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2013/02/25

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Dog Bites Woman Salt & Pepper Shakers

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

Dog Bites Woman Salt & Pepper Shakers

Whether you are making a delicious rump roast for dinner or a salad make sure that your table is dressed to impress with the Dog Bites Woman Salt & Pepper Shakers from the NeatoShop. This hilarious glazed ceramic salt and pepper shaker set is held together by magnets. Each shaker features beautiful hand painted details. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Salt & Pepper Shakers. 

Link

Death on the Mississippi

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

The following is an article from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Few people know about the Sultana, despite the fact that it suffered the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. For some reason, it is almost completely ignored by history books. Here's the tragic story.

HEADING HOME


The Civil War was finally over. It was April 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered; Abraham Lincoln had been shot; and Confederate president Jefferson Davis had been captured. After four years of bloodshed, the war-torn nation was ready to start the process of healing and rebuilding. The first order of business was to get the weary troops home.

Captured Union soldiers were being released from Confederate prison camps. Thousands amassed along the Mississippi River seeking passage on one of the many steamships making their way upriver to the north.

One such riverboat was the Sultana, a state-of-the-art side-wheeler that had been built for transporting cotton. But now her cargo was people. By law, she was allowed to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85, and the ship's captain and owner, J.C. Mason, had a reputation as a careful river pilot. But in the end, the money he stood to make from the Union government for transporting extra troops was too tempting to pass up: $5 for each enlisted man and $10 per officer.

A SETUP FOR DISASTER

The Sultana left New Orleans on April 21 carrying a small number of passengers, about 100, and headed north. Each time she stopped, though, the ship took on more troops. The men who boarded were weak, tired, and homesick. After spending months or even years in brutal prison camps, the only thing they wanted to do was get back to their families.

On April 24, the Sultana made her regular stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to take on more passengers. Captain Mason docked the ship to find thousands of soldiers waiting there. Under normal circumstances, the ship would have made a brief stop, allowing the prescribed number of passengers to board, and then departed. But one of the ship's main steam boilers had sprung a leak and needed to be repaired.

First of all, Captain Mason made the decision to have a piece of metal welded over the leak to reinforce it (which took less than a day) instead of having the boiler replaced (which would have taken three days). While the boiler was being prepared, the waiting soldiers did everything they could to muscle their way onto the ship. Bribes were paid, and more and more men packed on. When the repairs were completed, Mason was eager to get underway, so he broke another rule. He let all of the passengers get on board before their names were logged in. Result: the ship was overloaded and no one on shore had a complete or accurate copy of the passenger list.

When an Army officer raised his concerns, Mason assured him that the Sultana was a competent vessel that could more than carry the load. "Take good care of those men, " the officer told him. "They are deserving of it."

THE MIGHTY MISS

Four years of war had been hard on the series of levees and dikes that control the flow of the Mississippi River. The spring of 1865 saw heavy rains, which, combined with winter snowmelt, caused the river to rise to flood stage. By April it was several miles wide and the icy current was much stronger than usual.

But the Sultana was solid and Captain Mason an able river man. As the ship trudged slowly upriver, she made a few more scheduled stops, picking up even more men at each one. The huddled passengers filled every bit of space on the 260-foot-long vessel -the bottom hull, the lower decks, the cabins, the pilothouse, and the hurricane deck on top. Yet even though the soldiers were tired and packed in like sardines, their spirits were high. They sang songs, told war stories, and shared their plans for when they finally got home …unaware of the disaster to come.

On the cool night of April 26, 1865, the Sultana disembarked from Memphis around midnight, carrying an estimated 2,300 people -six times its capacity. There were only two lifeboats and 76 life preservers on board.

HELL AND HIGH WATER

At around 2AM, the overloaded Sultana had made it nine miles north of Memphis when her weakened boiler could take no more. It exploded. The other two boilers went in quick succession.



The tremendous blast split the ship in two. Burning hot coals shot out like bullets. The horrified passengers were jarred awake, some sent hurtling through the air into the icy water, others scalded by the tremendous blast of steam. Still others were trapped on the lower decks to either suffocate, burn, or drown. The men on the top decks had a choice -albeit a dismal one: stay and face the spreading flames or try to swim to shore, more than a mile away in either direction.

One survivor remembered, "The men who were afraid to take to the water could be seen clinging to the sides of the of the bow of the boat until they were singed off like flies." Other who had waited too long on the hurricane deck were crushed when the two large smokestacks collapsed on them. Others slid down into the hottest part of the fire when the burning deck gave away.

