Word Fragments Game
If I don’t turn away now, I could be doing this all day! This game asks you so assemble parts of words. You can select the difficulty level. Your score will be measured in words completed, number of errors, and time spent; then you can see how your scores compare with others who have played the game. Link -via b3ta
September 12, 2008 Permalink | Posted by Miss CellaniaComment (0) Buzz up! email a friend +reddit +SU
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Album Covers Made of Food
Jacket Lunch Box is a blog by a Japanese artist who recreates album covers with food in a bento box! Link to slideshow. Link to blog (in Japanese). -Thanks, Andrew!
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How To Escape A Hurricane By Car
With hurricane season in full force, Jalopnik has some tips that might come in handy for those living near the coasts.
Evacuating from a hurricane involves more than just getting into your car and driving away from the coast. Of the estimated 120 deaths associated with Hurricane Rita, 107 of them were related to the mass vehicular evacuation rather than the storm itself. With hurricane watches being issued for the Mid-Atlantic and a major hurricane approaching the Bahamas, we thought it was a good time to review the proper steps an individual should take when evacuating from a storm in a motor vehicle.
Link -Thanks, Freshome!
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Metallica Rendered in LOLcats
A group of submitters at 4chan set the lyrics to Enter Sandman by metallica to pictures of appropriate LOLcats! Cute Overload has the collection. Link -via b3ta
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Where the Single People Are
Maybe you’ve seen the classic map that shows how single women are concentrated on the East coast of the US, and single men outnumber women on the West Coast. Here’s a version you can adjust for age! Of course, if you are a woman my age, you might not want to know…. Link -via Metafilter
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78-year-old to Celebrate Bar Mitzvah
Bernie Marks is practicing singing the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish ceremony that marks the symbolic passage to manhood. But at 78, Marks is a bit past the traditional age. When he was 13, he was living in a Polish ghetto under Nazi rule. Later, his family was sent to Auschwitz where he last saw his mother and brother. Marks and his father were sent to a labor camp until they were liberated by US forces in 1945. Rabbi Mona Alfi is delighted that Marks will finally be Bar Mitzvahed.
“It was always my desire to fulfill the dream that my father and grandfathers had,” Marks said. “For years, older men weren’t afforded the opportunity because it wasn’t traditional. But times have changed, and Rabbi Alfi is more progressive.”
So Marks, who speaks 10 languages and was trained by his grandfathers who were both rabbis, is scheduled to be bar mitzvahed Sept. 20.
“He’s definitely the oldest,” said Alfi. And she’s never heard of a Holocaust survivor having a bar mitzvah.
Marks’ story is a fascinating read. Link -via Fark
(image credit: Renee C. Byer/Sacramento Bee)
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How to Make a Glass Cat
(YouTube link)
He makes it look simple. I’m sure it’s not. -via the Presurfer
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10 Things About the Large Hadron Collider You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
Photo: Maximilien Brice, CERN
1. Why is it called the Large Hadron Collider?
The first one is easy: Large because it is really big. The LHC is a large circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers (17 miles), buried in the ground under an average of 100 m (328 ft) of dirt and rock.
In particle physics, hadron is a family of subatomic particles made of quarks and held together by the strong force*. Examples of hadrons are protons and neutrons. As you can guess from the name, the LHC uses mostly protons (with some ions) for its experiments.
Lastly, collider because the LHC accelerates protons into two beams travelling in opposite directions and then collides them to see what particles come out.
*There are four fundamental interactions: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force and gravity. Despite initial observations of the elusive metachlorian by Jinn, QG, et al (1999) Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, the existence of "The Force" remains a controversial hypothesis unaccepted by most modern scientists.
2. Why is it underground?
Well, that's because finding 27 kilometers worth of real estate above ground is really, really expensive. Actually, the LHC uses a tunnel originally dug for a previous collider (the LEP or the Large Electron Positron collider), which was decomissioned in 2000.
All that dirt and rock also provide great shielding to reduce the amount of natural radiation that reaches the LHC's detectors.
3. Why is the LHC like a Werewolf?
Both are affected by the Moon! Like tides in the ocean, the ground is also subject to lunar attraction. When the Moon is full, the Earth's crust actually rises about 25 cm (9.8 in). This movement causes the circumference of the LHC to vary by (a whopping) 1 mm (out of 27 km, a factor of 0.000004%) ) but that's enough so that physicists need to take it into account.
