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2012/08/08

Neatorama

Neatorama

Criminal Mastermind Tries to Carjack US Marshals

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US Marshals sealA carjacker in Shreveport, Louisiana experienced a major failure in the victim selection process when he tried to take a car that was stopped at a red light. Inside were three US Marshals:

Authorities say when Carter realized he had just tried to carjack three officers, he started running, but was caught a short time later.

He was booked into jail for attempted carjacking.

"To us, it's kind of comical. It's the kind of thing a police officer almost wishes would happen to him so somebody in the general public doesn't become a victim," said Turner

Link -via MArooned

Antique Steam Shovel Still Going Strong

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This Erie Steam Shovel Type B was built in 1925. It's not ready to retire yet. Here it is moving dirt at the International Plowing Match in Teeswater, Ontario in 2008.

Link -via New Jovian Thunderbolt

Fishermen Catch 1,100 Pound Sturgeon on a Rod and Reel

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sturgeon

It's not uncommon for fishermen to catch 30 to 100 pound white sturgeon in British Columbia's Fraser River. But this one, caught on a rod and reel, weighed about 1,100 pounds and was more than 12 feet long. It may be over a hundred years old:

It could also be 35 years older than the angler, Michael Snell, 65, of Salisbury, England. Snell, who was fishing with his wife, Margaret, called the catch a fish of a lifetime.

"It is the most excitement I've ever had with a fish," said Snell, who took 1 1/2 hours to eventually land the fish along the shoreline. "It all happened so quickly. When we picked her head up out of the water, it was almost three-feet wide. I never knew a fish could be that large."

By comparison, the world-record swordfish is 1,182 pounds. The world record for a white sturgeon? It is 468 pounds taken in Benicia, Calif., according to the 2012 International Game Fish Association book of World Record Game Fishes.

The Snells and their professional guide took photos of the fish, tagged it and released it back into the river.

News Story and Video -via Neo-Neocon | Photo: Great River Fishing Adventures

Legal Ownership of Angel's Law Firm

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Wolfram & Hart

Wolfram & Hart is a demonic law firm on the TV show Angel. Angel, the vampire cursed with a soul, battles it for four seasons until, in a stunning move, the firm offers him leadership of is Los Angeles branch office.

Angel, it's worth noting, is not a lawyer. But he's in charge of a law firm. Is this legal? According to attorney James Daily, it probably is, but it's bad practice:

It’s possible that Angel could be paid an ordinary salary (profit-sharing with non-lawyers is another no-no under 5.4(a)) and not have an ownership stake in the firm. That would take care of subsection (1). And it’s possible that procedures could be put in place such that he would not have the right to direct or control the professional judgment of Wolfram & Hart’s lawyers. For example, his role could be limited to managing marketing, non-lawyer human resources, information technology, investments by the firm, etc, with no control over how the firm handles cases. That could possibly take care of (3). But (2) is a killer. It strictly forbids a non-lawyer from being a corporate director or officer (in a professional corporation) or having a similar position (in a non-corporation). The CEO is such a position.

But, all is not lost. These are only the model rules. What matters is California’s own rules. And as it turns out, California doesn’t have an equivalent of Model Rule 5.4(d). There is California Rule 1-310, which states that “A member shall not form a partnership with a person who is not a lawyer if any of the activities of that partnership consist of the practice of law.” But Angel isn’t forming a partnership with the lawyers of Wolfram & Hart. ”A partnership generally involves a joint ownership and can be evidenced by firm name, declarations of coownership, or sharing of profits.” Los Angeles County Bar Association Ethics Opinion No. 518 (citing Crawford v. State Bar, 54 Cal. 2d 659, 667 (1960)). As long as Angel does not share profits with the firm (i.e. is paid a fixed salary) or have any ownership interest in it, then it doesn’t appear to be a partnership.[...]

True to form, Wolfram & Hart seems to be on slightly ethically shaky but technically legal grounds. Although I don’t think this arrangement would work in many other states, it’s possible that it would work in California. If I were Wolfram & Hart I would probably ask the State Bar of California for an advisory opinion before I hired Angel, though.

Link | Photo: Warner Bros.

Dastardly Knights Rob French Renaissance Faire

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Some rather dark knights recently robbed the organizers of a French Renaissance Faire at swordpoint, taking away a $25,000 haul and a tale worthy of becoming a bard's song.

