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Avi Steinberg, a former prison librarian, has written a memoir about his experience. In it, he recounted the books that were the most popular among prisoners, and why:
The prisoners’ book choices are suggestive: Anne Frank was effectively coping with incarceration in her Amsterdam attic, and Plath is an obvious choice for those less than contented with their lot. Participants in Steinberg’s women’s writing group insisted on checking out an author’s photo before they would read the book, with interesting reactions. Flannery O’Connor’s portrait got a positive verdict – “She looks kind of busted up, y’know? She ain’t too pretty. I trust her” – but the judgment on Gabriel García Márquez was blunt: “That man is a liar”.
Crime fiction was also very popular.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Author’s Website | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user jvoss used under Creative Commons license
A retired US Secret Service agent named Gerald Blaine said that on the evening after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he almost accidentally shot President Lyndon Johnson:
Blaine heard footsteps approaching. He picked up his submachine gun and, in the darkness, pointed it at the chest of a man who turned out to be Johnson.
Blaine writes that the enormity of what had almost happened left him chilled. He realized that, 14 hours after losing one president, the nation had almost lost another one by his hand.
Link via Joe Carter | Photo: Cecil Stoughton/US National Archives
Astronauts can lose 1-2% of their skeletal mass for each month that they spend in very low gravity. After a several months, this loss can become a serious health problem. But a new MIT-designed outfit called the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit may help counteract this problem:
With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on—pulling the wearer’s shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human’s legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit’s legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer’s legs are subjected to a greater force—replicating gravity effects on Earth.
The prototype suit testing took place on parabolic flights that created brief periods of weightlessness. Results showed that the suit successfully imitated the pull of gravity on the torso and thighs, but it did not exert enough force on the lower legs. Researchers are now refining the suit’s design to address this; they also plan to test the suit to see how it performs when worn overnight.
Link | Photo: MIT/James Waldie
John VandenBrooks of Arizona State University in Tempe examined how changing levels of oxygen in the atmosphere may effect the size that insects grow:
The team raised cockroaches, dragonflies, grasshoppers, meal worms, beetles and other insects in atmospheres containing different amounts of oxygen to see if there were any effects.
One result was that dragonflies grew faster into bigger adults in hyperoxia.
Experimenting with giant insects — what could possibly go wrong?
Link via DVICE | Image: Warner Bros.
A slab of marble in the Cathedral of St. Ambrose in Vigevano, Italy, appears to contain a cross-section of the skull of a dinosaur:
“The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull. The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth,” Andrea Tintori, the University of Milan paleontologist who spotted the fossil near the altar, told Discovery News.
Measuring about 30 cm (11.8 inches), the skull was cut in sections as slabs of the marble-like rock were used to build the Cathedral between 1532 and 1660.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo: Andrea Tintori, University of Milan
Thomas Kirkwood writes in Scientific American about why women live longer than men. Fellas, the good news is that you might be able to increase your lifespan by fourteen years. The, uh, bad news:
As many dog and cat owners can attest, neutered male animals often live longer than their intact counterparts. Indeed, the evidence supports the notion that male castration might be the ticket to a longer life.
Might the same be true of humans?[...]
The historical record is not good enough to determine if eunuchs tend to outlive normal healthy men, but some sad records suggest that they do. A number of years ago castration of men in institutions for the mentally disturbed was surprisingly commonplace. In one study of several hundred men at an unnamed institution in Kansas, the castrated men were found to live on average 14 years longer than their uncastrated fellows.
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: NIH
Rowan, a German Spitz, was born without eyes. But he’s able to navigate by barking and listening to the echo:
Mrs Orchard who breeds dogs at Spilmah Home Boarding in Potton, near Biggleswade, Beds added: “‘When he’s running around in the open it’s just as if he were the same as the rest of my dogs.
”When he first started going out there were no leaves on the trees but when the leaves grew there was the rustling and we noticed the change in his behaviour.
‘He would go out and to find his direction he would use his bark. It really does seem to be a form of echolocation.
You can watch a video of the dog at the link.
Link via Urlesque | Photo: Express.co.uk
It’s hard to believe today, but less than 100 years ago, there was a great debate about whether women should be able to vote. The anti-suffragists declared that voting women would abandon their families, they would become ugly and mean, and society would collapse.
This attitude was reflected in the suffragette caricatures drawn in newspapers and magazines. According to Tickner, depictions of spinster suffragettes were normally slender in a time when curves were celebrated; their faces likewise were severe and gaunt, “the lines of disappointment etched deep by the illustrator’s pen.” The spinster suffragette’s clothes and physical appearance emphasize that she is a failed woman and wannabe man. The lady wants to vote because she couldn’t get a date.
