I know only two things about golf: (1) checking is not allowed and (2) I am no longer permitted at my local golf course.
Now I can add a third item to that list: at least one golf course is plagued by a fox. A course in Verbier, Switzerland has a resident fox with a craving for golf balls. He's stolen hundreds of them. Is he reselling them?
If golf is, as Mark Twain put it, "a good walk spoiled," then I can only applaud the creation of a novel obstacle necessitating ingenuity from golfers. Require golfers to retrieve their balls from the fox or take three stroke penalties.
Pretty much everyone agrees that pandas are adorable, but there are those who claim that the money we've been spending on panda conservation would be better spent on other species and that we should just let pandas die off and worry about other creatures instead. in 2009, David Plotz of Slate wrote: "Pandas are not ill-natured. They are worse: They are no-natured. Drearier animals you cannot imagine. They are highly anti-social, detesting interaction with other pandas and people."
For those who disagree with this concept, Popular Science writer Dan Nosowitz has many strong argurments to argue with those who say pandas don't deserve to live. While you should certainly read the whole thing, the bottom line is that pandas have evolved just fine to survive in their environment. The reason they're having problems now is only because we have interfered with their ecosystem to the point that they can't survive in it properly -that means we owe it to them to help stop their extinction and to right the wrongs of our own species.
The Leidenfrost effect is when a liquid (in this case, water) comes in contact with a surface so hot (above the liquid's boiling point) that instead of evaporating in hurry, the water droplet becomes surrounded by a layer of water vapor, which slows down the evaporation. This is how cooks use water droplets to see how hot a griddle is. In essence, the water droplet is hovering over the hot surface. This hovering droplet can be manipulated: for instance, when the hot surface is textured in a certain way, the drop will skitter in a predetermined direction. Even uphill!
Carmen Cheng and Matthew Guy used that principle to build a maze in which water droplets were directed along a winding path by the Leidenfrost effect. They use this maze to demonstrate the science, but it looks darn cool, too! -via Arbroath
We all go through that awkward phase. It's just for some of us, like Beth Evans, it begins at birth and continues indefinitely. Do your best to distinguish between the conversations inside your head and outside of it.
Behold the Mother of All Swiss Army Knives that you can actually bring to a gunfight ... and win!
The knife has 100 functions, including every types of blades imaginable. It has a serrated blade, dagger blades, shears and scissors, an auger, a corkscrew, saws, a lancet, button hook, cigar cutter, pens and pencils, mirror, and straight razor. You can even use this tool to tune a piano, as it has a piano tuner built in. Hungry? It's got a butter knife so you can butter your toast.
But that's not all: This is a knife you can actually bring to a gunfight. It has a fully functioning .22 caliber five-shot pinfire revolver. And as if that ain't enough, the tortoise shell handle covers of the knife open up to hold picks, tools, and even mini folding knives.
I recognize that there cowboy! That's Neatoramanaut Glen, dressed as Woody for our featured costume of the day!
Here are a couple of pictures of me dressed up as Woody from Toy Story from all the way back in 2010. I am sending two because one is a close up and the other shows off the entire costume including the back "pull string" which was a last minute shower curtain ring addition on the day of Halloween. Everything was either handmade, borrowed, or something that I already had around the house. I wore my costume to work and was mobbed several times through out the day by strangers who wanted their picture taken with me. Several people thought that I actually worked for Disney (I do not), and the most memorable part of the day was when I went to catch the train to go home a group of 8 or 9 teenage girls saw me from across the street and literally ran over screaming and started snapping pictures and each one wanted their picture with me. That was the best costume that I have ever had and some of the most fun.
Thanks, Glen!
Send us a picture of your most memorable Halloween costume! Email it to tips@neatorama.com and then look for it on the Halloween Blog during October. The best costumes will win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! We've had a different featured costume from our readers every day so far at the Halloween blog.
When I post marching band performances, it's usually because they have a clever show. Not this time. This short clip of an unnamed school marching band has a section of eight Sousaphone players. While marching backwards, number two goes down followed by five or six others. No one was injured, but two instruments were damaged. This kind of thing happened all the time when I was in marching band (not always my fault), although we never had more than one Sousaphone player. -via Tastefully Offensive
Wojtek was a Persian bear cub who was adopted by a unit of Polish soldiers training under the British Army in the Middle East during World War II. The 22nd Transport Company, Artillery Division, raised him the best they could to be a good soldier. Wojtek fit in quite well, as his favorite activities included wrestling and drinking beer. When the unit was deployed to Europe, the only way they could take Wojtek with them was to make him an official soldier.
