Neatorama

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• Steampunk Tra(i)nsformer
• Meet the Beatles Covers
• Little Black Dress Apron
• Psychological Study: Old People Enjoy Hearing about Young People Being Stupid
• The Web's Points of Control
• Lying on a Bed of Lion
• Neatorama Update: September 2010
• Does Language Shape the Way You Think?
• Golfer Swings, Hits Rock, Starts 12-Acre Fire
• Teenager's Car Totaled One Hour After Driving Test
• F-22 Double Rainbow
• The Mysterious Madara Rider
• Jersey Circus
• Beer Facts from Around the World
• Cylon iMac Helmet
• Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy 4
• Bullets Shooting through Drops of Water
• The Seventh Annual World Testicle Cooking Championship

Steampunk Tra(i)nsformer Posted: 02 Sep 2010 05:19 AM PDT The Encline Designs team has created this cool steampunk model of Optimus Prime, the Autobot leader in the Transformers universe, which transforms from robot to steam train. The model features functional lights and wheels that roll, and a detachable trailer that Optimus uses as a secondary weapon, similar to the trailer in his well-known firetruck mode. Link

Meet the Beatles Covers Posted: 02 Sep 2010 05:04 AM PDT HELP! For the HELP! photo shoot, photographer Robert Freeman warmed up by shooting publicity stills of the band playing around in the Austrian snow. In the process, he realized that their arm motions reminded him of semaphore, a system of emergency naval communications using waving flags. Because the album title was conveniently four characters long, the photographer had each member of the group spell out a letter using the code. However, Freeman found that the arm motions for H-E-L-P were much less aesthetically pleasing than the positions for N-U-J-V, so he decided to use those letters instead. SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND The Beatles spared no expense for this 1967 cover, shelling out more than $60,000 to produce, arrange, and shoot dozens of cutouts and images. Among the celebrities included on the album cover were Marilyn Monroe, boxing champ Sonny Liston, and wax models of the Beatles borrowed from Madame Tussaud’s collection. They even commissioned images of Jesus, Hitler, and Gandhi, but decided to leave them out for fear of offending fans. THE BEATLES After the circus that was the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the Beatles wanted to simplify things for their next record. The following year, they collaborated with pop artist Richard Hamilton to create what’s now known as The White Album-a completely white surface embossed with the Beatles stamp. To add a layer of irony, Hamilton suggested that each copy be individually numbered, even though it was hardly a limited edition. (At least 600,000 U.K. copies were numbered.) McCartney remembers that Lennon grabbed No. 0000001. Typical. ABBEY ROAD The iconic crosswalk scene was shot in just minutes outside the Beatles’ recording studio in 1969. The cover is a darling of conspiracy theorists, who claim that Paul McCartney died prior to the shoot and that he was replaced by a look-alike. Supposedly, the band dropped clues on the cover by dressing up as a funeral procession.: Lennon in white as the preacher, Starr in black as the undertaker, Harrison in jeans as the gravedigger, and McCartney shoeless, with the wrong foot forward, as the corpse. However, the person who’s truly out of step in the photo isn’t Paul McCartney but Paul Cole, a visiting Floridian who was captured in the background. Cole didn’t find out about the picture until months later, when his wife brought the album home from the store. __________________________ The above article is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Little Black Dress Apron Posted: 01 Sep 2010 10:12 PM PDT Little Black Dress Apron – $29.95 Every woman needs a little black dress. With this Little Black Dress Apron from the NeatoShop, you can look chic and stylish, even when you’re washing the dishes or slaving over a hot stove in the kitchen: Link | More Fun and Unusual Aprons | Fun Kitchen Stuff

Psychological Study: Old People Enjoy Hearing about Young People Being Stupid Posted: 01 Sep 2010 07:05 PM PDT Researchers in Germany examined what news stories older people like to read. They found that grandma and grandpa tend to prefer stories that cast younger people in a negative light: “Living in a youth centered culture, they may appreciate a boost in self-esteem. That’s why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society,” said Dr. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, of Ohio State University.[...] All the adults in the study were shown what they were led to believe was a test version of a new online news magazine. They were also given a limited time to look over either a negative and positive version of 10 pre-selected articles. Each story was also paired with a photograph depicting someone of either the younger or the older age group. The researchers found that older people were more likely to choose to read negative articles about those younger than themselves Link via Slashdot | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user little sourire used under Creative Commons license

