Neatorama

Yes or No?
Don't Swim After Lunch, Animated Clip by Jens Blank
How the Post Office Deciphers Bad Handwriting
House-in-a-House Concept for New Homes
Tiny Worlds Inside Altoids Tins
Hubble Space Telescope Sees a Gravitationally Lensed Quasar
Lady Gaga Autographs Urinal, Urinal Now on Sale for $460,000
Kiss and Peel Vegetable Peeler
Welcome to Kitty City

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 08:08 PM PST

Well, depends on your point of view, of course. This clever sculpture, aptly called "Yes-No," is made by sculptor and conceptual artist Markus Raetz. Via Look-E-Here

Don't Swim After Lunch, Animated Clip by Jens Blank

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 06:06 PM PST

This one is marvelous: watch this short 3D animation by Jens Blank called Don't Swim After Lunch, about the fantastic things that pop up on the kitchen table.

I'd love to see that expanded into a longer movie! Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] - via LikeCOOL

How the Post Office Deciphers Bad Handwriting

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 04:07 PM PST

Neither snow nor rain nor bad handwriting will stop the post office from delivering mail. But how exactly does the postal service deal with bad handwriting?

With humans. Lots of them.

Barry Newman of the Wall Street Journal tell us what happened to the letters whose addresses are deemed indecipherable by the post office's automated sorting machines:

Computers have since learned to see words in scrawls and squiggles the way voice-recognition software hears them in hemming and hawing. The Postal Service says their reading score today is 95%.

What's left over is the handwriting from hell. It pours into just two remaining RECs—here and in Wichita, Kan. Their 1,900 clerks cope with machine-unreadable mail from the whole country. Last year, that included 714,085,866 chicken-scratch first-class letters.

In late afternoon, when volume peaks at the Salt Lake center, a blinking panel showed 67,000 letters awaiting attention—from San Juan, Paducah, Los Angeles, Kokomo. A clerk wearing a headset had hit a patch of pen-pal letters from pupils in Memphis. She was decrypting them at a rate of 800 per hour, down from the desired 1,100.

"We ought to teach kids how to address letters," said Bruce Rhoades, a manager looking over her shoulder. His boss, Karen Heath, stood watching beside him and sighed, "A lost art."

Link (Photo: Barry Newman/The Wall Street Journal)

House-in-a-House Concept for New Homes

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 02:05 PM PST

Just in time for the boomerang kids and aging parents, homebuilder Lennar is unveiling a new concept for Baby Boomers looking to buy a new house: a house-within-a-house.

Alejandro Lazo of the Los Angeles Times explains:

Like a Russian nesting doll with a smaller doll inside, the new residential design incorporates a smaller home with a separate front entrance, kitchenette, bathroom and bedroom.

Lennar designers and researchers and an independent architect developed the floor plans this year to respond to the doubling-up trend that has affected more than 1 in 5 U.S. households. Executives with the Miami-based home building titan hope the atypical designs will appeal to families moving in together and pooling financial resources; the idea is to draw them back into the beleaguered market for newly constructed homes, which is on course for its worst annual performance on record.

It's like a duplex as a new house! Would you buy a new house designed specifically so the kids will come back to live with you?

Link (Photo: Robert Gauthier/LA Times)

Tiny Worlds Inside Altoids Tins

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 12:57 PM PST

The overarching theme of artist Jim Doran is to “put ideas inside of other objects.” In keeping with this motif, he illustrates tiny pen and ink scenes and layers them inside storage tins. This one, which has seven layers, is called “Muse Ut Vos Postulo Suus.” That means “A Muse When You Need Her.” Need inspiration? Reach inside your pocket.

Artist’s Website -via Bit Rebels

Hubble Space Telescope Sees a Gravitationally Lensed Quasar

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 12:01 PM PST

Photo: NASA, ESA and J.A. Muñoz (University of Valencia)

You're looking at a picture of a quasar that's beeing sucked into a black hole, taken by the Hubble Space telescope. ESA's Hubble Space Telescope page explains:

While black holes themselves are invisible, the forces they unleash cause some of the brightest phenomena in the Universe. Quasars — short for quasi-stellar objects — are glowing discs of matter that orbit supermassive black holes, heating up and emitting extremely bright radiation as they do so.

“A quasar accretion disc has a typical size of a few light-days, or around 100 billion kilometres across, but they lie billions of light-years away. This means their apparent size when viewed from Earth is so small that we will probably never have a telescope powerful enough to see their structure directly,” explains Jose Muñoz, the lead scientist in this study.

Until now, the minute apparent size of quasars has meant that most of our knowledge of their inner structure has been based on theoretical extrapolations, rather than direct observations.

The team therefore used an innovative method to study the quasar: using the stars in an intervening galaxy as a scanning microscope to probe features in the quasar’s disc that would otherwise be far too small to see. As these stars move across the light from the quasar, gravitational effects amplify the light from different parts of the quasar, giving detailed colour information for a line that crosses through the accretion disc.

Link - via Forbes

Lady Gaga Autographs Urinal, Urinal Now on Sale for $460,000

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 08:19 AM PST

It was an ordinary urinal, but now it’s extraordinary:

The man toilet was used in a Gaga photo shoot for Vogue Homme in Japan, though it's highly doubtful the pop star actually used it. The Lady donated the urinal to showstudio.com, a fashion website that is trying to hock it for just under half a million dollars.

She’s a reasonably talented performer, but I think that it was premature to grant Lady Gaga a peerage. Perhaps she should have received only a knighthood, as in the case of Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Flickr user Peter Cruise

Kiss and Peel Vegetable Peeler

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 06:29 AM PST

Kiss and Peel Vegetable Peeler – $11.95

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Is it time to put a little sex appeal back in your cooking? You need the adorable lipstick shaped Kiss and Peel Vegetable Peeler from the NeatoShop. The lipstick cap doubles as an extra-long handle.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fun Kitchen Gadgets.

Link

Welcome to Kitty City

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 04:19 AM PST

(YouTube link)