It's time for the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? I can't even figure out what it's for! The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name will win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
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: We have winners! A difficult selection, with many entries and many good entries, and ultimately Foosnark rose to the top with arBra, a clever palindrome. old_joe came in second with the Dance Enhancer. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
NPR's Robert Krulwich posted last week about comparing sizes. He was surprised to find out how small an area the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wandered when they made the first moon landing in 1969.
Armstrong's longest, boldest walk took him about as far as Joe DiMaggio used to jog every inning — from home plate to about mid-center field. That's like walking about a block from your hotel's front door. Who knew?
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong doesn't do many interviews, so it was a surprise when he wrote to Krulwich to respond.
It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions.
There's a lot more you can read at NPR. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-armstrong-talks-about-the-first-moon-walk -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
Thomas Cane patented a device in 1996 that will alert children to the presence of Santa Claus. If someone trips the sensor disguised as a ribbon across the fireplace, lights in the stockings will be triggered, giving proof that Santa came through the hearth! One would think the appearance of candy in the previously-empty stockings might be proof enough. Link -via the Presurfer
Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal posted a series of methods your cat will use to get your attention while you are surfing the web. Cat owners will not be surprised by what finally works! Link -via Digg
Brian Kidd, also known as the Unipiper of Portland, Oregon was the very first entry in the GTFO contest earlier this year. He set the bar pretty high when we publicized the contest by showing the video where he played the Star Wars theme on pipes while riding a unicycle. He ended up winning second place in that contest.
Skip forward to December. The Unipiper planned and made a special Christmas greeting video for Neatorama! While in the process, he was spotted by SterlingBreed, who recorded Brian riding and playing in Portland on his phone and uploaded the video. In a bit less than 48 hours, that video went viral and racked up almost 100,000 views. Several people sent it to me, but I wanted to check out whether it was the same bagpiping unicyclist who entertained us back in the summer. I should have known, of course -how many could there be?
I asked if he wanted to add anything to this post, and Brian says he wants to thank everyone who supported him in the GTFO contest. Thanks, Brian, and Merry Christmas!
College Humor has a collection of science fiction stories done up as children's books. I liked Goodnight Dune the best, but you really need to see Oh, The Places You'll Go by Dr. Who. http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1811404 -via mental_floss
Nowhere in the world is archaeology as tied to politics as it is in Israel. Different factions have a stake in determining where the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel were ruled from, and how powerful its leaders were. At the heart of the matter is King David.
He has persisted for three millennia—an omnipresence in art, folklore, churches, and census rolls. To Muslims, he is Daoud, the venerated emperor and servant of Allah. To Christians, he is the natural and spiritual ancestor of Jesus, who thereby inherits David's messianic mantle. To the Jews, he is the father of Israel—the shepherd king anointed by God—and they in turn are his descendants and God's Chosen People. That he might be something lesser, or a myth altogether, is to many unthinkable.
"Our claim to being one of the senior nations in the world, to being a real player in civilization's realm of ideas, is that we wrote this book of books, the Bible," says Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center, the Israeli research institute that helped fund Eilat Mazar's excavation work. "You take David and his kingdom out of the book, and you have a different book. The narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction. And then the rest of the Bible is just a propagandistic effort to create something that never was. And if you can't find the evidence for it, then it probably didn't happen. That's why the stakes are so high."
National Geographic looks at competing theories about the archaeological finds in Israel and the few hard facts that we have about them. Link
"Follow the path you're on" is not always the best advice -especially if the path maker is a prankster! I don't where this video originated; the short description in Polish was not helpful. -via Arbroath
Hope all you Neatoramanauts are enjoying a wonderful holiday season! The big news this week is that we are teaming up with mentalfloss.com and resila.com and giving you a chance to win a brand new Ford Fiesta on December 21st in NYC. The details we have so far are here. Watch for more to come!
This week we completed the two-part story of the Pearl Harbor Spy from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, so you can read both parts one and two.
Jill Harness brought us some holiday fun in Neatorama Facts: Christmas At Disneyland.
The most commented-on post of the week (besides the contests) was Mispronounced in Your Head. Everyone reads words they don't know how to pronounce at first; you can still add yours to the conversation.
At the Neatorama Art Blog we welcomed a new gallery from Julia Feld, who carves discarded and obsolete books into works of art.
Neato-Puzzle #9 came around on Tuesday; give if a try if you haven't already.
We have winners in the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Congratulations to Gauldar, who came up with The Hygenie 2000, and to haricotvert who named this item the Roto-Toother! Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop.
In the What Is It? game on Thursday, the very first comment had the correct answer! UnderpantsGnome knew the object is a spring winder for making conical bedsprings. The award for the funniest answer goes to lonewolfe13, who gave us this gem:
It is obviously for making giant spaghetti balls. First you take your pot of pasta and you tilt it sideways so you can get the tip if the spiral cone into the pasta. Then a friend of yours would spin the crank until you have a flying spaghetti monster worthy dinner.
Both win T-shirts from the NeatoShop. Congratulations, guys!
In Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy, the winning text was contributed by Mark Wrede, with "Sort of makes you feel huge and significant, doesn't it?" However, he did not select a t-shirt prize.
Over at our Facebook page, the discussion theme is "31 Days of Television". Questions include who is/was the prettiest woman on TV ever, which is the funniest sitcom ever, and what's the best TV commercial of all time. Oh yes, you can win prizes for participating!
This video from Friskies was filmed entirely by cats wearing cat cams. The camera operators are Charlene Butterbean, Fudge, Gizmo, Jett, Milo, Moca, Mousse, Nutkins, and Penelope. Read more about the movie at the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee. Link -via Metafilter
We just love to quote our favorite movies. Think you'll do well when someone else picks the films? That's the challenge in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You'll be given a movie quote, and you have to decide what movie it's from. Simple! I scored 80%, far better than the current average. Link
When you think of prehistoric cats, you probably think of Smilodon, the saber-toothed tiger. There were plenty of other big cat species you may have never heard of, like the Xenosmilus, the cave lion, or the American lion. Pictured here is Machairodus kabir, which probably resembled a modern tiger with the addition of huge fangs. Oh, and it weighed over a thousand pounds! Link -via the Presurfer
Cracked looks at studies that have compared the amount of time people spend watching TV and the differences between those who watch a lot and those who don't. The results show that watching more TV over years make folks more likely to commit violent acts, gain weight, and have short attention spans. But the news isn't all bad.
Using a combination of four studies, scientists have shown that television shows can instill a sense of belonging in people with low self-esteem who have been rejected by friends or family. This is called the social surrogacy hypothesis, which figures that in order to fill the emotional void of social deprivation, a person will establish relationships with fictional characters (as teenagers, many of us had a similar type of relationship with late-night Cinemax).
One study showed that subjects who were experiencing feelings of loneliness felt better after turning on their favorite television programs. Another had subjects writing essays about either their favorite shows or some other random subject as a control. The subjects who wrote about their favorite shows used fewer words expressing loneliness than the control group.
