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2011/10/29

Neatorama

Neatorama


Ducklings on a Water Slide

Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:52 AM PDT


(YouTube link)

It must be fun; they keeping climbing up for more! These ducks were recorded at the Cabarrus County Fair in North Carolina. -via Arbroath

Clever Camera

Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:51 AM PDT

WVIL is the name of a cool concept that the Artefact Group has come up with. It’s a camera that features a touchscreen that works pretty much like the iPhone.

The patent-pending WVIL system takes the connectivity and application platform capabilities of today’s smart phones and wirelessly connects them with interchangeable full SLR-quality optics. It is the inevitable solution for photographers who expect the power of modern mobile devices but who also demand uncompromised quality.

Link via GigaOM

Great Pictures From The 2011 Blizzcon

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 09:02 PM PDT

If you missed the 2011 Blizzcon, but are a huge fan of WOW and other Blizzard games, you won’t want to miss Geeks Are Sexy’s wonderful collection of the greatest costumes from the event. Some of the outfits are seriously impressive.

Link

The Anatomy of a Pumpkin

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:59 PM PDT

Who knew jack-o-lanterns had such stunning skulls inside. They must be pretty fragile because I never see them while carving my pumpkins.

Link Via BuzzFeed

50 Breakfasts From Around The World

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:56 PM PDT

In America, we love cereal and eggs and bacon, but every other country has their own classic breakfast and while some seem a little strange, others, like this English breakfast look utterly delicious. Learn what 50 other places eat for breakfast over at the link.

Link

14 Sexy Costumes That Shouldn't Exist

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:53 PM PDT

BuzzFeed has a great collection of “sexy” costumes that make no sense. I actually think the one above is kind of cute, but it’s still idiotic to have a sexy version of Edward Scissorhands.

Link

10 Adorable Japanese School Buses

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:49 PM PDT

School buses in America are so boring, but in Japan, it’s a whole different story. InventorSpot has a collection of 10 different buses from the country and I have to say, they are precious.

Link

Inception Animals

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:22 PM PDT

YouTuber MrSexyFoo specializes in a specific type of animal videos: dramatic animals in Inception, set to Zack Hemsey's iconic soundtrack.

The ending is as mind-boggling as the film! Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via I Heart Chaos

See previously on Neatorama: 19 Things You Didn't Know About Inception

Virtual Costume

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:39 PM PDT


Let’s state upfront that redditor adriannezy is brilliant. She wanted to participate in Halloween at work, but not wear a costume that got in the way. So she generated a QR code that, when scanned, reveals a picture of herself in a classic Star Trek uniform. She writes, “I’ve had groups of guys holding phones up to my chest all day. It’s been awkward.”

Link -via Super Punch

Steampunk Pumpkin

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 06:21 PM PDT

Thomas Willeford of Brute Force Studios has released a guide on how to make your very own steampunk pumpkin for Halloween: Link [PDF] - via GeekDad

How Woodpeckers Peck Wood without Hurting Themselves

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:59 PM PDT

If you routinely and repeatedly bang your head against the wall in the vain hope that doing so will alter reality, then you should know that it’s not as safe as when a woodpecker does it. How can these birds hammer away like they do without suffering brain injuries? Scientists think that they have the answer:

The birds have little “sub-dural space” between their brains and their skulls, so the brain does not have room to bump around as it does in humans. Also, their brains are longer top-to-bottom than front-to-back, meaning the force against the skull is spread over a larger brain area.

Close examination of the birds’ movements permitted researchers to create a computer simulation. It revealed that:

Firstly, the hyoid bone’s looping structure around the whole skull was found to act as a “safety belt”, especially after the initial impact.

The team also found that the upper and lower halves of the birds’ beaks were uneven, and as force was transmitted from the tip of the beak into the bone, this asymmetry lowered the load that made it as far as the brain.

Lastly, plate-like bones with a “spongy” structure at different points in the skull helped distribute the incoming force, thereby protecting the brain.

Link -via Nerdcore | Photo: Flickr user texas_mustang

Propane Tank Jack-o'-Lanterns

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:41 PM PDT

Before you take a cutting torch to your own propane tank, make sure that it’s complete empty of fuel. Or just leave the work up to Scott Krichau, who made this and other jack-o’-lanterns from empty tanks.

