How cute are these sloths? The entire family was made by a crafter in Hokkaido, Japan. See more pictures at Craftzine. Link -via Rue The Day
Jenny and Dave Prager brought us First Impressions of the USA last month. Some of the response they received from global visitors to the USA concerned the common greeting, “How are you?” Lakshmi says:
“When I set foot at the Dulles airport in DC, the immigration/customs guy asked me how I was doing — and I was taken aback. Am I supposed to know this guy? Does this guy know my cousin? And so, is that how he knows that I would be here at the airport today? Did my cousin ask him to take care of me until he could pick me up at the airport? If so why didn’t my cousin tell me? I looked like a deer facing headlights.”
She wasn’t the only one who was confused by the phrase, as well as “thank you”, “you’re welcome”, and the constant smiles of Americans. Read more at Our Delhi Struggle. Link -Thanks, Dave!
This Twaggie was illustrated by Davide Berneda from a Tweet by @linajk. Like all Twaggies, it can be enshrined in a t-shirt. Link
Walt Disney Imagineering is updating the features of the Haunted Mansion. Here’s a look at how they are changing the beloved “hitchhiking ghosts.” -via Boing Boing
An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the USSR (now Ukraine) during a safety test became the worst nuclear accident in history on April 26th, 1986. Twenty-five years later, the area is still uninhabitable. The Big Picture has posted 34 pictures from that disaster and its aftermath, continuing to the present. This picture shows a helicopter spraying decontaminant a month after the accident. Some photos may be disturbing. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Reuters/Itar-Tass)
This brilliant animation begins with a man doing restoration on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The ladder he’s working from is knocked out from under him and he sustains serious injuries when he falls to the ground. Can modern science put him back together? Perhaps, but he may have some trouble getting through airport security from now on.
Ghost Productions is a medical animation studio that produces surgical training, patient education and marketing materials for medical device manufacturers, hospitals, pharmacological firms, television stations, and public health organizations.
Link – Via Kuriositas
Detail from the Darke/Holmes study
by Michael Berry
H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory,
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The applications of mathematics can be bizarre. Soon after I arrived in Bristol in the 1960s, a senior colleague called me, saying that someone in the veterinary school needed help with mathematics — or was it physics? — and I seemed just the person to help. Cursing inwardly, I agreed to see the fellow. He was Peter Darke, a graduate student near the end of a Ph.D. studying horses’ hearts.
He showed me a paper by Gabor (Dennis Gabor, who invented holography) and Nelson1 and asked me to explain it. It took a while to understand. The idea is that a heart is like a little battery, pushing weak electric currents in a three-dimensional pattern round the body. The battery has a strength and a direction: it acts as a current dipole, represented as a little arrow — the heart vector. During each heartbeat, the vector (tip of the arrow) draws a loop – the heart loop — whose shape is a powerful diagnostic of health. Therefore it is useful to measure this loop, in a way that doesn’t involve killing the horse. Gabor’s paper gave the theory of a way to do that, inferring the heart vector by measurements of the electric potential on the surface of the horse. It is an ingenious application of Gauss’s theorem.
The Darke/Holmes study, which used the Berry approach to integrate over the surface of a horse.
Peter had spent three years preparing to implement this idea. He enveloped his horse in a coat he had made, of several hundred potentiometers, with electronics to measure the potential at each of them, fifteen times during each heartbeat, and he had arrived at the point where he had a huge file of all these measurements. But there was a difficulty: he knew only the most elementary high-school mathematics and so had no way to understand the formulas in Gabor’s paper. His specific question was: does the theory apply to a real horse, or only to an ideal cylindrical horse? Unlike the physicists’ mythical ‘spherical cow,’ this was real.
I learned that the formulas work for a horse of any shape, but they do assume uniform conductivity — a better approximation, apparently, for horses than for people. (Actually, it doesn’t have to be accurate: who cares whether the loop describes the real dipole inside the real horse? To be useful for diagnosis, it is necessary only that the loop be reproducible.)
