Amazing Friendship!

5 Famous Scientists Dismissed as Morons in Their Time

Every nutjob in the world with some out-there theory thinks he's Galileo, rejected for daring to think different. Virtually all of them are, in fact, simply insane.

Yet, there have been brilliant rebels who put their own world-changing ideas on the line, only to end up like Doc Brown in his alternate timeline: humiliated, ridiculed, ignored and/or straight driven to insanity.

Gregor Mendel

You probably know Mendel as the guy who pioneered the science of genetics, and for keeping eighth-graders busy while science teachers watch porn at their desks. Anybody with a high school diploma has filled out those dominant/recessive trait Punnett squares ...
... though astute readers are probably wondering why that technique is called a Punnett square if it predicts patterns Mendel discovered.

What you probably didn't know was that before making his revolutionary discovery, Gregor Mendel flunked his ass out of school and resigned himself to a quiet life as the abbot of a monastery. It had an extensive experimental garden and there Mendel patiently spent the next seven years of his life breeding and cross-breeding peas.

He carefully documented his work and developed what would eventually be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. Then he wrote it up and got it published in an lesser-known journal, the Journal of the Brno Natural History Society in 1866.

His Genius Was Rewarded By ...
A quiet life of complete anonymity. Mendel's work was read by about zero people, even after he took it upon himself to contact the highest minds of his time by personally sending them copies of his theory. It turns out he would have been better off writing it on a paper bag filled with dog shit and leaving the whole flaming mess on porches.

Why did they ignore him? Because the greatest minds of his time couldn't understand him. It wasn't until 16 years after his death that three independent botanists rediscover Mendel's work and started the genetics ball rolling.

Ignaz Semmelweis

We've brought up poor old Semmelweis once before, but just in case you don't have a running loop of Cracked articles going through your head, here's the recap: Back in 1847, Semmelweis found himself in charge of two maternity clinics. The first clinic was a teaching school, with medical students learning birthing, autopsying and everything in between. The second clinic was intended for women who couldn't afford health care and was serviced by midwives, not actual doctors or students.

Yet it was the second clinic that women of all social statuses begged to get into. Why? Because if they went to the first clinic they'd have a 10 percent chance of dying of puerperal fever, a six percent greater rate of death than in the midwife-run hospital. Women literally had a better chance of surviving a birth on the street than in the first clinic. After an exhaustive study, Semmelweis figured out that medical students were smothered in disease cooties from cadavers, and that maybe, just maybe, they should wash their hands in between the autopsy room and the birthing rooms.

He insisted students perform a simple chlorine wash after handling dead guys and immediately got the death rate down to one to two percent. With numbers like that, you'd think the whole continent of Europe, much less the medical community, would have crowned him "king of live babies" or something.

His Genius Was Rewarded By ...
First dementia, then a beatdown at an insane asylum, then death, by virtually the same disease he had eradicated in his own hospital.

Semmelweis didn't just have the disregard of his contemporaries, he had their flat-out scorn. Maybe it was because he didn't get around to explaining himself on paper right away, so no one understood what hand-washing had to do with keeping people alive. Some doctors were actually insulted that he was accusing Viennese medical students being dirty enough to kill people.
Within 14 years of his groundbreaking discovery, Semmelweis just stopped giving a fuck. He got drunk all the time and called all his detractors "ignoramuses" and "murderers." He started chilling with prostitutes and lashing out at family. That last part proved to be a bad move, because in 1865 they had him committed to an insane asylum, where he was promptly beat up and stuck in a dark cellar.

He died two weeks later. It took another 20 years and Louis Pasteur's germ theory for the rest of the world to come around to the concept of washing your hands to keep from getting sick.

George Zweig

The year 1964 was a watershed year by any measure. The Beatles arrived, the Civil Rights Act was passed, Nicolas Cage was born and in two separate parts of the world, two separate scientists proposed the existence of quarks, the teeny-tiny subatomic particles that combine to form matter. If you've been paying attention, you know one of these guys is about to get screwed. (Hint: It's George Zweig.)

Zweig had three things going against him in 1964. One, he was a young graduate student, unpublished and unproven. Two, he was working at a particle research center in Geneva. You'd think that would be an advantage, but it turns out his institute had a stringent model for publication, and his paper on quarks, which he called "aces," didn't meet its standards (even though he had come up with a much cooler name for the particle). And three, an older scientist from his grad school proposed the exact same theory at the exact same time and because of his stature was able to publish that exact same theory with the exact same publication that rejected Zweig's.
At first, both men were called crazy for their insane notions of invisible particles. They had no model of behavior for the buggers and no methods of ever actually looking at them. But eventually the science world came around, and by 1969, Zweig's rival was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. As for Zweig.