Read more about the anti-suffrage movement and see more cartoons and caricatures from the debate at mental_floss. Link
Tired of the old, ugly toaster in your kitchen? Here’s a new concept design that will make your metal toaster throw in the towel. Burcu Bag, Amalia Monica and Vinay Raj Somashekar has created a super-flexible toasting device called "Halo" that uses a sheet of heating element to do its job.
Weird? Well, if you think about it, electric sleeping blanket works pretty much the same way, right? Link
Is the actor really that bad or is it just a bad movie? Weird Worm shines the light on 5 actors who you thought were bad, but are actually quite talented. Take, for instance, Nicolas Cage:
Mr. Cage is the man that inspired this article. Never before has Hollywood seen an actor who is has such immense talent but is pretty content with doing movies like “Bangkok Dangerous”, “Ghost Rider” and “The Wickerman”.
Nick Cage is an Academy Award winner for Best Actor. That’s right. Those aren’t like Golden Globes, which everyone has – he’s won the real deal. He earned it for his performance in “Leaving Las Vegas” where he systematically drinks himself to death and befriends a prostitute along the way. This is the same actor in “Con Air” and “G-force” mind you. After doing a couple more blockbusters and a few more flops, the real Nick Cage returned in 2002 with “Adaptation”. Again he was nominated for “Best Actor”- as if to remind everyone that the joke is on us. In short, Nick Cage is like a mythical Chinese Dragon that appears every thousand years, except when Nick Cage resurfaces he doesn’t herald the end of the world, he just behaves like a talented actor.
Link (Photo: nicogenin [Flickr] via Wikipedia)
Wanna go to a haunted house this Halloween? Wild Ammo has a list of 13 scariest haunted houses in the United States – this one above is from the 13th Gate in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
The 13th Gate has consistently been recognized as one of the top haunted attractions in the country, rated best by Hauntworld.com. This 40,000 square foot haunted house will take you on a journey through 13 frightening themed indoor/outdoor sets where your worst nightmares come true and anything can happen. Award-winning scenic artists, set carpenters, lighting and sound technicians, and special effects artists are just a few of the many crewmembers that make The 13th Gate a great haunted experience. It’s an experience you won’t soon forget, IF you survive The 13th Gate!
Check out the rest of the selections: Link
Finally, a film that explains everything! This trailer for a prequel to the Alfred Hitchcock horror classic The Birds comes from NYSUfilms. -via b3ta
Apparently you can, according to a New York judge:
The suit that Justice Wooten allowed to proceed claims that in April 2009, Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, who were both 4, were racing their bicycles, under the supervision of their mothers, Dana Breitman and Rachel Kohn, on the sidewalk of a building on East 52nd Street.
At some point in the race, they struck an 87-year-old woman named Claire Menagh, who was walking in front of the building and, according to the complaint, was “seriously and severely injured,” suffering a hip fracture that required surgery. She died three weeks later.
Her estate sued the children and their mothers, claiming they had acted negligently during the accident. [...]
In legal papers, Mr. Tyrie added, “Courts have held that an infant under the age of 4 is conclusively presumed to be incapable of negligence.” (Rachel and Jacob Kohn did not seek to dismiss the case against them.)
But Justice Wooten declined to stretch that rule to children over 4. On Oct. 1, he rejected a motion to dismiss the case because of Juliet’s age, noting that she was three months shy of turning 5 when Ms. Menagh was struck, and thus old enough to be sued.
What do you think? Should we be able to sue little kids for negligence?
For more baby and kid-related stuff, don’t miss our blog NeatoBambino!
DIY Vasectomy Magnet Set – $10.95
All it takes is a steady hand, and a mere few dollars to get yourself this handy dandy DIY Vasectomy fridge magnet set from the NeatoShop!
Link | More Fun and Unusual Magnets| New Items from the NeatoShop
Bruno Kurth and Tobias Reichling. Vanessa Graf, Tanja Kusserow-Kurth, and Torsten Scheer built an enormous relief map of Europe topped with models of famous monuments. They used 53,500 pieces to create a structure that measures 12.5 feet on a side. 44 monuments lie on the surface of the map.
Link via Make | Photo: Tobias Reichling
Luxury furniture maker Dedon sells Nestrest. This chair designed by Daniel Pouzet and Fred Frety can sit on the floor or be suspended from an overhead hook.
Link via Born Rich | Photo: Dedon
Note to cheating students: teachers aren’t as naive or as technologically illiterate as you think they are.
