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- World's Greatest Athlete Chugs 4 Beers While Running a Mile in under 5 Minutes
- The Japanese Superhero Show That Became <i>Power Rangers</i>
- This Cool Bed Shows the Layers of the Earth
- Unexpected Ballet
- This Nutella Donut Milkshake Is the Only Food You Will Need for the Rest of Your Life
- Colonel Hadfield Sings About Space
- Tube Map of Roman London
- Bran's Modern Life - Who Needs A Hodor When You've Got A Heffer?
- A Spider Web as Long as a Football Field
- This Umbrella Teaches Women Self-Defense
- The 2016 Presidential Candidates Are Peddling Some Crappy Merch
- This Little Dog Is Determined to Keep the Balloon from Touching the Ground
- Incredibly Cool Crashed Star Destroyer LEGO Diorama
- The Rescue Swimming Dogs of the Italian Coast Guard
- Husband Surprises Wife with Pregnancy Announcement
- 31 Amazing Marvel Tattoos
- The 50 Most Cringe-Worthy Moments In Comic Book Movie History
- These Tauntaun Cookies Have Candy Guts Inside
- The Humans Vs. The Plague (The History League) - Flea Circus Halftime Show
- Max Gets a Drink
- Video Essay Explains The DIfference Between Good And Bad CG Visual Effects
- Could an Old-School Tube Amp Make the Music You Love Sound Better?
- What If Werner Herzog Directed Ant-Man?
- How Ernö Rubik Created the Rubik's Cube
| World's Greatest Athlete Chugs 4 Beers While Running a Mile in under 5 Minutes Posted: 08 Aug 2015 04:00 AM PDT It is the world's purest, most elemental sport. It is an event that, more than any other, connects with the human experience. This is the Beer Mile. The participant runs a full mile while pausing to drink a 12-ounce beer every quarter mile. Only athletic titans can even attempt this feat. And Josh Harris, a 25-year old Australian, is their new king. He recently ran the Beer Mile in 4 minutes and 46.2 seconds. The official Beer Mile organization has recognized Harris as the new world champion. You can watch his run in the video below: Harris's run is truly inspiring. I will immediately begin intensive training for this event. Well, half of it. -via Jonah Goldberg  | ||||||||
| The Japanese Superhero Show That Became <i>Power Rangers</i> Posted: 08 Aug 2015 02:00 AM PDT The franchise we know as Power Rangers debuted on American television in 1993 with the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, but the concept was already old hat to Japanese TV audiences. The characters in the picture above are Zyurangers from the 1992-93 show Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, one of the many Super Sentai Series shows that had been airing since 1975 in Japan. It was this show that became the American Power Rangers, thanks to a genius money-saving trick. Haim Saban of Saban Entertainment approached the Japanese producers about buying Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, but only the action sequences! This allowed Saban to essentially eject the vast majority of Zyuranger’s plot, and develop a vastly different story to slot the action sequences into. Originally, Zyuranger was not about modern-day people becoming superheroes, as many Super Sentai shows were. Rather, it was about a group of Humans who came from an ancient civilization that existed during the time of the dinosaurs 170 million years ago. The 5 heroes—Boi, Mei, Dan, Goushi, and Geki—were placed in suspended animation following the sealing away of their evil rival, the witch Bandora, only to reawaken in ‘90s Japan, following Bandora’s escape. Each hero represented one of 5 prehistoric “Guardian Beasts”, and they invoked their powers to summon giant robot dinosaurs and battle Bandora’s alien forces from a planet named Nemesis. All that was dropped, and a team of California teenagers was inserted in the non-action sequences with a modern story. Who woudl know the difference, with the actors underneath masks? That led to some oddities, like the yellow Power Ranger being male in Japan and female in America. Read the entire story, including the connection between the Super Sentai Series and Spider-Man, at io9. -via the Presurfer | ||||||||