Link -via Dude Craft | Artist’s Website | Photo: Skull-A-Day

Live-Action Pac-Man Game

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:29 PM PDT


(Video Link)

It is the duty of all parents to teach their children those essential life skills that are passed down from generation to generation. Fine work, Nathan Glemboski. Someday your son will thank you.

-via Kotaku

Huge Portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. Made from 4,242 Rubik's Cubes

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:15 PM PDT

It may look like a painting from a distance, but Pete Fecteau’s mosaic is actually more than four thousand carefully arranged Rubik’s Cubes. His appropriately named “Dream Big” project took a year to complete, but it looks like that was time well-spent.

Link -via DVICE | Photo: Paul L. Newby II

Baby Wookiee Is Adorable and Creepy

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:02 PM PDT

Well, the good news is that this isn’t one of those dolls that pees. Although “I changed Chewbacca’s diaper” would make a great t-shirt, it’s probably not a good experience.

eBay seller eyelovelucy makes realistic (as in semi-human looking) Han, Leia, Luke, and Chewy dolls. You need them to round out your action figure collection.

Link -via Technabob | Previously: Baby Chewbacca

Cloud Shadow of Mt. Rainier

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 04:20 PM PDT


Photo: Nick Lippert

Take a look at this: a phenomenal sunrise of Mt. Rainier in Washington state, where the volcano actually casts a sky shadow on the clouds!

From Seattle's Komo News:

Mt. Rainier has quite a few tricks up its sleeve for adding additional beauty to the Pacific Northwest, from the majestic snow-capped peaks, to the mysterious lenticular cloud displays.

But another trick it pulls off during the fall and winter is to cast a big shadow on a brilliant sunrise.

It only happens when the sun rises farther to the south as we head toward the winter solstice and has to be in the exact position to where Rainier blocks the first rays of morning light.


Link
– via Bad
Astronomy

Real Life Imitates The Simpsons: Three-Eyed Fish Caught Near Nuclear Plant

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 02:19 PM PDT


Images: (L) Gentileza Diario Uno/Infobae (R) Simpsons Wiki

A group of fishermen in Cordoba caught a mutant fish off a lake near a nuclear power plant that looked like it came straight out of The Simpsons. Folks, meet the real life equivalent of Blinky, the three-eyed fish:

"We were fishing and we got the surprise of getting this rare specimen. As it was dark at that time we did not notice, but then you looked at him with a flashlight and saw that he had a third eye," said Julian Zmutt, one of the fishermen.

Link [Google Translate] - via Geekosystem

Hello Kitty Mustache Coin Bag

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 12:49 PM PDT

Hello Kitty Mustache Coin Bag – $16.95

There used to be a time when mustaches were only worn by the manliest of men. Not any more. Mustaches are now sported by the cutest of cats. Behold the adorable Hello Kitty Mustache Coin Bag from the NeatoShop.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Hello Kitty and Mustache fun!

Link

Necco Fans Prefer Their Candy Artificially Enhanced

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 12:17 PM PDT

Natural schmnatural! Bring back the yummy goodness of artificial ingredients!

You'd think that most people would prefer their favorite food to be made from natural ingredients, but not Necco Wafers fans. When the company changed their recipe to use natural flavors and colors, the fans clamored for the return of the original, artificially enhanced candy:

Perhaps the problem for Necco, which was founded in 1847, is that, chemicals and all, many people do recognize Necco Wafers as food.

"A stronger part of our customer base is probably an older demographic," Green says. "And that's the part of it that we alienated."

He says that the all-natural shift prompted people to send stories about using the wafers to practice for communion wafers, or poker chips — even, reportedly, to fool tollbooths in Chicago.

"People were reminding us of what they grew up with," he says.

And maybe that's part of the reason people like eating them — to trigger old memories, and to eat a candy that promises neither to be a "brain food" nor an answer to life's problems. It's just a little candy wafer that's sweet, and unnaturally attractive.

NPR has the story: Link

Smashing Pumpkins in Slow Motion

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 09:54 AM PDT


(YouTube link)

What could be more Halloweeny than flying pumpkin guts and creepy music? Film by Devin Graham with original music by Stephen Anderson. -via Buzzfeed

The Wizard, The Power Glove, and Children in Peril

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 09:49 AM PDT

The Wizard was a 1989 movie that was entirely made of product placement, mainly for Ninento’s Power Glove. I have never heard of this film that was catnip for kids (it’s about video games!), but it sounds like the most bizarre mishmash ever. It involves a road trip across the country for three runaways, one who has escaped from a mental institution, in which no police are involved and the people they meet don’t find anything odd about unaccompanied minors.

