Look at this awesome Speed Racer Mach 5! It's authentic down to the last detail, but this is no cartoon, it's a full-size licensed replica from custom car wizard Mark Towle.
Our Speed Racer Mach 5 has it all, from the rotating front saw blades and push button chrome steering wheel to the custom M5 logo and red leather interior. Our Mach 5 is built for SHOW & GO implementing a California RUST FREE CORVETTE C-4 chassis to provide sports enthusiasts with the proformance, and handling only an American Made Corvette can deliver.
It's time for another Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Fill in the empty speech bubble and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. If you don't specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Enter as many times as you like (text only, please), but leave only one entry per comment. For inspiration, check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations go out to Kay Truman, who filled in the bubble with "Okay, so this wasn't the best way to find my contact..." She wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
This pink-eyed katydid lives in the forest canopy in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the over 200 new species discovered by the Conservation International expedition to the Muller Range mountains last year. See more of the new species of frogs, ants, spiders, mammals, and plants, and videos of the expedition at Conservation International. http://www.conservation.org/explore/asia-pacific/png/muller_range/pages/muller_range_png.aspx -Thanks, Lindsay Walter-Cox!
Before becoming the Vatican's top dog in 1458, Pius "the coolest-pope-in-history" II was an adventurer who traveled abroad on spy missions for the papacy, a smooth-talking diplomat, and a prolific writer. (Think of him as a kind of medieval James Bond with a slightly different collar.) His Eurialus and Lucretia is still read today, partly because it's an excellent example of the epistolary novel, but mostly because it was written by a man who became pope-and it's dirty! Full of erotic imagery and surprisingly funny, it's comprised of salacious love letters between Lucretia (a married woman) and Euralialus, servant to the Duke of Austria.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
One of America's greats, Joyce Carol Oates, has become synonymous with high-falutin' literature. So what's a writer oft-nominated for the Nobel Prize doing with pulpy romance novels like Soul/Mate and The Stolen Heart on her resume? She never meant them to be: Written under pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" (a feminization of Raymond Smith, her husband's name) and "Lauren Kelly," respectively, Oates was surprised and disappointed when her cover was blown by an anonymous source in 1987.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
If you're hoping for a heaving bosom or two, Benito Mussolini's The Cardinal's Mistress, serialized in a socialist newspaper long before he was an iron-fisted fascist leader, is bound to disappoint. While filled with purple prose, there's not a lot of action between the sheets. The story, about a cardinal's unhappy affair with a doomed woman, is mostly a soapbox for its author's anticlerical ranting. Sorry, Duce-propaganda makes terrible beach reading.
SADDAM HUSSEIN
In between all his Kurd-gassing, Kuwait-invading, and dissident-murdering, Iraq's own Great Dictator somehow found the energy to pen Zabiba and the King. Published anonymously after the first Gulf War, the book's authorship by Saddam was revealed by a Saudi newspaper in 2001. But was its provenance really a mystery? Not only was there zero criticism of the novel upon its release (the Iraqi press called it an "innovation in the history of novels"), the book's thinly-veiled allegories were a total giveaway: A kindly leader (Saddam) loves a beautiful commoner (the Iraqi people) who is raped by her cruel husband (the United States).
LYNNE CHENEY
Just another breathy melodrama when it was published in 1981, Sisters sold poorly and was soon out of print. So why are paperback copies selling on the internet today for $300? Because Sisters makes its author [former] second lady of the United States and vocal gay marriage ban advocate Lynne Cheney look like a big fat hypocrite. It's a lesbian romance set in the Old West that features lots of romance and sex-both in and out of wedlock-and promotes contraceptive use for women who want to remain "free". Asked to comment on Sisters by the New York Times, Cheney said "I don't remember the plot." Apparently, gay marriage is even more controversial now than it was in 1981.
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From mental_floss' book Scatterbrained, published in Neatorama with permission.
Don't forget to visit mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog!
You might remember how Randall Munroe of xkcd created a map of the internet in 2007. A lot of things have changed since then, so he made a completely new map to reflect the state of online communities today. Just a portion of the map is shown here. Go to xkcd and enlarge the map, and you'll find Neatorama in the inset of the Blogosphere area (in the Sea of Opinions), a tiny island off the coast near Deadspin and Lifehacker. Look around, and you'll see plenty of cleverness, such as Facebook's privacy controls isolated in a pool of lava, and a meteor crater where Craiglist's adult services used to be. Link -via Metafilter
Update 10/6/10 by Alex: Woohoo! Randall knows we're alive - Neatorama made it to this year's map, right alongside Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and Deadspin:
Hardcore homemade robots will go head-to-head in a fight to the finish at Combots Cup V, the annual championship for combat robots. On October 23rd and 24th in San Mateo, California, robots from one to 220 pounds will compete for a total of $3500 in prize money and champion bragging rights!
