Organ Donor Socks

Do you feel strongly about organ donation? Where your heart on your feet with the Organ Donor Socks from the NeatoShop. This comfy pair of tube socks fits most men and women. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Footwear. 

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This picture might look photoshopped, but Patrick is 100% real. The 27 year-old wombat weighs 66 pounds and lives in the Ballarat Wildlife Park in Australia. While the adorable little man is already 12 years older than most wombats, he probably won't pass on his genes because he has never mated with a female, so don't hold out your hopes for a Patrick 2.0 to show up in another 27 years.

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Some days--heck, weeks--you just give up. It's time to veg out and do nothing, not even move. But what would happen if the entire human population did that at the same time? Reza Farazmand describes the end of the world.

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My daughter, the driving student, asked me why so few drivers use turn signals. I thought about it, and said it's because they derive no personal benefit from using them. Turn signals do not benefit the driver, only all the other drivers around them. It's like the group that could only eat with four-foot-long spoons: we only benefit when everyone acts unselfishly. Or obeys the law. That is an example of traffic psychology. Studies of the behavior of drivers show us that poor driving is caused by errors in perception and psychological quirks that make us notice bad driving in everyone but ourselves. The Guardian gives us ten examples, such as     

3. We forget that other drivers are people too …

When someone accidentally walks into us on the street or their shopping trolley bumps into ours, the usual reaction is to apologise and move on. But when driving, near misses are often met with instant anger – and in the most extreme cases, road rage. Research shows that drivers more readily dehumanise other drivers and pedestrians in ways they wouldn't when interacting in person. This loss of inhibition is similar to the way some of us behave in online environments.

4. … yet we behave more aggressively to those of 'lower status'

One interesting paradox is that even though we're prone to dehumanising other drivers, we still act according to social status. Decades of research shows that prolonged honking, tailgating, and other aggressive behaviours are more likely if the aggressor believes they are the more important driver. What's particularly interesting is that these judgements can be based simply on the vehicles involved, with no knowledge of the person behind the wheel: larger cars generally outrank smaller cars and newer cars trump older ones. Drivers of more expensive cars are also more likely to behave aggressively toward pedestrians.

Read the rest and see if you are reminded of anyone you know. Link  -via mental_floss

Alexander Schlesier, AKA The Steampunker, is maker of steampunk housewares, furniture and mad scientist gear. He built this classy and functional computer desk. I like what he did with the classic Singer treadle sewing machine. 

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Complaining about the country's education system is a favorite pastime of many American parents, but why don't - or can't - we change the way we educate our children?

Author Amanda Ripley decided to investigate by enlisting "field agents" of American students who studied abroad at Finnish, South Korean, and Polish schools.

Here's what she found out:

“If you want the American dream, go to Finland.” These blunt words from a British politician, quoted by Amanda Ripley in “The Smartest Kids in the World” [...]

[American student named Kim, who went to a typical Finnish school] soon notices something else that’s different about her school in Pietarsaari, and one day she works up the courage to ask her classmates about it. “Why do you guys care so much?” Kim inquires of two Finnish girls. “I mean, what makes you work hard in school?” The students look baffled by her question. “It’s school,” one of them says. “How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?”

It’s the only sensible answer, of course, but its irrefutable logic still eludes many American students, a quarter of whom fail to graduate from high school. Ripley explains why: Historically, Americans “hadn’t needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn’t gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional.” But now, she points out, “everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.”

Read more over at the New York Times: Link | Ripley's book: The Smartest Kids in the World

(Photo: Wired)

Tomás Saraceno, an artist whose work we've featuredpreviously, designed this kite called Solar Bell. He based his design on a flying machine concept conceived by Alexander Graham Bell:

You probably know Bell as the man who invented the telephone, but he was actually quite active in the early days of aviation when engineers were exploring how to make manned flight a reality. Bell’s tetrahedron-shaped kite concept looked to maximize surface area and minimize weight through the use of light, pyramid-shaped sails. The idea was to make a machine capable of carrying a man and a motor into flight, and though he did achieve that, Bell’s kite ultimately failed to inspire the future of manned flight. [...]

The Solar Bell you’re looking at stands 5 meters tall, but the current sculpture is just a stepping stone to Saraceno’s much more ambitious vision. Eventually he’d like to see the Solar Bell reach 60 meters high, effectively turning it into an observation deck that would flutter above land or water supported totally by the wind.The idea is that humans will be able to steer and manipulate the position of the structure based on the distribution of weight. “I want to see people going up in it, climbing in it, using it,” he said.

