Neatorama

Mythbusters live: Mona Lisa in .008 seconds

Posted: 06 Sep 2008 02:42 AM CDT

Painting Mona Lisa In .008 Seconds - Watch more free videos
These video clips look like they’re from a live Mythbusters performance. The clip shows two machines they’ve built to paint using paintballs. The first one is a bit of a joke - it definitely doesn’t come close to producing the Mona Lisa. The second machine - “GPU” - has massive compressed air tanks, more than a mile of hose and 1100 fixed barrels each loaded with a single colored paintball. La Jaconde has been painstaking reproduced by scores of artists over the years. The Mythbusters use their incredible machine to reproduce the Smiling Lady in .008 seconds. [Break.com]

Desktop Butt Station

Posted: 06 Sep 2008 12:53 AM CDT

Here’s the best desktop organizer I’ve seen in years: the Desktop Butt Station:

It’s a desktop organizer that looks like a fellow sitting on the john. Besides the spaces to hold pens and Post-it Notes, the figure holds adhesive tape in his hands as if it were a roll of toilet paper.

As a special touch, the toilet itself can hold paper clips. The colorful guy has a magnet in his butt so the paper clips stick to it when you lift him up!

Link - via Presurfer

And the Award for Most Inappropriate Ad Goes To …

Posted: 06 Sep 2008 12:51 AM CDT

A friend of Jeanette Ordas sent her this 1970s ad made for CBC Radio. My how times have changed! Link - via Nag on the Lake

Website Lets You Copy and Paste Special Characters

Posted: 06 Sep 2008 12:50 AM CDT

Ever had to hunt around for the keyboard combination for special characters like ½, ± or ©? Well, you won’t have to with this nifty website.

Here’s CopyPasteCharacter by Konst & Teknik and Martin Ström (hey, I used it just now to type his last name!): Link - via Quipsologies

Free Obama Tattoo

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 07:20 PM CDT

If you’re an Obama supporter, you can now put your skin where your mouth is: an Oklahoma tattoo artist is giving away free tattoos of the presidential hopeful!

Talk about a stinging endorsement! A tattoo shop in Moore, Oklahoma is giving Barack Obama tattoos for free.

"I don’t have any extra money to donate to the cause," said Phillip Calfy, tattoo shop owner. "I’m a tattoo artist and a lot of people that are into the tattoo thing like free tattoos."

Link (with video clip) - Thanks Shana Chapman!

Scientists Found the Commitment Gene

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 07:19 PM CDT

Playas beware: scientists have now isolated the gene for commitment and monogamy. And worse: they can transmit the gene through genetic engineering (at least in voles). Your roamin’ days are numbered:

Scientists studying voles (mouse-like rodents) discovered that transferring a single gene, the vasopressin receptor, from the monogamous prairie vole into the brain’s reward centre of a promiscuous meadow vole, would cause that meadow vole become monogamous.

Meanwhile, Swedish scientists have studied more than 500 twins and their spouses/domestic partners and have come to find that the vasopressin gene seems to have a similar effect on humans. “The researchers found that men with a particular variant of the AVPR1A gene (that codes for vasopressin in humans) scored lower on the bonding questions and were less likely to be married compared to men who did not have the variant…Also, men with two copies of the gene variant were twice as likely to report having had a relationship crisis with their marital spouse or partner in the last 12 months as men without the variant.”

Link - Thanks Dawn Govender!

That’s One Really Long Zucchini!

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 07:19 PM CDT

Left to their own devices, zucchinis tend to grow and grow and grow … Sometimes, even veteran gardeners like Apollonia Castitlione of Queens, New York, get shocked at how big they can grow:

Castitlione, 48, said she noticed the giant fruit was growing longer than usual last month when it suddenly shot up a couple of inches in as many days.

She then went on vacation to Boston for the weekend and returned to find it had shot up another 1.5 inches.

At last count, the zucchini was just over 6 feet - nearly 2 feet shy of the world-record 7-foot, 10-inch zucchini grown in India three years ago.

Link - Thanks Ros!

History’s Most Viral Photoshopped Pics Explained

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 07:18 PM CDT

Matthew Moore wrote a really neat article for the Telegraph on 20 of the most viral Photoshopped photos on the Net. Like this famous photo of a shark lunging at a helicopter:

This striking fake was created by merging two separate images - a US Air Force helicopter on a training exercise in San Francisco, and a great white shark leaping out of the water off the cost of South Africa.