4. Why is the LHC like a Refrigerator?
The Large Hadron Collider is not only a cool particle physics gizmo, it's also a very, very cold one. Indeed, it is the largest cryogenic system in the world and is one of the coldest places on Earth.
To keep them at superconducting temperature, scientists have to cool the LHC's magnets down to 1.9 K (-271.3°C), which is lower than the temperature of outer space (-270.5°C). First, the magnets are cooled to -193.2°C using 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen. Then 90 tons of liquid helium is used to lower the temperature down to -271.3°C. The whole cooling process takes a few weeks.
5. Who the heck is CERN anyway?
In 1952, eleven European countries came together to form the European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in French, which gave it the acronym CERN).
Two years later in 1954 it was renamed the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which would've given it the French name of Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire or the acronym OERN). Nobody liked "OERN", so the acronym CERN stuck.
If CERN sounds familiar to you even before this whole LHC business got started, that's because the World Wide Web was started by CERN employees Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (See: 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet)
6. How much does it cost, and who's paying for it?
The Large Hadron Collider is nearly 30 years in the making - and costs the member countries of CERN and other participating countries an estimated €4.6 billion (about US$ 6.4 billion). Like those late night infomercials, however, we can say "but that's not all!" Extra things like detectors, computing capacity, and extra warranty (just kidding!) cost an extra €1.43 billion.
The United Kingdom, for example, contributes £34 million per year, less than the cost of a pint of beer per adult in the country per year (Source).
The United States contributed approximately $531 million to the development and construction of components for the LHC (with the US Department of Energy shelling out $450 million and the National Science Foundation kicking in the remaining $81 million).
7. How much electricity is used to run the LHC?
It takes 120 MW to run the LCH - approximately the power consumption of all the Canton State of Geneva. Need a better comparison? 120 megawatt is equivalent to the energy used by 1,2 million 100 watt incadescent light bulb or 120,000 average California home.
It's estimated that the yearly energy cost of running the LHC is €19 million.
8. How much data is expected from the LHC?
The LHC experiments represents about 150 million sensors delivering data 40 million times a second. The data flow is about 700 MB/s, or about 15,000,000 GB (15 petabyte) per year. If you put all that in CDs, it'll stack 20 km tall each year! Perhaps it's better to put them in DVDs. That'll just be 100,000 DVDs every year ...
To prepare for the deluge of data, CERN built the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid - sort of a super-fast, private Internet connecting some 80,000 computers to analyze the data (Source).
9. Okay, will the LHC spawn a black hole that'll eat my planet?
Every time physicists come up with particle accelerators, party poopers come up with doomsday scenarios on how they will destroy Earth: black holes, killer strangelets, magnetic monopoles, and vacuum bubbles.
Let's talk about them one by one:
Micro black hole: Basically it's a region in space where gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape. Planet-eating black holes are created when massive stars collapse on itself (and by massive, we mean massive - even our Sun isn't big enough to create a black hole if it collapsed. You'd need 10 times the mass of the Sun.)
There is a remote possibility that micro black holes can be created in the collisions at the LHC. These black holes are small: about 10-35 m across (the so-called Planck Length) and puny in mass (less than a speck of dust). These black holes would evaporate in 10-42 seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation. Even black holes with the mass of Mt. Everest would have a radius of about 10-15 m across. It would have trouble "eating" a proton, much less the entire planet. (Source: Pickover, C. (1997) Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide)
Strangelets: These are strange matters that, like the Ice-nine in Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, would turn all matters it touched into strange matters and eventually all of the planet will be transmuted into strangelets.
The problem with strangelet doomsday scenario, besides being very bizarre, is that no one has ever seen a strangelet. It remains a hypothetical particle. Previous particle accelerators that operated at lower energy than the LHC were actually better candidates to producing strangelets, and so far, we're still here.
Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles with a single magnetic charge (hence the name) - either a north pole or a south pole, but not both. Magnetic monopoles "eat proton."
Actually, physicists have been looking for magnetic monopoles for a long time - and so far they've never found it. By calculations, magnetic monopoles are actually too heavy to be produced at the LHC.
