Is it luck or a curse that causes German speed skater Daniela Anschutz-Thoms to finish in fourth place? Not once, not twice, but fifteen times in the Olympics, the World Championships, and the European Championships. At each competition, medals are awarded to the top three only. It happened again in Vancouver.

Right up until the last lap, Germany's unluckiest Olympian looked set to break the mold and grab silver in the women's 3000 metre speed skating race.

But eventually the 35-year-old fell short, losing out on third place by just three hundredths of a second.

No matter how hard poor old Daniela tries, she just can’t escape fourth place.

Anschutz-Thoms will have one more chance at a medal, in the 5,000 meter race next week. Link -via Digg

Is there something in our brains that make humans see the same geometric patterns during drug use, illness, or near-death experiences? Even pressing on our eyes can induce the same spirals other people see. Research by professor of Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience Paul Bressloff and his colleagues at Oxford shows that these patterns are formed in the first visual field of the brain, or V1.

An object or scene in the visual world is projected as a two-dimensional image on the retina of each eye, so what we see can also be treated as flat sheet: the visual field. Every point on this sheet can be pin-pointed by two coordinates, just like a point on a map, or a point on the flat model of V1. The alternating regions of light and dark that make up a geometric hallucination are caused by alternating regions of high and low neural activity in V1 — regions where the neurons are firing very rapidly and regions where they are not firing rapidly.

A closer look at the types of specialized neurons in the V1 field and how they interact with each other explains the geometric patterns.

Bressloff and his colleagues used a generalised version of the equations from the original model to let the system evolve. The result was a model that is not only more accurate in terms of the anatomy of V1, but can also generate geometric patterns in the visual field that the original model was unable to produce. These include lattice tunnels, honeycombs and cobwebs that are better characterised in terms of the orientation of contours within them, than in terms of contrasting regions of light and dark.

That's about as simple as I can make it in a short blurb; the entire article explains it better. Yes, there is math involved. Link -via Metafilter

In any movie, witnessing a murder will surely lead to a chase scene. In Pivot, the animation is what makes the chase special. Until the ending. Designed and animated by Kevin Megens, Floris Vos, Arno de Grijs, and Andre Bergs for the KORT! 2009 project. http://pivotthemovie.com/ -via Digg

Sure, you know some famous Canadians, but those people you know aren't on this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You'll be given fifteen names, and you determine if those people were born in Cnada or not. It's harder than you think! I scored 73% (11 out of 15), but I would have done better if I knew who all these celebrities were. Link

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The couple in Maryland who made the fire-breathing snowman have their own dragon busy at work melting snow. Wouldn't you love to have neighbors like this? -via Gizmodo

Someone mentioned that John Coker's homemade rockets looked like crayons, so he ran with the idea. His crayon rockets were launched all together from a crayon box! Well, OK, half of them worked. See how he made them in this account of the adventure. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It's called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.

Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn't the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?

"We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments," says Jacak. "The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we're trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature."

The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg

Photographer Cédric Delsaux (previously at Neatorama) began the project Dark Lens with the intent of photographing suburban decay in Dubai, but the addition of Star Wars characters made it something special. Link to pictures. Link to article (en Français). -via Dark Roasted Blend

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Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration by T.J. and the Revo is a parody of the song Apologize by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic. A perfect video for President's Day. Link -via reddit

The Mathias quadruplets of Lexington, North South Carolina captured our hearts by laughing in unison in a clip featured on America's Funniest Home Videos. Grace, Emily, Mary Claire, and Anna will turn ten years old on February 16th, and they are still laughing. The four girls are identical quads, which are very rare, and have been featured on many TV shows as well as three appearances on AFHV, and they've been in commercials as well. http://www.thestate.com/local/story/1153648.html -via Arbroath

(right image credit: Renee Ittner-McManus)

Giving chocolates, roses, and diamonds are only the current customary gifts for Valentines Day. At other times and places, the holiday entailed very different activities for finding or expressing romantic love. Or some other feeling. Some customs were downright superstitious.

In the 1700s, rural Englishwomen would pin five bay leaves to their pillows—four on the corners, one in the middle—on the evening before Valentine’s Day. By doing so, it was said, they would see their future husbands in their dreams. A variation of this tradition called for women to sprinkle bay leaves with rosewater and lay them across their pillows.

Link -via Nag on the Lake

Missed connections, looking for marriage, let's meet, in addition to rooms for rent, cars for sale, and job openings. Sounds like Craiglist, but these kinds of ads have been around in newspapers as long as there have been news papers. The New York Times has some examples from the 19th century.

If the young lady wearing the pink dress, spotted fur cape and muff, had light hair, light complexion and blue eyes, who was in company with a lady dressed in black, that I passed about 5 o’clock on Friday evening in South Seventh Street, between First and Second, Williamsburg, L.I., will address a line to Waldo, Williamsburg Post Office, she will make the acquaintance of a fine young man.

Jan. 19, 1862

I only wish we knew how successful these ads were. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(image credit: Flickr user "T"eresa)

This picture shows one of four methods for storing and organizing cats documented at The Daily Tail. http://www.thedailytail.com/pictures/how-to-store-organize-cats/ -via Everlasting Blort

Is the art of the love letter dead, or just dying? If more people knew about the great love letters of the past, maybe a few would take the trouble to put pen to paper and create something that the recipient will keep as a treasure. President Woodrow Wilson wrote beautiful love letters to his wife Ellen Louise Axeson, and after her death wrote to Edith Bolling Galt, who married him in 1915.

While wooing Edith, Wilson penned a series of love letters, some signed “Tiger” (Wilson was a Princeton alum, but this was before the university took on the tiger as its mascot.) In one, Wilson wrote, “You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write.” In another, he pines, “Please go to ride with us this evening, precious little girl, so that I can whisper something in your ear—something of my happiness and love, and accept this, in the meantime, as a piece out of my very heart, which is all yours but cannot be sent as I wish to send it by letter.”

You'll find more examples of great love letters at mental_floss. Link

The Disney folks have stated that Donald Duck was "born" on June 9, 1934, which is the day his first cartoon came out. But when is his real birthday? Bob Bishop did some detective work to uncover the actual date. A series of clues led him to determine that Donald Duck was born on March 13th, 1914. Link -via the Presurfer

Previously: Donald Duck's Family Tree