| This Cool Bed Shows the Layers of the Earth Posted: 08 Aug 2015 12:00 AM PDT You're not ready for a dirt nap, but you're ready for a good night's rest in a warm bed. And what could be warmer than being deep inside the Earth, ever closer to the core. This bedding set sold by the Land of Nod shows the layers of the Earth, from the core up to the crust and even the stars above. It comes with throw pillows that look like a shovel and an erupting volcano. -via Nerd Approved | ||||||||
| Posted: 07 Aug 2015 11:00 PM PDT A pair of New York street dancers prepare to tumble and breakdance for the crowd at Washington Square Park. But when they turn the music on, instead of hip-hop, the strains of Tchaikovsky’s "Sleeping Beauty Waltz" came out! What to do? There was nothing to do but dance! It soon became clear that these guys knew what they were doing. They are professional ballet dancers, as were the two women they pulled out of the crowd to dance with. This is the latest stunt from Improv Everywhere, which they performed several times for the changing crowds that afternoon. Read the details of the caper at their website. A good time was had by all. -via Buzzfeed | ||||||||
| This Nutella Donut Milkshake Is the Only Food You Will Need for the Rest of Your Life Posted: 07 Aug 2015 10:00 PM PDT
Something strange and wonderful is happening in Australia. A few weeks ago, the justifiably named "Freakshow" milkshakes surfaced in Canberra. Now the outbreak has spread to Sydney. Foodcraft Espresso and Bakery is offering what it calls the Tella Ball Shake. It consists of ice cream, milk, chocolate syrup, and an enormous donut filled with Nutella. You drink it by ramming a sturdy straw through the donut into the ice cream. Mashable reports that Tella Ball Shakes have consumed Sydney, no doubt while baker and inventor Aki Daikos cackles diabolically. As of this reporting time, we have been unable to make contact with Sydney. We can only recommend that people in surrounding communities to begin evacuating away from the city. -via That's Nerdalicious! | ||||||||
| Colonel Hadfield Sings About Space Posted: 07 Aug 2015 09:00 PM PDT We knew astronaut Chris Hadfield was a musician when we saw him sing “Space Oddity” on the ISS. Now he’s written a song called “Feet Up,” about his personal experience with the lack of gravity in space. It’s the first single from the album Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can, available for pre-order from iTunes. The entire album will be released October 9th. -via Digg | ||||||||
| Posted: 07 Aug 2015 08:00 PM PDT Your task is to make your way from the Cripplegate to the Shard. So ride the Fortifications Line until you get to Bishopsgate, then get out and walk south, turning at that weird blue box. Clear? If the ancient Romans who built London (then Londinium) had also built a subway line to match their roads, then a map of the network might look like this. You can find a larger version at The Londonist. -via Nag on the Lake | ||||||||
| Bran's Modern Life - Who Needs A Hodor When You've Got A Heffer? Posted: 07 Aug 2015 07:00 PM PDT Bran's Modern Life by Moysche Designs Bran's modern life was bleak and full of danger, but at least he had the behemoth Heffer to keep him company. Heffer couldn't say much more than his own name, but he was big and brutish and his strength kept the hungry lions at bay as they moved through Lannister land in search of a place to rest their weary bones. They came upon a barn guarded by a wolf dog named Spunky, who Bran took to calling Rocko on account of his rock hard head, and it seemed like life would be tolerable for Heifer and Bran, at least for tonight... Don't play games with your geeky wardrobe, bring home this Bran's Modern Life t-shirt by Moysche Designs and cast a spell on your fellow classic cartoon fans! Visit Moysche Designs's Facebook fan page, official website, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more fantastically geeky designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| A Spider Web as Long as a Football Field Posted: 07 Aug 2015 07:00 PM PDT A spider web in the north Dallas suburb of Lakeside Park passes from tree to tree and stretches about as long as a football field and up to 40 feet high. Can a spider really spin a web that size? No, but hundreds of spiders can, if they cooperate with each other.
