If you’ve never watched the YouTube series Thug Notes, you’re missing one of the gems of the internet. The host, Sparky Sweets, PhD, breaks down great works of literature in plain street language (only slightly NSFW). In the latest episode, he reviews The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Sweets manages to describe and explain the classic in a straightforward way that I’ve always struggled with. The most I can ever really tell someone about the book is that it’s deeply absurd and absurdly deep at the same time and they really should read it. Sometimes that works, but this is better. -via Tastefully Offensive
It has been said that there is no true American cuisine, because everything we cook comes from somewhere else. That may be true, but we have a tendency to take recipes from all over the world and change them to make them our own. That’s especially true of barbecue, which is now truly American. In this video, young women in Korea try American barbecue for the first time, in three modes: pulled pork, brisket, and ribs.
The TV series Batman premiered on January 12, 1966. That makes the show 50 years old! In some ways, the series is a relic of a bygone era, but it also it seems like just yesterday. Compared to the more recent Michael Keaton/Christian Bale/Ben Affleck Batman movies, the ‘60s series is a real outlier, and even at the time was just plain goofy. There was a method to the madness, as the TV show followed the resurgence of Batman comic books. Believe it or not, until the mid-’60s, the Batman comic book character wasn’t all that popular, and was even declining.
In response, DC editor Julius Schwartz drastically revamped the book in 1964: He threw out the science fiction elements and put Carmine Infantino on art. Infantino had a cleaner, more realistic style than previous Batman artists such as Dick Sprang and he completely redefined the book. The result was an action series with a penchant for the ridiculous. Batman often solved mysteries that made little sense using solutions or tools that made even less sense, and often found himself stuck in elaborate death-traps. It is, to modern eyes, all a bit silly, but it sold: By 1965, Batman was back on the charts.
The idea of a Batman TV series had been in the works since 1961, but stalled repeatedly. It was saved by ABC executive Harve Bennett, who saw the potential of a series (in a nice bit of nerd symmetry, Bennett would go on to save Star Trek in the ’80s). Bennett saw the popularity of a roadshow of the old serials and hits like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and thought Batman would be perfect for the network.
You’ve probably heard discussions about how the latest movie in the Star Wars series, The Force Awakens, has some things in common with the first movie, which is known to youngsters as A New Hope. The resemblance is there in some ways, but there are quite a few key differences. Differences that Jhall and Tristan Cooper of Dorkly are only happy to highlight for you in a most amusing way. The comic contains spoilers, just in case you haven’t seen The Force Awakens yet, so I only posted the first panel here. Still, this one panel shows a crucial improvement in the newer movie: a female hero who not only kicks ass, but doesn’t whine the way young Luke Skywalker did. But Luke really wasn’t so bad -compared to young Anakin Skywalker.
Mastropietro’s diagnosis made him examine his life, and determine what was important to him. In the years since, he’s worked and spent £160,000 ($230,000) to make his unique underground dream house. -via Viral Viral Videos
The Powerball jackpot has risen to $1.5 billion dollars. It's never been that high.
The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are about zero. If you buy a ticket, the odds increase only slightly, to 1 in 292,201,338. If you buy two tickets, your chance of winning increases to 2 in 292,201,338. Yeah, that’s twice the chance, but still pretty close to zero. And you’re out $4. Look at it this way: this particular lottery has already gone through 18 drawings, and no one has hit all the numbers any of those times.
The astronomical odds can be confusing. To get an idea of how the lottery works, you can try the Powerball Simulator. In a flash, it played six months of Powerball for me, wherein I paid $112 for tickets and won $12. Yay. You can keep playing if you like. The simulator doesn't cost anything.
Even if you understand the odds, you might want to buy a ticket because the jackpot is so high that the “expected payoff” formula is worth the $2. That is, before you figure out how much tax will be taken out, and the possibility of splitting the jackpot with multiple winners.
I still think it’s better to not buy a ticket in this week’s Powerball lottery, precisely because the jackpot is so high. That kind of money is guaranteed to ruin your life. No matter who wins, if anyone does, I can tell myself I still have that $2.
Marko Petrovich is a security guard at the public library in Portland, Maine. How you see his job depends on how you use the library. While he stays on the lookout for people who use drugs, fight, or otherwise abuse the facility, he also keeps in mind that the library’s mission is to serve all of the public. In winter in Maine, it might be the only indoor space some people have access to, and those folks are as deserving of consideration as anyone else.
The typically quiet library is a vast, open space. When voices escalate, they carry. Even the smallest harrumph can become very public. Petrovich will often put his arm around misbehaving patrons and corral them to the security office to chat. It’s a gentle and vulnerable gesture, and people seem to respond with concession and openness. To be an officer of the library is to be a steward of it. They must be civilized and caring toward the space, its resources, and, most importantly, its patrons.
Enforcement is a defensive act, not an aggressive one, and Petrovich learned the distinction between the two at a young age. “My grandfather telling me one day, ‘You are soldier but you no murderer,’” he recalls.
Those words must have been bellowing in Petrovich’s memory on the night that he deserted the Serbian army, fleeing the country. It was a flight to protect his life, and to protect other people from the killing he’d been tasked to do. Petrovich could fight soldier-to-soldier, or against anyone with a weapon. When there’s fire on both sides, it is, as Petrovich says, “you or them.” His job as a sergeant was to protect his soldiers, but he wasn’t willing to do the job of killing innocent civilians. He had begun to refuse orders that looked to him like he was simply going into villages to murder hundreds of people just because they were Muslims. They were the kind of orders that make what Petrovich calls “bloody hands.”
