I took my first college courses at the age of six, because Mom got a job and Dad took me to work with him as he taught geology and geography during summer school. I was fascinated by the lesson on how rivers matured. As the coursing water bounces off the banks from side to side, it creates meanders, which widen until they are completely cut off from the main flow, creating oxbow lakes. There’s a pretty simple explanation of the process here.
Fifty years later, we get to see the process happening on earth, thanks to satellite imagery. Google Earth Engine combined Landsat images of the Ucayali River in Peru over thirty years time to illustrate the advancing meanders, which culminate in the creation of an oxbow lake. Read more about this particular progression at Hindered Settling. -via Boing Boing
Blog Posts John Farrier Likes
A blueprint is only as good as the person following the instructions, but even the most experienced builder can have an off day, and when nothing seems to be going right workers will often pack it in before the project is complete.
But when those workers had one simple task to complete and couldn't even get that right they should probably start seeking employment in another field.
Sometimes bad work comes off like a cry for help, because when the work you do seems to indicate you've been drinking heavily on the job site there's nowhere left for you to go but straight to an AA meeting!
See 11 Ridiculous Design Fails That Defeat The Whole Purpose here
There are a lot of stories out there about cops doing wrong, but for every story you hear about an officer breaking the rules there are probably ten stories of police doing something great that you don't hear about. Here are some fun stories of police going above and beyond their duties in the best possible way.
1. The Cop Who Retired in the Best Possible Way
When you get pulled over by the police, you probably get nervous and worry about whether or not you'll get a ticket. But if you happened to be pulled over by Commander Brian Peters on his last day of work, you might have been delightfully surprised to not get a ticket but a gift card.
That's right, to celebrate his last day on the job, Peters sought out people he thought could use a little extra financial help and then gave them $50 gift cards for Target and Cub Foods. He ended up giving out gift cards worth the total of his last paycheck, saying, “The citizens and city have been wonderful to me. I am very blessed, so it feels good to give back.”
2. The Officer Who Bought Groceries for a Mother Caught Shoplifting
Police Officer Mark Engravalle of Roeland Park was called to handle a shoplifting case in July of 2015. The shoplifter wasn't a teen looking for a thrill or someone trying to get a new pair of shoes way out of their price range, but a widowed, homeless mother of six who was trying to steal $300 worth of diapers, shoes and baby wipes.
“What she did was wrong and against the law, but her heart was in the right place with wanting to help to take care of her children,” Engravalle said. So rather than arrest the mother, Sarah Robinson, he offered to pay for the items to help the suffering mother. “Walmart might see her as a criminal, but I just saw her as a mom going through a really difficult time,” the officer explained, though he did still write the mother a ticket as was protocol.
This story has a particularly happy ending as Robinson ended up getting $6,000 in donations sent to the Roeland Park Police Department, which was more than enough to pay for her fine and help her take care of her kids for a while.
3. The Officer That Bought A Shoplifting Father Baby Formula
Bad haircuts are the unrelenting foes we encounter in our quest to reinvent ourselves by radically changing our look, catching us completely by surprise and forever changing our personal sense of style.
In fact, some hairstyles are so bad the poor soul who has fallen victim to the scissors and electric razor might be better off shaving their head and letting it grow out again from the ground floor.
Everyone has a horrible haircut tale to tell, but the measure of a hero is their ability to bounce back from a bad look and become a hirsute hero, inspiring future generations to take chances with their hairdos.
This guy took a chance and shaved the side of his head while keeping the rest long, never knowing that he was sporting the Skrillex hairstyle before it was cool.
While Mickey Mouse, Garfield the cat and Donald Duck have long been the most popular write-in candidates those characters just aren't tough enough to deal with the modern state of affairs.
That's why we need a candidate who knows when it's time to go out drinking with world leaders and when it's time to teach the world our peaceful ways...by force, a candidate like Bending Unit 22 Bender Rodriguez.
Imgur user bigllamas posted these pics taken in his neighborhood with the caption "My neighbor is a graphic designer. And smartass." Well Bender couldn't be any worse than Robot Nixon!
You used to hear about chunks of blue sewage falling off airplanes and crashing through roofs or even hitting someone on the ground. That doesn’t happen much anymore, because airlines use a more modern system, although I can imagine some of the older planes haven’t caught up yet. Here’s how it works, from the folks at Smithsonian.
Bless Lothar and all the folks who do the dirty work that enable us to live in a civilized manner. By the way, when they mention “long haul flights” in which you get two meals, they are talking about international flights. You can fly from one end of the US to the other and not get a meal these days, but few people bemoan the lack of airline food. -via Bits and Pieces
Firefighting is, and has always been, a male dominated profession, and as such many fire stations feel like a boy's club complete with cheeky posters and calendars hanging on the wall.
But one seemingly innocent geological survey map from the "Department of the Exterior" hung on a firehouse wall for years before Imgur user Shinygreencloud noticed its NSFW secret.