The Web's Points of Control Posted: 01 Sep 2010 06:26 PM PDT This year’s Web 2.0 Summit, a conference for web bigwigs, has a pretty neat topic: Points of Control, The Battle for the Network Economy. What got my attention was the nifty presentation of various segments of the Internet as a battlefield map. One could envision a smoke-filled backroom where Internet honchos (I’m looking at you, Ben Huh) play the Net like a game of Risk: Link – via John Battele’s Searchblog

Lying on a Bed of Lion Posted: 01 Sep 2010 05:13 PM PDT Photo: Renegade Pictures From Nat Geo Wild’s new TV series Lion Ranger: Trouble in the Pride, comes this photo of self-taught animal behaviorist Kevin Richardson lying on a bed of lion. Or would you prefer catnapping on big cats? Sorry, can’t resist that. It’s been a long day. Perhaps you can do better? Thanks Minjae!

Neatorama Update: September 2010 Posted: 01 Sep 2010 03:08 PM PDT Hello Neatoramanauts! I'm sure you've been noticing a lot of changes on the blog recently so I'd like to take a moment to update you all about what's happening: New Layout Neatorama and NeatoBambino got new layouts, with cool footer art by one of our favorite artists, Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. Check out the bottom part of the blog for larger versions. The Best of Neatorama You'd probably be surprised to learn that we have an archive of more than 900 featured articles, including syndicated content from mental_floss and Bathroom Readers. Now, there's an easy way to browse these articles chronologically at the Best of Neatorama. Farewell to NeatoGeek In a short period of time, NeatoGeek has become one of my favorite things about Neatorama (where else could you read about The Value of Enterprise in the Star Trek Canon?), thanks mostly to John Farrier's hard work, so it was a very difficult decision for me to discontinue the sub-blog. Ultimately, the reason came down to cost. Discontinuation of the Upcoming Queue We're also saying goodbye to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. While the UQ was the source of many neat and interesting posts, it took quite a bit of manpower to combat spammers. On Starting New Projects In a few short years, the blogosphere has changed a lot. When we first started in 2005, there were a lot of indie bloggers in the Technorati Top 100. Now, most of them are corporate-backed blogs and Neatorama is but one of a handful large indie bloggers still around. So we have to be creative and nimble: we helped develop an infrastructure to create sub-blogs within WordPress (WP-Hive by John Sessford), created a crowdsourced blog post submission process (the Upcoming Queue), and started an online store (the NeatoShop). Undoubtedly, some of these won't work - but that should not and will not stop us from trying new things. NeatoHub Talking about new projects, the NeatoHub is one I'm very excited about. It's a very similar concept to web rings (remember those from the early days of the web?) - basically, it's a way for bloggers to get exposure to a wider audience by joining a network of bloggers that display each other's best posts to viewers of the entire network through widgets like you see at the footer of this blog. The NeatoHub is only a few weeks old, but it has already a significant traffic drivers for its members. The Hub is in private beta right now, but if you're interested in learning more about it (or noticed something's not working right with the new layout), please feel free to email me.

Does Language Shape the Way You Think? Posted: 01 Sep 2010 12:12 PM PDT In the New York Times, Guy Deutscher has a lengthy article about the speculations of some linguists that the language that we first learn strongly shapes and limits how we think. One interesting example that he cites is an Australian aboriginal language that has no personal spatial descriptors, such as the English phrases “to my right” or “behind me”. Instead, it uses cardinal directions in everyday conversation: But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply "natural." In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn't make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like "left" or "right," "in front of" or "behind," to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they'll say "move a bit to the east." To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they'll say, "I left it on the southern edge of the western table." Or they would warn you to "look out for that big ant just north of your foot." Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was "coming northward." Link via Popehat | Photo by Flickr user psd used under Creative Commons license