The spider species has not yet been identified, but is believed to be similar to the Tetragnathus guatamalensis species that built a similar community web in Lake Tawakoni State Park, Texas, in 2007. They are not harmful to people, and experts say it’s best to just let them be. Alrighty then. -via Boing Boing (Image credit: Texas A&M/Mike Merchant) | ||||||||
| This Umbrella Teaches Women Self-Defense Posted: 07 Aug 2015 06:00 PM PDT
In recent decades in India, many men have moved from the countryside to large cities in order to find work. Their wives often remain at home on farms and in villages. Their husbands use wire transfer services, such as Vodafone's M-Pesa, to send money back home. The women walk into town to get the money. Criminals lie in wait for them and attack. In response to this problem, Vodafone asked the ad agency Oglivy Mumbai to design a self-defense tool. The result is this umbrella. It's not a sword cane, but a sturdy and otherwise ordinary umbrella. The key difference is that its segments contain pictographic representations of self-defense techniques. They show several ways the umbrella can can be used as a weapon. | ||||||||
| The 2016 Presidential Candidates Are Peddling Some Crappy Merch Posted: 07 Aug 2015 05:00 PM PDT As the 2016 presidential candidates prepare to hit America's highways in search of financial support for their campaigns we can expect to see the best and worst of every candidate come to light. But one of the campiest, cheesiest, and most ridiculous elements of presidential campaigning is the sale of candidate related merch, and the silly stuff they sell often becomes a collector's item because of the historical significance. 2016 promises to be a benchmark year in the world of presidential candidate related crap, because Hillary Clinton’s got her own Chillary Clinton can Koozie, Rand Paul’s selling signed copies of the Constitution for one large, and Jeb Bush is selling a cheap plastic Guaca Bowle for a mere $75 buckaroos. It’s a star spangled shopping bonanza! See The Best Worst Presidential Campaign Merchandise at Gizmodo | ||||||||
| This Little Dog Is Determined to Keep the Balloon from Touching the Ground Posted: 07 Aug 2015 04:00 PM PDT Rose, a Boston Terrier, has invented a great game! She wants to keep the balloon in the air. She bumps it with her nose, keeping it from hitting the ground. And Rose is good at this game! -via Huffington Post | ||||||||
| Incredibly Cool Crashed Star Destroyer LEGO Diorama Posted: 07 Aug 2015 03:00 PM PDT Did you ever build a ship out of LEGO bricks and then try to make it look like it actually crashed by dropping it on the floor? I tried that technique a time or two, but LEGO bricks fit together so well that it never really worked out the way I wanted it to. But where I failed to crash a LEGO vehicle the right way Brickster KevFett2011 succeeded in style by using a whopping 12,000 bricks to build this impressive crashed Star Destroyer scene from Star Wars Episode VII. KevFett2011’s Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens Apoca Star Destroyer On Jakku LEGO model is one super square work of art, and it totally would have made childhood me go squee! -Via Super Punch | ||||||||
| The Rescue Swimming Dogs of the Italian Coast Guard Posted: 07 Aug 2015 02:00 PM PDT
Big, brave, and strong swimmers--Newfoundland dogs have all of the natural characteristics of a rescue swimmer. That's why the Italian Coast Guard employs them for that purpose. Roberto Gasparri, a dog trainer who works with this program, explained to Dog Heirs that these dogs have a great advantage while in the water:
The Newfoundlands can jump out of boats and helicopters and swim through dangerous waters to people in need. Once they reach someone in the water, the victim can grab onto the dog's lifejacket and rest while the dog pulls him to safety. -via My Modern Met | ||||||||
| Husband Surprises Wife with Pregnancy Announcement Posted: 07 Aug 2015 01:00 PM PDT Sam and Nia are obviously from the internet generation, where everything is recorded and everything is shared. He doesn't have to hide the camera, because she's used to it. The following video contains some intimate details of their bathroom habits, but if you can overlook that, you’ll enjoy the story. Nia had her suspicions, but Sam found out that Nia is pregnant before she did. her reaction is priceless, as is that of their two kids. -via Viral Viral Videos | ||||||||
| Posted: 07 Aug 2015 12:00 PM PDT For over 70 years, Marvel Comics has thrilled us with the most compelling heroes and villains in exciting, inspiring, and even heartbreaking stories. Its legion of heroes and criminals have inspired many people to get inked with their favorite characters, scenes, and memories. BuzzFeed rounded up 31 great Marvel tattoos, including this beauty by Paul Boxall. Spider-Man doesn't have the fame or the resources of other heroes in the Marvel Universe, but he'll get the job done and leave a riveting image behind. | ||||||||