SEE heavyweight fighting robot behemoths like Last Rites and Sewer Snake wipe the walls with each other inside our custom built bulletproof arena!
THRILL to all the good parts of a NASCAR crash without all that pesky danger to human life! All the excitement of monster trucks, but up close and extremely personal!
FLAME THROWERS! SPINNING BLADES OF DOOM! HYPER-PSI STEEL FLIPPERS OF NASTINESS!
Also, it's educational for the kids, but you don't have to tell them that. You'll also be able to speak with the people who design and build the robots -and you have a combat robot, you'll want to enter! http://www.suicidebots.com/2010/10/05/combots-cup-v-looms-fighting-robots-live/ -Thanks, Simone!
Alton Towers is a popular theme park in Staffordshire, England. The resort recently opened a thrill ride called the Carnival of Screams, featuring "killer clowns" that reach for visitors. However, the new attraction is touching a sore spot with clowns, who are protesting at the park's gates.
One protestor, Fips the Clown, said: ”We are protesting because we feel the Alton Towers Resort’s new horror maze, Carnival of Screams, is an unfair depiction of clowns.
”It only serves to reinforce stereotypes of clowns as evil.
”I can’t believe this – it has taken us years to get over Stephen King’s ‘IT’ and now this just adds to further damage the reputation of clowns worldwide.
”This will do for clowns what Jaws did for sharks.”
The Carnival of Screams will only be open from October 16 through the 31st. Link -via Arbroath
Americans know that you are supposed to tip a waiter at a full-service restaurant 15-20% for good service. There is no obligation to tip at all unless the restaurant makes it mandatory, as they sometimes do for large groups. However, in the US, food servers are often paid below the minimum wages as tips are expected to make up the difference. What about outside the full-service restaurant? How much should you tip at bars or buffets or take out windows? This article at mintlife spells those out for you.
Whenever I go through the takeout dance with a host (she retrieves my food, I pay—inevitably with a credit card—and my eyes scan down to that darned gratuity line), I feel anxious. Am I rude if I don’t tip? A sucker if I do? What’s the proper percentage? (Surely not the full 15% to 20%.)
“I’ll leave a couple of dollars, maybe more if it’s a larger order and required more work by the host,” says Heather Chang, a former hostess at a San Diego gourmet pizza restaurant. What constitutes more work? “Things the host would’ve helped put together, like a salad or something that required fancy packaging.” If this turns out to be the case, 10% is plenty.
YouTube user lizardgirl797 raised a litter of nine baby skunks. This one, named Goober, was her favorite. -via Metafilter, where you can find more skunk video links.
It's a classic but tragic mistake. Irmgard Holm of Phoenix, Arizona has several eye drop medications because of cataract surgery, but what she grabbed was a bottle of superglue.
"The bottles are identical and I am not young anymore, but I am not senile," says Holm.
She tried washing the adhesive out, but the quick-drying glue did its job and sealed her eye shut. Paramedics and hospital staff had to get it open and wash out her eye before major damage was done.
"They had to cut off the glue substance and it was all hard and in the eye, and I couldn't even see."
Her case is not as rare as one would hope.
The Food and Drug Administration will interview Holm later this week, and she hopes her case and the others will put pressure on glue makers to change their bottles' shape and size.
The Nobel Prize committee has announced the 2010 Nobel Prize laureates for Physics. The honor will be shared by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". However, this is not the first physics prize for Andre Geim.
Congratulations to Andre Geim, new Nobel Prize winner in physics. He becomes the first to win, as an individual, both a Nobel Prize (this year, together with Konstantin Novoselov, for experiments with the substance graphene) and an Ig Nobel Prize (in the year 2000, shared with Sir Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog).
You can see a video of the levitating frog at Improbable Research. Link
A literary-technical tour de force, and the man behind it by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Philip M. Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is likely the most prolific.
Philip M. Parker is also the most wide-ranging of authors. The phrase “shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings” is not the half a percent of it. He has authored some 188 books related to shoes, ten about ships, 219 books about wax, six about sour red cabbage pickles, and six about royal jelly supplements.
To begin somewhere, let’s note that Philip M. Parker is the author of the book The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in the United States. This book is 677 pages long, sells for $495 and is described by the publisher as a “study [that] covers the latent demand outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders across the states and cities of the United States.”
Philip M. Parker titles include the following (this is a hastily chosen few, so they are probably not his most colorful):
The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Rotary Pumps with Designed Pressure of 100 P.s.i. or Less and Designed Capacity of 10 G.p.m. or Less
Avocados: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide
Webster’s English to Romanian Crossword Puzzles: Level 2
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Golf Bags in India
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan
The 2002 Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Cataract Surgery
The 2007 Report on Wood Toilet Seats: World Market Segmentation by City
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen Asparagus in India
Professor Philip M. Parker, author of more than 300,000 books. Photo courtesy of INSEAD.
Parker: Who?