“I cannot do that,” he says. “It is not my moral things. Not my code. Is not my job.”
Watch 100 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) dance in the sky to the music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony! They display precise formations and flicker their colored LEDs for an appreciative crowd at Flugplatz Ahrenlohe, Tornesch, Germany, in November. The video was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2016) last week.
No, not that kind of spoiler, yet the image is strangely appropriate for this post.
We mentioned earlier that there should be some sort of statute of limitations on movie spoilers, particularly for a Star Wars film that fans are dying to discuss online and around the water cooler. Yet there’s a line real fans wouldn’t cross, and that line has been crossed big time by a Jeep owner. We don’t know where this was spotted, but he/she/they had the biggest spoiler of the entire movie The Force Awakens plastered across the back window of the vehicle. Don’t look if you don’t want to know.
Yeah, it’s one thing to talk about the movie in a group of friends or co-workers who can speak up, or even on the internet, where people can avoid reading about the movie if they choose. It’s completely different to drive around in public with a billboard attached. What is this person trying to accomplish? Internet fame? Buddy, it’s not worth it. -via Gamma Squad
The Chinese firm Ehang was at CES 2016 in Las Vegas and plans to build the Ehang 184, a personal quadcopter that carries a person. Just one person, but that’s a lot more than a “drone,” which is called that because it carries no person.
While it’s currently just on the drawing board as Ehang are still in early phases of the development process, the Ehang 184 would be an extremely capable small, personal aircraft. Ehang are calling it “the sagest, eco-est, and smartest low altitude autonomous aerial vehicle”. The one-seater drone would be able to carry a person up to 220lbs for a short distance within the area. They say that it would be able to hit speeds of 62 mph in the air, have a ceiling of 1,640-feet, and would be able to stay airborne for 23 minutes.
The real question is: where will this be "street legal," so to speak. Read more about the Ehang 184 and see more picture at Worthly.
Nerd_Herd42 got a fortune cookie with a message worth sharing with the world. The reference is to the opening credits of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but even if you didn’t know that, you’d find this delightful. Of course, he was accused of Photoshopping it, but this cookie is from Yokozuna, an Asian fusion restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They are well-known for the unique fortunes in their cookies. They have original fortunes that are inspirational, accusatory, local, and even sometimes go out on a limb. Redditor sheeruss had a bonus fortune to show us. That’s not just a one-time thing. You might get one, too.
We love to read whodunits and watch crime procedurals on TV. For most of us, those mysteries and investigations are a stimulating intellectual exercise, as we try to figure out the crime before the cops and the forensic scientists do. At least, that’s what we want everyone to think. There is no doubt a small minority of people who watch such TV shows as a do-it-yourself guide. I hope none them are in your household. This is the latest from Megacynics.
Cheetahs are outliers among wildcats. They don’t roar, but they purr like domestic cats. Females are solitary, while males hang with their littermate for life. And they are notoriously picky about who they mate with. Cheetahs also lack genetic diversity due to several bottlenecks in their evolutionary history that caused populations to fall to dangerous levels. And there’s a lot we still don’t know about cheetahs. But a facility in Front Royal, Virginia, is leading the way in cheetah research and breeding. It’s the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
Nick has spent his entire life in these hills at SCBI, where 21 endangered species are bred and researched. The cheetah program is considered one of the facility’s biggest success stories. Over the last five years, SCBI has been responsible for bringing 34 healthy cheetah cubs into the world and contributing a wealth of scientific research to our understanding of the species. The goal is to gain knowledge that will help conserve cheetahs in the wild. Because of their nomadic nature and vast territories, studying cheetahs in situ has always been a difficult task, and a large portion of what we now know about the species—their health, fertility, endocrinology, genetics—came from research done on captive cats.
But there are conservationists who question whether this strategy does much to help the wild population. With just an estimated 10,000 cheetahs remaining in the wild and everything from habitat destruction, to conflicts with farmers and the exotic pet trade threatening the species’s survival, is this strategy the most effective way to protect these cats? What good is a friendly cheetah in Virginia to the ones facing extinction in the wild?
For one thing, producing cheetah cubs for zoos eliminates the necessity of taking wild cheetahs out of their natural African habitat. But to produce enough cheetahs, the SCBI went through a steep learning curve. Read about the problems in breeding cheetahs and what the research center is doing to overcome them at Motherboard. -via Digg
Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu —known to most of the public as Dr. Nakamats— of Tokyo, is likely the world’s most prolific inventor, with more than 3500 patents. His wig for use against attackers is a simple device, described in a patent:
“Wig for Self- Defense,” Japan patent 2007285622 (A), granted to Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats, November 1, 2007.
The patent’s technical drawings, reproduced here, are perhaps sufficient to explain the nature and power of the self-defense wig.
Many of Dr. Nakamats’s other inventions, including the inventor himself, are celebrated in the documentary film The Invention of Dr. Nakamats, which was released to the public in 2009.
Renee Lusano went hiking with five friends on the island of Maui in Hawaii. She had her drone camera along to capture the beauty of the island. Little did they know they would be caught in a flash flood! Water from rain higher up on the mountain all converged into this one stream, where they were playing in a waterfall.
None of the shots once the river started flooding were intentionally captured or composed. I only operated the drone to keep it high out of the way as I fled to higher ground. I lost sight of the drone several times because my focus was not piloting the drone, it was simply not crashing it while we climbed to safety.
At the end the drone was flown to alert the helicopter of our location, because we received word from our friend back at the road that the helicopter was unable to find us.