| The 50 Most Cringe-Worthy Moments In Comic Book Movie History Posted: 07 Aug 2015 11:00 AM PDT Superman throws his "S" Shield in Superman II Comic book movies are always going to be full of bad one liners and "WTF just happened?!" moments, but knowing they're coming doesn’t make these scenes any less cringe-worthy for the viewing audience. Reed Richards dances his arms off in Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer When io9 called out for readers to submit their favorite cringe-worthy moments in superheroic cinematic history they got way too many submissions to use. But in the end they were able to boil it down to the 50 Most Cringe-Worthy Moments In Comic Book Movie History. The list is full of superhero schlock at its saddest, and it shows how far some comic book movies have come and how far they still have to go before they're free of that cheesy stigma. See The 50 Most Cringe-Worthy Moments In Comic Book Movie History here | ||||||||
| These Tauntaun Cookies Have Candy Guts Inside Posted: 07 Aug 2015 10:00 AM PDT And you thought that they smelled good on the outside! Just wait until you cut open one of these delicious tauntauns with your lightsaber. It'll keep you warm on a chilly Hoth night. In The Empire Strikes Back, to keep Luke Skywalker from freezing to death, Han Solo cut open a dead tauntaun and spread its warm organs over Luke's body. You can experience the same thing with this cookie invented by Jenn Fujikawa. She made it with 3 layers of sugar cookie dough shaped like a tauntaun. The inner one has a body cavity filled with candy, including Skittles and gummy worms. A bit of icing adds definition to the tauntaun, which was thankfully a rental. -via That's Nerdalicious! | ||||||||
| The Humans Vs. The Plague (The History League) - Flea Circus Halftime Show Posted: 07 Aug 2015 09:00 AM PDT The Humans Vs. The Plague (The History League) by Amorphia Apparel To recap the Regional Finals between the poorly equipped Humans and the dynamic and deadly Plague- the Plague came out strong in the first quarter, reducing the Humans squad to two-thirds of their players instantly, but the Humans fought back with cleanliness and pest control. It looked like the Plague was going to hang on there in the third quarter, but they began to fumble and lost the striking power they once had, and in the end the Humans were able to pull out a victory and go back to work repopulating the locker room. Have a good haha at the expense of history with this The Humans Vs. The Plague (The History League) t-shirt by Amorphia Apparel, and show the world you're a diehard fan of knowin' cool stuff about the past! Visit Amorphia Apparel's Facebook fan page, official website, Twitter and Tumblr, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| Posted: 07 Aug 2015 09:00 AM PDT Did you pay a couple grand for a state-of-the-art refrigerator with in-door ice and water dispensers and fancy electronic controls? Maybe you ought to invest in a security camera, too, to determine whether you are drinking water from a nozzle drenched in dog drool. Max discovered how to activate the water dispenser on the refrigerator so he can get a drink anytime he wants. Smart dog, expensive drinking fountain. -via Daily Picks and Flicks | ||||||||
| Video Essay Explains The DIfference Between Good And Bad CG Visual Effects Posted: 07 Aug 2015 08:00 AM PDT Whether you’re a fan of CGI in movies, prefer the practical effects, or simply don’t give a crap about computer generated imagery in cinema one thing’s for certain- you probably don’t know the difference between good and bad CG visual effects. That’s not to say it takes a trained eye to spot bad CGI, but almost every single movie has some sort of computer generated visual effect applied to it nowadays so it’s hard to tell a good use of digital enhancement from utter rubbish. This visual essay by Freddie Wong for RocketJump Film School does a really good job of illustrating the difference between good and bad CG VFX, and once you watch the video you'll start spotting all those CG effects you weren't supposed to notice. -Via Laughing Squid | ||||||||
| Could an Old-School Tube Amp Make the Music You Love Sound Better? Posted: 07 Aug 2015 07:00 AM PDT Music systems, which those of us of a certain age just call “stereos,” started out filled with vacuum tubes, then went to transistors, and finally computer chips. What’s the difference, and which is best? There are a lot of factors involved. The leap from tubes to transistors meant smaller, safer, longer-lasting, and less power-hungry components.
