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.
The new music video for "We Got More" by Eskmo was directed by animator Cyriak Harris. You may be familiar with his work, as he's been featured previously at Neatorama. -via The Daily What
Costas Schuler ("The Pen Guy") sent a picture of a Christmas wreath he made and decorated with ink pens for his car. I was more interested in the car itself, because it is also covered with pens! It turns out we linked this car a few years ago, but it's certainly worth another look. The "Mercedes Pens" is covered with 10,000 pens and markers as an art and recycling project. Oh yeah, it also now has a Christmas wreath on it. Link
Considering the pollution and congestion on our roads, could it be time for the return of pneumatic tubes for deliveries? A British project called Foodtubes proposed that a network of high-speed pipelines be built underneath the United Kingdom to deliver food shipments from source to city.
The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of air pressure pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.
Now, this idea might seem a little nutty - I'll admit it seems rather fanciful. But the people behind Foodtubes point out the UK transports 180 times more water than food everyday, and all of that is done using pipelines with minimal pollution and no traffic jams.
Up to 200,000 food-carrying trucks could be taken off British roads, which would save 40 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
The new movie The King's Speech is about George VI and his problem with stuttering. The film is being hailed for its sensitive portrayal of stuttering, which is relative to the quite insensitive way previous movies have presented the disorder.
The movie, as formulaic in its way as Rocky or Rudy, is buoyed by its good acting and by its entirely new portrayal of a grown man who stutters: Colin Firth's King George gulps and strangles himself trying to get the words out, yet retains his dignity and invites our empathy. For the 1 percent of the population that stutters, and has withstood the additional ignominy of watching stuttering characters in Hollywood films, the movie is a rare catharsis. A likable king struggling to speak is significantly more attractive than the violent criminals (Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Primal Fear), or abused, suicidal inpatients (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) of yore.
Slate has a slide show of video clips from movies that address stuttering, but even more interesting is their short history of attempts to cure stuttering. Link -Thanks, Jocelyn!
The class of 2013 perform a medley of songs from The Wizard of Oz for the annual Nykerk Cup competition at Hope College. Sure, they sing well, but where are they hiding all those props? You can also watch the performance of their competition, the freshman class. -via Buzzfeed
The Swingtop Philharmonic Orchestra, an all-star combo assembled especially for this project, plays "Oh, Christmas Tree" on instruments made from beer bottles in this ad from Belgian Dutch brewer Grolsch. -via the Presurfer
A new gallery is up at the Neatorama Art Blog! We welcome Julia Feld, who carves discarded and obsolete books into works of art.
I am a scientist by trade and have always enjoyed the visual elements of science (graphical representations of data, figures of theoretical models, diagrams of complex systems, etc). People often focus on the information these elements contain, rather than appreciating their aesthetics. I started carving books to draw attention to their beauty rather than their content. I have made carvings that display the illustrations the books contain as well as some that depict topographical landscapes and “specimen boxes” that hold paper butterflies
The sign on the highway that tells you to yield to oncoming traffic is not as old as you might think. Oklahoma police officer Clinton Riggs came up with the "yield" sign in 1950, which spread from its birthplace in Tulsa to all corners of the US.
It was during his time as a trooper that Riggs conceived the idea of the “yield” sign, and he began developing it while attending Chicago’s Northwestern Traffic Institute in 1939.
He spent more than a decade experimenting with the sign, according to the Tulsa Police Department’s history book. His goal was a sign that would not only control traffic at an intersection but would also attach liability in a collision if one driver failed to yield.
The sign was a hit, especially among women.
...engineers in Dallas were pleasantly surprised by how grateful women were for the signs, the article said. Some women were apparently afraid to stop at night, so a yield sign helped them feel safe from roadside prowlers.
Until today, the only thing I knew about "yield" signs was that old joke with the punch line, "Of course I yield! I yield and yield, but they kept coming anyway!" Link-Thanks, Michael Mason!