The formulas involved integration, and Peter didn’t know what an integral was, so it was hard to explain how to add up all those measurements. A complication was that what had to be inferred was a vector, so he needed to know, at each point on the horse, the components of the perpendicular to the surface of the horse with respect to the three symmetry directions of the horse. After some discussion, we made a ‘cos-theta-meter,’ and I left him to it, and never saw him again.
Further detail from the Darke/Holmes study.
But a year later, I received two papers from him,2 reporting the outcome of all that arithmetic. To my surprise, he had indeed calculated fifteen vectors for each heartbeat, and thereby deduced the heart loops for several horses in different states of health. At the end of the paper were the usual acknowlegements to colleagues and funding agencies. For technical help, he thanked me; and for financial support, he thanked the Horserace Betting Levy Board (financed by racecourse gamblers).
The moral of this is that applications of mathematical knowledge can be unexpected; you may find yourself taking a surface integral over a horse.
References
1. “Determination of the Resultant Dipole of the Heart from Measurements on the Heart Surface,” D. Gabor and C.V. Nelson, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 25, 1954, pp. 413-6.
2. “Studies on the Equine Cardiac Electric Field. I. Body Surface Potentials, II. The Integration of Body Surface Potentials to Derive Resultant Cardiac Dipole Moments,” P.G.G. Darke and J.R. Holmes, Journal of Electrocardiology vol. 2, 1969, pp. 222-234 and 235-244.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2010 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.
You know when you were a kid and would absentmindedly doodle smiley faces on dollar bills? Well it seems now there is a whole artistic community of currency defacers out there. Maybe part of the national budget crisis arose from all the cash that has to be taken out of circulation because George Washington has been replaced with Darth Vader. However, these portraits would make Andy Warhol proud.
Death Star Planetarium – $29.95
Do you know someone who has trouble falling asleep at night? Maybe they would sleep better under the Star Wars Galaxy.
The Death Star Planetarium from the NeatoShop allows you to transform any darkened room into your very own planetarium. Now you can finally get cozy and relax under the Star Wars galaxy, or the Earth’s night sky, all from the comfort of your own bedroom.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Star Wars items and Gifts for Geeks!
off
You have to wonder about the culture that creates a market for a toy like this. If you are afraid of your children using chemicals, why would you be interested in a chemistry set at all? Link -via The Daily What
"Neatorama"
Say hello to “Neatorama.” (To the left.)
At Turn Your Name Into a Face dotcom users are invited to submit their name to the site. With the click of a button it will generate an 8 bit facial depiction based on “your name.”
But let’s face it; the real fun comes from submitting your buddy’s name or that of “Mickey Mouse” only to get this beautiful mug staring back at you: 
They have been hawking Indiana Jones and Star Wars themed Lego video games for years now. Now thanks to Custard Productions on YouTube, we get a taste of what it would be like to mash up some of our favorite movie franchises with our favorite building blocks. Could a Lego feature film be in the works? If George Lucas remade the entire Star Wars franchise with Legos it surely would be a glorious day for nerds everywhere! Link
They’d prefer a pond. But this will have to do for now. The dog seems rather mellow about it.
via Ace of Spades HQ
Jose Duarte, a graphic designer, has lately been presenting information using physical objects. These balloons, for example, represent the number of Internet users in (from left to right) China, the EU, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Portugal.
New Orleans-based crafter Miss Malaprop made a dress covered with stuffed animals for the most recent Mardi Gras. She accidentally sewed through her finger with a sewing machine needle while making it, but “Either way, I’m happy with the way it turned out, it was very fun to wear and very SOFT!”
The whole Snow White story — well, the Disney version, anyway — is told in this lovely back tattoo. I’m not completely sure who’s responsible, but it’s been attributed to an artist named Ping who lives in Taiwan.
via Caramel, Carmel
Saunas are great, but they’re not very portable. Here’s a gadget that tries to solve that problem. The sauna pants wrap around your nether regions and give them the Finnish treatment.