Shrieks and screams pierced the night, as did the crackling of flames and the booms of small explosions. But the loudest of all was the hissing sound as sections of the flaming steamboat sank into the water. Another survivor described it like this:

The whole heavens seemed to be lighted up by the conflagration. Hundreds of my comrades were fastened down by the timbers of the decks and had to burn while the water seemed to be one solid mass of human beings struggling with the waves.

What was left of the Sultana drifted downstream until finally banking on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi River. The ship's broken, burning body then slowly disappeared into the dark water.

DAWN OF THE DEAD

As first light rose on the river, the devastation was overwhelming. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were floating down the Mississippi. Dotted between the corpses were dazed survivors floating on makeshift rafts of driftwood and ship parts. Some sang marching songs to keep their spirits up. Others just floated silently among the carnage.

All the way to Memphis, men -alive and dead- were washing up on shore. Barges and other steamships were dispatched for search and rescue. At least 500 men were treated at Memphis hospitals; 200 of them died there. Because the passenger list went down with the ship, no one knows for sure how many lives were lost that night, but most estimates put the number around 1,700 -including captain Mason.

Sultana survivors at a reunion in 1920.



INTO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

So why is the Sultana disaster such an unknown part of U.S. history? Mostly because of timing. After the bloodiest war in U.S.history, the nation was largely desensitized to death. What was another 1,700 in the wake of hundreds of thousands of casualties? The newspapers were full of articles about the end of the war, a new presidency, and a nation rebuilding. On the day before the disaster, the last Confederate army had surrendered and John Wilkes Booth had been captured. The story of the sinking of the Sultana was relegated to the back pages.

Another reason for the minimal coverage was that it was an embarrassing story. A lot of people -from the ship's captain to the army officers in charge of boarding- had failed miserably at their jobs. The Army was not anxious to publicize such a horrible dereliction of duty.

But the fact remains that the explosion and sinking of the Sultana was -and still is- the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. Her bow is still lying on the muddy bottom of the Mississippi River as a sad memorial to the men who never made it home.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Risa Hirai's Edible Art

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 04:00 AM PST

This is a cookie. Yes, it's also a work of art. Risa Hirai is an artist who uses cookies as her medium. She is a senior at Tama Art University in Japan. Hirai's cookies will be on exhibit in March in Tokyo, but you can see a few of them at Spoon & Tamago. Link  -via Nag on the Lake  

Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Cup Stuffed Oreos

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 03:00 AM PST

oreos

Brooks made these sugary delights for a baby shower. First split an Oreo, add a peanut butter cup and reassemble the Oreo. Dip the entire thing in liquified chocolate, cool, then add sprinkles. My suggestion: add another Oreo layer, then dip it in chocolate again.

Link -via Foodbeast

National Newspaper Seeking Stories

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 02:00 AM PST

vA Daily Mail reporter went to a British parenting forum to dig up dirt for a story. Instead, she got schooled. The question:  

I am writing a feature for The Daily Mail about the increase in the number of children being sent to A&E. Figures released earlier this week show an increasing number of youngsters are sent direct to hospital, because GPs are reluctant to treat children. Babies in particular. This means long waits, and inappropriate care. Has your child been sent to A&E with a common infection or minor injury by your GP or NHS Direct? Have you an opinion on this subject, as a parent?

I gathered from reading this that A&E means a hospital. Anyway, the parents at Mumsnet who responded not only advocated sending children to a hospital if there are any doubts about a diagnosis, they also had plenty to say about the Daily Mail in general. Here's a sampling:

Sorry but even the way you have asked your question is skewed to make us think negatively of the NHS. How many lives have GPs saved by sending babies to A&E because they aren’t sure what to do? Happy to wait 6 hours if a little life is saved.

I'd much rather be sent with dd and it turns out to be nothing than a gp think its nothing and it turns out to be something bad. It isn't inappropriate care and no parent would begrudge a long wait to be seen and ensure their childs health.

How does sending a baby to a&e result in 'inappropriate care'???

All these stories of GPs sending babies to A&E and saving their lives. Is that what you are looking for Zoe?

Do your parents know you work for the Daily Mail?

Have you an opinion on this subject, as a parent?
Yes. Please stop bashing the NHS.

