Neatorama

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• The Twilight Zone Turns 50
• M-Cups: Measuring Cups Shaped Like Matryoshkas or Russian Nesting Dolls
• Ig Nobel Prizes 2009
• 15 Strangest Breast Cancer Awareness Products
• The World’s Largest Wind Farm Began Operations Today
• Why Early Humans Started Walking: Food and Sex
• Art Inspired by Craigslist “Missed Connections”
• Electricity-Generating Backpack
• Personal Laws à la Star Trek
• 6 Weird, In a Cute Way, Plush Toys
• Gruesome and Bloody Things to Decorate Your Home
• What Car Would Spock Drive?
• Werner Herzog’s Notes From The Amazon
• Edison The Grand Lamp, a Giant Table Lamp by Alex Bergman
• The World Needs More Pooh
• Gigagalaxy Zoom
• Twitter User Served Writ…By Tweet!
• Top Ten Great Movie Deaths
• Ardipithecus
• Magic Dots
• You’ve been shagged by a rare parrot!
• A Day at the Magic Kingdom
• Vintage Ads: Translation, Sex Appeal, and Innuendo
• 11 Unbelievable Glittering Golden Objects
• The 15 Ugliest Cars Ever Made
• The Unique Origins of 25 Popular Products
• Shooting Old Living Things

The Twilight Zone Turns 50 Posted: 02 Oct 2009 04:22 AM PDT Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of The Twilight Zone. The first episode of Rod Serling’s classic horror/suspense television show aired on October 2, 1959. William Kates wrote for the AP about the origin of the series: In a time on television when suburbia was idealized in popular shows such as “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Make Room for Daddy,” Serling offered a mixture of fantasy, science fiction, suspense, horror — and the show’s trademark macabre or unexpected twist. Serling had already earned acclaim for his television writing (”Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Patterns,”) but found himself fighting CBS to get “The Twilight Zone” on the air. Serling would have repeated conflicts with network censors throughout his career. My favorite episode is “The Shelter.” What is yours? Link via Alphecca | Image: CBS

M-Cups: Measuring Cups Shaped Like Matryoshkas or Russian Nesting Dolls Posted: 01 Oct 2009 11:11 PM PDT M-Cups Matryoshka (Russian Nesting Doll) Measuring Cups This is a clever one by Carl Mitsch of Fred Studio: a set of measuring cups shaped like matryoshka (babushka or Russian nesting dolls). They’re cute and functional! And perhaps best of all, they nest inside of one another so they don’t take up much cabinet space. At $11.95 each, they’re the perfect gift for those who love to cook … and who knows, maybe you’ll get dinner out of it, too. From the Neatorama Shop: Link

Ig Nobel Prizes 2009 Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:20 PM PDT The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander's Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to "honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think." A few of the winners: PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless. LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”. See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research. Link

15 Strangest Breast Cancer Awareness Products Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:17 PM PDT October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so you'll see a lot of items produced in pink. Some product tie-ins will make you scratch your head and smile trying to figure out how they might have anything to do with breast cancer. Most likely, the people in charge of these companies are committed to the cause and this is the best way they can show it. Still, how can you see a pink cement mixer and not do a double take? Link -via Gorilla Mask

The World’s Largest Wind Farm Began Operations Today Posted: 01 Oct 2009 05:57 PM PDT The world’s largest windfarm began operating today. The Roscoe Wind Complex is composed of 627 turbines over four counties in western Texas. According to E.On Climate and Renewables North America, the owner, it is already generating at full capacity — that’s 781.5 megawatts, or enough electricity to power 230,000 homes. John McFarland wrote for the Associated Press: At the Roscoe wind farm, the turbines range in size from about 350 to 415 feet tall, and they’re generally spaced about 900 feet apart, Woodson said. The land is leased, mostly from dryland cotton farmers who continue to work the fields around them, Woodson said. Texas is the nation’s leading producer of cotton, most of it from West Texas. “It’s a use that appears to be quite complimentary,” Woodson said. “This whole community was extremely welcoming to us.” E.ON has facilities around the state, but it could be awhile before the company builds more huge wind farms in West Texas because of the glut of wind companies and lack of transmission lines, Woodson said. The state is planning more lines from West Texas to more heavily populated areas, but they won’t be completed for at least two more years. Link via TigerHawk | Image: Biggunben, used under Creative Commons license