Vacuum bubble: It is actually a very interesting idea in quantum field theory. It states that life, the universe and everything aren't the most stable configuration possible. Perturbations caused by the LHC could tip it into the more stable state (called the vacuum bubble) and all of us "pop" out of existence.
In all of these cases - if micro black hole, strangelets, magnetic monopoles, and vacuum bubbles were a problem to begin with, they would've been created by cosmic rays already. The continued existence of Earth and the rest of the universe tend to discount the validity of these doomsday scenarios.
But if you were itching to celebrate our continued survival, here's a "I Survived the Large Hadron Collider" T-shirt from Neatorama's Online Store for you: Link
10. How can I help?
Well, although over 7,000 physicists are tackling the hard sciencey stuff, your computer can help! The LHC@home project lets you contribute idle time on your computer to help calculate simulations of the real thing.
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Odd-Eyed Cat
Photo: Jorge Barrios [wikipedia]
Neatorama reader Jon Jason sent in this post from Scienceray titled Top 5 Animals with the Most Stunning Eyes - I was most fascinated with the cat with two different eye colors. It turns out, heterochromia (difference in coloration) of the eye is caused by the difference in concentration and distribution of the pigment melanin.
In cats, a form of heterochromia results in odd-eyed cats [wiki] - they are most commonly found in white cats and is due to the white spotting gene. In these cats, melanin granules are prevented from reaching one eye during development, resulting in a cat with one blue eye and one green, yellow, or brown eye.
September 11, 2008 Permalink | Posted by AlexComment (29) Buzz up! email a friend +reddit +SU
Bottled NY Tap Water
Truth in Hydration is a bottled water company that sells … New York tap water in bottles! To market their product, the company’s "street team" went about Central Park refilling people’s empty bottled water with good ol’ fashioned NYC tap!
Link - Thanks Jake Bronstein!
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NetFlix Origami
What do you do with that tear-off flap from your NetFlix mailings? Rather than throwing them away, how about making … a Netflix origami instead?
Link - Thanks FlapperT!
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Caption Monkey 42: Baby Bath Time!
Does anyone know the story behind this photo?
Yay! It’s time for Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey game. Funniest caption will win an original Laugh-Out-Loud Cats cartoon by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Contest rules are darn simple: place your caption in the comment section. One caption per comment, please. You can enter as many as you’d like.
For inspiration, check out Adam’s blog. Good luck!
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Remembering the Victims of 9/11
Photo: noamgalai [Flickr]
It was seven years ago that the September 11 attacks occured. Nearly 3,000 people died that day. Today, as a tribute to the victims of 9/11, take a look at the people who lost their lives and remember them: More …
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Pirate Fonts
This font is Windlass
The annual Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up on September 19th - so to get your blog ready, here’s a nifty collection of Pirate symbols and fonts: Link - via Matt Cutts
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Superstitions Helped Mankind Survive
Did superstitions develop to help mankind survive? Evolutionary biologist Kevin Foster of Harvard University and Hanna Kokko of the University of Helsinki thought so:
Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.
The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.
For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but "if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around," Foster says.
Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine explains:
"Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, connecting the dots and creating meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B, and sometimes it is not," he says. "When it isn’t, we err in thinking that it is, but for the most part this process isn’t likely to remove us from the gene pool, and thus magical thinking will always be a part of the human condition."
Link - via Slashdot
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Super Lice: Pesticide-Resistant Bugs Took Just 3 - 5 Years to Become Immune
Overuse of antibiotics had given rise to scary antibiotic-resistant microbes, and now, the same thing is happening to head lice:
As school begins, health officials and parents across the country are bracing for this year’s bout of what some call "super lice," drug-resistant critters that fend off nearly all pesticides, even as experts say better treatments for the ancient, annoying condition may be waiting in the wings.
Researchers have been warning for years that head lice in the U.S. and around the world are developing immunity to the strong insecticides used in over-the-counter and prescription shampoos. It takes just three to five years for the bugs to adapt to a new product, despite claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, noted Shirley C. Gordon, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University who studies persistent head lice.
Link - via Fark
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Guerilla Road Signs
To bring a smile to passer-bys, the Glenn Group installed these guerilla street signs all over downtown Reno:
The Glenn Group wrote sign copy, created layouts for the printer, and hung the signs. The design team’s primary challenges were to make the signs as authentic looking as possible, and to duck police officers and city officials during “installation.”
