The issues addressed here are timely, but even when you get outside the realm of internet security, you can see that this is a universal problem. You have a supervisor (or maybe client) who is convinced he is smarter than you because he is your supervisor (or client). He wants what he wants, and does not want to hear your reasons for saying no. And because he is your supervisor, he has a built-in target for blame when it all goes downhill. This is the latest comic from CommitStrip.
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You've probably seen this picture somewhere. It gets posted at reddit every few months, and it is shared on social media quite a bit. The cat's name is Suki, and she has 800,000 Instagram followers. Suki the Bengal cat was adopted by Marti Gutfreund, who trained her from kittenhood to walk on a leash and to enjoy traveling to new places, such as the beautiful parks of Alberta, where they live, and the deserts of the Southwest. Suki has a great time, and takes awesome pictures because she always looks like she is posing.
Though Suki usually appears without a leash on Instagram, she’s always wearing one when outdoors — Gutfreund simply removes it in Photoshop to achieve a cleaner image.
Canada’s provincial and national parks require animals to be leashed, and Gutfreund is committed to Suki’s safety. She encourages other owners of aspiring adventure cats to properly leash-train their pets before taking them outdoors. Once a cat is comfortable outside, owners should ensure their pets stay hydrated even on shorter adventures, Gutfreund advises.
Suki herself is gearing up for the adventure of her lifetime: In August, Gutfreund is whisking her to Europe for six months. They’ll visit Gutfreund’s family in Germany and tour the rest of the continent too, snapping as many pictures as possible along the way.
Read about Suki at Adventure Cats and see more pictures at Instagram.
Mary is a 17-year-old in Australia. Secret is her dog, a border collie/Australian shepherd mix. With a pedigree like that, you know this is an intelligent dog. Mary has been training Secret all her life, beginning with clicker training. They even exercise together!
Secret is learning new stunts during their exercise routines.
Secret also dances, does housework, and creates art. And she finds time for some fun, too! See more of Secret at her Instagram page. That's a good dog. -via reddit
Thor seems a bit shocked. Never underestimate the power of a cat responding to the basic feline instinct of knocking things to the floor. And you can grant them all the power in the world, but that won't motivate a cat to come to your rescue, unless he happens to be in the mood to do it. This is the latest comic from Jon Baker at Alarmingly Bad Comics. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Admiral Richard E. Byrd loved milk and missed it during his expeditions to Antartica, so he dreamed up a scheme to bring dairy cows to the South Pole. Milk wasn't the only reason, though. Byrd surmised that a boring scientific expedition would get few headlines, especially since actual outposts had been established on Antartica by the 1930s. Shipping in cows would give the rest of the world something to talk about. And he was right.
And so—for all these reasons, and perhaps more—in the fall of 1933, the team loaded a trio of Guernsey cows into the SS Jacob Ruppert. There was “Foremost Southern Girl,” from New York, “Deerfoot Guernsey Maid,” from Massachusetts, and “Klondike Gay Nira,” from North Carolina, who was pregnant. All were the same breed, thanks to a deal Byrd had struck up with the American Guernsey Cattle Club. The crew’s carpenter, Edward Cox, shouldered the caretaking responsibilities. A bevy of other sponsors provided the cows with some necessary accoutrements: 10 tons of feed, various farm equipment, and a Surge Milking Machine.
The cows took the three-month journey alongside their human companions, living first in a knocked-together stall on the deck, and later, after it was completed, in a larger barn below. There was hope that Klondike would give birth within the Antarctic Circle, giving her calf “a unique claim to immortality,” as Byrd put it in his memoir of the expedition. Instead, it happened about 250 miles too far north. Still, this proved more thrilling than the frozen surrounds: “Almost to a man the crew waited with breathless expectancy for an event which has been common in Nature since the world began,” Byrd recalled wryly. They named the calf Iceberg—only fair, given baby icebergs are called calves—and the birth announcement made the New York Times.
So that was three cows and a young bull that landed in Antarctica in January 1934. Their year on ice didn't show them much of nature, but they were pampered by the men around them. They returned as heroes, but the experiment was never repeated. Read about the world's southernmost dairy at Atlas Obscura.