National Geographic posts many lists in December rounding up up the top ten of subjects you won't find anywhere else. The Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010 has quite a few we've posted about, but seeing them all in one gallery is almost startling. Yes, the tiny purple octopus is there, and the snub-nosed monkey, and this friendly-looking bat.
This tube-nosed fruit bat—which became a Web sensation as "Yoda bat"—is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009, scientists announced in October.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In 1966, a beluga whale swam the wrong way up the Rhine -and wound up paving the way for environmental reform in Germany.
When World War II finally came to an end, Germany was in shambles. Its cities had been transformed into forests of twisted steel and broken concrete, and the German people were suffering from food shortages and rampant unemployment. Within a few years, however, things were looking up. Production of steel and coal were fueling remarkable growth in West Germany, and the country was positioning itself as the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
But this "economic miracle" was wreaking havoc on the environment. Careless mining and manufacturing turned the Rhine into what amounted to an open sewer, and soon, the international waterway contained millions of gallons of toxic waste. By the 1960s, the river was striped with red and green steaks of sludge. The water's oxygen level had plummeted, and fish were dying en masse. Germany tolerated the pollution because food, jobs, and a sense of progress came along with it, but everyone knew that something had to change.
The catalyst for that change appeared unexpectedly on the morning of May 18, 1966, when a fisherman on the Rhine spotted a large, white creature swimming alongside his boat. Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt, director of the nearby Duisburg Zoo, was called in to identify the animal, which he recognized as a beluga whale. Intrigued, Dr. Gewalt quickly put together a team of whale hunters to trap the animal and bring it to his aquarium.
That was easier said than done. For all his expertise, Gewalt had little idea how to capture a whale without harming it. He tried trapping the animal using tennis nets, but the whale swam right through them. Several more failed attempts followed, and the whale began to garner more and more attention. Before long, the newspapers had nicknamed him Moby Dick. But as the German people continued to watch Dr. Gewalt's attempts to capture the whale, it became impossible to ignore the unfortunate side effects of post-war progress. As Moby Dick proceeded to swim up the Rhine, journalists noticed that the whale's skin went from soft and white to bumpy and splotchy. Concerned citizens began to fear that the river's water would harm the animal, if not kill it outright.
After a couple of weeks, Moby Dick finally left the Duisburg area and traveled downriver. It was only a few yards from the North Sea when a strange thing happened. The whale suddenly stopped, turned around, and went back upriver. A few days later, Moby Dick appeared outside the German parliament building in Bonn -150 miles south.
This caused quite a scene. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the river, and a group of nearby politicians even suspended their NATO news conference so they could get a glimpse of the whale. Meanwhile, the press went wild, with newspapers suggesting that Moby Dick's plan all along had been to raise awareness of the environmental plight of the Rhine.
Although the whale eventually escaped to open water, its presence remained. For four weeks in 1966, Moby Dick captured the nation's attention and highlighted the country's ecological desperation. Not coincidentally, environmental politics soon became a pressing national issue. The German people began forming grass roots organizations, and in 1972, the influential Federal Association of Citizen's Initiatives for Environmental Protection was formed. That same year, the German parliament passed the first two laws that effectively regulated waste disposal and emissions in rivers. And in 1979, Germans formed the first successful political party to focus on ecological concerns, Die Grünen Partei, literally "the Green Party." It's from their name that we get the term "green politics."
Today, the Rhine is the cleanest it's been in decades. Germany is still an industrial powerhouse, but it's also one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world. Yet the river might still be a sewer today if it hadn't been for one lost whale that tested the waters.
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The above article by Michael Ward is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is?
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: The very first comment had the correct answer! UnderpantsGnome knew this object as 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!
NASA scientists collected images from the Hubble space telescope and other sources and knitted them together to give us a visual representation of all the known galaxies in the universe, from the perspective of our tiny little spot. Cosmic. Link
YouTube member Sp0ntanius performs the "Song of Healing" from the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Not only does he play all the parts on wine glasses well, but as you watch the video, weird things start to happen! -via The Daily What
