Neatorama

---

• A Sweeping Success
• What Is Shakespeare’s Most Popular Play?
• Customer Gets Crusty When She Finds Out Subway Is Out Of Meatball Subs
• Catch The Demogorgon - Don't GO Looking For Monsters
• Meet the Man Who Made Up the Klingon Language
• Horses Find This Funny
• New Law Forced IMDb To Remove An Actor's Age Upon Request
• What Really Happened to the Grand Duchess Anastasia?
• Follow Your Dreams
• The Bravest Thing He’s Ever Done
• Clever Signs That Will Definitely Get Your Attention
• Let’s Talk About Crown Molding
• Fun Things Every Geek Needs to Own
• Pen Pineapple Apple Pen
• Yoshimbo - Adult Anthro Samurai Dino, Mushroom Power!
• Pop Culture Characters Share Their Problems With Sigmund Freud

A Sweeping Success Posted: 27 Sep 2016 04:00 AM PDT The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year! by Marc Abrahams, AIR staff In the film Good Will Hunting, a college janitor came to be recognized as a genius. Something vaguely -- very vaguely -- akin to that happened during the 2005 Ig week. For some time now, Roy Glauber has been a vital participant in the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. By spontaneous tradition, the Ig audience throws paper airplanes at the stage during the entire ceremony (and the people on stage waft some of them right back). The airplanes accumulate so rapidly that it is necessary to have two people spend the entire ceremony sweeping them off. Roy, a Harvard physics professor, has nobly, stylishly, and vigorously swept the stage for ten long years. Like Gandhi, Roy patiently pursued humble tasks in the long years before the world at large came to appreciate his greatness. Two days before the 2005 Ig Nobel Ceremony came the news: Roy Glauber has been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. The process, indeed the physics, of sweeping is now deeply ingrained in Roy’s psyche. That day, a  reporter asked him: “This is your first day as a Nobel Prize-winner. How is it?” Roy’s reply: “Well, it’s like being swept up into the vortex of a bit of a tornado. It’s not quite that chaotic, but it’s every bit as vigorous.” (You can listen to a recording of that entire interview by going to the Nobel Foundation’s web site.) In substance, of course, it is no surprise at all that Roy won a Nobel Prize. At Los Alamos in 1940s, the teenage Roy Glauber -- interrupting his formal college studies -- was one of the youngest physicists in the atomic bomb development team. And his career went nowhere but up after that. In the 1960s he led physicists to a new, richer understanding of how the quantum theory applies to light. During the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, we drew on Roy’s renowned expertise with quantum theory. He delivered a moving testimonial about that year’s winner of the Ig Nobel Physics Prize: Dr. Deepak Chopra, author of the book Quantum Healing. Dr. Chopra earned the Ig “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” Here is the complete text of then-future Nobel Physics Laureate Roy Glauber’s tribute to 1998 Ig Nobel Prize-winner Deepak Chopra: “There is not much that I need to tell you about relativistic quantum mechanics. There is not much I can tell you about relativistic quantum mechanics. Its achievements in the world of atoms and particles have been great. Its successes, on the other hand, in the world of psychiatry and emotional well-being have been few. And it is certainly not been known for them, particularly. Not, that is, until the recent work of tonight’s honoree. Success, of course, is a matter of definition. Relativity and quantum mechanics applied to personal well-being and psychiatry may or may not  have  done  good, but they have certainly done well. Thank you.” The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony featured a special tribute to Roy Glauber. You can see it -- as part of the video of the 2005 Ig Nobel Ceremony -- at YouTube. [Ed. note: The tribute begins at 16 minutes into the ceremony.] (Special thanks to Bruce Petschek of Seven Generations Video for lovingly preparing that video tribute.) At the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, participants watch a video tribute to Roy Glauber, who two days before was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. Glauber swept paper airplanes at each of the previous ten Ig Nobel Prize Ceremonies. [Ed. note: Dr. Glauber attended the Ig Nobel Awards just last week, as he does every year. That makes 21 years of sweeping service.]  This article is republished with permission from the November-December 2005 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift! Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

What Is Shakespeare’s Most Popular Play? Posted: 27 Sep 2016 02:00 AM PDT First, try to answer this question from your own experience. Don’t spend too much time thinking about it. I immediately said Hamlet, maybe because that was the first of Shakespeare’s plays I ever knew about. My mother had to read it for college, and she read most of it out loud to me. It was years before I knew there were any others. We studied a half-dozen or so of Shakespeare’s plays in school, but not the one play that is the most performed now. According to data from the site Shakespearances, these are the William Shakespeare plays most often performed by professional troupes since 2011. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most popular even when you divide the list into American and non-U.S. performances, but the rest of those two lists are different. Read about how modern audiences prefer Shakespeare’s legacy at Pricenomics. -via Digg

Customer Gets Crusty When She Finds Out Subway Is Out Of Meatball Subs Posted: 27 Sep 2016 12:00 AM PDT It's safe to say Subway is serving up some of the most sub-par sandwiches in America, but there's one thing you can say about them, and indeed most chain restaurants- they're consistent. People know what's on the menu and they expect it to be available and ready for consumption when they arrive, but do you know what happens when those expectations are diced like an onion? Customers get all crusty, like the lady in this video who was deeply hurt by Subway's lack of meatball subs. (NSFW due to language) (YouTube Link) -Via Distractify