In a city where street art and renegade postings are not common, the signs inspired surprise, delight, and good feelings about the city.
Their little guerilla art project won an award at the 2008 Society for Environmental Graphic Design Award: Link - via RuebenMiller
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Missing Cat Came Back … Nine Years Later!
Gilly Delaney thought that her beloved cat was killed by a car nine years ago - so it was a pleasant surprise when one day, the cat turned up alive!
An overjoyed cat owner has been reunited with her missing moggy - nine years after she wandered off from her family home. Gilly Delaney was left distraught after hearing her beloved pet Dixie had been killed by a car in 1999.
So it came as a big surprise when RSPCA officers turned up on Mrs Delaney’s doorstep - with her missing pet in tow. The officers, who scanned Dixie’s microchip, returned her to her rightful owner after they found her wandering less than half a mile away from Mrs Delaney’s home.
Link - Thanks Geekazoid!
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MC Mallet: Stop Mallet Time!
Australia’s Vert Design Shop made this CNC cut flat pack hammer cleverly called MC Mallet - At $40, it’s way cheaper to go to a local hardware store. But then again, a real hammer is no where near as cool a conversational piece as this baby.
Link - via Vector Vault, Thanks Adam!
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Large Hadron Collider’s Secret Emergency Stop Button
With all the hullabaloo over how the Large Hadron Collider will spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth, do you think that scientists will leave it up to chance? Noooo, of course not. They have a secret emergency abort button.
Thanks to Skepchick blog, we now have secret photos from inside the CERN research center: Link - Thanks Rebecca Watson!
Don’t miss: I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt
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Fantastic video explains how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) works
The folks at CERN have successfully tested the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They are now ready to move forward on the tests for which the LHC was built. The LHC has had a great deal of press of late - some positive, some negative. We’ve posted about it several times here on Neatorama.com.
The YouTube video above, apparently created by CERN employee Chris Mann, does a great job explaining what the LHC is all about. It followed hydrogen gas from a tank that is released into the system all the way to a collision between super-high-energy protons colliding at near light speed.
If you’re remotely interested in the LHC, consider this a “must-see” video. [YouTube]
September 10, 2008 Permalink | Posted by Adam StanhopeComment (18) Buzz up! email a friend +reddit +SU
VideoSift Clips of the Week
(Links open in a new browser window/tab)
The Best of the Best Cat Clips
Yay! No need to hunt for the funniest cat video clips anymore. Here are the best of the best cat videos in one convenitne YouTube clip:
Link (including many that I haven’t seen before!)
Melee: 1 Protestor, 4 Security Guard, 100 Fans
When four security guards tackle a protestor who ran into a soccer field during a game, that was fair enough. But when they started beating him with a stick, 100 fans rushed the field and started a melee!
Link
Tumbleweed Vortex
What happens when a bunch of tumbleweed got caught up in a vortex?
Check it out for yourself: Link
Australian School Rickroll Bell
When this Australian school let students choose their own school bell sound, what’s the worse that could happen? The students chose to Rickroll themselves every period!
Link
Russian Pothole
If you think your town’s roads are bad, you’ve got to see this: the mother of all potholes in Russia!
Link (Cue the obligatory "In Soviet Russia, pothole launches you" joke)
For more the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
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Cat Versus Printer
Ok this isn’t GiGi The Angry Cat who got respect out of an electric toothbrush. This cat on the other hand, (whose name is unknown at this time) packs a good punch and tries to gain respect out of a printer. Watch and enjoy…I know I did.
Link: YouTube
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I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-Shirt
So, the scientists at CERN flipped on the Large Hadron Collider and life as we know it didn’t end (yet). So to celebrate our continued existence, here’s the "I Survived the Large Hadron Collider" T-Shirt on Neatorama’s Online Shop: Link - on sale for $9.95
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WALL-E LEGO
The folks at Trossen Robotics sent us this: Disney’s latest pixar animation movie star WALL-E made from LEGO! Forum user bazmarc, who created it, wrote:
He is entirely made of Lego parts and Lego NXT Mindstorms Robotic System for brains, he is fully automated and animated and programed using Labview’s NXT-G software. I have built many prototype before coming to this final revision (wall-e rev.3)
Technical specs:
1 Mindstorms NXT with rechargable pack,
3 Lego NXT Servo Motors,
4 Lego PowerFonctions motors,
2 PF IR receiver,
1 UltraSonic sensor,
1 Sound sensor,
1 InfraRed link sensor, (HiTechnic)
1 NXTservo module and
1 mini RC servo, (Mindsensors)
10 AA batteries
Lego parts mainly from the Bulldozer set #8275 and other parts from various technic sets.
