It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Or do you already know?
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. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Update:grape_ape knew the right answer: it's a brass paper folder, used by pharmacists to wrap powdered medicines before tablets became common. You'll find a more detailed explanation and more examples of such devices at the What Is It? blog answer page. The funniest answer came from Swami, who said, "It's a "First Step" made by Duzee,Inc. Plainfield, MA, circa 1892. Yep, that first step is a Duzee." Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
Someone bought this necklace featuring a snake fetus in a vial, but the Etsy seller has more vials of creepy things for sale. The necklace is part of a list of 10 Shockingly Creepy Pieces of Taxidermy Jewelry. Bones, feathers, teeth, and other animal parts are available for you to wear. But would you want to? Link
I knew this, but only because I recall the approximate the number of miles to the moon, and the circumference of the earth. Those near my age might also remember that a fast rocket ship takes three days to get to the moon. -via reddit
The loudest purr in the world? Let's hope so! Smokey the cat, of Pitsford, Northampton, England, purrs so loud that her owners can't hear themselves think.
Owners Ruth and Mark Adams say Smokey's deafening purrs make it impossible for them to hear the television or radio when she is in the room and they struggle to have telephone conversations.
"She has always been very vocal and purrs at some level nearly all the time," said Ruth, from Pitsford, Northampton.
"She even manages to purr while she eats. The only time she is quiet is when she is asleep.
"When I'm on the phone friends often ask what the loud noise is and they can't believe it is coming from a cat."
Smokey's purr has been measured to be as loud as a lawnmower or a plane landing. Link -via Arbroath
Hop over to NeatoBambino to see an adorable five-year-old who know what she wants to do with her life, and what she doesn't want to do. http://www.neatorama.com/neatobambino/2011/02/22/i-dont-wanna-marry-until-i-have-a-job-first/
This web clock from designer Jack Hughes displays the time like all web clocks, but it also changes the background to correspond to the hexadecimal color value represented by the numbers of the digital time. Watch for any length of time and it will change, although sometimes quite gradually. However, when I looked up #110927, I got a completely different color. The colors may be set for a specific time zone. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Power of Decision is a short film obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. This four-minute preview is only a part of the 12-minute video you can watch at the link.
Washington, D.C., February 19, 2011 - "The Power of Decision" may be the first (and perhaps the only) U.S. government film depicting the Cold War nightmare of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. The U.S. Air Force produced it during 1956-1957 at the request of the Strategic Air Command. Unseen for years and made public for the first time by the National Security Archive, the film depicts the U.S. Air Force's implementation of war plan "Quick Strike" in response to a Soviet surprise attack against the United States and European and East Asian allies. By the end of the film, after the Air Force launches a massive bomber-missile "double-punch," millions of Americans, Russians, Europeans, and Japanese are dead.
In this scenario, the "success" of a nuclear war was defined as not having the will of the enemy imposed on the US, despite millions of citizens killed. Link -via Metafilter
by Joe Staton Museum of Comparative Zoology Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Photos by A. Kaswell
The field of culinary evolution faces one great dilemma: why do most cooked, exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken?
It is curious that so many animals have a similar taste. Did each species evolve this trait independently or did they all inherit it from a common ancestor? That is the burning question.
A meat counter featuring some of the author's favorites, including turtle, emu and boar.
Evolutionary Theory: Some Background
First, some tasty technical background.
The different traits of an organism (its hair or lack thereof, its teeth or lack thereof, its lungs or lack thereof, its taste, its color, etc.) can have distinctly different evolutionary origins. Some of an organism's traits are inherited from many, many, many, many (thousands, or millions, even) generations of ancestors. Other of its traits developed late in the evolutionary history. If you compare the traits of two different kinds of organisms, you may find that:
1. Some of the things they have in common were inherited from a common ancestor; while 2. Other things they have in common were not inherited from any common ancestor-but happened to have developed independently for each organism.
Modern evolutionary analysis helps us try to sort out and understand the true origins of all sorts of traits. Here's how you do it.
Cat tastes mammalian. In essence, it tastes like tetrapod.
