Blog Posts Alex Santoso Likes
Redditor Rhinobeetle has an awesome mom:
My brother is special needs and 17, this year he drew his first picture. My mother did something pretty special with it.
They had already spent five years on a boat in the Svalbard Islands north of Norway. That wasn't quite extreme enough for the Brossier family. For two years, they've lived on their 15-meter boat Vagabond in Grise Fiord in northern Canada. At the moment, the boat is ice-locked. But they can handle it:
This is the second year the family has spent in Grise Fiord, but Brossier and his family are no strangers to living on a boat in the Arctic. They also spent five years on a boat near Spitsbergen, which is an island near Norway. Brossier’s eldest daughter was only 12 days old when her parents first brought her on board.
“Our neighbours were really the polar bears. I think we saw 800 polar bears in five years so it was not many people,” he said. [...]
“We live here without any agenda and without any tight schedule. When you start something you have time to finish it,” he said. “Of course there are some things we cannot do. We miss mainly our families but we are already with our own little family… and it’s easier nowadays to keep in touch with Skype and the internet.”
Link -via Offbeat Families | Photo: Eric Brossier
Gaze into eternity. Papercrafting duo Zim and Zou created this depiction of the Higgs boson particle as a cover illustration for an issue of Le Monde that explored the fifty-year search for the particle. This is just the cover image. They made several other sculptures to express the nature of the Higgs boson. You can see them at the link.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) was the greatest boxer ever to lift a glove. Heavyweight boxing, without his amazing presence, is nowadays dull and almost completely uninteresting. Can anyone name the current heavyweight champion of the world? Ali turns 71 today, and in his honor, here are ten facts about "The Greatest."
1. He never turns down an autograph request.
As a young boy, Cassius Clay asked his idol, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson for an autograph. Robinson rudely told the boy "I don't got time." Young Cassius never forgot how hurt he was by Robinson's rejection. To this day, he has never once turned down a request for an autograph. He even has a special P.O. box for anyone who wants his autograph.
2. He used to race the school bus.
As a kid growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius didn't ride the bus to school like other kids. Instead of riding, Cassius would literally race the bus to school every morning.
3. A stolen bicycle started his boxing career.
Why did Cassius Clay become a boxer? As a 12-year-old boy, he was given a beautiful new bicycle as a gift. The bicycle was stolen, and when Cassius went to the local police department to report the theft, he met officer Joe Martin. Martin introduced Cassius to the world of boxing, and this was the beginning of his boxing career. Also Cassius vowed that he was "going to whip whoever stole his bike," but the stolen bicycle never turned up.
4. He only wore Elvis' robe once.
The security team at Verizon had a case study about a guy who outsourced his own job and then spend all day at work having fun on the internet. There was no mention of what company was involved.
The story goes a little something like this. A developer at a US-based critical infrastructure company, referred to as “Bob,” was caught last year outsourcing his work to China, paying someone else less than one fifth of his six-figure salary to do his job. As a result, Bob had a lot of time on his hands; in fact, during the investigation, his browsing history revealed this was his typical work day:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
5:00 p.m. – Go home.
If Bob were the CEO of a company, he'd get a promotion for such money-saving ingenuity. But Bob is not a CEO, and the communication with his consultant in China involved some serious security breaches. What ultimately happened to Bob is unknown, but you can read how they caught him at The Next Web. Link -via Digg
Dachshund and Cupcake Salt & Pepper Shaker
Is your kitchen table begging for a sweet treat? Go ahead and let your house go to the dogs with the adorable Dachshund and Cupcake Salt & Pepper Shakers from the NeatoShop. This fun dog shaped salt and pepper shaker set is held together by magnets.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Salt & Pepper Shakers.
Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Ball in 1865 was a lavish affair for 4,000 people with a midnight buffet. Which didn't turn out quite as planned.
Oysters, roast beef, veal, turkey, venison, smoked ham, lobster salad and a seemingly endless display of cakes and tarts spread across a table 250 feet long. The hungry crowd charged the food, and the lavish event devolved into a food fight of sorts. “In less than an hour the table was a wreck…positively frightful to behold,” wrote the New York Times. Men hoisted full trays above the masses and took them back to their friends, slopping stews and jellies along the way. “The floor of the supper room was soon sticky, pasty and oily with wasted confections, mashed cake, and debris of fowl and meat,” reported the Washington Evening Star.
