Pages

▼

2022/01/31

Neatorama

Neatorama

How Franz Josef Land was Discovered

Posted: 30 Jan 2022 05:17 PM PST

Franz Josef Land is a cluster of 192 islands in the Arctic Ocean. Despite the name, it was never a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first sighting of Franz Josef Land is thought to have been in 1865 when Norwegian sealers found the archipelago, but they kept that discovery to themselves to keep competition from other seal hunters away. That wasn't the case when a 24-man Austro-Hungarian crew set out on a science and exploration expedition on the ship the Tegetthoff. They were looking for a route to the North Pole.

The Tegetthoff left Norway in July of 1872. Before the end of August, the ship was encased in sea ice. The ice didn't break up the next summer. Nor the next. But it drifted, and carried the Tegetthoff into unknown waters. The ice carrying the ship reached a land mass in August of 1873, and scientists from the Tegetthoff duly trudged over to see and document it. They named the land mass after the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, who was most notable for later sparking World War I when he was assasinated. But the crew was no closer to navigable sea or rescue. In May of 1874, after nearly two years on the ice, the crew decided to walk out, dragging their lifeboats to open water. That journey took an additional three months. Read about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition and what they found instead at the Dawlish Chronicles. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Oona Räisänen)

Pisonet is a Vending Machine That Sells 5 Minutes of Internet at a Time

Posted: 30 Jan 2022 10:43 AM PST

🖥️ How do poor people in the slums of Manila, the Philippines, access the Internet? Through a vending machine that sells them 5 minutes of Internet at a time for a peso.

📚 Now that's recycling: Garbage collectors in Turkey built a public library stocked with books that were thrown out in the trash.

🐱 Co-sleeping with your cat's gonna look a lot more stylish with this human bed and cat tower combo!

🎬 Look like a makeup artist, Yoda does. But why? In 1979, during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, makeup artist Stuart Freeborn gave an interview of how Yoda was made, from drawing to puppet.

🎵 Bill Murray made a surprise musical performance in a New York City Park.

🐊 Why did the alligator NOT cross the road? Related: Why the chicken could not cross the road.

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, and Supa Fluffy.

Image: Kimberly dela Cruz/Rest of World

Featured art: Die Cry Hate by Nemons for those who are sick and tired of all those Live Laugh Love designs.

This limited-time special is ending soon: Save up to 20% off all Valentine's Day T-Shirts, Funny Tees, Funny Sayings Shirts, and Cute & Kawaii T-Shirts.

The Invisible College of Experimental Flatology

Posted: 30 Jan 2022 06:21 AM PST

As you might guess, the Invisible College of Experimental Flatology is a website about farts. ICEF was founded in 2020 as "a distraction during an otherwise bleak period in human history." Or at least according to the About Us page, that's a hypothesis about its founding. It could have been for scientific collaboration or just for kicks.

The posts include a lot of scientific inquiry into farts, such as their speed, power, and longevity. For example, experiments have determined that farts travel much slower than sneezes. Check out their many "tootorials" on the subject. There is also a fart generator in which you can set the parameters for a customized audio fart, and another in which you can turn text into Morse Code farts. You'll also want to see (and hear) the beautiful Fartworks. Whether the title is a play on "artworks" or "fireworks" is up to you. It's still all about farts. There's enough here to keep any 12-year-old busy all weekend. Somebody alert Alex. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user greg johnson)

The Fight to Bring Live Television to Deaf Audiences

Posted: 30 Jan 2022 04:30 AM PST

For most of the 20th century, movies and TV were completely useless for deaf people. We take captioned entertainment on TV, streaming services, and video sites for granted these days- not only can you read what's being said, you can select a different language. It wasn't always so. You might be surprised to learn that television didn't use captions at all until 1980! And even then, the rollout was quite bumpy.

The scheme that the networks ABC, NBC, and PBS agreed to was for television caption decoders to be sold by Sears, with royalties going to the National Captioning Institute to be used to pay for adding closed captions to shows. It was an expensive proposition, as captioners had to be hired and trained, and it took 24 hours or more to caption a one-hour program. The devices were expensive, too. This created a Catch-22 situation. Deaf people didn't want to invest in the decoders for just a few hours of captioned TV, which might not even be something they wanted to watch. But captioning more hours was impossible without funds from device sales. What's more, CBS wouldn't get on board with the plan because they had already contracted to use an alternate system.