The trek to California is accomplished primarily by gambling — a series of double-your-money hustles instigated by the queerly parentless Haley. We actually get to see Haley's trailer home at one point, though her father (a trucker) is on the road. In addition to video game-related hustles, the trio end up at one point in an actual casino, wherein Haley's skill at craps allows an adult ("Spankey," a mentally challenged "trucker friend" of her father's, played by Frank McRae) to win hundreds. It's later revealed that Haley's deceased mother had a gambling problem, which apparently led to Haley's hustling skills. Corey's mother is also dead. And Jimmy's sister/Corey's half-sister? She's dead, too. What?! Never mind that now. We have to get to California.

The climax involves a video game tournament, so you can guess the ending. It doesn’t make any sense, either. Read more about how a favorite movie from a writer’s childhood becomes completely nonsensical when he watches it again as an adult. Link

Time Twister

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:59 AM PDT


(YouTube link)

I haven’t spent this much time watching a clock move in …a long time. Hans Andersson, who gave the Rubik’s Cube-solving robot, built this clock called the Time Twister.

Time Twister consists of two LEGO Mindstorms bricks communicating via Bluetooth. The master brick keeps track of the time and handles the minute digits. The slave brick handles the hour digits and the second indicator.

Read more about it at the Tilted Twister site. Link -via Laughing Squid

Alternate Alternative Fuel for Robots of the Future

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:25 AM PDT

In what seems like the perfect solution to everything (or an episode of What Could Possibly Go Wrong?!), a pair of prototypes hint at a future in which robots eat bugs for fuel. Forget charging batteries or docking in your very own R2D2 — these autonomous, self-feeding droids could easily run along happily without us. The secret lies in two developments, both of which mimic the Venus flytrap’s prey-catching method:

Recreating this method means finding materials that can not only detect the presence of an insect but also close on it quickly. At Seoul National University in South Korea, Seung-Won Kim and colleagues have done this using shape memory materials. These switch between two stable shapes when subjected to force, heat or an electric current.

The team used two different materials – a clamshell-shaped piece of carbon fibre that acts as the leaves, connected by a shape-memory metal spring. The weight of an insect on the spring makes it contract sharply, pulling the leaves together and enveloping the prey. Opening the trap once more is just a matter of applying a current to the spring.

Mohsen Shahinpoor at the University of Maine in Orono took a different approach. His robot flytrap uses artificial muscles made of polymer membranes coated with gold electrodes. A current travelling through the membrane makes it bend in one direction – and when the polarity is reversed it moves the other way.

Bending the material also produces a voltage, which Shahinpoor has utilised to create sensors. When a bug lands, the tiny voltage it generates triggers a larger power source to apply opposite charges to the leaves, making them attract one another and closing the trap (Bioinspiration and BiomimeticsDOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/6/4/046004).

“We should be able to benefit enormously from these flytrap technologies,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK. He and colleagues previously developed Ecobot, a robot that can digest insects, food scraps and sewage to power itself. Ecobot uses bacteria to break down a fly’s exoskeleton in a reaction that liberates electrons into a circuit, generating electricity.

It’s an interesting premise, the bug-eating robot. I’d personally never thought of feeding a machine anything other than electricity (or sunlight for the solar-powered variety).

If you built a robot, which fuel source would you design it to run on?

Link

Adventures in Depression

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:04 AM PDT

Allie Brosh is back at Hyperbole and a Half after six months with what is believed to be an explanation for her absence. Her post is an honest and illustrated account of what it’s like to experience depression. In the comments, many others corroborate her experience. Link

Cinderella, Cinderella

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:47 AM PDT

If you are interested in the global folk tale we know as Cinderella, and you have a lot of time on your hands this weekend, you might want to check out a mega-post at Metafilter. From the original Chinese version in which a king becomes obsessed with a tiny bound-foot slipper to modern feminist interpretations, there are links for anything and everything to do with Cinderella, including books, film, poetry, opera, advertising, variations, and literary criticism. Link

(Image credit: DeviantART member TwilightxGirl)

Five Minutes

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:44 AM PDT


(YouTube link)

Relax, the video is only a few seconds long. Five minutes is the subject matter. A reporter covers a building demolition, but failed to synchronize his watch. -via The Daily What

13 Horror Movies and the 'True Stories' They're Based On

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:42 AM PDT

Some of the most over-the-top horror films are based on real-life stories, though you wouldn’t know it to watch them. For example, the story in The Exorcist was based on the exorcism of a 12-year-old boy named Robbie Mannheim.