First, you need to make a diagram showing which kinds of organisms evolved from which other kinds of organisms. (How to make this kind of chart is a whole question in itself. For a good introduction to it, see Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology, by Daniel R. Brooks and Deborah McLennan. University of Chicago Press, 1991.) Such a chart will usually turn out to be tree-shaped, and so it is called a "tree" of evolutionary ancestry (the jargon phrase for this kind of "tree" is "a phylogeny").
If you are interested in a particular trait, you can go through the tree and mark every kind of creature which has that trait. These markings on the evolutionary tree then show you whether:
1. The trait developed just once, and was then inherited by the creatures that subsequently evolved. (You will see that the trait is spread over connected branches of the tree. The name for this is synapomorphy.) 2. The trait developed independently more than once. (You will see that the trait only occurs in isolation, on tree tips. The jargon phrase for this is convergent evolution)
Mike Cooper made a cake for his son's 6th birthday on the theme of the Angry Birds video game. However, this cake was a game itself, complete with a working catapult, and was played before eating! See a video of the cake in action, and follow instructions to make one for yourself. Link -via Laughing Squid
Today is Presidents Day in the US, and it is UNESCO International Mother Language Day everywhere. This is a day to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, and to learn about the world's languages. National Geographic has an interactive world map highlighting areas where languages are in danger of dying out, as part of their Enduring Voices Project. As it is now, one of the world's 7,000 languages is gone for good an average of every two weeks.
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.
Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Sister Maria Jesus Galan was asked to leave the Santo Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, Spain, where she had lived for 35 years -over her Facebook activities. The Dominican convent, which normally discourages nuns from dealing with the outside world, first allowed a computer in ten years ago, and Sister Maria put it to work.
Sister Maria saw the future that this computer offered. She digitized the Dominican convent's archives. The computer also offered more mundane assistance.
"It enabled us do things such as banking online and saved us having to make trips into the city," she told the Telegraph.
The local government even gave her a prize for her digital initiatives. Oh, but with the prize came the fame. She began to collect more friends on her Facebook page. It seems, though, that this made her enemies within her own walls.
Her fellow nuns reportedly claimed that Sister Maria's Facebook activity "made life impossible." She was therefore asked to leave and now lives with her mother.
At the time, Sister Maria had 600 Facebook friends. Her profile page shows 1700 friends now, and her fan page has over 8,000 supporters. Link -via J-Walk Blog
I had heard long ago about how Warner Brothers was upset about the then-upcoming 1946 Marx Brothers movie A Night in Casablanca because the studio was protective of their own 1942 film Casablanca. It turns out that the story I heard was not what really happened. Groucho Marx did write a series of hilarious letters responding to Warner Brothers' request for information, but they were all part of a publicity stunt that paid off well for the Marx Brothers' movie. Letters of Note has one of the responses that Groucho wrote:
I just don't understand your attitude. Even if they plan on re-releasing the picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.
You claim you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without their permission. What about Warner Brothers -- do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. When Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor's eye, we were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers and even before us, there had been other brothers -- the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazoff; Dan Brouthers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, can you spare a dime?" This was originally "Brothers, can you spare a dime" but this was spreading a dime pretty thin so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other brother and whittled it down to "Brother, can you spare a dime?"
It's time for the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas in his Museum of Possibilities posts. What should we name this one? The commenters suggesting the funniest and wittiest names will win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop. Put on your thinking cap and leave an entry in the comments.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don't select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: There were a lot of very clever names submitted this week. First prize goes to pismonque for Geri-Go-Round. Second prize goes to Haring Wati, who was the first to submit the name Car-ousel. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop! Other names that deserve a second look include: Geriatric lazy susan Senior roulette seat Mobile oldies dispenser Spinster (two entries) Seat-or-rama Roadtisserie Geriatric Gyro Geri-sel THE OLDS-MOBILE
Vimeo user aaron_gx flew through the spinning blades of a wind farm. With a remote-control plane, of course.
This kind of stunt is typically frowned upon in the industry, to the point that the person(s) responsible for aiding him were probably fired, if they were caught. I would never allow such a thing to happen on my watch, but… it’s fun to watch.
