The artist who goes by the name freakingawesome created a typography poster entitled Zombies. It contains the names of 978 zombie movies, books, and video games. At the link, you can click the image to enlarge it (several times if needed) and read them to find your favorites. http://freakingaweso.me/zombies.php

A secret corps of photographers and filmmakers documented US nuclear testing in the 1940s through the '60s. The "atomic moviemakers", officially known as the Lookout Mountain Laboratory, established in 1947, made at least 6,500 films for the government.

Two new atomic documentaries, “Countdown to Zero” and “Nuclear Tipping Point,”  feature archival images of the blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism is on the rise and call for the strengthening of nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of global arsenals.

As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”

Link -via the Presurfer

Think you know everything about the history of dieting? Fat chance.

Slim to None

To put it mildly, dieting wasn't really a concern for our ancestors. For them, the main problem was getting more carbs, fat, and sugar into their systems, not less. That's why, in all of human history, the first person to go on a recorded weight-loss diet was England's first king, William I. Better known as William the Conqueror, by all accounts, he's the fattest man to lead a major country until William Howard Taft became stuck in a bathtub nearly 1,000 years later. Near the end of his life, William became so corpulent that he was unable to get on a horse, a major drawback at a time when that was a key means of transportation and regal honor. To cut his waistline, William adopted a liquid diet; with "liquid" here meaning "liquor." For the better part of a year, the king attempted to subsist on nothing but alcohol. Amazingly, this worked better than you might expect and, eventually, he was even able to get back in the saddle. Unfortunately, this also led to his undoing. Not long after losing the weight, the king was riding his horse when it reared, driving the saddle horn into his gut and causing internal injuries that killed him shortly thereafter. To add insult to fatal injury, when it came time to load William into his casket, it turned out his diet hadn't worked all that well, Courtiers still had to squeeze him into the box. Thus, appropriately, the first diet was also the first failed diet.

Fletcherism

The first fad diet programs began popping up in the 19th century in America, usually centered around sanitarium health spas. But it wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century that the diet really became part of popular culture. Much of the credit for that achievement goes to Horace Fletcher, a businessman and self-taught nutritionist who became the 20th century's first diet guru. Fletcher's diet was really more of an overall plan for how people ought to eat, whether they were fat or not. To Fletcher, most of America's dietary health, from corpulence to bad dental hygiene, could be explained by one simple fact: people weren't chewing enough. Fletcher taught that, for ideal health, people should chew food until it becomes liquid in their mouths. Yum. From 1895 until 1919, Fletcherism was a part of the American psyche, with believers claiming that it would help you lose weight, keep your teeth clean and healthy, and save you money on food you'd have otherwise wasted in rushed, careless eating. For best weight-loss results, Fletcherites were also urged to eat only when they were really, really hungry and to never eat when their emotions were running high. If they followed these rules, and adequately chewed everything, they could eat whatever they wanted.

Weight Watchers

Arguable not so much a "fad" as a long-standing love affair, Weight Watchers was started in the small Queens, New York home of Jean Nidetch in the early 1960s. According to her own reports, Nidetch had always been a "big girl," and had never felt comfortable around thin people, preferring to build friendships with people who were struggling with their weight as much as she was. As a young wife in her 20s, Nidetch decided to finally get control of her body, but even after losing 20 pounds in 10 weeks using a diet sponsored by the New York City Board of Health, she found she couldn't seem to stick to the plan in the long term. That was when she realized she needed the support of her friends. Nidetch began holding weekly meetings at her house, passing copies of the Board of Health Diet to anyone who came, with the hope that the more people were dieting together the better they all would do. Bear in mind, this predates the self-help movement and its attendant support-group networks. Nidetch and her friends were making this all up from scratch, and it turned out to be an addictive recipe. Within three months of her first meeting, more than 40 people were cramming into Nidetch's house on a weekly basis. Over the next year, she started several different groups around the New York metro area, finally incorporating her fledgling business in May of 1963. Now down to a trim 142 pounds, Nidetch hosted her first official Weight Watchers meeting, drawing more than 400 attendees.