Link via Geekologie
Illustrator Steve Thomas created a series of beautiful retro posters for locations, transportation facilities, and events featured in the Star Wars movies. They may be available to purchase as prints soon! Link -via Buzzfeed
In the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, the explanation for how the elephant got its trunk involved a crocodile that pulled on a baby elephant’s nose until it stretched out. That same scene was photographed recently in South Africa. A baby elephant was taking a drink when a crocodile, hidden under the surface of the water, clamped down on the juvenile’s trunk!
Hearing the baby’s calls of distress, the herd of elephants immediately went to its rescue, scaring off the crocodile by trumpeting and stamping the ground. After the attack the herd stayed with the youngster.
When the baby had recovered the herd crossed the waterhole together in safety, only yards from where the crocodile had been hiding.
These pictures were taken by amateur photographer Johan Opperman in the Kruger National Park in South Africa.
Experts said crocodiles don’t normally attack elephants. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Johan Opperman/Solent News and Photo Agency)
Just because we like to keep you on your toes, this week we have a second round of the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Almost three-year-old Gram wanted to be Robocop for Halloween, so his dad went to work and made this costume. They went out for a photo shoot and met some real Detroit police officers!
They even let him sit in the police car. He in awe during the whole encounter. Detroit’s finest were there to help protect a movie or TV Show that was filming on that block. While we were talking, some Hollywood-type rushed over to take a picture of the kid with his camera phone. “I’m good friends with Peter Weller, the guy who played Robocop on the movie,” he said. “He’s gonna get a kick out of this.” The guy proceeded to e-mail the photo to Weller, so chances are the real Robocop has seen my little Robocop. Then we headed back to the first precinct for some repairs (after such an eventful shift, the paint was peeling off the suit and parts were falling off).
The post includes many more pictures, and how the costume was created. Link -via Metafilter
If you’re looking to ramp up for Halloween by watching some horror flicks, you could go the typical route of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street marathons, but if you’re really looking for a spooky movie fest, why not go the extra mile. The films on this list are all so violent and so offensive that they have been subject to protests, boycotts or censorship and many have even been banned in a few countries. While many of these are lesser known and hard to find, some of the big name controversial movies may surprise you. Because offensiveness and scariness are so subjective, these are presented in order of release date.
Warning: this post contains video clips that may be disturbing to some viewers, as they are from intentionally disturbing films.
Video link
This movie was the directorial debut of Wes Craven and depicted two teenage girls who are kidnapped by escaped convicts on their way to a rock concert. They are then sadistically tortured, raped and eventually murdered. By using a grainy, hand-held 16 mm camera, Craven’s picture seemed all too real to many movie viewers. He tried to defend the violence by saying it was “a reaction on my part to the violence around us, specifically to the Vietnam War.”
Craven’s excuses didn’t do much to quell the controversy and the movie was censored in many countries, particularly the U.K., where it was banned for seventeen years and remained subject to censorship until 2008.
Video link
You probably already know this is a darn creepy movie, but you may not know that it was so shocking to movie goers that many viewers were subject to nausea, convulsions, fainting and shocking displays of anger –one viewer in San Francisco attacked the movie screen, attempting to kill the demon. Paramedics began to be called to the screenings and it wasn’t long before picketers started showing up at the theaters. The film was even banned on video for 14 years in the U.K.
After the film was released, there was a major increase in requests for priests to perform exorcisms and a drastic rise in alleged spiritual possessions and psychoses by people claiming to be possessed. Taking advantage of the hysteria, Reverend Billy Graham claimed he “felt the power of evil buried within the celluloid of the film itself.”
The fear of being buried alive is an old one, and is even the origin of the phrase “saved by the bell”. Annalee Newitz of io9 has a roundup of technologies developed over the years, right up to the present day, to prevent a person from meeting this fate. Pictured above is Thomas Pursell’s 1930s-era tomb that featured doors that could be opened from the inside.
Todd from Cleveland, Ohio submitted this picture of his latest tattoo to Geeky Tattoos. The only thing that could improve it is a cursor hovering over a right-click menu.
There are many familiar terms you read on the internet, but if they came up in conversation, you might not pronounce the words the same as other people do -because you’ve only seen them typed! Geekosystem has a pronunciation guide for 21 words and phrases that you may not have ever heard spoken out loud. But if you ever do, you’ll be correct. Take, for example, the word “Cthulhu”.
4) Cthulhu
Created by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a humongous cosmic entity resembling a blend of an octopus, dragon and humanoid. Bordering on a ridiculous mishmash that would be found laughable in today’s horror scene, Cthulhu is still widely-known and loved amongst literature buffs and geeks the world over.
* The Mystery: Probably doesn’t need a list of common mispronunciations, but it’s safe to say every letter in the name other than the “l” can be pronounced one way or another.
