When constructing a building that is expected to last a long time, getting it to stand straight up and down is pretty important. But apparently it’s not always crucial to making the building last. The most famous example is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it’s not the only one. And even if the building was originally straight, things happen.
Built in 1765, the Crooked House was first a farmhouse. The area was used for mining in the 1800s, and eventually, it caused one end of the structure to gradually sink. There is a four foot difference from side to side on the building now.
Eventually, it became a public house called Siden House. The word “siden” means crooked in the Black Country local dialect. At one time it was also named the Glynne Arms in honor of the area landowner. In the 1940s it was condemned as being unsafe. It was scheduled to be demolished, but the Dudley and Wolverhampton Breweries rebuilt it with girders and buttresses to retain its crooked angles, while making it safe for use. It is currently a pub and restaurant which contributes to optical illusions due to the tilted walls. It is possible to see marbles looking as if they are rolling uphill, and glasses appearing to slide across tables.
There are also buildings that were intentionally designed to be crooked. Read the stories of ten crooked buildings at Housely.
When the captain tells you to get in the boat, you better not waste any time! A playground at Munson Park in Monroe, Michigan, is the setting for an epic high seas adventure.
When you’re James Hashimoto, the Action Movie Kid (previously at Neatorama), you can go with the flow, because you know that sooner or later, the stories in your adventures will come to life on video. But even if you aren’t, your parents can learn to do this from the tutorials his dad shares. You can see how this particular video was made here. -via Metafilter
A photo posted by U.S. Military Academy (@westpoint_usma) on May 23, 2016 at 11:03am PDT
Alix Schœlcher Idrache was one of the more than 950 cadets who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point on Saturday. Staff Sgt. Vito T. Bryant captured this photo at the moment his emotions spilled over. Idrache responded to the picture with a comment on Instagram:
I want to thank everyone for your kind and thoughtful comments on this picture. SSG Bryant captured a moment that I will never forget. At this moment, I was overwhelmed with emotions. Three things came to mind and led to those tears.
The first is where I started. I am from Haiti and never did I imagine that such honor would be one day bestowed on me.
The second is where I am. Men and women who have preserved the very essence of the human condition stood in that position and took the same oath. Men who preserved the Union is a dark period of this country's history. Men who scaled the face of adversity and liberated Europe from fascism and nazism. Women like CPT Griest, LT Haver, MAJ Jaster who rewrote the narrative and challenged the status quo to prove themselves worthy of being called Rangers.
The third is my future. Shortly after leave, I will report to FT. Rucker to start flight school. Knowing that one day I will be a pilot is humbling beyond words. I could not help but be flooded with emotions knowing that I will be leading these men and women who are willing to give their all to preserve what we value as the American way of life. To me, that is the greatest honor. Once again, thank you.
It’s the senior talent show at the high school. The entire student body has already sat through singers, musicians, and drama students with amazing talent that they’ve seen dozens of times before. Then this guy steps up. He has one talent, and he wrings all the drama he can out of it.
Well, to be honest, he probably has other talents. Like showmanship, and making a lot of friends. How else would you draw a standing ovation for tossing a water bottle? The other question is, how long did he train to master this maneuver? -via Viral Viral Videos
In the early 20th century, you could see exhibits at Coney Island featuring people with physical anomalies, cultural exhibits that were ”human zoos,” and premature babies in incubators. That may seem weird now, but people flocked to see the babies, because they were miracles. Prematurity often meant a short life back then, and hospitals rarely had the time or facilities to save them. Martin Couney's Infant Incubator exhibit went the extra mile to save their lives. If a parent had nowhere else to turn, it made sense to commit their struggling baby to a sideshow.
Each incubator was more than 5ft (1.5m) tall, made of steel and glass, and stood on legs. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of fine mesh on which the baby slept, while a thermostat regulated the temperature. Another pipe carried fresh air from outside the building into the incubator, first passing through absorbent wool suspended in antiseptic or medicated water, then through dry wool, to filter out impurities. On top, a chimney-like device with a revolving fan blew the exhausted air upwards and out of the incubators.
Caring for premature babies was expensive. In 1903, it cost about $15 a day ($405 or £277 today) to care for each baby in Couney's facility.
But Couney did not charge the parents a penny for their medical care - the public paid. They came in such numbers that Couney easily covered his operating costs, paid his staff a good wage and had enough left over to begin planning more exhibits. In time, these made Couney a wealthy man.
Martin Couney had more than just the incubators going for him. He believed in the power of breast milk and cuddling when medical experts did not, although he was also a showman, and dressed the babies in oversize clothing to make them look even smaller. Read about Couney and his sideshow nursery at BBC Magazine. -via Metafilter
A group of hunters saw a female beaver in a trap in Saskatchewan, and knew her babies must be near. They found a litter of four beaver kits, only a couple of days old, and took them to Salthaven Wildlife Rehabilitation & Education Centre. Medical intervention saved the babies, and they will be raised at the center until they are two years old. See more pictures of the adorable baby beavers at Buzzfeed.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
Sound cards like the Creative Sound Blaster were the missing element that computers needed to take on multimedia. Then, they faded from view. Here’s why.
Before we embraced MP3s as the official noise of the internet (taking the place of screechy modems), it took a while before the synthesized notes of our musical past could be modulated through the inner-workings of a computer. Some of our earliest computers, for example, could only make very basic bleeps and bloops. But in 1989, everything changed when a Singaporean company called Creative Technology hit upon the perfect approach for synthesizing sound. Here is an ode to the Sound Blaster, the PC peripheral that helped turn the modern computer into a multimedia powerhouse—as well as the company that busted through by breaking some major cultural rules in its home country.