Now we can't show you the full image here on Neatorama (click here to see it), but what we can show you is the way cutting out the naughty bits makes it look like an ordinary map.
And if you view it full size and read what's written on the map the dirty joke suddenly becomes clear. Now that's one clever way to conceal smut!
-Via Boing Boing
There’s no need to invest in Oculus Rift or another virtual reality gadget when you’ve got TV and a Dad who’s willing to help out! (Though a commenter did call this “Oculus Thrift”.) Too bad this idea will be shelved when the child gains another twenty pounds or so. Still, she’ll probably remember this adventure for the rest of her life. -via reddit
Who is this? It’s DeviantART member problematiiques, all decked out for cosplay! But who -or what- is she dressed up as? She’s BMO, an animated video game console!
Adventure Time‘s BMO is a simply delightful character. Completely asexual, adorably cheerful and both a friend and source of entertainment in the post-apocalypse, BMO is the electronic friend we only wish we could have. While BMO may not be real (at least not yet), we can at least celebrate him/her through the power of cosplay and here are some of the most delightful BMO cosplays out there.
See ten widely varying ways people cosplay BMO at Rue The Day.
Why buy a bunch of candy for your Easter basket when you can instead make a Kit Kat that will last you all of April and be too big for any Easter basket you've ever seen? If you want to make your own chocolate monstrosity this holiday, then be sure to head over to Instructables for the tutorial.
Of course, if you really want to go crazy, try making a 15 pound one.
You know who hunts eggs at the Cincinnati zoo Easter egg hunt? Gorillas! And it looks a bit like a human Easter egg hunt, except for the basket flinging, the immediate eating of real eggs, and the lack of crying.
A good time was had by all. -via Tastefully Offensive
Last week, we linked the story of Paramount’s search for a story to tell in the first Star Trek feature film. The followup is the tale of how the movie got made, although it was a mess of a production from the beginning. After dropping the idea in 1977, Paramount suddenly decided in 1978 that there would be a Star Trek movie one way or another, and it had to be made within a year. That led to all kinds of struggles, even after the principle filming was finally finished. For example, the computer visual effects, which the producers were counting on.
“They made some really big, fundamental mistakes in trying to pre-vis on computers that weren’t ready for primetime,” Trumbull told The Hollywood Reporter. “They spent a year and nothing was finished, and nothing worked.”
As a result, Trumbull found himself at the centre of a massive panic at Paramount. Theatres had paid advances amounting to $30 million with the understanding that Star Trek would open on December 7th. Yet here they were, with the movie just months away, and not a single effects shot had been completed. The size of the situation was such that, if Paramount couldn’t deliver the movie, they’d almost certainly be sued into oblivion by angry cinema owners.
But that was just one problem among many in the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Read the whole story at Den of Geek.
Your facial hair is the first thing people see when they look at your face, and when your chin hairs enter the room before the rest of your face you can be sure people are going to stare at it and wonder.
Sometimes they're wondering why you don't shave it all off, or what you would look like when you're clean shaven, and a few jealous facial hair fans will wonder how long it took you to grow out your fabulous look.
But as you'll see in this illustrated guide created by Caldwell Tanner and Susanna Wolff your beard and moustache typically does most of the talking for you, giving the world a hairy glimpse into your soul.
See What You're Saying With Your Facial Hair here (NSFW due to language)
Submit your suggestions for a name https://t.co/6feXAM3qXV @BAS_News #NameOurShip pic.twitter.com/GNLVgck7Yi
— NERC (@NERCscience) March 17, 2016
The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council has a new ship. It’s a polar explorer ready to carry 90 scientists and staff to the Arctic and the Antarctic for research expeditions. And they decided to name the boat by an open internet poll. You know how that goes. The current leading name is an awesome one, though: the RRS Boaty McBoatface. Other notable names in the running are:
RRS Usain Boat
RRS Ice Ice Baby
RRS Boat Marley and the Whalers
RRS I Like Big Boats & I Cannot Lie
RRS Pee-Eee Cee Tee
RRS Motörboat
RRS Feed
RRS Icey Smashy-Smash
RRS Thanks for All the Fish
NERC appears to be trying to encourage names like Titan, Orca, Ada Lovelace, or David Attenborough. Good luck with that -Boaty McBoatface is unstoppable, although I really like RRS Pee-Eee Cee Tee. You can suggest a name or place your vote here. This site is overwhelmed right now, but bookmark it, because voting will be open until April 16. Meanwhile, Boaty McBoatface has its own Twitter account. -via Metafilter
The interwebs are all abuzz about a Danish woman who seems to disappear right before our viewing eyes during a live news broadcast, and people are understandably concerned.
Where did the woman disappear to, and does it have anything to do with the return of the X-Files?
Was it all a hoax or a trick done with some sort of real time video editing software? And why does no one seem to care that she's vanished into thin air?
There's bound to be a reasonable explanation for this "sudden disappearance", but don't spoil the fun with truth bombs just yet because the solutions people have thought up are starting to get good...
-Via Daily Mail