Catch The Demogorgon - Don't GO Looking For Monsters Posted: 26 Sep 2016 10:00 PM PDT catch the demogorgon by haplo Way before a game called GO made people want to go out and catch pocket monsters there was a portable game called Catch The Demogorgon, but it didn't last very long due to numerous fatalities. The game involved tracking down a creature many people thought to be imaginary, but since the game was in 8-bit it didn't include information on catching or killing the creature so kids were at its mercy when they finally managed to track it down. Things got even stranger when kids who'd played the game started claiming they had traveled to a parallel dimension called the Upside Down, supposedly the home of the Demogorgon. But parents blamed the whole thing on Dungeons & Dragons, and in a misguided attempt to save their children D&D was banned but the Demogorgon was allowed to go about its business... Show the world why it's okay to catch pocket monsters but real monsters should be left alone by wearing this Catch The Demogorgon t-shirt by Haplo, it's strangely appealing! Visit Haplo's NeatoShop for more old chool cool designs: bikes for dark background kodos la petite eleven Love cookies View more designs by haplo | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts 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!

Meet the Man Who Made Up the Klingon Language Posted: 26 Sep 2016 10:00 PM PDT While the alien race we know as the Klingons appeared in the original Star Trek TV series, they only achieved the iconic look and used their own language in the first Star Trek feature film in 1979. The language they spoke in Star Trek: The Motion Picture consisted of words made up by James Doohan, who played Engineer Scott. The role of non-human species and their languages would expand for further movies. About that time time, Marc Okrand of the National Captioning Institute was preparing to do close-captioning in real time for the 1982 Academy Awards. During preparations in L.A., Okrand was having lunch with an old friend when serendipity struck. The friend was working on what would become Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the film just so happened to need a linguist to dub a conversation between Vulcans Spock and Saavik (played by a young Kirstie Alley). Using clues from the little bit of Vulcan spoken in the first film, Okrand got to work. But Vulcan at this time wasn't really a language. "The scene was filmed with the actors speaking English. My job was to make up gobbly-goop that fit the lip movements and then was dubbed in," Okrand says. Two years later, he was asked backed to work on the third Star Trek movie, but this time the task was a bit more complex: to develop the Klingon language. Okrand started with the scraps of words the Klingons had already used, and built an entire language from the bottom up. He tells a little of how he did it at Popular Mechanics.

Horses Find This Funny Posted: 26 Sep 2016 08:00 PM PDT A man tries to back a horse trailer into a spot at the stable. He’s not very good at it. The horses find this hilarious. Their laughter is infectious! (YouTube link) This ad is trying to sell us something hi-tech, but all I heard was laughing horses. -via Tastefully Offensive

New Law Forced IMDb To Remove An Actor's Age Upon Request Posted: 26 Sep 2016 06:00 PM PDT Celebrities like to keep secrets, and their favorite secret to keep is how old they are, because we'll assume they're 25 for the rest of their lives if we don't know their actual age. (sarcasm) In an effort to keep Hollywood's age a secret California has passed bill AB-1687 which forces sites like IMDb to remove the age of an actor from their page if the actor requests it. This bill was supposedly put in place to protect actors from age discrimination, assuming casting directors look on sites like IMDb for info on potential hires and might pass due to their posted age. But the bill doesn't apply to news outlets, so an actor's true age will still be easy to look up online, which makes this quote from Larry Gelbart just as true today as it was in his day: (Image Link) -Via Gizmodo

What Really Happened to the Grand Duchess Anastasia? Posted: 26 Sep 2016 04:00 PM PDT Russian history in U.S. schools is usually limited to Lenin, Stalin, the space race, and maybe now they include the fall of the Soviet Union. Depending on your age, you likely learned about Nicholas II, the last Tsar and his family from movies, because it was a very dramatic story. There were several movies about Rasputin, and I would recommend the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. But even more people recall the movies Anastasia (1956) or Anastasia (1997), neither of which tell us much about the family or the Russian revolution. They are about Anna Anderson, who was presented as the youngest of the Tsar’s four daughters, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. Anderson was only taking advantage of the rumors that Anastasia was the only member of the family who had survived the assassination of 1918 and had been missing ever since. How did those rumors ever get started? Probably because, despite the Soviet Union's refusal to say anything about the Tsar's fate, there were a few people who knew that not all the Romanovs were buried together.   In the spring of 1979, Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov discovered the pit in which five of the seven Romanovs (and four of their servants) had been buried. Since the Communists were still ruling Russia at the time, Advonin and Ryabov decided to keep the finding a secret. The pit wouldn’t be officially opened until 1991, the same year that the Soviet Union dissolved. DNA and skeletal analysis matched the remains in the pit to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Yevgeny Botkin, Alexei Trupp, Ivan Kharitonov, Anna Demidova, and three of the four grand duchesses. William R. Maples (a forensic expert) concluded that the two bodies missing from the family grave were that of Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia. However, Russian scientists believed that it was the body of Maria that was missing. Using a computer program to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave, they identified one the bodies in the pit as that of Anastasia. The actual fate of Grand Duchess Anastasia was not fully revealed until 2007. You can read the short version of the story at History Buff.