The Drinking Man's Diet

In 1964, stylish San Franciscan Robert Cameron launched the one diet we would personally be ecstatic to follow. Combining his triple loves (booze, gourmet food, and weight loss), Cameron launched what he christened "The Drinking Man's Diet," aiming it at slightly chubby men-about-town such as himself. Cameron began the business with a simple pamphlet, price at $1 (cheap!) and within two years he'd sold more than 2 million copies. And no wonder. At its core, The Drinking Man's Diet was a pre-Atkins take on the low-carbohydrate plan. In Cameron's time, however, low-carb tended to take the form of country-club lunch foods: fine steaks, meaty fish, French sauces, and high-quality cheese. Cameron called this "man-type" food and supplemented it with a healthy daily serving of booze. Noting that distilled spirits, such as rum, vodka, and gin, all contained mere trace amounts of carbs, Cameron incorporated them into his plan, thus finding a way to stand out from the crowd by crafting a diet perfectly fit for the pages of Playboy. In fact, the Drinking Man's Diet and Cameron himself are still going strong. The pamphlet now costs $4.95 on Amazon.com while Cameron remain svelte at 96 years old.

And Another Thing: The Other "Ayds"

Just a simple appetite-suppressant candy laced with phenylpropanolamine (try it in chocolate, caramel, or butterscotch!), Ayds were the toast of the weight-conscious 1970s. Then, the company hit a small marketing snag. Although company officials claimed that there had been no HIV-related impact on sales in 1983, within five years Ayds had lost 50 percent of its market share and the company was reluctantly forced to "soften" the name to "Diet Ayds," a name that customers were less prone to associate with the horrific virus-related deaths.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss' book In the Beginning.

From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here's a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss.

Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book!

Oh, did you think Morse code was obsolete and had no use in the modern world? Here are six ways the code is still used -although most of these gadgets were designed specifically for geeks who know Morse code to show off their knowledge. I would be impressed! Shown is a Morse code leather arm guard, a steampunk creation by Etsy seller ProfMaelstromme. http://blog.promomachine.co.uk/morse-code/ -Thanks, David!

BrickExpo 2010 will be held in Cincinnati the weekend of September 11-12. One of the displays will be a recreation of the 2009 plane crash in New York in which an airliner safely landed in the middle of the Hudson River, which became known as "the Miracle on the Hudson" as all passengers and crew were rescued from the water. Ken Osbon of Goshen Township, Ohio created the Lego version of the incident. Osbon, one of the event's organizers, said other Lego displays will depict a farm, a city with a train running through it, a pirate tableau, and even one recreating a scene from the TV show The Deadliest Catch. Link -via Fark

The bravest among the brave, some soldiers stand head and shoulders above the rest for war exploits that will make your jaw drop. For example, Audie Murphy's actions in World War II that won him a Medal of Honor:

Murphy's unit was down to 19 men out of 128. They couldn't fight, they needed to rearm, and they needed somebody to hold the line. So Murphy stayed behind, shooting Germans until he ran out of ammo. Then, deciding he wasn't done killing Germans, he jumped onto a burning tank and starting using its .50 caliber machine gun. He even killed an entire squad of Germans trying to sneak up on him. Oh, and he did this for almost an hour, while wounded in the leg. And then his men showed up, and Murphy led them on a forward action. Translation: after spending an hour in the freezing cold on a burning tank spraying Germans with machine gun fire, he decided that wasn't enough and decided to get close and personal.