The business oversight that created the market for sound cards
The IBM PC was created squarely for the business market, and while such machines were far more powerful than most video game consoles of the day, two places where they fell flat were video and audio.
The reason? At the time of the machine’s initial release—particularly before clones came about—there was no real business case for a computer to support a wide array of graphics and sound. The graphics-heavy GUI as we know it was still years from becoming commonplace, and it wasn’t like you needed robust sound capabilities when writing documents or crunching numbers.
While early IBM PCs had speakers, they effectively existed only to allow for error messages—and as a result were heavily crippled. As developers got their hands on these devices and moved beyond purely business programs, they eventually figured out ways to stretch this incredibly limited palette of sound using a hack called “pulse width modulation.”
This eventually allowed for the PCs to make 6-bit digitized sounds—not enough, say, to play a pop song through your speakers, but plenty to make music for your average King’s Quest game.
IBM, nor many early clone-makers, were really interested in improving the sound element much for the business computers, but they did try to make overtures to the home market. IBM’s PCjr, released in 1984, had better sound capabilities, thanks to its use of the Texas Instruments SN76489 chip. You may not have owned a PCjr, but you’ve probably come across a SN76489, as the chip was used in many video game systems—both of the arcade variety and in home consoles like Sega Master System and Genesis. But the PCjr’s lack of compatibility with PC software, along with its inability to play games very well, killed the machine on the market.
Candace Payne, who went viral with her unboxing video featuring that Chewbacca mask, was on The Late Late Show with James Cordon last night. They did a skit in which Payne recreated her original reaction while she was supposed to be driving Cordon someplace. He was a bit annoyed at the delay. Then a surprise guest shows up to calm things down.
But even better was the short interview afterward. Payne shows that she is just as delightfully joyful in front of an audience without as script as she is elsewhere.
Humans have a tendency to turn any activity into a competition. Otherwise, we wouldn’t ever see an eating contest. This one looks like a lot more fun. Combat Juggling is not exactly new, but it still hasn’t gained a foothold in the U.S. The goal is to keep three pins in the air while at the same time trying to cause your opponent to drop his.
The video documents what is said to be the “semi-final” of combat juggling at an event called NJF 2016 Fight Night. For the uninitiated (read: nearly everyone), that’s Nederlands Jongleer Festival, an annual juggling convention held on the Feast Of The Ascension in the Netherlands. So combat juggling, it turns out, is a Dutch diversion.
Oh, I believe Americans would flock to it, if we didn’t have to learn to juggle first.
This is just a picture of two people hugging. It has a nice beach background. But wait, something is a little off about their legs. The more you look, the stranger it gets. How did her legs end up on the other side of his body?
He is wearing two-toned basketball shorts, dark on the outside, white on the inside, and you cannot see what she is wearing at all. Cover her legs with your thumb to see it.
If you can’t figure it out, this outline will clue you in. See, she’s not wearing capris at all! She’s probably wearing a dress. -via reddit
Have you ever noticed that the quality of a YouTube video drops immediately when snow falls or confetti is thrown? I honestly never did, but my eyesight is not that great. The HBO intro was given as an example of how noisy background affected video quality. And there are examples in this video.
You’d think the explanation would be very technical, and it is. But Tom Scott (previously at Neatorama) explains what happens in a simple, concise way that left me feeling smarter about video in the digital age. -via reddit
The fourth feature film of the Star Trek franchise, The Voyage Home, was released in 1988. It immediately stood apart from the first three films, and its magic has never been duplicated. Conceived and directed by Leonard Nimoy, it highlighted each main character from the Original Series and used plenty of humor to contrast the 23rd century with 1980s San Francisco. And what little violence it contained turned out to be counterproductive. Who was responsible for straying from the formula? Well, three writers got credit for the screenplay.
So it was a team effort, in front of the camera and behind the scenes. But it was a team effort with a leader. And the leader wanted to make a different kind of film. Nimoy later explained the core concept: “No dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy.” His previous Star Trek film had all those things, and outer space, and aliens, and sets. Nimoy wanted to make a movie about Earth, right now, shot on location, with human people.
Now that the franchise is celebrating its 50th anniversary and the 13th film is coming, it’s nice to look back at the one film that even non-Trekkies can quote. Entertainment Weekly tells the story of how Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home came about, and gives us some great behind-the-scenes stories, too. -via Metafilter
A photo posted by Rey (@reythekitten) on May 16, 2016 at 8:43pm PDT
Rey was born eight months ago with no eyes. Alexander Speweik adopted Rey and her sister Leia, and Rey now gets around the apartment just fine. She even plays fetch!
Wadded up aluminum makes a great ball to roll around on a wood floor, and Rey follows it almost perfectly just by the sound. She also plays with boxes, climbs her cat tower, and wrestles with her sister. She doesn’t chase a laser light, but likes to play with the chain attached to the laser pen! You can follow Rey at her Facebook page or at Instagram. -via Digg
The Crazy Russian Hacker bought thirty pounds of dry ice just to throw it in the pool. Which, of course, makes it wet ice. It looks pretty cool, but what is surprising is how long it lasted. -via Viral Viral Videos
Grant Woolard, who gave us that awesome Classical Music Mashup a few months ago, is back to give the same treatment to Disney songs. he mixed 49 different songs into a pleasing mashup that highlights how similar some of them are, illustrated by musical notes made from icons of the movie, to make it easy for you to follow along.