Link via DVICE | Image: Amazon.com
The Environmental Transport Association (UK) developed the QTvan — a travel trailer that can serve as a shelter for users of mobility scooters. It contains a bed, a 19″ television screen, and a kettle. Available options include a satellite dish, a gaming console, and a heater. You can watch a video of it at the link.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: ETA
Garage genius Jörg Sprave, who invented the machete-firing crossbow, has made a multi-shot slingshot that repeats like a Gatling gun:
The Slingshot Channel took the challenge to design a rubber powered version of Mr. Gatling’s great invention. And here it is: Eight 20 mm balls, on their way to the target in less than half a second. The theoretical firing rate is 960 rounds per minute, slightly faster than the popular M16 assault rifle.
via Geekosystem | Sprave’s Blog
Brush Acme Pen – $64.95
Are you looking for a fun graduation present for your favorite Art Major? You need the Brush Acme Pen from the NeatoShop. This gift is a stroke of genius!
Be sure to check out all the fabulous Pens & Pencils available at the NeatoShop!
off A little ingenuity and a lot of brooms will get you this Chinese street sweeper: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Arbroath
…OK, maybe not cool, but this art project takes the sting away from seeing a telltale envelope stuck under your wiper blades. The Parking Ticket Emotional Reclamation Project (PTERP) writes a little note explaining the project on one side of a card that fits neatly into New York City parking ticket envelopes, then asks kids, artists and random people to draw something on the other side. PTERP’s people then scour the city looking for cars that have received a ticket and place the art in the envelope with it, hoping that the good of the art will balance out the bad of the ticket.
Should you have hot cocoa? William Sisskind of Socrates’ Closet crated the flowchart to determine the answer of this weighty question: Link
In his bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success
Well, Dan McLaughlin decided to put the 10,000 Hours Rule to the test by becoming a pro golfer:
Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.
The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.
Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. "If I could become a professional golfer," he said one afternoon, "the world is literally open to any options for anybody."
Oceanographer Paul Hargreaves and artist Faye Darling used an electron microscope to capture this image of a diatom – a tiny single-celled marine algae – that looks exactly like lips.
The Telegraph has more: Link
We take TV remote control for granted, but did you know that the first TV with remote control was made 50 years ago? Here’s an ad for RCA Victor’s wireless wizard remote control (billed as the greatest advance in television since color television itself / the ultimate in performance and convenience).
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Bits and Pieces
The Internet is packed with examples of motorists getting into trouble for trusting their GPS navigation – so color me glad to see someone creative enough to tack on a "Your GPS Is Wrong!" sign to warn people of this dead end road. I think it should be standard issue for some roads. Via The Presurfer.
Previously: GPS Strands Motorist on Mountain
How many plastic containers does your family go through? Multiply that by millions of families, and you see why they have to be made so fast that this video is slowed down to show us how it’s done. This is from the TV show How It’s Made. -via J-Walk Blog
There have been 47 people to hold the office of vice-president of the United States so far. How many can you name in ten minutes? That’s the challenge in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I guessed I’d probably name five (plus the three giveaways), but scored 21 of them. I bet you can do better than that! Link
Howdy, Neatoramanauts – it’s your lucky day! A mysterious box Thor Box showed up at the NeatoPlex last week. What’s inside the box? Well, we don’t know! Here’s where you come in.
Let’s play a game of What’s Inside The Box (like we did a while ago with Iron Man 2). Contest rules are simple:
Enter your guess in the comment below
1. One Thor item you think is in the box.
2. Head on over to the NeatoShop and take a look at our wide selection of Funny T-Shirts. Pick one that you’d like (please include size and color).
One entry per comment, please. If you don’t enter both, you forfeit the prize, mmkay? First person to guess the content of the Thor Box correctly wins whatever’s inside. Two more people – picked at random – will win the T-shirts they selected. You can enter as many comments as you’d like.
Got that? Good luck!
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