Joey Prusak, 19, works at a Dairy Queen restaurant in Hopkins, Minnesota. In September, a blind man purchased a meal at the counter. While paying, he accidentally dropped a 20-dollar bill on the floor. The woman standing behind him in line snatched it and put it in her pocket.
Prusak approached the woman and asked her to give it back. She refused and began cussing at him. He told her to leave, which she did, while keeping the money. Later Prusak spoke with the blind customer and handed him a 20-dollar bill from his own pocket.
All of this might have passed by without further attention but for an email that another customer sent to Dairy Queen’s management. She described the incident, which promptly went viral.
Since then, Prusak has gotten a lot of positive attention, including an invitation from Warren Buffett to attend a shareholders meeting of his company, Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen.
Robert Vick is a prisoner at a minimum security prison in Lexington, Kentucky. He's serving 6 years for burglary and 5 years for possession of a forged instrument. On Sunday, he escaped. He spent about 20 hours outside wearing only a prison issue jacket, shirt and pants.
On Monday, he walked into the office of a local motel and asked the clerk to call the police. Vick had had enough of the winter storm and wanted to get warm.
Paramedics briefly examined him before police returned him to prison.
In their 1894 book The Coming Railroad, George Nation Chase and Henry William Kirchner wrote that America’s rail system was the most essential piece of technology to maintain modern life. But the rail system had reached the limits of its capacity for transportation. It was expensive and inefficient. In order to increase the carrying capacity of railroads to keep up with the demands of a growing population, the United States should switch to wind-powered locomotives.
The authors called their proposal the “The Chase-Kirchner aerodromic system of transportation.” In it, cars would rest on elevated tracks. Each car would have “banks of aeroplanes” between 2,000 and 4,000 square feet in area. These planes would catch the air and, supplemented by electric motors, provide movement.
Your parents may have told you this when you were little and learning table manners. Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida remember how to play with their food--and they're really good at it, too! The two photographers have created amazing dioramas using ordinary food items and human miniatures. You can see more photos in the series here.
The two artists gave an interview for the blog Erratic Phenomena. In it, they explained their creative process:
Pierre: I always look for the narrative structure, and when I've outlined the idea, I have the frame of the image. Very often I make a sketch in my notebook. Then comes a dialogue with Akiko. If she doesn't understand the story, I need to clarify it, or think of an another situation that's more accessible. Next comes the research for the elements. Since there are quite few in our image, we should find something that's "just right," but often we pick up an object in the bottom of a drawer that completes the image! In each step, Akiko is a little like the project chief. She doesn't follow all these steps very closely, but she keeps just enough distance so that she can be objective in the end. During the shoot, I take care of the lighting and technical parts. An image will be validated when we're both happy with its tone and its aspect. When it makes us smile or when the result surprises us, we've won!
Akiko: Pierre is very good at constructing narrative and model-making (his talent from Beaux-Arts, the art school), and everything technical when shooting. I'm much more like a stylist who takes care of the details of the scene. I have much finer fingers than he does, so it's often my role to move the small figures or to install tiny elements.
That title doesn't really do this culinary marvel justice. The bun consists of two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which been battered in kettle chips, then deep fried. The beef patty has been marinated in bananas and sriracha sauce. Oh, and there's bacon, too.
You want one? You'll have to go to PYT, a restaurant in Philadelphia that prides itself on making weird burgers. Now stop licking the monitor.
Two years ago, Ann Reardon wowed the internet with her cake shaped like the Instagram logo. With every slice through the core, you got the full symbol. This cake is similar, but shows Larry, Twitter’s iconic bird.
The calls it a “surprise inside dessert.” To make your own, get a tall, roughly cylindrical container. Print out a template for your logo, sized so that it fits easily within the container. Get 0.3 millimeter-thick aluminum flashing. Mold it into the shape of logo.
Then mix a chocolate cremeux, which apparently is something like a gelatinous mousse. Also make a white chocolate mousse for the white background, an orange glaze for the crust and a pate de sucre for the base. You can find the full recipe here.
Two and a half years ago, Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling enchanted and disturbed the internet with their delightfully weird and slightly terrifying short film Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared. Here's their sequel with the same puppet cast which has somehow survived the madness and maintained a functional level of sanity.
The subject of this film is time. What is it? What does time do? What are our limitations within time?
Long ago in a house just down the street, Han Fredricksen and Ellie Organa dreamed of travelling far, far away. When Han was unable to fix the hyperdrive, he had to escape Imperial forces trying to put him into a nursing home by tying balloons to his ship and floating away.
Brittany Mathis, 19, is a waitress at the Kaiserhof Restaurant and Wunderbar, a German restaurant in Montgomery, Texas. She found a rash on her leg that wouldn’t go away. Doctors performed tests and brought back terrible news: Ms. Mathis has a brain tumor.
"Here's a family, they really work hard they have a lot of stuff against them in the past and they are not holding their hand open they didn't even ask anybody for help," said De Beyer.
He suspects that the restaurant is worth $2 million. That could go a long way to helping Ms. Mathis.
Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University. You may remember him for his quirky final exam. Dr. Cowen tries to apply economic thinking to areas that you might not consider. For example, he argues that Christmas day should always fall on a Wednesday:
I say the goal is to minimize non-convexities, which in this context means avoiding the possibility of no mail or UPS deliveries for two days running. That makes Saturday and Monday especially bad days to have Christmas.
When Christmas is on Wednesday, as it was this year, on that Wednesday you still can be reading the books which arrived on Tuesday and then a new lot comes on Thursday. The public libraries also close for only one day, not two or three in a row.
Christmas on Wednesday also means that the roads are deserted for all the other weekdays, since many people end up leaving town for the entire week. Then you can visit all those ethnic restaurants you wanted to get to in Gaithersburg or Mount Vernon without hassle.
And if you are taking a vacation abroad, and trying to use a limited number of vacation days, you certainly don’t want Christmas to fall on either a Saturday or a Sunday, which in essence wastes a granted day off.
Ben Walsh, a blogger for Reuters, has a different take. He looked at economic data and concluded that retail sales do best when Christmas falls on a Saturday. So the holiday should always be on a weekend:
Obviously, one conclusion you can draw from this chart is that having Christmas fall in the midst of a full-blown financial crisis is bad for sales. But to address Cowen’s point, over the last decade the average retail sales bump from a weekend Christmas (23.5%) has been higher than a Tuesday or Wednesday Christmas (18.75%).
Americans have spent a total of $84 billion more over the last two Saturday and two Sunday Christmases than the last two Tuesday and two Wednesday Christmases. And Saturday seems the best option of all, with the highest average percentage bump in sales (24.5%).
Get ready to thrash with this custom electric guitar by Vladislav, a maker of fine My Little Pony crafts. It's decorated with the colors of Princess Twilight Sparkle. It's made of alder, mahogany and rosewood. The star-shaped controls, which imitate Twilight's cutie mark, are a nice touch.
Even before there was a United States, the American people were innovators in military technology. David Bushnell, a Connecticut supporter of the rebellion against British rule, designed and built the roughly spherical ship Turtle in 1775. It was the first submarine in naval history to see combat.
(Image: Library of Congress)
Bushnell’s ship was a technological wonder of its time. It was the first submarine to use water as ballast. The pilot could control water flow into the bilges with a foot pedal and then make finer adjustments to the depth level with a vertical screw. A forward-mounted screw pulled the submarine through the water.
The pilot had enough air to keep breathing for half an hour. But he also had a snorkel that gave him access to fresh air when surfaced. It closed automatically when the vessel submerged.
The Turtle was equipped with a time bomb which could be detonated underwater—again, an invention that Bushnell devised. His plan was that the pilot of the submarine would drive a screw into the wooden hull of an enemy ship. The bomb would be attached to the screw. The pilot could then escape before the bomb detonated.
(Photo: US Navy)
After Bushnell completed the Turtle in the fall of 1775, he planned to use it to break the British blockade of Boston. But the British abandoned Boston in March of 1776, so Bushnell decided to put his invention to work against Royal Navy vessels in New York harbor. General George Washington took a keen interest in the project and assigned Sgt. Ezra Lee to pilot the Turtle.
On the night of Sept. 6, 1776, an American ship towed the Turtle out into the harbor. Lee submerged the Turtle and proceeded to HMS Eagle, the British flagship. Lee tried to attach the bomb, but it would not connect to the hull of the Eagle. Eventually, he cut it loose. The bomb floated away and detonated in a huge but harmless explosion.
Bushnell tried two other times to use the Turtle, but these were also unsuccessful. On October 6, the British sank the American ship carrying the Turtle and the submarine never saw action again. The project was a failure, but it inspired the imaginations of military leaders. Reflecting on the project in 1785, Washington wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that “I then thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius.”
Bonus item: the first submarine to sink another vessel in combat was the Hunley, a submarine of the Confederate Navy.
This cool illustration from a 1921 issue of Scientific American uses a human head to demonstrate how map projections distort the sizes and shapes of landmasses. The upper left drawing shows a globe, which is why the head looks normal.
This is one of several neat cartographic demonstrations rounded up by Joe Hanson, a biologist and TV star. You can find the rest here.
Nick Chipman, the mad food scientist at DudeFoods, found a way to make eating a fast food meal more efficient. Why eat a burger and fries as separate food items? You can combine them.
They key ingredient is an edible adhesive called Dab-N-Hold. I don't have any, so I'll just use wood glue as a substitute. Nick baked frozen French fries, applied the adhesive, then cut out a circle by tracing along the outside of a glass. He reports that it tastes like a regular hamburger with "a slight hint of lemons."
You can eat an entire apple--including the core--if you eat it the right way. Foodbeast's research team showed us how last year. Now they're back with a demonstration of how to eat a chicken wing. You've got a pile of those hot, spicy, greasy things. They're wrapped in bone, fat and cartilage. How will you get them down your gullet with as little work as possible?
I generally avoid chicken wings because they're not worth the hassle. But maybe this method demonstrated by Brandi Milloy is just the right trick.