Here's how it transpired:

"There were apparently three to four members of the group, and they struck early on Monday morning. The organizers were counting revenue from the weekend faire in Bitche, near the France and Germany border. The faire, "Medievales Europeennes de Bitche," is a huge one and draws more than 11,000 attendees. The amount of money they had on hand doesn't surprise me at all.

Masks were unfortunately part of the thieves' knight costumes, but hopefully they'll be able to make arrests soon."

I guess the Ren Faire promoters are lucky the crooks weren't taking a note from Robin Hood's book, or else they'd be stuck full of arrows!

The <i>Hunger Games</i> Guide to Using the Library

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There's only one copy of The Art of War on reserve at the library. Which student will survive the training and the competition for that copy? In this outstanding orientation film, the librarians at Texas A&M University retell the story of The Hunger Games.

Video Link -via Library Journal

The Monkey Whisperer

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monkey

Do you have an unruly monkey? Lisa Whiteaker, a professional pet monkey trainer, can come to your rescue:

Whiteaker, 48, has been a monkey trainer since 1992, and her specialty is privately owned pets. She rehabilitates monkeys adopted by people with no primate experience—customers who, in her words, “saw The Hangover Part II and thought, ‘I want a monkey too!’” By her own estimate, she’s “fixed” 6,700 monkeys so far in her 20-year career, not just in the U.S.: She’s traveled from South Africa to Mexico to Panama to the United Kingdom, and she Skypes with hundreds of troubled monkeys and their owners every week. But getting an appointment to see her isn’t easy. “I’m completely booked until March or April of 2013,” she says.

 Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: donjd2

Man Tries to Sell Counterfeiting Machine at a Famous Pawn Shop

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moneyAmerican Jewelry and Loan in the famous Detroit pawn shop where the reality TV show Hardcore Pawn is shot. According to its flamboyant owner Les Gold, people travel enormous distances to visit it and possibly appear on the hit show. One customer took even more extreme measures. He tried to sell his counterfeit money and the machine that he used to make it:

So Gold didn’t bat an eyelash when Smith showed up and wanted to sell him his counterfeit money and machine. He wanted to be on the show. Smith told Gold he would bring his counterfeiting equipment to the store. A short time later the Secret Service showed up at American Jewelry and Loan. They had been tracing Smith's activities since he had been passing his fake bills.

Gold filled them in on what Smith had told him and the agents found out Smith's counterfeiting claims had been captured on camera for the show. [...]

 As Gold says, “All because he wanted his five minutes of fame on TV."

Smith actually signed a waiver to be on the TV show.

Link -via Lowering the Bar | Photo: Images of Money

Images Of People Stuck In Uncomfortable Positions

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Photographer and digital artist Lee Materazzi enjoys putting his subjects into uncomfortable positions via photo manipulation.

How they got there is a backstory you'll have to create for yourself...

Link  --via Beautiful/Decay

 

Amtrak's $16 Burger

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You can get $16 hamburgers at fancy restaurants, but it takes Big Government's Amtrak to sell hamburgers that cost that much AND incur a loss of $834 million over the past 10 years.

The secret? Amtrak sells microwaved burgers for $9.50, but pays out over $16 in food cost and labor:

Amtrak spent $1.70 for every dollar it earned on food and beverage sales last year, leading to a loss of $84.5 million on the service, according to information provided to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week.

Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) blasted the “inefficient and wasteful” record of the nation’s rail line, pointing out the substantial cost to taxpayers occurring with each transaction.

“Over the last 10 years, these losses have amounted to a staggering $833.8 million,” said Mica. “It costs passengers $9.50 to buy a cheeseburger on Amtrak, but the cost to taxpayers is $16.15. Riders pay $2 for a Pepsi, but each of these sodas costs the U.S. Treasury $3.40.”

Link

Celebrating Julia Child's 100th Birthday

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(YouTube link)

I used to do a great Julia Child impression on the radio, but now half the audience wouldn't recognize her voice. If you remember the delightful and entertaining French Chef, you'll enjoy this tribute Twin Cities Public Television created for the 100th anniversary of her birth on August 15th. -via mental_floss

The Brain of Hoarders

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Photo: Hoarders/A&E

You've probably watched A&E's series Hoarders, which feature homes of suffer from compulsive hoarding. It's a fascinating show, probably because we all can relate to being messy, but these people just take it to a whole 'nother level.

