Origami Iron Man by Brian Chan, Photo: J0nB0n [Flickr]
How can origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding be improved? Add a dash of geekery! Here’s a neat list of the geekiest origamis on the Web: Link
Neatoramanaut Ivan C. emailed us a photo he found in a photo album several years ago, and thought that it looked like young Abraham Lincoln:
The photo has brought a heated debate for over 5 years now over this photo. I brought a photo album 7 years ago and inside were many photos of well known people. One photo caught my eye. It was a photo on a piece of heavy metal, 2"x3". mirror image. I said to my self this guy looks like Abe Lincoln. The photo had many other pictures of Abe Lincoln and also of his wife and kids.
Well I started my research into why the photo is not Abe Lincoln. I learned all I could about abe lincoln especially of him being hit in the face by a horse at age nine. I had the photo authenticated. One person who saw the photo in person was Abe Lincoln expert from Denville, New Jersey Dr. Jerome R. Corsi. Also Dave Blanchette and Drs. Thomas Schwartz and James Cornelius. They all agreed and said it was a very young Abe, age 27 to 29.years old. I also had a forensic detective look at it. Mr. Bob Garrett CSCSA, CLPE, FFS New Jersey State Division International Association for Identification. He said all facial characteristics match.
If you see the photo in person you see that Mr. Lincoln was very tall and homely and you can see his mole, crooked lip and disfigured jaw. One eye was smaller and one ear was higher than the other. Abe is wearing his WHIG button and his suit and cravat is of the victoria age.
If you want to see the photo in person I live in New Jersey.
I’m no photo expert, but a cursory play with various images of Lincoln I found online showed a remarkable match in the eyes, nose, and mouth positionings. Could Ivan have found daguerrotypes of young Abraham Lincoln? What do you think?
1. Many people know that Ray Bradbury wrote his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451 in just nine days on a rented typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library. However, what wasn’t known until recently is that in the process of writing the novel, he made a unique friend: Ernest Hemingway’s son. They rode the same bus every morning to the library and got to talking. Hemingway told the stranger that his favorite writers were “Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury,” and the two remained friends for decades.
5. In many ways, Bradbury was a writer of intuition. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury was the first to predict the invention of flat-screen TVs, televised surveillance footage, ear-bud headphones, and ATMs — in the space of the nine days he spent writing the novel. However, it wasn’t until later that he realized how subtle his subconscious instincts really were: without knowing it, he’d named his four main characters after a paper company (Montag), a pencil company (Faber), an envelope company (Granger), and a now-gone office supply chain (Beatty).
6. Ray Bradbury never went to college. Instead, he went to the library all day, three times a week, until he got married at 27. To this day, he regularly organizes fundraisers for libraries, and refuses to touch e-reader devices like the Kindle.
What do you get when you add Borat to the world of video games? Meet Keith Apicary, a "game-loving man-child" (played by alter ego/comic actor Nathan Barnatt):
Keith Apicary sprang to life when Nathan purchased a slightly used Neo Geo arcade machine for just $200, a console that became the focal point of most of Keith’s videos.
"I just started talking out loud and some spit gathered in my mouth," Nathan says, describing how he came up with the character’s voice. "I also always wanted to do something with the name Apicary. I had the name saved."
Nathan describes Keith, as a grown man "who probably stopped growing mentally at the age of 14 when he was having the most fun, playing Genesis."
"He’s the character I do [who is] most like me," Nathan reveals. "I like video games. I’m clumsy. I fall down. I like ‘Rambo.’ All the things Keith likes, I generally like … I’m pretty immature."
Danny Gallagher of Asylum blog has more: Link – Thanks Nick Romano!
“Locksport” is an emerging form of competitive lockpicking. Participants strive to open locks that they’ve never seen before as quickly as they can:
Locksport fans compete in several formats, including head-to-head contests that determine the fastest lock picker. In the so-called Locksport Wizard, each contestant is given a burlap sack containing an identical set of locks and is required to blindly pick them using only tools they have put in the sack.
In other challenges, participants have to pick their way out of handcuffs before attempting to defeat a set of locks. There also are competitions to disassemble locks and reassemble them properly.
Some police officers are concerned that criminals could use these events to learn lockpicking skills, but enthusiasts say that criminals are unlikely to invest the time necessary to develop them.
Link via Make | Photo by Flickr user robertdx used under Creative Commons license
Amanda Greene of Woman’s Day found fifteen odd perks offered to guests for free at different hotels. At the Heatherman Hotel in Kirkland, WA, for example, guests receive a mattress menu:
The boutique property lets you “order” your mattress off their Art of Sleep menu. Choose from European featherbeds, European pillow-tops and Tempur-Pedic mattresses. And you’re not the only one who gets the royal treatment: The hotel also offers an Art of Sleep for Paws menu, featuring pillow-top beds, heated beds and organic bumper beds for dogs.
Did you do anything productive over the past month? I ask because YouTube user JoshuasCorner blew up 5 watermelons with powerful electrical discharges. How many did you explode?
Photographer Sergey Larenkov takes photos from the same perspectives of historical photos and juxtaposes them. Pictured above is modern Berlin with the Soviet Army marching through it. You can view more examples at the link.
YouTube user PvtGermanWagz and his friends emptied the contents of 32 glowsticks into a toilet’s reservoir and flushed it to see the results. The results are simultaneously asinine and cool. Warning: foul language.