Golfer Swings, Hits Rock, Starts 12-Acre Fire Posted: 01 Sep 2010 11:55 AM PDT A man at the Shady Canyon Golf Club in Irvine, California hit a rock with his club, sparking a fire that required the labors of 150 firefighters to extinguish. Orange County Fire Authority Captain Greg McKeown said: “Usually, we’re able to close out the fire season in the winters here,” McKeown added, “but we haven’t been able to do that since 2006. That’s just how dry it is out there.” McKeown said no charges have been filed against the golfer, whose name has been withheld. Apparently, he was trying to hit his ball out of the rough when he struck the rock, which sparked the blaze at 12:07 p.m. Saturday, officials said. Link via Geekosystem | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user chispita_666 used under Creative Commons license

Teenager's Car Totaled One Hour After Driving Test Posted: 01 Sep 2010 09:16 AM PDT Charlotte Carrington of Sawston, Cambridgeshire, England took her driver’s license test test for the third time and passed. The 19-year-old’s car was totaled within an hour. The kicker is -she wasn’t driving it! The car was parked on the road in front of her home. “I heard a bang and I looked out and the lamppost was lying on the floor but it had snapped in half. It had slid down the side of my car. “It damaged the back of the roof and it smashed a window and scratched the frame.” She said the grass cutter, an employee of firm CGM (Commercial Grounds Maintenance and Garden Services for Norfolk Suffolk and Cambridgeshire), had driven into the lamppost causing it to fall. Miss Carrington, a student, said the car, which is 11-years-old, had just passed its MOT, adding: “I bought it myself out of my savings. “I was really angry. We had to ring the number on the lamppost as wires were hanging out and it was still sparking.” Insurance will cover the cost of the car, which was worth less than the repair bill. Link -via Arbroath

F-22 Double Rainbow Posted: 01 Sep 2010 08:55 AM PDT Skill, timing, and the sun came together in this air show photograph by Bernardo Malfitano An F-22 at Miramar at the top of a loop. He is pulling so many Gs, the low pressure air over the fuselage (that is “sucking” the airplane into the loop) gets cold enough for the water to condense… And the angle is just right for sunlight to undergo total internal refraction and make rainbow colors around the airplane (although I had to under-expose quite a bit for the effect to be visible). The picture won second place in the Museum of Flight photo contest. Link -via reddit (Image credit: Bernardo Malfitano)

The Mysterious Madara Rider Posted: 01 Sep 2010 08:02 AM PDT The Madara Rider is an 23-meter tall relief sculpture carved into a vertical face of a rocky plateau in Bulgaria. It shows a mounted knight, probably representing a Bulgarian Emperor, attacking a lion. The origin of the sculpture is uncertain, but it’s thought to date back to the 8th Century AD, when the power of the First Bulgarian Empire was increasing: Including the inscription in Medieval Greek, the rider covers close to 1400 square feet on a vertical 328 foot cliff face. The horseman is depicted in a hunting scene, spearing a lion. The lion is being trampled by the horse and a dog is trailing behind the rider. The Greek inscriptions tell the history of the Bulgarian state and the three Khans including Tervel, Krum and Omurtag. Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Amos Chapple

Jersey Circus Posted: 01 Sep 2010 07:35 AM PDT Jersey Circus is a parody of the reality TV show Jersey Shore and the cartoon The Family Circus. It places quotations from the show’s actors into the mouths of the cartoon’s characters. In the above cartoon, Snooki speaks for the young boy Jeffy. Link via Urlesque Previously: Scott Meets Family Circus The Nietzsche Family Circus

