Kevin Van Aelst create artworks inspired by biology from a wide variety of mediums. I particularly like this set of chromosomes made from Gummi worms. Link -via The Sciencepunk Blog

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Beaker tries for YouTube fame. It's not as easy as he thought! -via YesButNoButYes

Edgar Parker opened his dental practice in 1892 and found business was not that great. So he took his practice on the road and became "the P.T. Barnum of dentistry." Dentistry as entertainment?

Working in the 1890s during the height of ‘humbugs,’ ‘dime museums’, and rational amusements, Parker did what any natural-born-showman would do. He took a cue from the best and hired one of P.T. Barnam’s ex-managers to help him take his practice on the road. From his horse drawn office, amid his show girls and buglers, Parker promised that he would painlessly extract a rotten tooth for 50 cents. And if the extraction wasn’t painless, he would give the customer $5.00, the equivalent of roughly $115 today. Parker’s band actually served a three way purpose. First it drew a crowd. Second, it distracted the patient whose tooth was being pulled (along with a healthy cup of whiskey or an aqueous solution of cocaine he called “hydrocaine,”) and third, it drowned out any possible moans of pain emitted from a patient.

Parker even legally changed his first name to Painless. Link

We are often told we must learn from history, and that we should learn from the experiences of others, but how often do we learn about forms of government from scientific experiments? MIT economist Benjamin Olken got the chance to run a field study on direct democracy in three Indonesian districts: one predominantly Muslim, one predominantly Christian, and one with a mixed population.

In fieldwork involving 49 Indonesian villages, Olken arranged to have major decisions on public-works projects in some settlements decided by plebiscite — in which all citizens get a vote — rather than by the traditional small councils of village leaders. Unexpectedly, the types of projects selected by majority vote were nearly identical to those picked by village elites; the voting public did not try to redistribute wealth to themselves. And yet when people were allowed to vote, they expressed greater contentment with the results than when decisions were simply handed down by the elites. The conclusion was that even if democracy doesn’t make a material difference in people’s lives, it creates greater civic cohesion.

Of course, this experiment only compared direct voting to village councils, in which the leaders are close to the citizens. Whether the results of this study can be extrapolated to a comparison with larger governments is unclear. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Benjamin A. Olken)

A moonbow is a rainbow that appears in moonlight. Light from the moon must be refracted through a mist of water in order for us to see the effect. Photographer Wally Pacholka captured this effect at the edge of Haleakala crater on the island of Maui. The large "star" in the picture is Mars. Link to story. Link to Pacholka's website. -via Arbroath

PS: There's a state park near my hometown that has a moonbow every month if the weather is clear. Link

Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your familiarity with city nicknames. If you're lucky, your city will be one of the ten! If you're unlucky, you'll score 30% like I did. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/46899

Michael R. Barrick created a graphic last summer using the Vancouver Olympics mascots and the internet cartoon character Pedobear. The image shows up in a Google image search for the mascots, so it was only a matter of time before someone used it without knowing that Pedobear is not an Olympic mascot. The graphic showed up this weekend in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Olsztyn. Link

You can get a swine flu vaccination at Walgreens. To advertise that fact, they put stickers on other products, but do they say "vaccine"? No, the stickers just say "H1N1 Available Here", which won't make much sense once you get these products home. Link -via J-Walk Blog

One hundred years ago today, the Prince of Abyssinia visited the British Navy battleship H.M.S. Dreadnought. The prince and his retinue took a tour of the vessel and were accorded diplomatic honors as fitting for visiting royalty. The guests spoke a language the sailors did not understand, but they figured "Bunga Bunga" was a polite greeting because the royal group used it a lot. But this wasn't the prince of Abyssinia! The Navy learned about the hoax when it hit the newspapers.

The next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the party they had escorted around the warship had not been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. Instead it had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. Their ringleader was a man named Horace de Vere Cole, but the entourage also included a young woman called Virginia Stephen who would later be better known as the writer Virginia Woolf.

By February 12 the British newspapers were full of the story of the stunt. "Bunga Bungle!" the Western Daily Mercury trumpeted. For a few days the Navy was the laughingstock of Britain. Sailors were greeted with cries of "Bunga, Bunga" wherever they went. One newspaper suggested that the Dreadnought change its name to the Abyssinian.

Link -via Metafilter

See a larger photograph of the event. Link

Craftster member teriyakimoto made this knitted gas mask for a friend who thought it would be a cool way to stay warm while riding his bike in winter. It is attached to his knit cap by Velcro straps. Link -via Unique Daily

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An Armenian story in Russian with English subtitles. Starring the wildest animated wizard you've ever seen! (via Metafilter)

The game Record Tripping uses only your mouse, and mostly just the scroll wheel. Figure out your goal as you go along, which gets more difficult in the upper levels. The graphics are nice, but you might want to turn the sound down if you find it as distracting as I did. Link -via b3ta

Director Alfred Hitchcock was a busy man. He had a lot of projects going at once, and many had to be abandoned along the way due to inadequate budgets, scheduling conflicts, and other reasons. Mental_floss takes a look at a baker's dozen of those movies that were never completed, such as Flamingo Feather.

In 1956, Hitchcock bought a story called Flamingo Feather from South African author and diplomat Laurens van der Post. The plot involved a Russian scheme to train South Africans for nefarious Communist purposes. When Hitchcock went to South Africa to scout shooting locations, though, the project quickly fell apart. The director wanted Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly as the leads, which would be pricey, and he felt he needed fifty thousand Africans to act as extras. Hitchcock didn’t love the look of the country’s terrain, and it became apparent that even in South Africa it would be tough to get together 50,000 African extras when most of the country’s population worked long hours at farming jobs.

Link

Justin Van Genderen designed a series of five posters of places in the Star Wars universe. They remind me of vintage travel agency posters. See posters featuring Tatooine, Hoth, the Degobah System, and Bespin as well as Endor at Gigantor. http://giagantor.com/2010/02/04/minimal-star-wars-galaxy-posters/ -via Buzzfeed

A weekend trip to Granada, Spain gives us all a look at the Nazrid Palaces of the Alhambra, built in the 14th century by the conquering Moors of North Africa. Considering the history, it's astonishing that these buildings have survived 700 years without significant damage. The Alhambra is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Link -Thanks, Juergen!