Follow Your Dreams Posted: 26 Sep 2016 02:00 PM PDT People tell you to follow your dreams when you're young, but if you get too old before you've turned your dreams into a monetary reality those same advice happy people start calling you a dreamer. Dreams don't have an expiration date but we print one on them anyway, and then, as this comic from Blazers At Dawn shows, the expiration date arrives and we're forced to torch those dreams and draw up new ones. -Via Geeks Are Sexy

The Bravest Thing He’s Ever Done Posted: 26 Sep 2016 12:00 PM PDT This morning, redditor twilling8 found a skunk wandering around his neighborhood in Ontario with a Coke can stuck on his head. What to do? He could ignore the skunk, and go about his business, but that could return to haunt him later. Or he could risk getting sprayed. (YouTube link) He is indeed a brave man, and did the right thing. Now if people would only keep their trash picked up and lids on their garbage cans, this would have never happened.

Clever Signs That Will Definitely Get Your Attention Posted: 26 Sep 2016 10:00 AM PDT (Image Link) Right now signs are littering lawns across the U.S. urging us to vote in the upcoming election, but we don't have to restrict the statements made by our lawn signage to political matters- we can tell people to scram too. (Image Link) Signs are put up to tell people what not to do and signs are put up to tell people to go away, but sometimes signs are put up just to give people a good laugh and perhaps initiate a trade. (Image Link) And when you're able to combine two or more message types on one epic sign you have officially earned the title "master signer". (Image Link) See 30 Yard Hilarious Yard Signs That Will Totally Get Your Attention here

Let’s Talk About Crown Molding Posted: 26 Sep 2016 09:00 AM PDT Plain or fancy, the addition of crown molding can make a cheap home suddenly look established and well-built, but only if it’s done right. There are a lot of factors to consider: the size and shape of the room, the size and shape of the molding, the cost of the materials and labor, and the final look you are aiming for. Get some design tips and see 100 examples of what crown molding can do for a room at Housely.

Fun Things Every Geek Needs to Own Posted: 26 Sep 2016 08:00 AM PDT If you love video games, Harry Potter, Star Wars, proper grammar or anatomy, then you officially have a geeky side. We at Neatorama support the geekification of the public and encourage anyone with even one of those interests to check out this fun Distractify article with over 20 awesome things for geeks to bring into their home. A few highlights from the list include the marauder's map scarf and respect the chemistry spice rack seen above, as well as this Super Mario light and this set of Pokemon gym pins. Of course, this hatching dinosaur candle is pretty lovable as well.

Pen Pineapple Apple Pen Posted: 26 Sep 2016 07:00 AM PDT Japanese comedian Kosaka Daimaou, whose real name is Kazuhiko Kosaka, has a character he does named Piko-Taro. Here, Piko-Taro sings a little ditty about pens and pineapples. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, but since he posted it one month ago, it’s been covered and remixed by dozens of YouTubers.    (YouTube link) Now if you see the abbreviation PPAP or these emoji, you'll know what it means. Well, good luck getting that tune out of your head the rest of the day. -via Metafilter

Yoshimbo - Adult Anthro Samurai Dino, Mushroom Power! Posted: 26 Sep 2016 06:00 AM PDT Yoshimbo by Nicko Designs Yoshi had been on a permanent vacation after winning the Mario Kart tournament and becoming a very wealthy dinosaur, but downtime was not good for Yoshi. After being cooped up in the house for six long months eating mushrooms and watching old samurai flicks he was starting to believe he was some kind of ronin, a deadly dino swordsman who was out for revenge against the Koopas. Mario tried to call Yoshi but he wouldn't answer, so he drove over to his house to make sure his old pal was okay. But when he walked up the stairs and saw Yoshi standing on the porch wearing a samurai costume, large sword on his hip, Mario knew Yoshi was starting to go bonkers... Bring home this super Yoshimbo t-shirt by Nicko Designs and watch your wardrobe go from a negative zone to a total 1-UP! Visit Nicko Designs's Facebook fan page, official website, Tumblr and Instagram, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more geek-tastic designs: Singin' in the Stars Clint McCree Law of the Jungle Main Street Road View more designs by Nicko Designs | More Video Game T-Shirts | New T-Shirts 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!

Pop Culture Characters Share Their Problems With Sigmund Freud Posted: 26 Sep 2016 06:00 AM PDT If a pop culture character is properly created, meaning complete with an unique personality and a backstory, fans can predict what that character is thinking and willing to do. But nobody could have predicted how many perfectly crafted pop culture characters would end up needing psychological treatment! Cartoonist Lee Gatlin imagines what pop culture characters like Superman, The Hulk and Tarzan would say if they had a psych session with Sigmund Freud, and for most of them one sentence says it all. -Via io9

You are subscribed to email updates from Neatorama. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States