To find out how their brains are different, David Tolin of Yale University School of Medicine subjected hoarders to fMRI brain scans. He found something quite interesting: hoarders don't particularly love stuff, instead they're deathly anxious of making the wrong decision to throw things out, so they keep them all instead.

As Tolin and his co-authors noted, hoarders are not necessarily eager to keep everything they possess, but rather “the disorder is characterized by a marked avoidance of decision-making about possessions.” And the extra activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula while evaluating what to do with their own items “may hamper the decision-making process by leading to a greater sense of outcome uncertainty,” the researchers noted. In other words, hoarders might often feel that they are at risk of making a wrong decision—and that that decision could bring with it greater risk than it actually would. “The slower decision-making may be a central feature of impaired decision making in hoarding,” the researchers noted.

Katherine Harmon of Scientific American's Observations blog has more: Link

Community Memory: World's First BBS and ... Online Troll?

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Photo: Resource One Newsletter, Number 2, April 1974, via Mark Szapakowski

Community Memory, the first public computerized bulletin board system was installed in Berkeley, California, in 1973, at a record store. The terminal let users to post and search for messages.

The Community Memory project, created by Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski and Lee Felsenstein, was hosted by an obsolete XDS-940 timesharing computer in San Francisco. The computer was huge: Felsenstein remarked that it's about 24 feet long and required 23 tons of air conditioning. It had a total of 58 megabytes of disk space (at a cost of $20,000!)

The public terminal, a Teletype model 33, was located at the top of the stairs leading to Leopold's Records in Berkeley, next to a real paper bulletin board. The connection ran at 110 baud or 10 characters per second, using a modem that Felsenstein developed himself (and later commercialized as the Pennywhistle modem)

People used it to post classified ads and messages, including "cars for sale, rock bands looking for bass players, carpenters looking for jobs, groups offering counseling, tennis players looking for partners, political commentaries ..."

Mark Szpakowski wrote:

The teletype was noisy, so it was encased in a cardboard box, with a transparent plastic top so you could see what was being printed out, and holes for your hands so you could type. It made for some magic moments with the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" playing in the record store. Musicians loved it - they ended up generating a monthly printout of fusion rock bassists seeking raga lead guitars. And out of it also emerged the first net.personality - Benway, as he called himself.

Personality indeed! He's the net's first troll. Here's what this Doc Benway character (perhaps inspired by the character from William S. Burrough's 1959 novel Naked Lunch) wrote:

The Diamond Anvil

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The first diamond anvil cell at the NIST Museum, from The Diamond Anvil Pressure Cell [pdf] by Gasper J. Piermarini and Stanley Block

The Diamond Anvil is a simple lab device that scientists use to create pressures as great as those found at the center of the Earth. It's called that because it actually uses diamonds - one of the hardest substances known to man - to squeeze things at pressures as high as 300 gigapascals or 43,500,000 psi.

The principle behind the diamond anvil is quite simple: put something between the flat surfaces of two brilliant-cut diamonds in a contraption like the one shown in the left below, and then turn the screws to push the diamonds together. Whatever is placed between the diamonds is then pressurized. But don't get excited about the diamond: they're just about a third of a carat big.


(L) Cross section of a diamond anvil cell/Wikipedia (R) Scanning electron micrograph of the diamond anvil/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The very first Diamond Anvil Cell was handmade by Charles E. Weir in the late 1950s at the National Bureau of Standards. He used regular shop equipments like a lathe, drill press, hack saw, soldering gun, threading tools, files, and a high speed grinding wheel to polish down the diamonds to form the anvil faces. He got the diamond for free, from smuggled contraband diamonds confiscated by the government.

Source: The Diamond Anvil Pressure Cell [pdf] by Gasper Piermarini and Stanley Block.

aMAZEme: A Labyrinth of Books

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This brings a totally new meaning to being "lost in a book." Brazilian artist Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo created a temporary labyrinth art project called "aMAZEme" out of 250,000 used books at the London 2012 Festival. Afterwards, the books will be donated to Oxfam.