The hoax emerged in 2001, and was later circulated via email with a caption claiming it showed a shark attacking British Navy crew in South Africa, despite the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge is visible in the background.

See if you remember ‘em all: Link - Thanks Andrew!

Minipop Pixel Art Cross Stitch

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 07:18 PM CDT

Photo: rubykhan [Flickr]

Inspired by Craig Robinson’s minipop drawings, Ruby Khan of Pigeons Playing Roller Derby blog made her very own version … in pixel art cross stich!

It contains 45 different figures; 99 individual people and one happy little tree accompanying Bob Ross. It took me about three months to finish, spread out over three years. There are a ton of tiny goofs, although the worst/funniest one is having made Andre the Giant (7′ 4") roughly the same height as everyone in The Clash (normal sized people) next to him.

Link | See if you can identify ‘em all: Flickr link with notes - via Craftzine, thanks Shana Chapman!

Oktapodi

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 04:50 PM CDT

(YouTube link)
A graduation project by several students at the French animation school Gobelins: Julian Bocabeille (who now works for Dreamworks), FX Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi. See a list of awards and a making-of featurette at the Ocktapodi site. Link -Thanks, Bill!

Japanese Salarymen Try New Tactic to Avoid Divorce: Being Nice to Their Wives

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 03:51 PM CDT

Japanese salarymen, the overworked and hard-drinking corporate warriors, are facing a new danger as they near retirement: divorce.

A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband’s company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives — hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect — are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they’re in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization — the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association — preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one’s wife.

"I can’t win. I won’t win. I don’t want to win," they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

So, what does an old salaryman got to do to save the marriage? Some of them are trying to be nice to their old ladies:

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was "99 percent" certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.

Link (Really, the organization is named the National Chauvinistic Husbands Association)

(Photo: hiromy [Flickr])

Google Chrome Got SAL 9000’s Eye

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 03:36 PM CDT

By now you’ve all probably been playing with Google Chrome, the search engine giant’s new browser (well, unless you’re on a Mac or Linux, that is). Well, Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped blog who broke the news on the whole thing has a really neat list of tips and pointers on Chrome.

One thing that many people are wondering about is what’s up with Google Chrome’s logo? Philipp thinks that it’s a combination of Pokémon’s Poké Ball, and the Simon toy (see also this post on Digital Inspiration)

Well, I say there’s something else. See that glowing blue eye? It’s absolutely, positively from SAL 9000, the Earthbound twin of the HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And here’s a YouTube clip of SAL 9000 (voiced by Candice Bergen, actually) from 2010: The Year We Make Contact (based on Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two)

[YouTube clip]

Zombies Singing “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 11:39 AM CDT

(Video Link)

A music video by puppeteer and special effects artist Matt Ficner. RT: 4 minutes. Via Zombie Monkey Projects

Stephen Hawking

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 10:32 AM CDT

(YouTube link)
At a recent appearance in California, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking keeps relativity on a layman’s level. -via b3ta

Procrastination Flowchart

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 10:30 AM CDT

It’s Friday and you are online reading blogs instead of working. This chart may hit a little close to home! Only a small portion is pictured here; you can see the entire chart at Project Sidewalk. Link -via Geek Like Me

Astronaut Reunion

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 10:29 AM CDT

An all-star gathering of legendary American astronauts appeared in Cleveland Aug. 29, 2008 to celebrate NASA’s 50th anniversary. John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, Jim Lovell, veteran of two Apollo missions, and Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space joined 15 other astronauts from Ohio.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: NASA)

NASA also has an interactive timeline about their 50 years in the space exploration business. Link

Lego Video Games

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 09:52 AM CDT

Check out this Flickr set of classic video games recreated in Lego! Pictured is NES Castlevania. Link -via b3ta

(image credit: skinny coder)

Hot Dog Bun Grilling Jig

Posted: 05 Sep 2008 09:48 AM CDT

The problem: grilling a hot dog bun on a barbecue without ruining the hinge. The solution: build a gadget. Evil Mad Scientists Laboratories has step-by-step instructions for making you own bun jig. Link