His Genius Was Rewarded By ...
Being blackballed by a major university and accusations of being a "charlatan."

It wasn't until the 1970s that anyone could actually prove the existence of quarks, and by that time, the Nobel Prize committee felt it had already given the little particles enough attention, so it was reluctant to revisit the subject. Nevertheless, in 1977, Zweig and his rival were both nominated, but neither won. Zweig ended up changing his field of study to neurobiology, presumably believing that if he made a seminal contribution to every area of science, he'd eventually get credit for something.

Albert Einstein

Trying to convince you that Albert Einstein was rejected in any way during his lifetime let alone a moron is a hard sell, considering that he was one of the most famous men on the planet at the time. But buried deep in a lifetime of utter brilliance, Einstein was saddled with one big mistake. One that it turned out wasn't a mistake at all.

To understand, you have to know a little bit about Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Not a whole lot, just the fact that it didn't allow for a static universe. Einstein believed the universe had to be static, or else the forces of gravity would cause the whole universe to contract onto itself, which it apparently wasn't doing. So, to make up for this weird conundrum, he invented something called thecosmological constant, an unknown, unchanging force that allowed him to have his cake (General Theory of Relativity) and eat it, too (stand by a static-universe model).

But not too long after Einstein came up with the cosmological constant, Edwin Hubble burst his little unmoving universe bubble by finding evidence that the whole shebang was expanding. Einstein called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder" and went to his grave thinking he was an idiot for having proposed it. And so did everyone else. For a while.


His Genius Was Rewarded By ...

Einstein didn't get heaped with scorn like some of the other geniuses on this list, so he got off with a little self-deprecation with a side of regret. And he also dropped the whole idea of the cosmological constant. But here's the thing -- it turns out he may have been right all along. Not about the universe being static, of course, but that this mysterious, unknown entity existed in the first place.
In the 1990s, scientists discovered that the universe was expanding faster than they had previously thought and that the rate of expansion was being fueled by a mysterious, unknown entity. There are several contenders up for consideration as the cause, but everyone's favorite? You guessed it: Einstein's cosmological constant. His math of the constant magically fit the bill. Also because you never go wrong when you bet on Einstein.


Ludwig Boltzmann 

Ludwig Boltzmann had the unfortunate luck of being born with a genius brain at the wrong time. Back in the 19th century, there was a huge debate over the nature of matter. Boltzmann not only had the audacity to presuppose the existence of atoms at a time when the atomic model was still controversial among scientists, but also built every one of his brilliant theories as if there was no debate at all. How brilliant? Hang on to your test tubes, because thing are about to get sciencey.

For one, he pioneered the study of statistical thermodynamics, which is a field of physics that provides a framework for predicting how a large number of particles will behave in a system. So, let's say you're camping and you start a fire. Boltzmann was the guy who tried to figure out what the crap was going on in those logs on a molecular level that allowed the fire to kindle, and he used fancy math formulas to figure it out. His work ultimately paved the way for the field of quantum mechanics, which eventually paved the way for the greatest time travel show ever.

His Genius Was Rewarded By ...

Death. He got death.
Back then, defending the existence of atoms was akin to defending creationist version of the origins of man today. Boltzmann wasn't just forced to defend something that would be accepted as fact within a few years, he was shamed for his stubborn refusal to yield and for his so-called materialist beliefs.
Nobody ever told scientists that nonmaterial science is already called philosophy. A long series of uneven debates left nearly every other supporter of atoms silent, leaving Boltzmann as their chief defender. Even colleagues who originally agreed with him began to question atoms' existence when his work seemingly undermined previously understood laws of physics.

The emotional burden of being the only right guy in the world, coupled with what was probably undiagnosed bipolar disorder, proved too much for Boltzmann to handle, and he hung himself in 1906, only three years before another scientist proved the undeniable existence of atoms. Nice job, science.

Picture of the Day!

What do you think of this picture ??????

Clever and Creative Tea Packaging

Cigarette Tea Bags

Cigarettea are creative tea bags that look just like real cigarettes.

Tea Forté

Tall polyhedral infuser tea packs by Peter Hewitt, each with a disarmingly natural-looking leaf/sprout tag.

Tea Stick

Cool tea bags designed for people who do not make their tea in a kitchen: gardeners, builders and campers.

Lighting Tea Bag

Cool lighting concept by Wonsik Chae imitates the form of a tea bag

Hanger Tea

Creative tea bags by Soon Mo Kang are shaped like T-shirts with a hanger that hangs on the tea cup

Origami Tea Bags

Creative tea bags designed by Natalia Ponomareva from Russia.