Why Early Humans Started Walking: Food and Sex Posted: 01 Oct 2009 03:01 PM PDT Why did early humans walk upright? Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University has an intriguing hypothesis after studying the oldest human skeleton, of the species Ardipithecus ramidus or "Ardi" for short: it’s all about food and sex! In apes—both modern apes and, presumably, the ancient ancestors of Ardipithecus—males find mates the good old-fashioned apish way: by fighting with other males for access to fertile females. Success, measured in number of offspring, goes to macho males with big sharp canine teeth who try to mate with as many ovulating females as possible. Sex is best done quickly—hence those penis bristles, which accelerate ejaculation—with the advantage to the male with big testicles carrying a heavy load of sperm. Among females, the winners are those who flaunt their fertility with swollen genitals or some other prominent display of ovulation, so those big alpha dudes will take notice and give them a tumble, providing a baby with his big alpha genes. Let’s suppose that some lesser male, with poor little stubby canines, figures out that he can entice a fertile female into mating by bringing her some food. That sometimes happens among living chimpanzees, for instance when a female rewards a male for presenting her with a tasty gift of colobus monkey. Among Ardipithecus’s ancestors, such a strategy could catch on if searching for food required a lot of time and exposure to predators. Males would be far more successful food-providers if they had their hands free to carry home loads of fruits and tubers—which would favor walking on two legs. Females would come to prefer good, steady providers with smaller canines over the big fierce-toothed ones who left as soon as they spot another fertile female. The results, says Lovejoy, are visible in Ardipithecus, which had small canines even in males and walked upright. Jamie Shreeve of NGM Blog Central has the story: Link

Art Inspired by Craigslist “Missed Connections” Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:58 PM PDT Image: Sophie Blackall Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn-based artist who is fascinated by the Missed Connections postings on Craigslist. She finds them to be bite-sized insights into the human experience. Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times: Currently, Ms. Blackall is only putting her spin on listings from New York City, where she says "people are colliding with each other constantly, criss-crossing paths all day, every day and yet the interactions are so fleeting and transient. It's really just an un-choreographed mess of colliding stories." Eventually, she says, she might branch out to other cities. "It would be interesting to see how the listings differ in California, for example." Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Etsy Shop | New York Times Post

Electricity-Generating Backpack Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:42 PM PDT Image: Lightning Packs Lightning Packs is a company that is developing backpacks that generate electricity with the motion of their users. As the user walks, the spring-mounted backback bounces slightly, turning a gear on a generator. It is the brainchild of Lawrence C. Rome of the University of Pennsylvania, who hopes to market his idea to the U.S. military: “Soldiers now carry GPS receivers, night vision goggles, headlamps, communication devices, and more. And with this technology, means of powering them becomes critical. Soldiers carry eighty pound backpacks, up to twenty pounds of which are spare batteries. Now, with the Suspended Load Backpack, electricity can be generated to power the equipment directly or to charge a lightweight rechargeable battery,” Dr. Rome said. When walking, the Suspended Load Backpack can generate up to 7.4 watts, more than enough power to simultaneously power an MP3 player, night vision goggles (or 3 LED headlamp), a PDA, a CMOS image decoder, a handheld GPS, Bluetooth, and a GSM terminal in talk mode. Link via Gizmodo (where there’s a video)