In Naples, it was British Courier Archibald Brown’s job to help process Polish soldiers that had just arrived from Egypt to advance with British soldiers against German and Italian forces. But when he called Wojtek’s name, no one answered.
“We looked at the roster, and there was only one person, Corporal Wojtek, who had not appeared,” Brown said in an interview years later. So he asked the other soldiers why Wojtek didn’t come forward. An amused soldier replied: “Well, he only understands Polish and Persian.” To his great surprise, Brown was led to a cage holding a full-grown bear.
Wojtek soon proved he was more than just a mascot when, during the series of assaults known as the Battle of Monte Cassino, he put his strength to good use after being trained to carry heavy crates filled with mortar shells from the supply trucks, delivering them to the men operating the large guns on the front line.
The army honored Wojtek's service by putting his image, carrying ammo, on the unit's official badge. Read Wojtek' s story at Today I Found Out. Link -via Digg
Walter White, Jr. (who prefers to be called Flynn now) is often shown in the series Breaking Bad while eating breakfast. What started out as a convenient way to have the family talking to each other developed into a trope about what Flynn had to eat vs. what he wanted to eat. The Whites' fortunes came to be measured by what Flynn had for breakfast. All these breakfast scenes are mapped out in one post at Thrillist.
Breaking Bad ends forever this Sunday, and while the show has repeatedly defied expectations over its five-season run, we do know a few things to be constant and true. Horrible things will always happen to Jesse Pinkman's girlfriends. Marie will always be clothed in some shade of purple. But, most importantly, you will never love anything as much as Walt Jr. loves breakfast. In celebration of the show's purest relationship, we decided to exhaustively catalog everything Flynn eats in the AM from the pilot to present.
I have a few teenagers, and it's safe to say that breakfast time is the one time of the day that you're sure to see your kid. If you have something to say, better do it over breakfast, because they have teenager things to do until bedtime. Still, the way Flynn's food has been analyzed over the series is a hoot. Link-Thanks, Ben!
Playing the lottery, at least on a national scale, is often called "a tax on people who are bad at math." The odds of winning the top prize in the Powerball lottery are a constant 1 in 175 million. The number of people who buy lottery tickets does not affect the odds of winning, but it does affect the odds that more than one winner will have to split the jackpot.
That said, there can be benefits from buying a ticket even when you don't win, up to a point. If you buy a raffle ticket that will benefit a charity, you've made a donation. If you get as much pleasure out of hoping to win on your $2 ticket as you would have gotten out of the $2 candy bar you otherwise would have bought, then it's worth the $2. But if you buy more tickets, the net worth goes down as it cuts into the family's grocery budget. And if you will be sorely disappointed when you don't win, the value of the initial pleasure is wiped out.
But what happens when you win the jackpot? Business Insider take a look at the option you have of taking the winnings in a lump sum vs. an annual payout plan. They crunch the numbers as far as taxes and investments go. Taxes are going to take a lot of the money either way, but when the jackpot is $400 million, does that really matter? The real difference is in whether you invest your winnings. A decent investment plan will make a lump sum pay off big over time.
What the article does not cover are real-life headaches for a lottery winner. Here are your estimated payouts, which will vary depending on your state taxes:
You can take the cash up front. This is a $223.6 million check. After paying federal taxes on it, we calculated that you'd have $135.1 million left. Not bad.
You could also take the annuity, which pays $400 million over 30 years with an increasing annuity — $7.1 M the first year, $7.4M the next, increasing up to $22.2M in the 30th year — and pay the top rate every year for the next thirty. That makes the $400 million jackpot worth, assuming the tax rates don't change from here to 2043, $242.9 million after federal taxes.
Now factor in all your relatives, who know you've won a $400 million lottery. If you don't make each and every one of them a millionaire, they will be very disappointed. And you can't do that on $7 million. You have more relatives than you realize. You can set up large trusts for your children, but what about your grandchildren, nephews, siblings, and cousins? None of them will understand why you have to draw a line somewhere. You can hand out $10,000 at a time, but there will be at least one of your grandchildren and quite a few cousins who will spend it within weeks and come back for more. For years. Until they hate you, and vice versa. Of course, not all of your relatives are like that, but you don't know until you are confronted with vast wealth.
Here's another scenario: Say you have four children, and you want to treat them all equally. You set them each up with, say, a $10 million trust that pays out when they are adults. Maybe even as an annuity. Then those children grow up. Child one uses the money to buy a house (or two or three), set money aside for retirement, put their kids through college, invest for their heirs, and doesn't brag about how much money they have. Child two gives the entire amount to their church, and lives a marginal existence while working a low-wage job. Child three never works, becomes a drug addict, and refuses to have anything to do with the rest of the family. Child four enjoys the money, becomes a real ass, abuses his household servants, and invests in third-world sweatshops. Are you now regretting your promise to treat them all the same and give them money you no longer control?