* The Answer: Wikipedia says H.P. Lovecraft once transcribed the pronunciation as “Khlûl-hloo,” though didn’t pronounce it that way at other times. Now commonplace, the accepted pronunciation is “ka-thoo-loo;” that is, if you accept a pronunciation from a source other than the creator of the word. Lovecraft didn’t seem to have any consistent way of pronouncing it though, so we’re all better off settling on the common way described above.
You’ll also want to check out the best way to pronounce FAQ, Ubuntu, and meme, among others. Link
(Image credit: the NeatoShop)
BCB International sells underwear made to protect your genitals and femoral arteries from injury by explosive blasts. They’re made with a double layer of Kevlar and are fire resistant. The shorts have been tested on dummies with substantial success.
So, you’ve used a time machine to travel back to the London of 1835. You encounter Oliver, an impoverished street urchin of 12 years of age. For some reason, you’ve decided to explain to him what the Internet is. How do you proceed? Comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner created a flowchart to illustrate your options.
Previously by Doogie Horner: What Your Facebook Portrait Says about You
The robot-building team at Bellarmine College Prepatory School in San Jose, California built a t-shirt cannon that can fire 200 t-shirts before reloading. It can spit them out as fast as three shirts per second.
Link via Make | Photo: Team 254
Prevously: The T-Shirt Cannon
The Tianhe-1A, which is at the National University of Defence Technology in Tianjin, is the fastest computer in the world:
According to Nvidia, a technology company that supplied parts for the Chinese computer, the Tianhe-1A was clocked at 2.507 petaflops, or more than two quadrillion calculations per second. It has the power of 175,000 high-end laptops.[...]
Until now, the fastest supercomputer was the Jaguar, built by Cray, and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar has clocked 1.75 petaflops in testing.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: NVIDIA
REDSKINS DOUBLE THEIR BLUNDER
During the NFL draft in 1946, the Washington Redskins were giddy when they nabbed UCLA running back Cal Rossi. By pairing Rossi with star quarterback “Slingin’ Sammy” Baugh, Washington hoped to build a backfield that would give opponents nightmares. There was just one problem: Rossi was still a junior in college, and in those days, only seniors were eligible for the draft. How did the Skins fumble so badly? The team’s owner, George Marshall, was too cheap to send scouts across the country; instead, he just picked new players by scanning the sports page.
The team selected Rossi again the next year, but amazingly, it was yet another wasted draft pick. As soon as the team selected him, the Redskins learned that Rossi had joined the Navy and had no intention of playing pro football.
HOT POTATOES
As a 1987 minor-league baseball game, catcher Dave Bresnahan made what looked to be a critical blunder. He threw the ball over the third baseman’s head, and the opposing team’s runner trotted home as the ball rolled into the outfield. But when the player arrived at home plate, Bresnahan tagged him out. How could the ball be in left field and in Bresnahan’s mitt? A quick investigation revealed that the so-called ball Bresnahan had thrown into the outfield was, in fact, a potato. In his spare time, the catcher had carved a tuber to look like a baseball and stashed it into his mitt.
Creative? Definitely. Successful? Not so much. The umpire scoffed at the ploy and called the runner safe at home. The bush league play also enraged Williamsport’s manager, who yanked Bresnahan from the game, fined him $50, and kicked him off the team. The fans, on the other hand, loved the stunt so much that Williamsport retired Bresnahan’s number the following season. At the ceremony, he joked, “Lou Gehrig had to play 2,130 consecutive games and hit .340 for his number to be retired, and all I had to do was bat .140 and throw a potato.”
FISHY BUSINESS
Back in 2005, Paul Tormanen looked like a rising star on the bass-fishing circuit. When other anglers struggled to find a decent catch, he managed to fill his boat with trophy bass in less than an hour. But unbeknownst to his rivals, Tormanen was arriving at each tournament a little too prepared. He would hit the lake before the competition, catch a mess of fish, and then leave the biggest ones tethered to a stump underwater. On tournament day, he’d simply retrieve his catch and collect the prize.
Tormanen got away with the scheme for several months, but his plans went awry after another fisherman stumbled onto his stash one day. Fish and Wildlife agents secretly marked the illicit catch, and when Tormanen netted the fish, he was arrested for contest fraud. The dubious tactic earned hm 120 hours of community service and a lifetime ban from fishing competitions.
Tormanen’s dirty tactics may seem crude, but they’re masterful compared to those of Robby Rose. During 2009’s Bud Lite Trail Boss Big Bass Tournament, Rose tried to make his bass seem bigger by stuffing 16 oz. weights down their throats. Contest officials realized something was fishy when Rose’s leaden catch sank to the bottom of the holding tank.
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The above article by Ethan Trex is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
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