Personal Laws à la Star Trek Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:36 PM PDT Remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with Ashley Judd (rrrowr!) as Ensign Robin Lefler? That character has a set of 102 "personal laws" to live by. "When I learn something essential," she explained, "I make up a law about it. That way, I never forget." Neatoramanaut John Farrier of The Zeray Gazette was inspired to write his own personal laws, which he blogged about here: In the past year, I’ve been intentional about formulating such life lessons. I keep a MS Word document on my hard drive listing these thoughts, and each one goes through a probationary period before being accepted as both true and important. Here are some of the results, including some probationary laws, with explanations: Just because you’ve done stupid stuff doesn’t mean that you have to keep on doing stupid stuff in order to be consistent. This is a reflection of Harry Browne’s Previous Investment Trap. Consistency is a vastly overrated virtue, and it is better to admit that you were wrong and stop going in the wrong direction. There is nothing inherently ennobling about hardship. My concept of masculinity long held that a man undertook great and challenging tasks and overcame obstacles. Suffering for a cause is noble. I now think otherwise. Go where the cheese is. Taken from the book Who Moved My Cheese?, anticipate that shit will fall out of the sky, and be prepared to move as conditions change. Be on the lookout for change, have a backup plan for everything, and implement it immediately when the change occurs. That you do not like the change will not prevent it from taking place. Link (with a very lively discussion in the comments) If you were to write yourself personal laws, what would they be?

6 Weird, In a Cute Way, Plush Toys Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:35 PM PDT Our very own Neatoramanaut Jill Harness wrote this very neat post over at InventorSpot about 6 "weird art" plush toys. I’m going to quibble with her and say that these are 6 "omigosh cute" plush toys … case in point: Haminal Haminal was the brain child of Crystal Chesney-Thompson, an animator who has worked on such major shows as Futurama. He is a blend of pigs, hamsters and guinea pigs, created so he would be easier to be canned than a traditional ham. There are two sizes of Haminal, a classic version served in a plastic “can” complete with nutrition info and a small one perfect for spam-style sushi. Of course, both flavors are best complimented with a foam pineapple ring. See the rest of the list: Link

Gruesome and Bloody Things to Decorate Your Home Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:34 PM PDT We go from cute to downright gruesome. This here is a post by Miss Cellania about furniture and accessories that will make your house into a bloody crime scene over at our pal mental_floss blog that makes me slightly afraid of her. Okay, a lot afraid of her This one above is the Dexter dining room chairs: Designer Amy Lau was inspired by the serial killer show on Showtime when she came up with these Dexter dining room chairs. The chairs are decorated with embroidered blood spatters. There are also bloody dinner plates and disfigured flatware to match, available from Spring Design. Link (Yes, astute readers will notice that Amy Lau’s blood spattered design was on Neatorama before)

What Car Would Spock Drive? Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:32 PM PDT What kind of car would Spock drive if Spock drives a car? Well, you don’t have to wonder. The Drex Files blog has a rare photo of Leonard Nimoy in full costume as Spock posing in front of this car (his car?) on the Desilu backlot in 1966. I wonder what car Kirk, Scotty and McCoy would drive … Oh, and what kind of a car is it? Find out for yourself: Link – via The Litter Box

Werner Herzog’s Notes From The Amazon Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:31 PM PDT In 1982, filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote and directed an epic movie called Fitzcarraldo, based on the life story of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald. In the movie, a man named Fitzcarraldo traveled to the heart of the Amazonian jungle to get to the last remaining rubber trees parcel in a steamboat. He has to navigate some of the most perilous river in the Amazon as well as transport the boat up a mountain on dry land (you’ll see). Just as interesting as the movie is his newly published book Conquest of the Useless; Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo, which is a transcript of Herzog’s notebooks from almost three decades ago. Minnesotastan of TYWKIWDBI blog has the excerpt: What was interesting to me was to discover that Herzog didn’t live the life of a pampered director; he was on-site near the headwaters of the Amazon, living in squalor and coping with the incredible incompetence of local workers. Here are some of my jotted notes from the book to give the flavor of the contents: 12 – At the Indians’ request, we bring chain saws, machetes, and shotguns to the Rio Cenepa, as well as a large canister of poison for arrow tips. They no longer know how to make it themselves. Vivanco says they will pay for a spoonful with a gold nugget. 79 – The family who had given us a pot of hot water crowded around, and we fixed tuna for them and gave them tea; that is how it is done here – food is always shared, Cesar says, which is why there is no word for “thank you” in their language. 169 – The helicopter of the Bolivian president, Barrientos, flew into a power line and crashed from a low altitude. He had suitcases full of money with him, presumably from drug deals. The helicopter immediately caught fire, but although people were there and tried to rescue him from the blaze, no one could get close, because the heat made the submachine guns carried by the president and his entourage start firing wildly, and in the hail of bullets no one dared approach. 226 – Across from our headquarters overlooking the Nanay there was a huge explosion in a boiler, fortunately after the work day in the factory there as over. The one night watchman was blown to pieces and sent flying. A smallish bloody piece of him landed with a splat on our porch. Link But if readin’ ain’t your thing, you can just rent Burden of Dreams, a documentary by Les Blank about the making of the movie.