The menu itself seems odd to modern diners, as half the offerings were meat and the other half sweets, which is explained by the caterer being a confectioner. But where are the vegetables and bread? Some dishes aren't seen much anymore, like smoked tongue, stewed terrapin, calf's foot and wine jelly, and burnt almond ice cream. Read more about these dishes at Smithsonian. Link
Salome was not just a dancer, but apparently a contortionist as well, at least according to this early 14th-century illumination. We know it's Salome because the accompanying illumination shows her with John the Baptist's head on a platter, which you can see at Retronaut. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user George Hatcher)
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, AIR Staff
Interpretive Illustrations by Marian Parry
In April [1998], it was my privilege to attend the joint convention of the Western Psychological Association and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association (WRMPA). The four-day event took place at the Albuquerque Convention Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wandering from room to room, I found many surprising and delightful things.
Terror
For me, the highlight of the convention was a lecture—a prestigious "invited presentation"—by Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. The topic was "Managing the Terror of Being Human: Theory and Research". The man knows his subject cold, as you can see from this description he wrote in the convention guidebook:
Biography
My terror began in the Bronx in 1954. It was amplified by my undergraduate experience at Penn and my graduate training at SMU and the University of Kansas. It has continued to grow over my 15 years at the University of Arizona.
Ignore the Face
I also enjoyed a lecture by Joseph J. Campos of the University of California at Berkeley. Campos raised the question, "Does the Face Really 'Express' Emotions?" His answer was a ringing No, "except under very special conditions."
Fluid Meaning
I accidentally touched off a minor incident the day after Georgia Tech professor Randy Engle gave a presentation on the topic "Working Memory Capacity, Controlled Attention and General Fluid Intelligence". I asked nine experienced psychology professors to define the phrase "general fluid intelligence". None of them could, although one did opine that "the lecturer probably knows what it means."
As a child, Jenni loved long bubble baths with Mr. Bubble-brand bubble bath, so when she had the chance to decorate a bathroom, she choose that theme. As you can see from the pictures at the link, her bathroom is saturated with Mr. Bubble memorabilia and appropriate shades of pink. She's got Mr. Bubble towels, toys, pictures, cabinet door knobs, a clock and more.
"I've got a bad feeling about this, Carl."
"You're always the pessimist! They moved us outside just for some fresh air. That's all."
D*Face, a street artist in London, added huge googly eyes to discarded Christmas trees that face a bleak future. You can view more pictures of his anthropomorphic trees at the link.
Poutine--it's the national dish of Canada! There are three basic ingredients: cheese curd, beef gravy and potato fries. Despite the great difficulty of finding cheese curd in Texas, I made it once. My mouth was in ecstasy. If you haven't tried poutine yet, you must.
But that's just basic poutine. There's also poutine pizza (pictured above), ice cream poutine, foie gras poutine, Guinness beer poutine, deep fried poutine and more! You can view 38 different kinds at the link.
Look at this huge limestone pillar -and there's a little church on top! The only way to get there is by ladder. It's in the village of Katskhi in western Georgia (the European one). There are many monoliths like this around the world, and for some reason, people always want to build something on top. See ten such sites at The World Geography. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Serge LAROCHE)
Once again, it's time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog! Do you know what the object in this picture is? You can win even if you don't know!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
Check out the What Is It? Blog for more mystery items of the week. Good luck!
Update: the mystery item is indeed a millstone. The first commenter who got it right (and followed all rules) was Craig Clayton, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer was from Dug, who said it is a "Recently unearthed Pompeii Satellite Dish Network receiver. It was still tuned to the Discovery channel when found. Some alarmist rhetoric show about end of the world, cataclysm, apocalypse, yadda yadda yadda." That one deserves a t-shirt, too! There were lots of funny answers this week; you should read them all. Several people mentioned the currency of Yap, which you can read more about in the post Funny Money: Strange currencies of the world. The answers to all this week's mystery items are posted at the What Is It? blog. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone for playing along!
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