But did those stereos, speakers, and amplifiers lose something in the process? Many audiophiles say that the quality of sound was much better with vacuum tubes. An article at Collectors Weekly runs down the history of sound amplification, the difference between tubes and transistors, and whether it ultimately matters in the experience of fine music. | ||||||||
| What If Werner Herzog Directed Ant-Man? Posted: 07 Aug 2015 06:00 AM PDT Ant-Man isn’t an incredibly deep movie, nor does it have a bunch of hidden symbolism and underlying meaning, because it’s meant to be a popcorn movie and not a deep thinker. But if Werner Herzog had been at the helm as director the story would have taken a very different turn. For one thing Ant-Man would have faced an existential crisis instead of a supervillain, his powers would have been drawn from introspection instead of a supersuit, and he never would have made it out of that tall grass growing in his mind. Thanks Patrick (H) Willems for showing us how strange Ant-Man could have been, and why Herzog should take the helm for the new X-Men movies, can you imagine the mental mayhem caused by all that mutant angst? | ||||||||
| How Ernö Rubik Created the Rubik's Cube Posted: 07 Aug 2015 05:00 AM PDT
At 29, Ernö Rubik was too old to be playing with blocks. But the Hungarian professor of architecture couldn’t help himself: He was fascinated with shapes and spent much of his free time building and perfecting 3-D models. In 1974, a particular project had him stumped. For months, he’d been working on a block made of smaller cubes that could move without causing the whole structure to fall apart. So far, each attempt had failed. The evidence was strewn all over the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his mother. One spring day, a frustrated Rubik left the apartment and wandered the streets of Budapest. He followed a gentle bend in the Danube River, a path he had walked countless times before. At one point, he stopped to listen to the water lapping ashore and looked down at the polished round pebbles that lined the riverbank. Suddenly, his heart started racing. The solution was right at his feet: If individual blocks hinged on a rounded core, they could move freely while maintaining the shape of a cube. Rubik raced home and created a prototype held together with paper clips and rubber bands—a structure consisting of 21 smaller cubelets, adhered to a rounded interlocking mechanism. “It was very emotional,” the inventor told CNN in 2012. And that was long before he realized the device’s potential to torment millions of people the world over while making him incredibly rich.
It took Rubik a month of trial and error to find that way home. When he finally returned the cube to its original pattern, he showed it off to—who else?—his mother. “I remember how proudly I demonstrated [it] to her when I found the solution,” Rubik told Discover in 1986, “and how happy she was in the hope that from then on I would not work so hard on it." But solving the cube hardly curbed his obsession. He soon showed the toy to his students, thinking it would be a handy aid for teaching math lessons on group theory and spatial relationships. That’s when Rubik realized his brainchild might have a wider audience. Bringing the cube to market was not going to be easy. Hungary was locked behind the Iron Curtain, where imports and exports were tightly controlled. And in any case, a puzzle with 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible wrong moves was a hard sell. But, as a man inspired by challenges, Rubik wanted to try. In 1977, he agreed to let a Hungarian toy-making collective produce the cube. The effort was a disappointment. The Magic Cube came out clunky, and half of the 10,000-piece order was prematurely canceled. A year later, a Magic Cube was sitting on a café table outside Budapest. It caught the attention of Tior Laczi, a Hungarian businessman living in Austria who had a soft spot for math. He bought it off the waiter for about $1. There was nothing like it on the toy market, he knew, and he thought he could popularize it. But first, he wanted to meet the mind behind the block. When he did, he was underwhelmed. “When [he] first walked into the room, I felt like giving him some money,” Laczi told Discover. “He looked like a beggar. He was terribly dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands. I told him we could sell millions.” Rubik agreed to let him try.