And he is just one of ten soldiers from all over the world listed as the most badass. Link -via Unique Daily

GORILLA

"First used in a Greek translation of 5th century BC Carthaginian explorer Hanno's account of a voyage to West Africa. He reported encountering a tribe of wild hairy people, whose females were, according to a local interpreter, called gorillas. In 1847 the American missionary and scientist Thomas Savage adopted the word as the species name of the great ape and by the 1850s it had passed into general use." (From Dictionary of Word Origins, by John Ayto)

FERRET

(Image credit: Flickr user Stacy Lynn Baum)

"Ferret comes from the Latin furritus, for 'little thief,' which probably alludes to the fact that ferrets, which are related to pole cats, like to steal hens' eggs. Its name also developed into a verb, to ferret out, meaning 'to dig out or bring something to light.'" (From Cool Cats, Top Dogs, and Other Beastly Expressions, by Christine Ammer)

SKUNK

"Because the little striped animal could squirt his foul yellow spray up to 12 feet, American Indians called him segankw, or segonku, the Algonquin dialect word meaning simply 'he who squirts'. Early pioneers corrupted the hard-to-pronounce Algonquin word to skunk, and that way it has remained ever since." (From Animal Crackers, by Robert Hendrickson)

HOUND

"Before the Norman conquest of England, French hunters bred a keen-nosed dog that they called the St. Hubert. One of their rulers, William, took a pack to England and hunted deer-following the dogs on foot. Saxons had never before seen a dog fierce enough to seize its prey, so they named William's animals hunts, meaning 'seizure'. Altered over time to hound, it was long applied to all hunting dogs. Then the meaning narrowed to stand for breeds that follow their quarry by scent." (From Why You Say It, by Webb Garrison)

LEOPARD

(Image source: The Medieval Bestiary)

"It was once wrongly believed that the leopard was a cross between a 'leo' (a lion) and a 'pard' (a white panther)-hence the name 'leopard.'" (From Why Do We Say It?, by Nigel Rees)

PYTHON

"According to Greek legend, the god Apollo's earliest adventure was the single-handed slaying of Python, a flame-breathing dragon who blocked his way to Pytho (now Delphi), the site he had chosen for an oracle. From the name of this monster derives the name of the large snake of Asia, Africa, and Australia, the python." (From Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun, by Willard R. Espy)

CARDINAL

"One would think that such an attractive creature would have given its name to many things, but in fact it is the other way around. The bird's name comes from the red-robed official of the Roman Catholic Church, who in turn was named for being so important-that is, from the adjective cardinal, from the Latin cardo, meaning 'hinge' or 'pivot'. Anything cardinal was so important that events depended (hinged or pivoted) on it." (From It's Raining Cats and Dogs, by Christine Ammer)

MOOSE

"Captain John Smith, one of the original leaders at Jamestown, wrote accounts of the colony and life in Virginia, in which he defined the creatures as Moos, a beast bigger than a stagge. Moos was from Natick (Indian) dialect and probably derived from moosu, 'he trims, he shaves,' a reference to the way the animal rips the bark and lower branches from trees while feeding." (From The Chronology of Words and Phrases, by Linda and Roger Flavell)

FLAMINGO

(Image credit: Flickr user Luis Argerich )

"This long-legged pink wading bird is named for the people of Flanders, the Flemings, as they were called. Flemings were widely known for their lively personalities, their flushed complexions, and their love of bright clothing. Spaniard explorers in the New World thought it was a great joke naming the bird flamingo, which means 'a Fleming' in Spanish." (From Facts on File Encyclopedia of Words and Phrase Origins, by Robert Hendrickson)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

SERIOUS MUSTACHES

(Image credit: Flickr user Chrissy Wainwright)

For fashionable men like Geraldo Rivera and Wilford Brimley, giant mustaches are mere frills. But for the walrus, whiskers are a matter of life and death. The long hairs of a walrus' mustache are actually delicate instruments, bristling with nerve endings. Walrus use them to detect shellfish hidden on the ocean floor, where the animals consume as much as 120 pounds of food a day. Wilford Brimley's mustache has never seen that much seafood, even in its prime.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TOOTH

(Image credit: Flickr user Lindsay Robinson)

Walrus tusks are actually modified canine teeth that can grow up to 3 feet long. The walrus uses its tusks to hoist itself out of the water and onto the ice-an ability that earned it the scientific name Odobenidae, Greek for "tooth walker". But these teeth weren't just made for walking. They can dig into an ice floe, anchoring the walrus so it doesn't drift away in its sleep. The Tusks work as weapons, too. While mostly used to settle disputes between male walruses, the tusks also protect against predators; even the deadly polar bear steers clear of the tooth walker.