Philip M. Parker is the INSEAD Chair Professor of Management Science at INSEAD, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France.
Parker: What?
Professor Parker is no dilettante. When he turns to a new subject, he seizes and shakes it till several books, or several hundred, emerge. About the outlook for bathroom toilet brushes and holders, Professor Parker has authored at least six books. There is his The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Japan, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Greater China, and also The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in India, and also The 2007 Report on Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders: World Market Segmentation by City.
Amazon.com offers (on the day I am writing this) 85,761 books authored by Philip M. Parker. Professor Parker himself says the total is well over 200,000.
How is this all possible? How does one man do so much?
Professor Parker created the secret to his own success. He invented a machine that writes books. He says it takes about twenty minutes to write one.
Parker: Why?
There arises the question, “Why?” The patent (U.S. #7266767), which describes a “method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing” and which Professor Parker wrote in the traditional, pre-Parker, non-computerized way, answers this question.
The answer appears on page 16. Professor Parker quotes a 1999 complaint by the magazine The Economist that publishing “has continued essentially unchanged since Gutenberg. Letters are still written, books bound, newspapers mostly printed and distributed much as they ever were.”
“Therefore,” says Professor Parker in this patent document, “there is a need for a method and apparatus for authoring, marketing and/or distributing title materials automatically by a computer.” He explains that “Further, there is a need for an automated system that eliminates or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labor, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel.”
Parker: How?
We asked Professor Parker how he manages this Herculean output. He replied:
I started back in 1992 with the idea. Had a lot of failures, then succeeded in 2000 when I filed the patent. I have amassed huge linguistics databases (I am an avid dictionary collector, since I was 18), and have a background in mathematics, and computer programming, so I have approached this from a management science perspective. Everything is organized by genre, and within genre by topic, and within topic by sub-topic, etc., for all languages. It is a matter of organization.
The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book — a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products, or maybe a patient’s guide to medical maladies. Then one hooks the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information or maladies. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.
Professor Parker estimates that it costs him about 23 cents to write a new book, with perhaps not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA or a physician might produce.
Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy, typically via an online automated bookseller. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.
Professor Parker’s patent document includes this schematic overview of the automatic authoring process.
Best-Selling Books
Among Professor Parker’s best-selling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.
His fifth-best seller is Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.
No. 6: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Ferrous Metal Waste and Scrap Excluding Waste and Scrap of Cast Iron and Alloy Steel in United Kingdom.
No. 21: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Seaweeds and Other Algae in France.
No. 25: Oculocutaneous Albinism—A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients, and Genome Researchers.
No. 44: The 2007 Import and Export Market for Fresh or Chilled Whole Fish in Lithuania.
The 2007-2012 Outlook for Chinese Prawn Crackers in Japan, mentioned above, is Professor Parker’s 66th-best seller.
This graphic overview shows the human consumer in the context of the automatic authoring process.
In the 93rd spot comes The 2007 Report on Cat Food: World Market Segmentation by City.
Rounding out the list, at number 100, is The 2007-2012 Outlook for Edible Tallow and Stearin Made in Slaughtering Plants in Greater China.
Professor Parker is also enthusiastic about books authored the old-fashioned way. He has already written three of them.
The books are in a way just the beginning. Professor Parker also plans to use the same method to produce video programs—thousands upon thousands of them—and video games. He tells us:
If I am lucky, this will allow the creation of content (educational material, books, software, etc.) for languages (or for subject areas) that simply do not have enough speakers, or economies that can support traditional publishing or content creation. For example, in health care, some diseases have fewer than 1,000 people who get the disease worldwide per year. Of those, only 1 or 2 might want a reference book. Using this method, the break even for a book is 1 copy, with no inventory cost (all books are either printed on demand, or distributed via ebook). Some languages have only 100,000 speakers, so no “Hollywood” producer would envisage creating programming to such a narrow audience, etc. This approach allows for this level of production (I am starting with an educational game show, and 3D personal computer games).
This flowchart, part of the patent document, discloses a further level of detail for parts of the process.
(Thanks to Peter Carboni for bringing the first toilet brush outlook book to our attention, and to Chris McManus for alerting us to the several hundred medical books.)
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The article above is from the March/April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Are you familiar with the exploits of the Bayside Tigers from the TV show Saved by the Bell? The athletic teams were featured in many episodes. Show off your smarts (or your memory) with today's Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss! I scored 60%, despite never having seen the show. Beat that! Link
James. J. Johnson drove his truck into a house in Webster, Massachusetts. He blamed the crash on the dogs running loose in his truck.
James. J. Johnson said the dogs make him lose control of his vehicle. But Webster police officers determined there were no dogs, police said.
Officers also determined Johnson had been drinking, police said. Johnson was charged with operating under the influence of alcohol, marked lanes violation, negligent operation of a motor vehicle and destruction of property.
One has to wonder what exactly made the police think that Johnson may have been drinking. Link -via Arbroath