Laczi started shopping the cube around at international toy fairs. In 1979, he bumped into British toy expert Tom Kremer at a fair in Nuremberg. Like Laczi, Kremer saw the design’s international potential. Luckily, Kremer had friends in high places. He pulled some strings and invited the bigwigs at Ideal Toy Corp.—the same company that banked on the teddy bear craze in the 1900s—to Budapest. After five days of tense negotiations, Ideal ordered one million cubes. Rebranded as the Rubik’s Cube, the block was an outlier toy, elegant in its simplicity. It didn’t shoot, flash, whistle, or wet its diapers; it wasn’t cute or fuzzy. Ideal’s marketing campaign played to the user’s intelligence. Solving the cube required brains and focus. “Sure, Sir Isaac Newton unraveled the mysteries of gravity, but could he have unraveled the mysteries of the Rubik’s Cube?” the TV commercial voice-over teased. Consumers were alerted to the toy’s addictive nature. “Warning: Once you get your hands on a Rubik’s Cube, you may never be able to put it down.” In essence, it was the perfect puzzle: a language-less object that makes intuitive sense despite being maddeningly difficult to solve. In a business where games didn’t necessarily require intelligence, it relied on precisely that—plus patience and persistence. In return, it offered a meditative occupation for the hands and brain. And untold satisfaction when order, at last, was restored. Soon, adults and kids alike became obsessed. More than 100 million cubes were sold in a little more than a year, turning Rubik into Hungary’s first self-made millionaire. In 1980, it won the prestigious German Game of the Year award and similar accolades in France, Britain, and the United States. Books covering the cube simultaneously held the first, second, and fourth spots on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. “It’s hard to overestimate what a phenomenon it was,” says Paul Hoffman, who oversees a traveling museum exhibit celebrating the toy’s 40th anniversary. Today, with 350 million official cubes sold and at least one billion knockoffs in circulation, it’s the best selling toy on the planet. While his creation became a cultural icon, Rubik himself kept developing puzzles and Rubik-themed products. He never matched the smashing success of his first invention, but to him, that doesn’t matter. “For me, the most enjoyable part is the puzzle, the process of solving, not the solution,” he told CNN. In 1990, he became president of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering, where he created the International Rubik Foundation to support young engineers and industrial designers. Now 71, Rubik says his greatest joy comes from watching his creation inspire others. “I’m wondering how people are so creative, and how many things were born out of and inspired by the cube.” And this many years later, the famously reserved inventor still feels “very emotional” about the twists and turns that have brought him—and his toy—a long way from the banks of the Danube. __________________________
Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today for more! |
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The Rubik's Cube's 41-year history is full of twists—quintillions and quintillions of them.
Rubik’s solution was really “only a starting point,” he later remembered. Having marked each side with different colored stickers, he gave the block a few twists and watched it devolve into a chaotic collage. “After only a few turns, the colors became mixed,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “It was tremendously satisfying to watch this color parade.” Before long, Rubik decided to reset his cube. “[It was] like after a nice walk when you have seen many lovely sights you decide to go home; after a while I decided it was time to go home.”
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The above article by Noah Davis is reprinted with permission from the August 2014 issue of mental_floss magazine.
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