material together. The researchers’ measurements show that this process is dependent upon the magnetic structure of the material, which in this case, causes the material to become ferroelectric, i.e. have an electric polarization. In other words, any change in the material’s magnetic structure will result in a change in direction of its ferroelectric state. By definition, that makes the material a multiferroic.
You'll find more technical information at the Brookhaven National Laboratory site.
The day hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, photographer Jennifer Shaw was giving birth to her son in Alabama, where she and her husband had taken refuge after evacuating the city. Two months later, she returned to the devastation in NoLa. In the photography project Hurricane Story, she staged scenes from her experience using plastic toys and took pictures with plastic cameras. The collection is available in a book, and some of the prints are for sale. See a selection of them at Soulcatcher Studio. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Losing a pet is losing a best friend who lived with you, so of course you want to remember him. However, the way you do it isn't proscribed by tradition the way human memorials are. So a wide variety of creative businesses have sprung up to cater to the bereaved pet owner -some you may think are quite bizarre. You can have a personal item made from your pet's ashes, or even its fur! Pictured are jewelry items made by Kate Benjamin from pet fur. Read about this and nine other strange pet memorials at Oddee. Link