Those were only in the first couple of hours. The thread was passed around on Twitter and eventually blew up to over 300 comments. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

Circular Beam of Electrons

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 01:00 AM PST


Beam of electrons moving in a circle, due to the presence of a magnetic field. Purple light is emitted along the electron path, due to the electrons colliding with gas molecules in the bulb.
(Photo: Marcin Bialek)

Oh, how I love you guys. In our recent post A Fiery Dance on the Sun, Neatoramanaut PlasmaGryphon kindly took the time to explain to us the physics behind solar flares. In the explanation, there was a link to Wikipedia article on Lorentz force, where I found this fascinating image of a circular beam of electrons in a Teltron tube. Neat, huh? (Thanks PlasmaGryphon!)

Star Wars Baby Mobile

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 12:00 AM PST

Andrea Burnett makes Star Wars-themed crib mobiles and sells them through her Etsy store Sheep Creek Needlecraft. They are each custom-made, with your choice of elements like different spaceships from the films, a Death Star, and planets. This is perfect for getting your geek baby off to a stellar start! Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

Elemental Silver Surfer

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 11:00 PM PST


Elemental Silver Surfer

W00t! I'm happy to announce that we've got a set of new and neat Funny T-Shirts from graphic artist extraordinaire Pablo "Wirdou" Bustos over at the NeatoShop. I love the Periodic Table-inspired Elemental Silver Surfer above. Check out the rest (and yes, they're available in sizes up to 6XL):


Become a Scientist

View more of Wirdou's T-shirts over at the NeatoShop: Link | Funny T-Shirts | Science T-Shirts, then visit his website for more awesome designs.

Wobble Head Bunny Pen

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:00 PM PST

Wobble Head Bunny Pen

Has work sucked all the life out of you? Do you feel that the best years are behind you? Nonsense! Reclaim your misspent youth with the Wobble Head Bunny Pen from the NeatoShop. Things can be fun and functional. You may have mounds of mind-numbingly dull work to do, but by golly you can still do it with style.    

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Office & Desk stuff. 

Link

In the Mountains of Fraggle Rock

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:00 PM PST

Fraggle Rock

Fraggle Rock

The company will need help to get to Moria. Sign on a hobbit? No, they'll need professionals. Licia, a skilled painter who specializes in popular television and movies, imagined an alternate version of The Hobbit.

Artist's Gallery -via Ian Brooks

Australia in 1872

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 09:00 PM PST

v

Bernhardt Otto Holtermann hired photographers to document Australia during its gold rush days. That photographic collection has been digitized by the New South Wales State Library, where you can browse them. A selection of these photographs have been paired with the same places as they appear now, which you can see and compare at the Herald Sun. Link -via Metafilter

Netflix for the Library: Hiring a Personal Librarian

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:00 PM PST

reference desk

Jeff O'Neal writes:

True story: I bribed a librarian (after a brief conversation about my general reading interests) to constantly stick new/interesting things in my hold queue. Best. Thing. Ever. It’s like Netflix for the library, now!

He's talking about what librarians call readers' advisory. In a readers' advisory reference interview, the librarian asks questions about the patron's reading tastes and suggests books to read based upon the patron's answers.

But O'Neal's librarian went even further. S/he automatically adds relevant reading materials to his hold queue without being specifically requested to do so. Kim Ukura thinks this is a great idea that could be expanded:

I am in love with this idea. How fun would it be to task a well-read person to develop a personally curated queue of books that will arrive for you to borrow intermittently, at no charge, based on what is new or exciting that seems to fit with your general reading tastes? It sounds almost too good to be true!

Most readers already find ways to build their own “librarian” for recommendations, finding friends or bloggers or book reviewers who seem to have similar tastes then seeking out their recommendations. But that system still has an element of choice — this Frankenstein’s monster of a librarian may cobble together a list of books that seem interesting, but you as the reader still end up making the choice of what to buy/borrow/bypass.

Having a real-life personal librarian could be so much better. Once the relationship was built, and with enough feedback about which books were interesting and which books fell flat, you could almost guarantee that your personal librarian would pick out some things that would be of interest to you. And since it’s a queue of library books, the decision about whether to spend money on an unfamiliar book is eliminated, making the barrier to trying something new really low.

Link -via @brainpicker | Photo: radical.librarian

POLL: Would you find this kind of readers' advisory service helpful?

  • Yes, because it would save me time.
  • No, I'd rather look on my own.

Kayla Loves the Moon

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 07:00 PM PST

(YouTube link)

Little Kayla is very excited about seeing the moon, but she can't reach it! -via Viral Viral Videos

Bed Bath & Beyond's Stack of Towels is a DAMNED LIE!