Edison The Grand Lamp, a Giant Table Lamp by Alex Bergman Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:28 PM PDT No, that’s not a really tiny woman. Rather, it’s a gigantic lamp shaped like a regular ol’ table lamp. Designer Alex Bergman created this Edison the Grand lamp for Fatboy studio. The large size of the lamp (it stands about 3 feet) is accompanied by the large sticker price: more than $900! Link

The World Needs More Pooh Posted: 01 Oct 2009 12:48 PM PDT That’s the opinion of the Trustees of Pooh Properties, which manages the estates of author A. A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard.  They have authorized a new sequel in the Pooh series.  Return to the Hundred Acre Wood has generated some controversy among Pooh purists, who argue that the original books were about growing up and moving on, and that if the creators had wanted sequels they would have generated them… “The whole point is that the boy has to go away from his childhood, from this very idyllic pastoral world of his childhood,” she said. “This is an absolutely perfect ending, and doing anything beyond this is pointless.” The trustees of the estate believe the sequel will be true to the original… “The good professor and other great lovers of Pooh will have to form their own conclusions,” Brown said. “And they may say, ‘oh, it’s not quite as good, it’s not quite the same.’ I can’t help that. All I can say is we tried very hard to do something that’s not offensive, shall we say.” Jennifer Quinn of the AP has more details at the StarTribune.  The BBC has a writeup on a new character – Lottie the Otter – created for the sequel.  And The Guardian makes note in passing of the possibility that Pooh may have had OCD. Image credit: Wikipedia.

Gigagalaxy Zoom Posted: 01 Oct 2009 11:27 AM PDT This is what I ended up with after just a minute of playing around with Gigagalaxy Zoom, a project by the European Southern Observatory.  Start with the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the naked eye, zoom into a section of it, then zoom to the next stage!  There are lots and lots of variations, and cool nebulas to explore! Link via Dark Roasted Blend

Twitter User Served Writ…By Tweet! Posted: 01 Oct 2009 11:27 AM PDT A lot of Twitter users are impersonating celebrities, using the social networking service to send bogus tweets on behalf of someone else.  That is against the site’s policies, and a ostensibly a crime.  Now, for the first time, Britain’s High Court is setting precedent by ordering one anonymous perpetrator to cease and desist.  They simply sent him a tweet. Andre Walker at Griffin Law said the anonymous Tweeter targeted by the writ will get a message from the High Court the next time they open their online account. “Whoever they are, they will be told to stop posting, to remove previous posts and to identify themselves to the High Court via a web link form,” he said. Link

Top Ten Great Movie Deaths Posted: 01 Oct 2009 11:26 AM PDT If ever there was a cause for a Spoiler Alert, this would rank.  The very nature of good films is the conflict factor, which will ultimately end with someone’s demise.  But who’s whose?  And how?  When it’s done memorably well, character death in a movie can have a lasting impression, and worthy of a top ten list.  David Frank’s offering at RopeOf Silicon is a pretty good one. These are the death scenes we remember long after the actors have screamed, slobbered, cried, coughed, wheezed, or drawn out to William Shatner-esque lengths their final words. They are a perfect combination of acting, writing, filmmaking, image and idea. Some are shocking. Some are sad or bittersweet. Others funny. Some deaths you cheer on. All are memorable. There are many more, of course.  Which ones did he leave out? Link Image from Psycho, Paramount Pictures.