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Tardar Sauce may be grumpy, but she certainly puts a smile on everyone else's face and you will to wearing this great Grumpy Cat bow in your hair. Of course, if she's not quite your style, Etsy seller uniquechicbows sells other geektastically fantastic bows featuriing icons like Tetris, Where the Wild Things Are, Batman, Nintendo controllers and more.

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One woman notices things she would have never noticed if she had remembered her phone. Those of us who weren't born into the mobile device culture understand all too well. -via Boing Boing 

When I was doing a bit of web research for our "8 Bafflingly Strange Plastic Surgeries" post on Neatorama, I googled "Klingon Forehead" on Google Images.

Sure enough, tons of images of Klingons and their ridged foreheads popped up, but I was perplexed at why Tracy Spiridakos showed up on Google Images' search results. There was no such association over at Bing Images.

As far as I know, Spiridakos, the Greek-Canadian actress has never starred in any Star Trek movies, and that there's no real connection between her, her sci-fi TV show Revolution with Klingons (well, until this post gets picked up by Google anyhow).

What gives, Google?

Neatoramanauts, have you noticed any other strange things over at Google?

(Note: After 8 years of writing for Neatorama, I've recently noticed strange things about our Google referrals - that's a topic for another time - but that's what got me interested in learning more about Google's search results)

Carrying all that gear across Hyrule won't be a problem for Link now that he's driving a mecha. Donald Kennedy, a custom toymaker whose amazing work we've featured previously, built this 6-inch custom figure.

Link -via Technabob

Alice in Wonderland Teapot (front and back)

Quick, invite the guests because it is time for tea! Throw your own mad tea party with the Alice in Wonderland Teapot from the NeatoShop. Both sides of this gorgeous collectible ceramic teapot feature scenes from the 1951 classic Disney film. Popping from the top is a 3-dimensional version of the sleepy little dormouse.     

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Kitchen Stuff. 

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The Brookfield Zoo in Chicago has announced that a snow leopard cub was born there on June 13th. The cub, a blue-eyed baby boy, does not yet have a name.  

The cub, who currently weighs about 10 pounds, is the first cub born to nearly 3-year-old Sarani and her mate Sabu, 3. Since his birth the cub and his mom have resided in an off-exhibit den. Until the cub is 3 months old, he will remain there bonding with his mom before making his public debut in mid-September.

See more pictures of the cub at the zoo's Facebook page. Link -via Tastefully Offensive, where you can see a video.

(Image credit: Brookfield Zoo)

To promote its line of cars, the Czech automaker Škoda built this massive ice cream truck. Carbuzz reports:

Built to mark the launch of the Octavia vRS, the 5.5-ton vehicle comes with 5 ft monster truck wheels and four mega speakers. If only Skoda built real cars as cool as this. The giant ice cream van will be touring the UK handing out 6,5000 free ice creams to kids that will hopefully have a stepladder handy.

I hope that all of the ice cream cones are as big as the one this little girl is getting.

Link -via Foodiggity

Move over, Adele! Here comes the Russian Army choir singing a cover of Skyfall that will make you forget that the Russians have been portrayed as villains in many James Bond movies.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Like that? Check out: Elderly Chinese Choir Takes On Lady Gaga

Treadmill desks may make you healthier, but you have to possess the self-discipline to keep them turned on. Brian Peiris modified his treadmill desk to do exactly that. The slower he moves, the slower his internet connection becomes:

After removing the treadmill’s original time/distance display, [Peiris] reverse engineered the speed sensor to send data to an Arduino and his PC.  We’ve seen a number of projects that interface treadmills with virtual worlds, but what really makes this project stand out is a simple script using the Throxy Python library which allows the treadmill to throttle his machine’s internet connection.

The end result is a browsing experience that reacts to how fast the user runs.  In the demonstration video, you can see Peiris tiptoe through images or jog through YouTube videos.  A minimum bandwidth setting keeps the connection live, so if you can’t make it all the way through that HD Netflix movie, taking a breather won’t time out the connection.