Those of a certain age will also need to factor in how long you expect to live to enjoy that money.
Oh sure, it's fun to dream. The question "What would you buy if you won $400 million?" is kind of silly, because you could buy whatever strikes your fancy. A more thoughtful question is "What would you do if you won $100,000?" That takes some real decision-making skills, because it's a large but limited amount that will not allow you to quit your job forever. The idea forces you to choose the most important things to do with your money. I once had some great ideas for this $100K, but now it would be a simple case of paying off my debts and using what little is left over to help pay my kids' college tuition. My life would not change much at all, except I'd have less stress.
What would you do with $100,000? What would you do with $400 million: would you take the lump sum or the annuity? How would you handle distributing that money? The question is moot for today; the $400 million winner has emerged, and the Powerball jackpot sits at $60 million. Which isn't bad, either.
Two-faced lover never looked this artistic! Berlin-based artist Sebastian Bieniek tells the story of a day in the life of a real life Janus in his photography series "Doublefaced."
Using eye pencil and lipstick, Bieniek created a simple yet arresting caricature - reminiscent of Picasso's women - of a two-faced girl waking up, eating, riding the subway and so on. Take a look:
You know the feeling that people are talking about you when they start whispering as soon as you enter the room? Well, don't walk into this cage of cotton-top tamarins at the Central Park Zoo in New York City!
Researchers Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss of The City University in New York were doing a research project on the monkeys by recording their loud calls and "mobbing behavior" in response to seeing people they fear. But, when a supervisor whom the monkey disliked entered their enclosure, the researchers noticed that the monkeys went quiet.
It turns out that the tamarins weren't exactly silent. When Morrison and Reiss examined their recordings, they realized that the monkeys were still chirping, but in a volume too soft for humans to hear. In effect, the tamarins were whispering to each other, potentially about what to do about the intruder.
"Psst, could you believe what that guy's wearing?" Image:
Postdlf/Wikipedia
In the study, published in the scientific journal Zoo Biology, Morrison and Reiss noted that the "low amplitude vocalizations" were previously unknown in the species and that if it were not for their serendipitous recording and subsequent analysis of the spectrogram, the monkey whispers would likely have remained a secret of the tamarins.
"Although it is unclear what the motivational state of the tamarins was when in presence of the supervisor, it appears that they were responding to him as an ambiguous threat and may have been investigating the situation by cautiously approaching him to determine the actual level of threat and communicating to each other the appropriate behavioral response to take," the researchers said, as quoted by PopSci.
The researchers speculated that other species may utilize similar methods of communications to avoid being overheard by predators.
So the next time you go to the zoo and the monkeys turn quiet, they're probably talking about you!
For a long time, it was thought that there was only one existing photograph of President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19th, 1863. As you can see, it's a shot of the dignitaries on stage, taken by David Bachrach (interactive graphic #3 identifies many of the people in the picture).
But Bachrach wasn't the only photographer at the event. Alexander Gardner and his crew were there, and made an experimental "stereograph" photo of the crowd. A picture was taken from two slightly different vantage points, with the aim of showing them together through the left and right eye for a 3D effect. With the technology of the time, they could have been taken several minutes apart. In 2007, John Richter identified Lincoln in the background of the stereograph photos. Now there were three photographs of Lincoln at Gettysburg!
Then enter UNC-Asheville media teacher and former Disney animator Chris Oakley. A longtime Civil War buff, Oakley took a new look at Gardner's crowd photographs. He and his students have spent the past two years analyzing the pictures and have found Lincoln, but in a different spot. To back his claim, the team used computer feature analysis of both the "new" Lincoln and the people around him to make identifications.
Of course, to proclaim such a find, Oakley had to have the data to back it up. Oakley's quest to confirm one person in a large crowd shot is detailed at Smithsonian magazine, with an interactive look at the photographs. Link
Battery operated back hair 2 in 1 shaving and grooming system
Three wheeled foot propelled bristle sweeper
Inspired by the SkyMall in-flight airline catalog, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Strattner made products designed to make basic life functions a little easier. He calls his series of inventions "Prototypes." You can find more at the link.
They're supposed to be absurdities, but that back hair grooming system could be a useful manscaping tool. And it looks like it's something that you could wear while doing work at the office or chores at home.