The teenager who sleeps for 10 days

 While most teenagers struggle to get out of bed in a morning, Louisa Ball might take 10 days to fully wake from her slumber, due to a very rare neurological disorder. So what's it like living with Kleine-Levin Syndrome?

Louisa has slept through holidays, friends' birthdays and half of her GCSEs.

In 2008, aged 14, she had been suffering from flu-like symptoms. She was at her school in Sussex when she started nodding off in class and behaving strangely.

"I didn't know what I was doing, what I was saying, everyone thought 'hey this isn't right,'" she recalls.
"I was hallucinating and after that I don't remember anything. All of a sudden it just went blank and I just slept for 10 days. I woke up and I was fine again."

Her parents Rick and Lottie watched their daughter becoming fidgety and with unusual facial expressions as she sank into sleep. The first time was a frightening experience for them, although Louisa herself says she wasn't scared by the episode, more puzzled.

"It was really weird, no one knew what was wrong, we just thought it wasn't going to happen again. And then four weeks later it happened again."

She was finally diagnosed with Kleine-Levin Syndrome (KLS). There is no known cause or cure but Louisa says it was good to know what it was and that it wasn't life threatening.

The average time it takes to diagnose the condition is four years, because there is no test and so it requires a process of elimination of other disorders.

The disease was named after Willi Kleine, a neurologist from Frankfurt, and Max Levin, a psychiatrist from New York, who identified patients with similar symptoms in 1925 and 1936.

Louisa is unusual as KLS usually affects teenage boys, who can also exhibit hypersexuality and inappropriate behaviour.
As well as excessive sleeping, symptoms include behaviour changes, irritability, feeling in a dream-like state and binge eating, symptoms that can be mistaken for normal teenage behaviour. There are no drugs that have conclusively shown to alleviate symptoms.

'No dreams'

People with the sleep disorder narcolepsy fall asleep immediately, but people with KLS might sleep more and more over a number of days before falling into sleep mode.

Louisa says she remembers very little when she wakes up from an episode: "It's just blank - no dreams. Now I'll remember a lot more that's gone on. Before I wouldn't remember anything at all. My dad thinks my brain is learning to cope with it more."

So how do you deal with a disorder that takes over your life so much?

It nearly ruined Louisa's career ambitions, because she slept through most of her GCSEs but her college allowed her to enrol and she is studying sport performance and excellence, with dreams of being a dancer.
At first, her school teachers didn't understand, she says. "They'd give work to my brother for me to do and when I went back to school they expected me to have done it but I'd have slept for 10 days."

Some people with KLS have complained they have lost their friends because they suddenly disappear for weeks on end but Louisa has a close knit group of girlfriends. Some even visit her when she's sleeping, just to check she's ok.

When she wakes up, it takes her a few days to fully come round, and her body is quite stiff so her dancing is affected for while.

"I've never really got upset about it but I sometimes do think 'why me', because I've always been a normal healthy person. But all of a sudden it happened and there's no reason why it happened and that sometimes frustrates me.

"But I've got used to it now and learnt to live with it. I'm a special kid."
The change in behaviour before and during a sleep episode is one of the most upsetting things for Louisa's parents, who take it in turns to remain with her. Doctors have told the family it's crucial to wake Louisa once a day to feed her and get her to the bathroom.

But Lottie admits it can take a while to get her to come round. "I've tried before to literally force her to wake up but she just starts swearing and gets so agitated and aggressive."
After watching a video the family made of her while sleeping, Louisa says: "I look scary, it doesn't look like me, it's like I'm on drugs."

Frustrated by the lack of information in the UK, Louisa was taken by her parents to the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière in Paris, where researchers are looking into whether it is caused by a defective gene.

Many sufferers have abnormalities in their temporal lobe, the area of the brain involved in behaviour and memory. A scan of Louisa's brain function revealed she does have abnormalities in her frontal lobe but there are no signs that this has affected her behaviour or memory.
The good news is the disease can also disappear just as suddenly as it came on. This normally happens after 10 to 15 years.

But Louisa is currently going through a good period. She was out doing Christmas shopping with her best friend this week and has not had an episode in 13 weeks. A few weeks ago she won yet another dance competition.

"It's almost as if I've forgotten about it because I haven't had one in so long."
Louisa's parents, however, are still watching her constantly for signs she could be heading into a sleep state.
"It's weird - now I've left school I haven't actually had an episode, they probably think I was faking it," she jokes.

What is Kleine-Levin Syndrome?