Beer Facts from Around the World Posted: 01 Sep 2010 06:31 AM PDT Yes, there are some countries in which the consumption of beer, along with other alcoholic beverages, is prohibited. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is brewing, selling, and imbibing the ancient drink. Mesopotamia: Beer dates back to at least 4,000 BC. The earliest Sumerian writings mention it. The earliest recorded recipe for brewing beer found so far is from the ancient Babylonians. It is thought that the drink arose independently in several locations during the switch from hunting and gathering to agricultural communities, as stored crops fermented naturally and produced alcohol. New Zealand: Beer was unknown in New Zealand until introduced by Europeans in the 1800s. The first beer brewed on the island was made from an indigenous evergreen tree and was intended as a cure for scurvy. Captain Cook brewed it himself in 1770, and it worked. Mongolia: In the 2010 World Beverage Competition, the top beer prize went to the United States. However, Mongolia won both a gold medal and a silver medal for Fusion Beer and Borgio, both brewed by the Mongolian beverage company APU. Peru: When drinking beer with a group in Peru, one person buys a bottle, pours a glass, passes the bottle on to the next person, drinks it, pours the dregs on the floor, then passes the glass to the next person, who repeats the process. The last person to get a drink from the bottle usually buys the next bottle. Sometimes shenanigans result as some try their best to avoid taking the last drink! Ireland: In 1756, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on a building in Dublin that has been producing beer ever since. Guinness, still run by Arthur’s descendants, is now produced in more than forty countries. South Africa: Umqombothi is an ancient South African beer made from corn and sorghum. It is also the title of a song about beer sung by South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka, that was featured in the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda. Czech Republic: According to global statistics for 2004 (the most recent year available), the Czech Republic leads the world in per capita beer consumption. Over 156 liters per year are consumed per person in that country. That’s 41.5 gallons for every man, woman, and child! Australia: All the large breweries in Australia are owned by only three companies. The one most familiar to Americans is Foster’s, which is brewed mainly for export and isn’t all that popular in its home country! China: The biggest beer market in the world is China, which consumes more beer than any other nation. However, that doesn’t mean the Chinese are big beer drinkers; only that there are more people in China than anywhere else. Beer companies are trying to take advantage of that market by making beer a popular social drink instead of “something you only drink to get drunk.” Denmark: In April of 2010, workers at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen went on strike to protest new rules limiting their workday beer consumption to lunchtime only. The strike ended a few days later when management promised to meet with the union. USA: The US state with the highest per capita beer consumption is Nevada, at 44 gallons a year per person. However, you can imagine a lot of that is consumed by tourists. The next highest state is New Hampshire at 43 gallons per person per year. Germany: The beer brewed in German homes for thousands of years was ale, until about 500 years ago when lager became popular. There is no written evidence of the earliest beer, but a Bavarian grave dating to about 800 BC contained beer made from bread. When the Roman Empire invaded Europe, soldiers found the residents of what would become Germany were already mass-producing beer. (Image credit: Flickr user Eli Duke) Antarctica: The McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica has three bars, although only one, Gallagher's Pub, serves beer year-round. In December, as new supplies come in, old or spoiled beer is destroyed by driving nails into the cans. There are competitions to see who is the best nail-driver!

Cylon iMac Helmet Posted: 01 Sep 2010 06:03 AM PDT (Video Link) YouTube user Frensleven took an old iMac G4 and turned it into a helmet resembling a Cylon head. Presumably the implication is that Steve Jobs wishes to exterminate the human race. via technabob | Previously: Cylon Birthday Cake with Functional Eye

Mal and Chad's Fill in the Bubble Frenzy 4 Posted: 01 Sep 2010 06:02 AM PDT Every week, y’all get mighty creative on us for the Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Fill in the empty speech bubble and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you'd like with your submission in the comments. If you don’t specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Enter as many times as you like (text only, please), but leave only one entry per comment. Even if you have no idea what he’s saying, check out the other entries! Also check out Mal and Chad's comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com.

Bullets Shooting through Drops of Water Posted: 01 Sep 2010 05:52 AM PDT Photographer Alexander Augusteijn captured several images of bullets hitting falling drops of water. Here’s how he does it: These kind of images require a lot of experimentation, dedication, patience and willingness to endlessly clean spill of liquids and debris from objects shot to pieces. Several hundreds of trial shots may be needed to get timing correct. After that, the process is pretty well controlled, and often half of the shots will be usable, with 1 out of 10 really interesting. You can view several more examples at the link. Link via Make | Artist’s Website

The Seventh Annual World Testicle Cooking Championship Posted: 01 Sep 2010 05:23 AM PDT Ozrem, Serbia hosted an international culinary competition in which chefs prepared the testicles of many different animals in creative ways: The food — politely called “white kidneys” in Serbian — is believed to be rich in testosterone. In the Balkans, it is considered to help men’s libido. “The bulls’ testicles are the best, goulash style,” said last year’s winner Zoltan Levai, stirring a metal pot heated by a wood fire and filled with vegetables and large testicles that he said were provided from a state-run slaughter house. The festival — which includes dishes like testicle pizza and testicles in bechamel sauce flavored with a variety of herbs found in the region. Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Photo (unrelated) of Texas calf fries by Flickr user austrini used under Creative Commons license Previously: Cooking with Balls

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