LEGEND OF THE LEFT-HANDED WALRUS

A few years ago, a team of very patients researchers off the coast of Greenland observed the way walruses snacked on shellfish. As the walruses used their flippers to clear away ocean muck to find clams, the scientists noticed that they overwhelmingly favored their right sides. In fact, a left-handed walrus has yet to be seen.

BIG BONED

(Image credit: Flickr user flikkerphotos)

The male walrus has a penis that's actually worth bragging about. It contains a bone within the erectile tissue called a baculum. Bacula are common in mammals (humans are a rare exception), but what sets the walrus apart is that its baculum can grow as long as 30 inches. And they're expensive. In 2007, a fossilized 4 foot baculum from an extinct walrus species sold at auction for $8,000.

BLUSHING BEAUTIES

(Image credit: Flickr user Mike Liu)

In the water, walruses are brown, but in the sunlight they become a rosy shade of pink. It's not a sunburn, as early observers thought, but rather a change in the way blood circulates through the animal's body. When the walrus is in the ocean, its blood retreats to its core, keeping the vital organs warm. On land, however, the blood returns to walrus' outer layers, giving it a healthy, sun-kissed glow.

THE ONE-MAN FLOATING BAND

(Image credit: Flickr user Steve McNicholas)

When courting a lady walrus, the guys aren't afraid of a little song and dance. In fact, a male walrus will elaborately click, bark, and drum his flippers on his pharyngeal pouches-two air pockets on the sides of his throat-creating music so complex it's been compared to the songs of humpback whales. On land, this pouch-drumming isn't so impressive, but underwater, it sounds like chimes. In fact, when marine explorer Jacques Cousteau visited the Arctic in 1972, he dropped a microphone into the ocean and mistook the ringing for bells. In addition to making music and impressing French divers, pharyngeal pouches also serve as flotation devices, allowing walruses to comfortably float and sleep with their necks above water. They're like water-wings, except in your neck.

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The above article was written by Isaac Kestenbaum. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Deviant Art member Joep Gerrits created 100 simplified but clever renderings of movie characters from 68 classic films. Can you name them? See all 100 and a list of movies at the gallery. http://joepgerrits.deviantart.com/gallery/#/dneo76 -via Gorilla Mask

At one time, it was a staple in movies and cartoons. Step in quicksand, and you'll never get out -unless the hero saves you! That trope has fallen out of favor in the last couple of decades because it was perceived as overdone and became a cliche. It didn't help that Mythbusters and other sources debunked the idea of certain death if you step in quicksand.

In any case, it's trivial to say that science has "debunked" quicksand. If anything, recent work on unstable granular media has revealed a far more diverse and complex set of phenomena than anyone imagined. Traditional scientific accounts describe just one type—the classic "artesian quicksand" shown in the MythBusters episode. That's ordinary sand that has been saturated with upwelling moisture: Given enough water, the sand liquefies, and the grains start to flow like a viscous fluid. But in the past 10 years or so, physicists have started looking at more interesting formations of sediment, in places where grains of sand or clay are assembled in delicate, latticelike structures. Step in one of these, and it collapses like a house of cards—before reforming in a dense pack around your feet.

Quicksand survives in movie fan clubs and fetish groups who avidly collect footage featuring quicksand. Daniel Engber put together a look at the phenomena of quicksand itself, quicksand fans, and a history of quicksand in the movies. Link

For many of us, the first time we appreciated the art of math was when we played with a Spirograph. However, it's a long way from addition and subtraction to epicycloids, and very few of us actually study math that far. But those who do sometimes end up creating some very beautiful artworks based on mathematics and geometry.  