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Yes, distraction, and an opportunity to show off, works wonders to make a child forget her problems. That works for adults, too, it's just a little harder to manipulate. -via Daily Picks and Flicks  

Earlier this month, Keizo Shimamoto released a ramen burger that quickly became the cronut of the burger world. If ramen isn't really your thing though, perhaps you'd prefer PYT's spaghetti burger that features a mozerella-stuffed meatball patty, pasta sauce and spaghetti cooked into garlic-y bun tastiness.

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Although it may look like an art project, these researchers from the University of Exeter are actually trying to track the movements of snails that carry lungworm parasites--a deadly menace to dogs in the UK. So they placed LEDs and UV paint on the snails. Skip to 2:49 in the video to see the snails in action.

-via Colossal

Through most of human history, the mentally ill spoke of seeing demons, spirits, and ghosts. Those delusions are different now. The Truman Show delusion is one in which the subject is convinced that the world they perceive is not real, but is being manipulated by others for the entertainment of the masses. Just like in the movie. The argument can be made that the Truman Show delusion is not really new, but an update of classic paranoid schizophrenic delusions of the past, reflecting our technological world.

Persecutory delusions, for example, can be found throughout history and across cultures; but within this category a desert nomad is more likely to believe that he is being buried alive in sand by a djinn, and an urban American that he has been implanted with a microchip and is being monitored by the CIA. ‘For an illness that is often characterised as a break with reality,’ they observe, ‘psychosis keeps remarkably up to date.’ Rather than being estranged from the culture around them, psychotic subjects can be seen as consumed by it: unable to establish the boundaries of the self, they are at the mercy of their often heightened sensitivity to social threats.

In this interpretation, the Truman Show delusion is a contemporary expression of a common form of delusion: the grandiose. Those experiencing the onset of psychosis often become convinced that the world has undergone a subtle shift, placing them at centre-stage in a drama of universal proportions. Everything is suddenly pregnant with meaning, every tiny detail charged with personal significance. The people around you are often complicit: playing pre-assigned roles, testing you or preparing you for an imminent moment of revelation. Such experiences have typically been interpreted as a divine visitation, a magical transformation or an initiation into a higher level of reality. It is easy to imagine how, if they descended on us without warning today, we might jump to the conclusion that the explanation was some contrivance of TV or social media: that, for some deliberately concealed reason, the attention of the world had suddenly focused on us, and an invisible public was watching with fascination to see how we would respond. The Truman Show delusion, then, needn’t imply that reality TV is either a cause or a symptom of mental illness; it might simply be that the pervasive presence of reality TV in our culture offers a plausible explanation for otherwise inexplicable sensations and events.

Paranoid delusions have been turned into almost believable fiction, in movie such as The Matrix, Total Recall, and, yes, The Truman Show. And some "reality" shows do manipulate everyday people with pranks and covert surveillance for our entertainment (case in point). But "real" reality is catching up fast. In the past, people who spoke of magnetic waves in the air and secret government surveillance were considered crazy. Now those things are part of everyday life. Read more about the evolution of paranoid delusions at aeon. Link -via Digg

Kelsie Curtis has a seriously cool dad. How cool? Well, he not only made her a custom TARDIS wedding cake topper for her big day, he also built a remote-controlled K-9 ring bearer for his baby girl. 

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Have you noticed that every week, Neatorama has more and more posts that you won't find anywhere else? We're gradually ramping up our exclusive articles, testing out new ideas, and hoping to find more of what you enjoy most on the internet! For example,

Alex and David Israel visited filmmaker Freddie Wong at his studios for an interview that became a Neatorama video called A Day in the Life of Freddie Wong. It was posted along with a couple of episodes of his web series Video Game High School.  

Alex wrote about 8 Bafflingly Strange Plastic Surgeries.

And also brought us Anti-Cheating Devices: From the Ridiculous to the High-Tech.

We had a guest post from Anna Johansson called Game of Thrones is Changing How Children Are Named.

Kieran from Thread.com gave us the Top 3 Most Stylish Comic Book Heroes.

Eddie Deezen told us about The Fears and Phobias of Famous People.

6 Complicated Concepts Explained Using Kitchen Items was from mental_floss magazine.

The Annals of Improbable Research asked the question Do Hamburger and Salmon Cause Cancer?

The New Deal came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

We tried something new this week: lists from the Bathroom Reader Institute. This week's offerings were Guilt by Association: These are Not Dirty Words and It Ain't From There.

David asked another Question In Need of Answers, in Which TV Characters Do You Miss Most?