Check out the time lapse "making of" YouTube video clip above and more pics below:


Photo via My Modern Met


Photo: Dominic Lipinski/AP via El Mundo


Photo via Informe Digital


Photo via Informe Digital

Kitty Cam Reveals Cat's Secret World of Slaughter

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The world of free-roaming house cat has been a mystery to humans until University of Georgia researcher Kerrie Anne Loyd outfitted cats with "kitty cams." She found out that behind the cute meows lie a secret world of slaughter:

Based on a U.S. house-cat population of 74 million, "cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American birds species are in decline," says George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy.

"The previous estimates were probably too conservative because they didn't include the animals that cats ate or left behind," University of Georgia researcher Kerrie Anne Loyd says.
The cats brought home just under a quarter of what they killed, ate 30% and left 49% to rot where they died.

The carnage cuts across species. Lizards, snakes and frogs made up 41% of the animals killed, Loyd and fellow researcher Sonia Hernandez found. Mammals such as chipmunks and voles were 25%, insects and worms 20% and birds 12%. The researchers will present their findings this week at an Ecological Society of America conference in Portland, Ore.

Elizabeth Weise of USA Today has the story: Link | Kitty Cam official website

With A Piece of Chalk

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Hopscotch ain't what it used to be anymore, folks! Check out this kid's moves in this wonderful short film by JuBaFilms starring Justen Beer.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Serenity Made from 70,000 LEGO

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Image: brickfrenzy/Flickr

This one is for all you Browncoats out there. Adrian Drake of Brickfrenzy created a 7-foot long Serenity spaceship from the sci-fi series Firefly out of 70,000 LEGO bricks. It took him over 475 hours to build over a span of 21 months. The highly detailed ship has full interior from the bridge to the cargo bay (I wonder if it has all the hidden compartments of a Firefly-class ship).

More photos:

Custom minifig artwork by Matt de Lanoy with sourcing by EJ Bocan.

Check out Adrian's Serenity Flickrset (77 photos!) and his AMA thread at Reddit - via The Brothers Brick

The Warsaw Basilisk

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The ancient legendary creature called the basilisk was feared in Europe and North Africa. It was a combination snake,rooster, bat, and sometimes other animals, that was born from an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad. And it was so venomous, birds flying over it would die! Pliny the Elder wrote about it, and accounts from the Middle Ages blamed basilisks for plague outbreaks and murders. Once a rooster was caught trying to lay an egg, and was convicted and executed for his unnatural act. But the most famous incident is the Warsaw basilisk hunt of 1587, which is a the best-documented of all the basilisk hunts. It started when two children and a maid fell down dead in a cellar.

Many people thought the air felt unusually thick to breathe and suspected that a basilisk was hiding in the cellar. Confronted with this deadly threat to the city of Warsaw, the senate was called into an emergency meeting. An old man named Benedictus, a former chief physician to the king, was consulted, since he was known to possess much knowledge about various arcane subjects. The bodies were pulled out of the cellar with long poles that had iron hooks at the end, and Benedictus examined them closely. They presented a horrid appearance, being swollen like drums and with much-discoloured skin; the eyes “protruded from the sockets like the halves of hen’s eggs.” Benedictus, who had seen many things during his fifty years as a physician, at once pronounced the state of the corpses an infallible sign that they had been poisoned by a basilisk. When asked by the desperate senators how such a formidable beast could be destroyed, the knowledgeable old physician recommended that a man descend into the cellar to seize the basilisk with a rake and bring it out into the light. To protect his own life, this man had to wear a dress of leather, furnished with a covering of mirrors, facing in all directions.

Benedictus did not, however, volunteer to try out this plan himself.

Read the rest of the fascinating story at Past Imperfect blog. Link -via Monkeyfilter

21 Links Between Unexpectedly Shared TV Universes

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Detective MunchIt's almost as if the writers worked on different TV shows, or knew each other, or something. You know they do, but a lot of small things go unnoticed until you read about them. But you probably noticed that detective John Munch has popped up in a lot of different TV series.

Richard Belzer’s sarcastic, conspiracy-loving Sergeant John Munch is the unlikely common thread among some of television’s most beloved series. The crossovers began with Munch—who began his TV career working as a detective on the David Simon-based Homicide: Life On The Street—making appearances on Law & Order, where not only is it revealed that the casts work the same universal beat, but Munch also discovers that he and Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe even shared a woman. After Homicide ended its run, Munch transitioned fully into Law & Order: SVU—though not seamlessly: Munch’s birthplace changed from Baltimore to New York and regulars from Homicide appeared as other, unrelated characters in SVU. The Munchiverse was stretched further when he popped up in Simon’s The Wire—a connection that raises questions like, “If Homicide’s Baltimore police were assisting Law & Order cops, were the Law And Order units also dealing with New York’s connections to the Baltimore drug trade of Marlo Stanfield et al.?”