Link: to Trossen Robotics Forum | Blog (with YouTube clip) - Thanks TR Team!
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Shipbreaking Yard: Where Ships Go to Die
Photo: Edward Burtynsky
There is a particular industrial activity that is quite unique to the small town of Alang in Gujarat Province, India. It’s not manufacturing - actually, it’s the exact opposite: in Alang, container and cruise ships are taken apart piece by piece … by hand!
When large container ships can contain or ship no more, they’re sent halfway round the world to so-called "breaking yards," where they’re dismantled (basically by hand), their metal is salvaged, and their intact structures, down to the doors and toilet seats, are put back onto the global marketplace.
Today, these yards tend to be in Bangladesh or India – but location is just a question of cheap labor and (nonexistent) environmental regulations.
It’s toxic work.
BLDBLOG has more: Link | More photos of shipbreaking by Edward Burtynsky
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Controller of the Universe by Damián Ortega
Photo: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
That’s "Controller of the Universe" by Damián Ortega, a sculpture consisting of dozens of tools suspended in the air as though in midexplosion. It’s part of an exhibit on art as means of change: Link - via who killed bambi?
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Auctioning Off Her Virginity to Pay College Tuition
Shock jock Howard Stern is no stranger to controversy, and now, he’s at it again: he’s "auctioning off" 22-year-old Natalie Dylan’s (not her real name) virginity to help pay her college tuition.
Shock jock Howard Stern interviewed 22-year-old Natalie Dylan (not her real name), who is “auctioning off” her virginity to help pay her college tuition:
Expected to step on the block, so to speak, of Stern’s Sirius radio studio is a San Diego woman who says she wants to sell her maidenhood to pay her college tuition.
"I don’t have a moral dilemma with it," says the pretty brunette, who’s using the pseudonym of Natalie Dylan "for safety reasons."
"We live in a capitalist society," she tells us. "Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalize on my virginity?"
Hoax? You be the judge: Link - Thanks honeybee
Update 9/10/08: Stern isn’t auctioning off anything - that was my mistake. First paragraph re-written. Sorry!
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Baby Falling Down the Odessa Steps
Photo: Library of Congress
Remember the scene in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), where Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, saved a baby-carriage that went down the stairs while in a shoot-out with Capone’s henchmen?
The famous scene is actually a homage to a 1925 The Battleship Potyomkin movie:
The scene is well-known: the sequence of the baby falling down the Odessa Steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s movie The Battleship Potyomkin (1925) is one of the most influential films in movie history (many films pay homage to the scene like Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables).
Although, the massacre on the steps is fictional (it took place in the surrounding streets), the movie has made many people see in the “Odessa Steps” the alleged place of bloodbath. The "Odessa Steps" (now known as the “Potemkin Steps”, by architect Francesco Boffo) got a tourist attraction – the movie has exaggerate the place.
anArchitecture has the movie clip and more on the famous Steps: Link | Wikipedia entry on the Potempkin Stairs
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Queensland “Flasher” Ad
To remind the people of Sydney and Melbourne, Australia that Queensland is a warm place to go to during winter vacation, Tourism Queensland employed a bunch of attractive women to … um, flash men on the street with this advertising message:
The objective was to make Queensland the number one choice for a winter holiday. To remind the Sydney and Melbourne markets than, evein in winter (it’s winter now in Australia), the weather’s warm enough to enjoy Queensland’s beaches 24 flashers were deployed throughout high traffic areas in chilly Sydney and Melbourne to promote sunny Queensland as a holiday destination this winter.
Here’s the "front view": Link (SFW, don’t worry - Update 9/10/08: Some visitors complained of a virus from the website - click at your own risk)
Update 9/11/08: delinked - website contains Bloodhound.Exploit.196 virus.