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 06:00 PM PST

How does Bed Bath & Beyond manage to stack their towels so perfectly? The answer is, they don't. It's all lies. LIES!

Via Neatorama's Facebook Page

I Wear a Fez Now. Fezzes Are Cool.

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 05:00 PM PST

Fez

Fezzes are cool. Some people doubt it, but they are wrong. Especially if you have a fez that travels through time and space, such as this one made by Coregeek and his daughter. And yes, the lantern on top lights up.

Link -via Technabob

Two Body Interactions: A Longitudinal Study

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 04:00 PM PST

Physicist A presents a research paper to physicist B. The paper had not been peer-reviewed nor had it been published (at that time), and the results have not yet been replicated, but you can be sure that will happen sooner or later. If you can't read the entire page above, you can enlarge it at the link. But you can see that physicist B (identity redacted) checked the "yes" box, meaning she accepted his proposal. We wish both physicists many years of happiness. Link -via reddit

Sun Wall Clock

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 03:00 PM PST

Sun Wall Clock

Spring is almost here. Are you looking for a quick way to heat up your home decor. Behold the Sun Wall Clock from the NeatoShop. This stunning wall clock is about 4.6 billion years in the making and features an actual graphic of the sun with solar flares. Make it the center piece of your room design. It is a great way to bring life to a cold boring room. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Clocks & Timers. 

Link

Seals Use Their Whiskers to Judge Size

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 03:00 PM PST

How big is that thing? Seals let their whiskers do the calculatin'.

Robyn Grant of University of Rostock in Germany wanted to know how seals can judge the size of an object using their whiskers, but first she had to figure out how to put eyemasks and headphones on seals to restrict their other senses:

[Grant] explained that these whiskers acted as a "higher-resolution sampling space", meaning that the seals could gather lots of information from one spot without moving all of their whiskers.

"They can press [their muzzle] on [the object] and by the number of whiskers it contacts, they can work out whether it's a bigger or smaller thing."

This brushing technique allows the seals to gauge their prey in water where visibility is often poor.

Ella Davies of BBC Nature has the post: Link

Doomed: a Biological Cartoon

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:00 PM PST

(vimeo link)

An increasingly frustrated narrator leads us through a nature documentary about useless animal species such as the cube fish and the inverted hedgehog that have no chance to survive or flourish because their evolutionary adaptations are just plain senseless. -via Daily of the Day

Bees Can See the Electric Field of Flowers

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 01:00 PM PST

Flowers are pretty and colorful to you and me, but to a bee, they're downright electrifying. You see, bees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower:

Dominic Clarke and Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol have shown that bumblebees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower. They can even learn to distinguish between fields produced by different floral shapes, or use them to work out whether a flower has been recently visited by other bees. Flowers aren’t just visual spectacles and smelly beacons. They’re also electric billboards.

Learn how a flower's electric field is actually also useful for bees as it tells them whether other bees have visited it before. Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science explains: Link

Nuclear Explosions as Units of Measurement

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 12:00 PM PST

nuclear

UPDATE 2/24/12: Commenter Chew Bird notes that some scientists commenting at The Atlantic and Wellestein's own blog strongly disagree with him. They argue that a nuclear detonation is a reasonable measurement of energy output.

------------------------------------

Last week, a meteor exploded over Russia with, according to some press descriptions "the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs." These were references to the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945. Atomic historian Alex Wellerstein says that the analogy makes little sense:

"In general," he added, "What I don't like is ... the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it's equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion." [...]

But nuclear weapons deliver more than just sheer force; there's also incredible heat, orders of magnitude hotter than a meteor's explosion, (most of the people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wellerstein says, died of fire), and, of course, the radiation. The radiation brings sickness, makes land uninhabitable in the long term, and can have residual genetic effects that long outlast the bomb's immediate destruction. "It's sort of the sum of these effects that we think of when we think of what's the problem with nuclear weapons," he says. To only think of an atomic weapon in terms of the kilotons of energy released glosses over the totality of the terror these bombs bring.

It's one thing to use an atomic explosion as a unit for describing a meteor's explosion -- the two are similar in that much of their energy is released as a blast wave -- but the comparison is even worse when applied to other sorts of disasters, Wellerstein contends. "My least favorite is when this sort of thing is applied to literally non-explosive phenomena: tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes. These are sometimes talked about in terms of their energy release. And you can always quantify an energy release -- you can just do the conversion to nuclear units and say, 'Oh my God look how much energy this is!' But, you know: An earthquake is a very different release of energy; a tsunami is a very different release of energy. The effects are just not comparable. They're nothing like nuclear weapons."