Munch also was seen in The X-Files, Arrested Development, and was even mentioned on a UK series. And he's just one of the list of 21 at The A.V. Club. Link

Previously:Tommy Westphall's Mind

Little Bottles

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I must admit some guilt in this scenario, but the upstairs bathroom our three teenage daughters use is even worse! This Twaggie was illustrated by Dave Collier from a Tweet by 1BigMick. See a new illustrated Tweet every day at Twaggies! Link

Counting Song

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(YouTube link)

Adam Buxton wrote a song about the joy of counting that soon turns into something not quite so joyful. Despite appearances, this is not for children. Video directed by Cyriak Harris, illustrated by Sarah Brown. -via Laughing Squid

A Marine’s Return to Ballet

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Roman Baca became a ballet dancer after high school. Since male dancers are in the minority, he found plenty of work, but not the full-time position he hoped for. So Baca joined the Marines and was sent to patrol Fallujah, Iraq, in 2005. When he returned, he couldn't find satisfaction in a desk job.

My then-girlfriend, now my wife, sat me down and challenged me to make a change: “If you could do anything, what would you do?”

I wanted to be part of a dance company.

So I choreographed a duet for two women in the neo-classical style, and sent it to competitions for feedback. It was rejected, but I wasn’t surprised. I felt like I was forcing creativity instead of creating something that I cared about. So I turned the duet into a four-movement work called Habibi Hhaloua (Arabic for my beautiful, you have my eyes) about a Marine on patrol, and sent it out.

Over time, Baca developed a program to combine dance with veteran's services.

We started performing in festivals and showcases in and around New York City and within a few months we had a name and a mission, Exit12 Dance Company, an organization to advocate and educate through performance on behalf of a new generation of veterans.

He now holds workshops for veterans and schoolchildren in both the U.S. and Iraq. Read more about Baca and his mission at The Daily Beast. There's a dance video included. Link

Ned Kelly's Bones

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Ned KellyThe remains of Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly have been identified and will be returned to his family, 132 years later. Kelly was executed by hanging in 1880, then buried in a mass grave. Remains of many prison inmates were moved in 1929, and then exhumed in 2009. DNA testing identified Kelly's bones, but the skull is still missing.

Property developers of the site had hoped to retain possession of Kelly’s remains to display in a museum, but Australia’s Victoria state government on Wednesday issued a new license for the bones, which instead returned them to his family. “The Kelly family will now make arrangements for Ned’s final burial,” Ellen Hollow, the great-great granddaughter of the outlaw’s sister said in a statement. “We also appeal to the person who has the skull in their possession to return it… so that when the time comes for Ned to be laid to rest his remains can be complete.”

Link

How A Slush Machine Works

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(YouTube link)

How are liquid slushes served at temperatures below freezing? It's the magic of physics! -via The Daily What Geek

Literary Javascript

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Twitter developeshakespearer and book nerd Angus Croll wondered what famous authors would do with javascript. His gives examples from his imagination for four great writers: Ernest Hemingway, Andre Breton, Roberto Bolano, and William Shakespeare. Here's how the Bard might write code:

function theSeriesOfFIBONACCI(theSize) {

  //a CALCKULATION in two acts.
  //employ'ng the humourous logick of JAVA-SCRIPTE

  //Dramatis Personae
  var theResult; //an ARRAY to contain THE NUMBERS
  var theCounter; //a NUMBER, serv'nt to the FOR LOOP

  //ACT I: in which a ZERO is added for INITIATION

  //[ENTER: theResult]

  //Upon the noble list bestow a zero
  var theResult = [0];

That's just Act One. See Act Two and the other authors at Fat XXX. Link -via Metafilter

New World Record Skydive

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(YouTube link)

The skies over Ottawa, Illinois saw 138 skydivers set a new world record this past weekend as they linked up in a snowflake formation. Months of planning and 15 attempts resulted in the stunt you can see in this video. The previous record for an aerial formation like this was 108 skydivers. These daredevils, jumping from six different planes, came from countries all over the world to participate. Link

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