The ultimate goal was to not only caption all TV shows, but live events, too. The first captioned news broadcast didn't happen until 1984, and the first captioned Super Bowl was in 1985. Read how that happened in a condensed history of closed captioning at Engadget.  -via Digg

Uh, Did You Know That A Billion Years Of Time Are Missing?

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 11:13 PM PST

How did they know what we were missing in the first place? Apparently, scientists can reconstruct the Earth's history through fossils, rocks, and other trinkets preserved in the ground. Experts have found a giant lapse in the Earth's history through the lack of evidence. The missing time, called The Great Unconformity, exceeds one billion years in some places. This means that some 550 million-year-old rocks are found that date back 1.7 billion years, but no other traces from the years in between were found. Learn more about this missing chunk of time here. 

Image credit: Tim Hart

These Statues Depict Ancient Egyptian King As A Sphinx

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 11:13 PM PST

Newly-discovered ancient statues show King Amenhotep III memorialized as a sphinx. The statues were excavated through the  Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project, a 24-year-old project that aims to restore, build, and preserve the ancient temples. The sculptures are 26 feet high, which earns them their moniker as colossal statues. According to Egypt's Ministery of Tourism and Antiquities, the artworks were made of limestone, and have undergone careful cleaning, strengthening, and restoration.

Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

This Tiny Honda N-Van Compo Can Fit Four People

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 11:09 PM PST

It's the perfect mobile for a small group of people! 

The Tiny Honda N-Van Compo is a Kei Van Camper, a Japan-exclusive vehicle under the Kei car classification. Kei cars are the smallesthighway-legal passenger cars that are built with restricted dimensions and engine capacity. This means that cars under this category, including the newest Honda model, pack a lot of features in such a tiny space. 

The N-Van Compo can hold four people with the help of an expandable roof. It can be easily transformed into a sleeping space when needed. Passengers can turn the driver's seat of the car around and spread the mattress modules in line for two people. See more photos of the vehicle here! 

Image credit: Honda via Yanko Design 

Recovered Coyote Man Sculpture Reveals A Pre-Hispanic Civilization

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 11:09 PM PST

An important artifact from a pre-Hispanic civilization has been recovered by archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) in Mexico. The statue is a coyote-headed figure on a throne. It was first unearthed 30 years ago in the Llanos de Canícuaro neighborhood in Tacámbaro, Mexico. The artifact was in a private collection until a Mexican federal law was employed to take it away under the premise of preserving a national cultural property. 

According to archaeologist José Luis Punzo, "one of the hypotheses is that the coyote-man sculptures could represent a dynasty that ruled this place, even before the Uacúsecha history was written."

Image credit: INAH

Your Gas Stove Is Leaking Gas Even If It’s Turned Off

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 11:08 PM PST

Oh, dear. Don't worry, the gas won't necessarily blow your entire house off. A study from Stanford University discovered that gas stoves constantly leak methane into the air, even if they are switched off. According to Eric Lebel, the lead author of the paper, "the leaks we're measuring are not going to be in concentrations that would normally be detected by a human nose."

This is because the recorded leaks were slow and constant, and did not reach the threshold where we can detect it by scent. It won't be harmful to indoor air and human health. However, the recorded methane leaks can be harmful to the environment via global warming. Read more about the discovery here. 

Image credit: Eduardo Pastor

The Great Tree Migration

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 06:24 PM PST

Since we are animals ourselves, we understand the seasonal movements of animals, as well as the refugee species that move into new territories for food or safety. Plants do the same, but on a different time scale and by a different method. Trees cannot just walk to a new place (ents notwithstanding), but instead disperse massive numbers of seeds. Those that fall into a better-suited area will take hold and thrive, while their parents may succumb to declining conditions. In this way, forests themselves move. We have records of tree species that have moved thousands of miles, whether they came from the fossil record or eyewitness testimony.

Trees die out in places where the soil is dry or depleted, the climate changes, or invasive species attack. In the last few decades, climate change has accelerated so much that the natural rhythm of forest movement itself is stressed. Logging has contributed to poor forest conditions, as well as the encroachment of farmland and human settlement. Global trade has fueled invasive species.