Link | Photo: US Department of Energy

Tree Roots as Art

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 11:00 AM PST

The canopy of trees usually get all the attention, but to artist Giuseppe Licari, the roots are equally interesting. In the Tent Rotterdam 2012 installation called Humus, the Sicilian artist featured the roots of trees as the main characters. Visual News has more pics: Link (Photo: Job Janssen & Jan Adriaans)

The Civil War, Now in Living Color

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:00 AM PST

v

The Civil War was the first American war to be documented on film, but those photographs are in black and white. John C. Guntzelman wants to change our perception of those scenes with his book The Civil War in Color: A Photographic Reenactment of the War Between the States, featuring dozens of photographed meticulously colored in Photoshop. Guntzelman talks about how he did it, and why he did it.

The purpose of this is to show that people 150 years ago were not very different from us today. It will hopefully bring forth an era that’s only two long lifetimes ago. This is 150 years not 1,500 years. It was just as colorful then. People were just as real then. I hope that people will look at these photographs and get a more realistic feeling of what happened at that time.

Smithsonian has more on the book, plus an interactive feature that lets you switch back and forth and compare several images in their original black and white and color versions. Link

(Image credit: Prints & Photographs, Library of Congress)

Bubbles Popping in Super Slow Motion

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 09:00 AM PST


(Video Link)

A bubble doesn't appear to pop instantly when you view it at 18,000 frames per second. The Slow Mo Guys used their Phanton v1610 camera to capture these dazzling moments. What would you like to see them shoot in super slow motion next?

-via It's Okay to Be Smart

Sesame Street Crew Socks

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST

Sesame Street Crew Socks

Life has its ups and downs. Some days you feel like Bert and some days you feel like Ernie. For those roller coaster days you need the Sesame Street Crew Socks from the NeatoShop. This great set comes with 2 pairs of socks. One pair features Bert. Another pair features Ernie.

Are you feeling really wild and crazy? Be daring and wear one Bert and one Ernie sock. People will be impressed by your willingness to express your complex personality.  

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Footwear and fantastic Sesame Street items. 

Link

Dolphins Have Names

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST

They may not call each other "Flipper," but dolphins do have names. A new study by biologist Stephanie King of Scotland's University of St. Andrews and colleagues revealed that dolphins call each other by their names:

... King and Janik’s team analyzed recordings made over several decades by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, a Florida-based monitoring project in which pairs of dolphins are captured and held in separate nets for a few hours as researchers photograph and study them.

During the captures, the dolphins can’t see each other, but can hear each other and continue to communicate. In their analysis, King and Janik showed that some of the communications are copies of captured compatriots’ signature whistles — and, crucially, that the dolphins most likely to make these were mothers and calves or closely allied males.

They seemed to be using the whistles to keep in touch with the dolphins they knew best, just as two friends might if suddenly and unexpectedly separated while walking down a street. Moreover, copying wasn’t exact, but involved modulations at the beginning and end of each call, perhaps allowing dolphins to communicate additional information, such as the copier’s own identity.

Brandon Keim of Wired has the story: Link

Razzie Award Winners

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 07:00 AM PST

vThe 33rd annual Golden Raspberry Awards (affectionately known as the Razzies) were bestowed last night, to honor the worst Hollywood films and actors of the previous year. The Razzie ceremony is traditionally the night before the Oscars. The big winner this year was Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2. It was nominated for 11 razzes (in ten categories) and took home seven.

The finale to the blockbuster supernatural romance dominated the Razzies with seven awards, including worst actress for Kristen Stewart, supporting actor for Taylor Lautner, director for Bill Condon and worst screen couple for Lautner and child co-star Mackenzie Foy.

Adam Sandler was named worst actor for the raunchy comedy “That’s My Boy,” his second-straight win after 2011’s “Jack and Jill,” which swept all 10 Razzie categories a year ago. Pop singer Rihanna won worst supporting actress for the action dud “Battleship.”

Razzies founder John Wilson has a theory that instead of 40 million people seeing the Twilight movies, it's 8 million girls each watching them five times. Link

Star Wars Family Tree

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 06:00 AM PST

We know that Luke and Leia has got Daddy problem in Star Wars, the space soap opera we all know and love, but have you ever wondered about their family tree? Matt Baker of Chart Geek has got you covered.

View the original at Chart Geek (and then tell me, who's Darth Vader's daddy?): Link - via GeekTyrant
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