According to the attending priest, the boy attempted to contact his late aunt using an Ouija board, after which paranormal activity started in the home including unexplained noises and an occurrence of a poltergeist-like event involving blankets flying around of their own accord. Robbie then began to show signs of possession, speaking in tongues and blisters and cuts appearing. He was taken to a mental institute in St. Louis where he was treated both mentally and spiritually. It was here that a group of priests started to perform various exorcising rituals to try and extract the demon. After a staggering total of 30 attempts, the priests were satisfied that they had successfully banished the demon from Robbie’s body.

After the ceremony he went on to have a very normal life, including a successful career at NASA. If my mother only knew that demon possession could lead to working for NASA, I’m positive that she would have made me play with Ouji boards every night.

Each of the 13 horror stories has a video clip from the film, and many have documentary clips from the stories that inspired them. Link

The Grand Wizards of Elementary School

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 05:19 AM PDT

How the KKK helped get children out of the factories and into the classroom.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan liked to think of themselves as white knights. And when it came to compulsory education for schoolchildren, believe  it or not, they actually were. To understand how this bizarre heroism came to pass, you have to go back to the 1820s, when about half the laborers in America’s cotton mils were children under the age of 15. Adults had a serious hankering to get those kids out of the workforce -not because they were concerned for their well-being but because adults resented the competition. After all, employers could get away with paying children much lower wages, and the little ones had energy to burn. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, vice president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, put the situation bluntly: “Wherever child labor prevails there is a corresponding decrease in employment for adults.”

In fact, getting rid of the kids was one of the first causes to unite the American label movement. When labor leaders realized they couldn’t just turn youngsters out in the streets to fend for themselves, they proposed a one-two punch of ending child labor laws and requiring school. Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law. In 1837, its state legislature barred factory owners from hiring anyone under age 15 who hadn’t attended public school for at least three months during the previous year. The law was ignored, and factory owners kept hiring kids anyway. Five years later, Massachusetts passed a second law, which went after factories more directly, limiting the amount of time children could work. When this law was ignored as well, the state made education compulsory in 1852.

By 1884, 16 states had instituted laws that forced children to go to school. Business owners, enamored with their short, low cost labor pool, denounced the status as “communist” and “un-American.” But the percentage of children in the workforce in cotton mills fell nonetheless; by 1890 it was just 10 percent. And not coincidentally, adult workers were awarded higher wages and better working conditions over the same period. From 1840 to 1880, average wages rose as much as 150 percent, while at the same time, the average workday fell from 13-14 hours to 10-11 hours.

At the turn of the century, labor unions lobbied for compulsory education nationwide, and they soon found an unexpected ally. The Ku Klux Klan supported the idea of public schools as a way of forcing immigrants to conform to white, Protestant culture. By 1918, labor unions had succeeded in getting compulsory education laws passed in every state. Two years later, a Catholic organization in Oregon demanded that the laws be amended to include private schools. The KKK took a more outspoken stance, and its membership grew quickly in support of the public school system.

But the fight wasn’t over -just because more kids were forced to go to school didn’t mean that they couldn’t work in factories. After all, there were always nights, weekends, and summer vacations, right? In 1923, a Klan newspaper warned that big business wanted to keep child labor legal to “secure a cheaper class of labor and hold the price paid to the American citizen down to a minimum at all times.” The Klan was nearing the apex of its size and clout, with more than 3 million members. Since a good portion of its ranks were poor whites, the Klan was more sympathetic to this group’s economic interests. It went on a full-throttle campaign to get kids out of the factories for good.

Around the same time that the national KKK began strongly advocating for a federal ban on child labor, a rift opened up between the Northern Klansmen and Southern industrialists. In the ensuing public relations battle, the industrialists tried to win points with Southern voters by portraying the debate over child labor as another fight against the Yankees. But the pull of the KKK was too great, and the Klan won a victory for children nationwide -well, white children. Southern business leaders agreed to child labor laws, but only as long as the adult minimum wage remained low and African-American children were prohibited from attending white public schools. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standard Act officially ended child labor, but it didn’t do much to help black kids living under Jim Crow. The result: White children across the country were guaranteed an education at the expense of black children in the South.

_______________________

The article above, written by Erik Sass, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

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