Ardipithecus Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:48 AM PDT Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent. White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys. There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter

Magic Dots Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:16 AM PDT Make your own fractals with just a mouseover on these magic dots. Other interactive toys on the same site are just as fascinating, or should I say, addicting. Link -via Gorilla Mask

You’ve been shagged by a rare parrot! Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:14 AM PDT (YouTube link) Stephen Fry gives Mark Carwardine a hard time after the parrot attempts to mate with the zoologist. From the BBC series Last Chance to See. -via Arbroath

A Day at the Magic Kingdom Posted: 01 Oct 2009 10:11 AM PDT Today is the 38th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. In honor of the occasion, Disney created a stop-motion video using the tilt-shift effect. "A Day at the Magic Kingdom Park" is a never-before-seen look at the park in miniature scale. The video is created from a series of photos snapped inside the Magic Kingdom Park. And the trick is tilt-shift photography. This really does remind me of my last trip to Disney World -because of how crowded it is! Link -via Boing Boing

Vintage Ads: Translation, Sex Appeal, and Innuendo Posted: 01 Oct 2009 08:16 AM PDT You ought to wonder what a wind-blown skirt and cleavage have to do with shoeshine, but you know what was on the minds of the men who came up with this advertisement! See more hilarious and suggestive magazine ads from the 40’s-60’s at Divine Caroline. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by StigNordas.

11 Unbelievable Glittering Golden Objects Posted: 01 Oct 2009 08:07 AM PDT Gold is a precious metal so you would, understandably, assume that it is used sparingly and wisely. However, that’s not always the case. Some people have more money than wit, as you can see from how one of the most expensive metals on earth is used to quite literally increase one’s self worth by ingesting a golden pill. Shown are statues of the ex-President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, who loved gold almost as much as he loved seeing his own image. See more golden bling at Money Hacker. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Arby.

The 15 Ugliest Cars Ever Made Posted: 01 Oct 2009 08:04 AM PDT Car design has gotten a lot more uniform and bland over the years, so it’s tough to find any truly outrageously ugly cars of late. Which is a shame as the ugly cars of old had tons of character and added to our shared experience. How many people who grew up pre-90’s don’t have a tale of their first hideously ugly car? Take the VW Thing: This compact SUV started official production in 1969 and continued civilian sales through 1980. Designed for German soldiers during the war, the first prototype continued to be improved upon, eventually resulting in this Jeep-like car. Probably one of the safest and most reliable vehicles on this list, that doesn't stop the VW Thing from being one of the ugliest. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.

The Unique Origins of 25 Popular Products Posted: 01 Oct 2009 08:03 AM PDT So many of the things we use daily are so old that it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist and needed to be invented. Almost every invention has an interesting backstory however, here are the origins of 25 things most of use everyday, including the microwave oven: In 1945, Raytheon engineer and inventor Percy Spencer stood in front of a magnetron—a radar component—and noticed a chocolate bar start to melt in his pocket. Curious about the magnetron's potential, Spencer obtained a bag of popcorn kernels and watched them pop next to the magnetron. The microwave oven was born. Radarange, the world's first microwave oven, was 6 feet tall, weighed 750 pounds, and cost around $5,000. Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.

Shooting Old Living Things Posted: 01 Oct 2009 05:53 AM PDT Rachel Sussman is a photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. One of her current projects in progress is called “The oldest living things in the world”. On this map you can see the places she has visited to take the photographs of these very old things, like the 400,000 years old Siberian actinobacteria in the picture above. Link – via kottke.org

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