KLS is a disease of adolescence, and sometimes will begin after infection or illness, says Tom Rico of the Center for Narcolepsy & KLS Research at Stanford University, California.
"An individual with KLS will have sleep episodes, typically lasting between one and three weeks, with coinciding cognitive disturbance in the few hours of wakefulness.
"During this time period, a patient will sleep anywhere between 16 to 22 hours a day, every day, until the conclusion of the episode."
But the excessive sleeping is only half the problem, he says, because when awake during the episode, patients experience what they describe as a "dream-like state".

Source: Frances CroninBBC News

Indian village bans mobiles for unwed women

LUCKNOW - A northern Indian village has banned unmarried women from using cell phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said Wednesday.

The Lank village council decided unmarried boys could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, council member Satish Tyagi said. Local women's rights group criticized the measure as backward and unfair.

Marriages between members of the same clan are forbidden under Hindu custom in some parts of north India, where unions are traditionally arranged by families. In conservative rural areas, families sometimes mete out extreme punishments, including so-called honor killings, for those who violate marriage taboos. In some cases, village councils themselves have ordered the punishments, though police often intervene to stop them.

The Lank village council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange forbidden elopements.

Last month, 34 couples eloped in Muzaffarnagar district, where Lank is located in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said. Among the couples who eloped, eight honor killings have been reported in the last month, police said.

"Three girls were beheaded by the male members of their family after they eloped" with boys from their same clan, said police assistant director general Brij Lal in the state capital of Lucknow.

Rulings by village councils — called panchayats and comprised of village elders selected by the community — are not legally binding in India, but are seen as the will of the local community, and those who flout them risk being ostracized. In Uttar Pradesh, panchayats are particularly powerful and have declared that boys and girls of the same clan are essentially siblings.

The cell phone ban for unmarried women is part of a wider, regional effort to curb intraclan marriage among the 3 million population of western Uttar Pradesh, Tyagi said. The Lank council ruling, which applies to around 50,000 people, is being considered by councils in the nearby villages.

"The village council members feel that cell phones helped in elopement of young couples," he said by cell phone from Muzaffarnagar.

The conflict is relatively new for the Indian region, where most marriages are still arranged by the parents, sometimes without the couple meeting before the wedding.

But young people are mingling more these days, with more women in schools and offices and increased access to the Internet, cybercafes and social networking sites. They are also watching more Western TV shows that focus on independence and individuality, sociologists say.

Cell phones, meanwhile, have become so common and affordable that even city slum dwellers, rural day laborers and children have them. Across the nation of 1.2 billion, there were more than 670 million cell phone connections as of August, with the number growing by nearly 20 million a month, according to government figures.

The local women's rights group Disha said banning cell phone use over sexual politics demonstrated the councils' archaic mindset, and warned it could put girls at a disadvantage in other areas of life.

"These help in easy communication, which in turn help these youth to get jobs. One cannot discriminate use of these contraptions on basis of sex," Disha president K.N. Tiwari said.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior
written authority of The Associated Press.

No-Guessing, Only Clear Punching

The Transparent Punch allows you to see where exactly you will be punching the hole in a paper. The red ring guides your placement and saves you from doing a shoddy job.

Designers: Kisang Yoon and Kyubok Lee

Source: Yanko design 

Proboscis Monkey

The Proboscis Monkey (Nasalis larvatus), known as the bekantan in Malay, or simply the Long-nosed Monkey. It is a reddish-brown arboreal Old World monkey that is endemic to the south-east Asian island of Borneo. It belongs in the monotypic genus Nasalis, although the Pig-tailed Langur has traditionally also been included in this genus - a treatment still preferred by some.

The monkey also goes by the Malay name monyet belanda 'Dutch monkey', or even Orang Belanda 'Dutchman', as Indonesians remarked that the Dutchcolonisers often had a similarly large belly and nose.

Appearance

A distinctive trait of this monkey is the male's large protruding nose, from which it takes its name. The big nose is thought to be used to attract females and is a characteristic of the males, reaching up to 7 inches in length. The females also have big noses compared to other monkey species, but not as big as the males. Besides attracting mates, the nose serves as a resonating chamber, amplifying their warning calls. When the animal becomes agitated its nose swells with blood, making warning calls louder and more intense.

Proboscis Monkeys belong to the order of Primates, from the family Cercopithecidae and subfamily Colobinae (Bennett & Gomber, 1993). According to Bennett & Gomber (1993), in the Old World, these monkeys are divided into two groups known as cercopithecines and colobines. Proboscis Monkeys are colobines. Males are much larger than females, weighing up to 24 kg (53 pounds) and reaching 72 cm (28 inches) in length, with a tail of up to 75 cm in length. Females are up to 60 cm long, weighing up to 12 kg (26 lb). This large sexual dimorphic difference is greater than in any other primate.