Leave it to Mad Magazine to craft a rejection letter that doesn’t leave you feel too rejected:
There’s nothing like a helping of light-hearted humour to ease the pain of rejection, as evidenced by this form letter from the offices of Mad magazine, one of the most influential humour publications ever released. The letter was sent to all unsuccessful submitters of material during the much-lauded reign of Al Feldstein.
Are those lolcat pranksters at it again? There can’t be no other explanation for this, folks:
The 30-year-old told police she noticed her car was running “rugged” late last week, according to a Rock Hill police report. The car would stop running, and let her start it again only to cut off a few minutes later.
Why?
A mechanic found a cheeseburger and a pickle inside the car’s gas tank, the report said. The lunch caused about $1,000 in damages to the car. It is not known how the sandwich got inside the vehicle’s tank.
When his son entered high school in Warner Robins, Georgia, little did pastor Donald Crosby know that he would soon be involved in fighting Satan himself, in the form of the high school’s mascot:
The devil is at the center of a fight that seems to start every few years when someone new to Warner Robins realizes that the city’s oldest high school, which has one of the most successful football programs in Georgia, rallies around a green-eyed, pitchfork-carrying demon.
The Warner Robins High School Demons.
A pastor at Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ was shocked when he realized his own son could be among the hundreds of students shouting ‘Go Demons!’ to cheer on the school’s sports teams, but particularly in football, where the Demons have won four state championships over the years.
Estonian designer Pavel Sidorenko created fantastic wall clocks out of used vinyl records. This one above is my favorite, but don’t miss the one cut to look like a pipe-smoking penguin: Link – via Core 77
Fourteen-year-old Kora Wira was fishing in Florida with her parents when a barracuda jumped out of the water and bit her arm! The 42-inch fish landed in the boat and was killed by Wira’s father. Between docking the boat and driving to the hospital, there was one more chore to be done.
Wira and her dad stopped for a quick picture before jumping in the car and heading to the hospital. Wira said she wasn’t in pain at the moment, but she was still creeped out by the fish. Her arm needed 51 stitches, and doctors told her they had never treated a barracuda bite. Her stitches are out now, and she said her arm is healing.
The complete story is a slide show of photographs that include Wira’s wounds, which may be disturbing. Link -via Buzzfeed
Gen Y Neatoramanauts probably don’t know what this is, but the rest of us could chuckle in nostalgia at these retro mouse pads over at the NeatoShop. They’re made to look like obsolete test patterns for televisions.
Have you ever been told that the reason giraffes have such long neck is that they evolved to eat leaves on tall trees? Well, you’ve been lied to. The real reason (surprise, surprise) is sex and mating:
The latest theory – and it’s a surprise this hasn’t come up before, given biologists’ fixation with it – is that the long necks are the result of sexual selection: that is, they evolved in males as a way of competing for females.
Male giraffes fight for females by "necking". They stand side by side and swing the backs of their heads into each others’ ribs and legs. To help with this, their skulls are unusually thick and they have horn-like growths called ossicones on the tops of their heads. Their heads, in short, are battering rams, and are quite capable of breaking their opponents’ bones.
Having a long and powerful neck would be an advantage in these duels, and it’s been found that males with long necks tend to win, and also that females prefer them.
The "necks for sex" idea also helps explain why giraffes have extended their necks so much more than their legs. If giraffes evolved to reach higher branches, we might expect their legs to have lengthened as fast as their necks, but they haven’t.
Are you unhappy? Maybe it’s because of all that money you have. Jonah Lehrer of Wired’s The Frontal Cortex blog explains:
Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)
Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.
But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. [...]
The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.
At first site these amazing hills on the island of Bohol look as if Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompas have upped sticks and relocated. However, although local people have their own legends as to the presence of the conical shaped hills, reality is somewhat different.
The limestone of the hills is actually called karst. This topography is caused when layers of bedrock made up of a soluble substance such as dolomite or in this case limestone. The landscape has been slowly eroded through a process called solvation. The hills are that which is left behind.
Quick: what do you know about the famous science fiction author 
, you’ve got to read this.
to reveal 10 things you didn’t know about the writer. For example:
What do you get when you add Borat to the world of video games? Meet Keith Apicary, a "game-loving man-child" (played by alter ego/comic actor 
“Locksport” is an emerging form of competitive lockpicking. Participants strive to open locks that they’ve never seen before as quickly as they can:
Amanda Greene of Woman’s Day found fifteen odd perks offered to guests for free at different hotels. At the Heatherman Hotel in Kirkland, WA, for example, guests receive a mattress menu:
Are those lolcat pranksters at it again? There can’t be no other explanation for this, folks:
When his son entered high school in Warner Robins, Georgia, little did pastor Donald Crosby know that he would soon be involved in fighting Satan himself, in the form of the high school’s mascot:
Gen Y Neatoramanauts probably don’t know what this is, but the rest of us could chuckle in nostalgia at these retro 
Have you ever been told that the reason giraffes have such long neck is that they evolved to eat leaves on tall trees? Well, you’ve been lied to. The real reason (surprise, surprise) is sex and mating:
Are you unhappy? Maybe it’s because of all that money you have. Jonah Lehrer of Wired’s The Frontal Cortex blog explains:
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