Hy Conrad's Whodunit this week was The Commercial Break Break-in.

Alex posted Did This Vet Do The Right Thing by Saving the Dog Instead of Euthanizing It? accompanied by a poll. The poll results show that those with an opinion favored saving the dog's life over carrying out the owner's order, but the comments and hearts show that many consider the vet guilty of financial fraud, even if he did the right thing by the dog.

In this week's What is It? game, the mystery object …is still a mystery object. We don't know what it is! But we have a t-shirt from the NeatoShop for Paul Bryant 2, who gave us this funny answer: "It's a primitive bowling ball. Scores were marked on the side, meaning that not only was it hard to control, but only good for one game. It was quickly decided that round would be better." Yes, that that way progress is made. See the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.

Congratulations to the NeatoShop T-Shirt Giveaway Winners, Alejandro Hinojosa, Parth Kothari, Ashley Eddy, and James Semaj!

You've got until tomorrow to enter the NeatoShop's Dream Picnic Pin to Win Contest on Pinterest! You could win a whole slew of great prizes from the NeatoShop, but time is running out.

The most commented-on post this week was Questions In Need of Answers - No. 6: Which TV Characters Do You Miss Most? (which is no surprise at all). In second place was Anti-Cheating Devices: From the Ridiculous to the High-Tech, and The Fears and Phobias of Famous People was third.

The comment(s) of the week was this odd exchange on the post You Need to Keep Yo Business Off of Facebook.

You can't hide anywhere these days! Honestly, we saw a lot of great jokes and puns in the comments this week -too many to mention here. You should always go and read the comments of fellow Neatoramanauts, the punniest commenters on the web.

The most popular post was The Fears and Phobias of Famous People, followed by Anti-Cheating Devices: From the Ridiculous to the High-Tech and 10 Perfect Facts About The Princess Bride From Rob Reiner, in order.

The most ♥s went to Tiffany's post Welcome to Kindergarten. It's a big milestone when a child reaches kindergarten, and many of us remember when the Santoso's son was born.
Coming in second was White Water Rafting Street Art, and in third place was Best Use For A Yoga Ball. Thanks for the ♥s!

The most emailed post was Anti-Cheating Devices: From the Ridiculous to the High-Tech, followed by The Fears and Phobias of Famous People and Racial Map of the United States.

Once you've caught up on what's going on here for the week, remember that Neatorama is much more than what's on the main page. Our sub-blogs, for specialized tastes, are available through the buttons in the gray bar at the top of the page. We'll soon be concentrating on seasonal treats on the Halloween blog, even though we've been feeding the monster continuously for over a year now. Consider it your go-to Halloween resource this year! Also, make sure you keep up on what's new at the NeatoShop, which supports everything else here. Our social media extensions include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+. Over at G+ this week, a caption request for this picture yielded a gem from Denise Yazak, as pictured here. And mobile users: Flipboard makes it easy to keep up with Neatorama.

Have a great week, everybody!

Vulture Hook Pillow

Do you find your home decor dead and uninviting, but you don't have the money to completely tear it apart and start over? Freshen up your look with the Vulture Hook Pillow from the NeatoShop. Nothing adds buzz to your home decor like a buzzard pillow. This pillow is sure to make your style soar to new heights. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop form more great Home Decor items. 

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Well, these are tough economic times for many Klingons....

(Photo: unknown)

So it makes sense that the Illinois Department of Employment Security would offer assistance to residents whose primary language is Klingon. Ellen Jean Hirst writes in the Chicago Tribune:

If you wanted to ask an Illinois Department of Employment Security professional how to appeal a denied claim — in Klingon — you would say: vaj tem DoQ, chay' Qu' appeal?

That means, if my claim is denied, how do I appeal?

You can learn how to ask many questions in Klingon — an unofficial language created for humanoid characters in the "Star Trek" television series and movies — on the IDES website. The site offers translations via Microsoft Translator. The current options are Spanish, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Klingon.

A department spokesman explained that the Klingon translation service doesn't cost the agency any additional money:

The unique language doesn't cost the department any money: Rivara said the Microsoft translation service is free. While the 280 or so pages on the department's website can be automatically translated, department staff members review each page in each language for accuracy and nuance. The department did not take time to review Klingon — so some words, like "appeal" and "unemployment," don't translate on the site.

News Story and IDES Website -via Dave Barry