The adult Proboscis Monkey is mainly reddish-brown, with grayish limbs (Bennett & Gombek, 1993). According to Burnie (2001), young Proboscis Monkeys have a blue face, blackish fur and a relatively normal sized nose at birth. As they grow older, fur coloration changes and the nose grows. Adult males have a large and fleshy nose which overhangs its mouth, but the female Proboscis Monkey does not have a large nose in comparison to the male.

Ecology and habitat

The Proboscis Monkey is endemic to Borneo's low elevation mangrove forests, swamps, and lowland riparian forests.One of the largest populations is found in the Danau Sentarum National Park. It lives in small groups of 10 to 32 animals. Group membership is very flexible, and animals are known to move from group to group quite often.

The Proboscis Monkey's lifestyle is both arboreal and amphibious, with its mangrove swamp and riverine environment containing forest, dry land, shallow water allowing wading, and deep water requiring swimming. Like other similar monkeys, the Proboscis Monkey climbs well. It is also a proficient swimmer, often swimming from island to island, and has been picked up by fishing boats in open ocean a mile from shore. While wading, the monkey uses an upright posture, with the females carrying infants on their hip. Troops have been filmed continuing to walk upright, in single file, along forest trails when they emerge on land, the only non-human mammal, with the exception of gibbons and giant pangolins, known to use this form of locomotion for any length of time.

Proboscis Monkeys usually lives in a harem which comprises one adult male, several females, and their offspring, but sometimes the male and female Proboscis Monkeys move between social group. The Proboscis Monkey is mostly arboreal, but sometimes the animals migrate downriver into the mangrove forest to feed.

The monkey also has a large belly, a result of its diet[citation needed] Its digestive system is divided into compartments, with bacteria that digest cellulose and neutralize toxins from certain leaves. This lets the monkey eat leaves and remain in the forest canopy. The contents of their stomach weigh in at about a quarter of their whole body. The diet consists mainly of seeds, leaves, fruits, and mangrove shoots.



Source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

True Facts

-The Pentagon in Washington, D. C. has five sides, five stories, and five acres in the middle.




-Newborn babies are given to the wrong mother in the hospital 12 times a day worldwide.




-In 1998, more fast-food employees were murdered on the job than police officers.

-Two very popular and common objects have the same function, but one has thousands of moving parts, while the other has absolutely no moving parts - an hourglass and a sundial.




-One out of three employees who received a promotion use a coffee mug with the company logo on it.


-If you know a (male) millionaire who happens to be married, The most likely profession of his wife is a teacher.






-An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.







- 1 pound of lemons contain more sugar than 1 pound of strawberries.










-60% of all US potato products originate in Idaho.






-A flamingo can eat only when its head is upside down.

-The Weddell seal can travel underwater for seven miles without surfacing for air.




-The longest words in the English language with only one syllable are the nine-letter "screeched" and "strengths".

-A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

-A snail can have about 25,000 teeth.


-A snail can also sleep for three years.

-A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.

Modern Rugs, Carpets, and Doormats

While I was surfing some sites , I happen upon these modern and unique rugs ; therefore I wanted to share it with all of you .
the source: http://www.toxel.com

- Bedside Slippers Rug

Bedside rug with porthole cut outs for your matching slippers. 

- Bar-code Doormat

After the robot uprising, place this stylish doormat in front of your house to show you are open and happy to be included in the first generation of capitulators.

- Woody Wood Rug

Creative rug by YL design is a is a print of cross-section of a tree.

- Moss Carpet

Creative bathroom carpet designed by Nguyen La Chanh.

- Modern Rugs by Madeleine and Dudley

Creative rug designs by incredible artists Madeleine & Dudley.

- Breakfast Eggs Rug

Sunny Side Up Shag Rug by Designer Valentina Audrito.

- Steel Doormat

Beautiful modern doormat made from high-grade steel. 

- Top Floor Ethereal Rug

An organic floral pattern reaches into the whitespace on this rug, yet this pattern is more than grooves and layers. Designer Esti Barnes has cut these layers right through the rug itself, exposing the bare wood below.

- Black River Stone Doormat

Washed and polished river rocks are hand-applied with strong adhesive to a durable backing of indoor-outdoor carpet

Kitten Gets Really Wild Purr-tection

Recently the extraordinary scene appeared in a zoo of the Indonesia. A wild monkey has stunned animal fans after becoming very purr-tective of his new furry friend.

Sources:http://www.atautocar.com