Sculpture

Sculptor Bathsheba Grossman creates metal and crystal artworks of forms found in math, physics, biology, and astronomy. Grossmen shows us Borromean rings, hypercubes, gyroids, fractals, Calabi-Yau spaces, and interlaced sculptures based on the five Platonic solids. I particularly like this Voronoi network wrapped onto a Möbius toroid, sculpted in white glass.

Grossman created this beautiful lamp from one of her Ora series sculptures. Available in several lamp styles from Materialise.

Jewelry

The Julia set is a fractal equation that produces a series of rather pleasing spirals. Designer Marc Newson took that fractal shape and designed a necklace of 2,000 diamonds and sapphires that took jewelry craftsmen 1,500 hours to put together. Note that the necklace is not symmetrical, but still has a sense of balance. See how the jeweler, Boucheron, advertises the necklace.

Drawing

Probably the best known artist to use math concepts in his works is M.C. Escher. Many of his 2-dimensional drawings turned 3-dimensional geometry on its head. The lithograph titled Waterfall illustrates the concept of the Penrose triangle, also called the impossible triangle. Escher also explored tessellations in many of his drawings.

Computer Imaging

Paul Nylander was one of the developers of the Mandelbulb that we saw in a previous math post. He is a computer engineer and an artist who renders math and science concepts into colorful images including animated .gifs to help us visualize their 3- or 4-dimensional structures. Shown is a Dodeca-Spidroball, a variation on the spidron, which was invented by Daniel Erdely in 1979.

Belgian mechanical engineer Jos Leys renders and animates all kinds of math concepts into beautiful forms that boggle the mind. His artworks include fractals, Kleinian groups, inversive geometry, recursions, tessellations, knots, and tilings in both images and video renderings to show 3- and 4-dimensional effects. The image above is called Indra200, an example of "Kleinian jewelry". Other artists rendering math images worth checking out include Torolf Sauermann, Brian Johnston, Mehrdad Garousi, and the late Titia Van Beugen.

Video

(YouTube link)

Creating visual representations of math concepts became easier with computer rendering software and digital video capabilities. That doesn't mean it is simple. Homporgo, the artist who created this video of a Mandelbox zoom said in a comment:

Believe me Bill, I wanted to go further too, but at the end part a single frame took 18 minutes to render, and the whole 1:27 minute video needed 12 days nonstop rendering. I felt thats more than enough at the time.

Twelve days! The result looks worth it to me. How about you? See more fractals on video in this post.

Previously at Neatorama: A Non-Math Look at Math Objects and A Non-Math Look at Math Shapes.

See lots of pictures of cats in their best finery, plus a link to outtakes from the cat fashion show last week at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The occasion was the 15th birthday of the official hotel cat Matilda. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Katie Sokoler/Gothamist)

CarlyB is obsessed with animals, especially those animals that don't get a lot of press. So she started the blog Featured Creature, which looks at animals you might not know already. One is the adorable spotted cuscus pictured.

When first discovered, scientists believed that this was a kind of monkey due to its prosimian-like movements through the tropical rain forest canopy. However, it is actually the largest possum on Earth, as well as one of the cutest creatures on Earth if I do say so myself. Males are always spotted but females are white or grey with a woolly coat (but no spots).

See the cuscus in action at the post. Link

Ron Sveden of Brewster, Massachusetts already suffered from emphysema, and when he took a turn for the worse, he expected he might have cancer. Instead, x-rays showed a pea plant sprout growing in his lung!

For two weeks they ran tests but they all came back negative for cancer, until one doctor found the plant growing in his lung.

“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the jolly green giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” said Sveden.

Ron said he never felt anything growing in his chest, just a lot of coughing.

Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.

“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” said Sveden.

Link

Previously: A tale of a pine tree growing in a lung that was later found to have been inhaled as a branch instead of a bud.

This vehicle is called Leach's Garbage Getter, a state-of-the-art sanitation truck built between 1932 and 1949. You can see many garbage truck designs from different eras and different parts of the world in a roundup at Dark Roasted Blend. Link