Emergence magazine has a multimedia article explaining natural forest movement, and how human activity and climate change have affected various trees' ability to find new homes. After the intro, scroll down to find text, videos, links, and charts explaining what's happening to our forests. The example of the black ash tree (also called the basket tree) is explored in depth, and there are links to the migration stories of sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce trees, too. -via Damn Interesting

A Buggy Beetle Battle, with Remarkable Audio

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 05:10 PM PST



"When tweedle beetles fight, it's called a tweedle beetle battle..." *

Watching two massive insects fighting each other is interesting, but it's much better when set to the soundtrack of the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The two beetles are obviously mismatched from the beginning, both in size and in fighting skill. You'll be glad to know that in this version, neither combatant is left limbless and bleeding. It's just funny. Redditor moistobviously made this a long time ago, but only today posted it on the forum.

* This line is from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks.

How Stray Cats Saved This Japanese Restaurant from the Pandemic

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 01:15 PM PST

🐱 Like many other restaurants have lost customers due to the pandemic, an eatery in Osaka, Japan, was in the verge of closing down when unlikely saviors appeared: stray cats. Here's a heartwarming story of how a stray cat and his family that moved into the cafe saved the Railway Cats Diorama Restaurant.

Bonus cat story: Willow the First Cat of the United States was officially welcomed into the White House.

🩸 Not having watched any sci-fi horror flick in the past decade, scientists in Siberia have managed to extract the oldest liquid blood in the world from the heart of a 42,000-year-old mummified foal preserved in the permafrost. Oh, and they're planning to clone the animal - what could possibly go wrong?

🏠 The Billy IKEA bookcase re-imagined by two designers into stylish furniture.

🗡️ Humans suck: The horrible ways that gamers murdered virtual people in The Sims.

💀 In a 1986 Twilight Zone episode called "Button, Button", a man was given the choice of pressing a button which would cause a stranger to die in exchange of receiving a lot of money. Well, how would that moral dilemma work today? Funny or Die explores the story in a short comedy clip called "The Button."

🎵 Disney animator Jonah Sidhom explains how the opening scene of Disney's Encanto was animated. Fantastic!

Image: diorama_syokudou/IG

More neat posts over at our new sites: Supa Fluffy, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus and Pop Culturista. Thank you for checking 'em out!

Featured art: Caffeine is My Patronus by indie artist Dumbassman. Accio Americano!

Limited time special: Save up to 20% off all Valentine's Day T-Shirts, Funny Tees, Funny Sayings Shirts, and Cute & Kawaii T-Shirts.

Jay Ohrberg's Extreme Vehicles

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 10:39 AM PST



Jay Ohrberg is the master designer of extreme cars. He was the one who built Kit, the car featured in Knight Rider, the Ghostbusters ambulance, the car in Robocop, and several iterations of the Batmobile. Oh yeah, and the Pink Panther car you see above. Somewhere along the way, he began to obsess about the limits of extreme cars: the widest, the longest, the most massive. And that's the origin of that limousine you saw on the early internet that you were sure was the result of image manipulation.



The limousine was real, held 72 passengers, and was 30.5-meters (100 feet) long. It sported a pool, a hot tub, a mini golf course, and a helipad, among other features. The limo made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. That was decades ago- what happened to the world's longest car since then? Find out where the limousine has been, and see plenty more of Jay Ohrberg automobile designs at Messy Messy Chic.

The Most Iconic Video Game Weapons

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 03:01 AM PST

Look, we've been through a lot of video games. So much so that if you ask me the specific names of weapons I know from all of the games I've played, I probably could only name one or two. The master sword from the Legend of Zelda series is one of them. Video game developers have done their best when it comes to making weapons for players to play around with, each having their own name, use, stats, etc. all to make the gaming experience more fun. IGN's Destin Legarie lists the top ten iconic, memorable weapons of all time (spoiler alert: the master sword is in the list). Read the full article here! 

Image credit: Nintendo  

Annual Giant Letter Installation In Chicago

Posted: 29 Jan 2022 03:00 AM PST

Giant Letter is an annual art installation that was launched in 2012 by Chicago-based artists Caro D'Offay and Laura Gilmore. Each year, a massive construction that stands between eight and 12-feet high is displayed in different spots around Chicago. The art installations featured in Giant Letter are messages between an imaginary 100-foot-tall boy named Bobby and those who matter most in his life (aka his mother Lucinda, cat Mr. McFluffins, and Santa). The most recent installation can be found at the intersection of Glenwood and Albion avenues in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. Organizers of the Giant Letter hope to be able to transfer the project to a museum or gallery in the future.

Image credit: Giant Letter via Colossal

@

No comments:

Post a Comment

Keep a civil tongue.