The Sony World Photography competition received 319,561 entries from all over the world. Images were sorted into four categories: Professional, Open, Youth, and Student Focus (for those studying photography). National awards were bestowed to the best photos from each participating country. Now the winners have been announced. The picture above was taken by Martin Stranka, and won the Czech Republic National Award. The cat below was photographed by Brendon Cremer, who won the South Africa National Award.
See more national winners in this gallery. You can also see a ranked list of the winning photographs from all categories at Bored Panda. -via Metafilter
Japanese comedian Akira 100% shows us how he can dance naked without exposing his genitals to us, because he's got a pie plate and is behind a strategically-placed Newton's Cradle. Not that we wanted to see 100% of Akira, but the skill and timing required by this weird routine is, let's say, fascinating.
Don't try this at home! Or, if you do, just keep it at home. You can see version 2, where the dancing is a bit bawdier, at Boing Boing.
After the massive success of the 2016 movie Deadpool, despite its R rating, there was never any question of a sequel. And we finally get a glimpse of it in the first full trailer for Deadpool 2. Contains NSFW language.
The YouTube description says,
After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Mayberry’s hottest bartender while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor – finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World’s Best Lover.
Which is complete nonsense. From the looks of the trailer, DP2 is more goofily irreverent than the first movie. In theaters May 18. -via Tastefully Offensive
A collaboration between Gallup and Sharecare led to the 2017 Well-Being Index, which they've done annually since 2008. The news is not good. While a few states improved over the previous year, none of the improvement scores were statistically significant. Most states had lower scores, some drastically lower.
Despite the national downturn, the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index found improvement in several traditional measures of physical health in 2017, such as the proportion of Americans reporting participation in regular exercise, abstention from smoking and being overweight. Community well-being – defined as liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community – also improved for Americans between 2016 and 2017.
Although improvements in certain physical health categories and community well-being signal progress, the sharp declines in overall well-being were driven by drops in purpose and social well-being metrics, as well as the mental health aspects of physical well-being. Out of a possible score of 100, the national Well-Being Index score dropped from 62.1 in 2016 to 61.5 in 2017, marking the largest year-over-year decline since the index began in 2008.
South Dakota improved its ranking, coming in at #1. Vermont, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Idaho had improved scores, while all other states' well-being declined in 2017. You can read the full report here, or the short version at Digg.
The calendar says we're officially into spring, but if you are watching the snow fall outside, you might need some encouragement to remind yourself that the season of growing is just ahead. GPhase grew a kidney bean plant from seed in a glass container and recorded it growing over 25 days. This time-lapse video captures its progress in photos taken every 9.5 minutes. It's set to the most appropriate soundtrack: "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss.
If you'd like some music that's just as pleasant but more contemporary, enjoy this time-lapse video of eight spinach plants growing for 40 days, set to the song "Spanish Summer" by Audionautix.
-via Nag on the Lake
No matter what age you are, that age is new to you, and you learn surprising things about being that age. Cracked has a pictofacts post about things that surprised you about adulthood, and it's obvious that the top contributors range in age from new adult to newly elderly. Having to change your own sheets comes a long time before waking up with aches and pains every day.
However, thanks to sharing on the internet, we needn't be too surprised by things our parents didn't tell us about aging. No matter what (adult) age you are, there's something you can relate to in the list of 23 disappointing things about being an adult.
Randall Munroe at xkcd has been playing with names. You can string a lot of celebrity names together, as there are so many standard names that are used over and again, in different combinations. That is only multiplied when a famous person uses three names because their names are so common. Munroe laid out these associations in a game of dominoes to show how they fit together. See the enlarged readable version here. When you study this grid, you comes across some full squares where everyone's name intersects with someone else's.
John Brown leads to James Brown, which leads to James Newton Howard, which leads to Wayne Howard, Wayne Brady, Wayne Knight, and Wayne Newton, which leads back to James Newton Howard. And John Wayne fits in there just fine. You don't even need Olivia Newton John! And the Howards peel off in a second direction, which leads one to believe this could have been 3D dominoes. The grid is from today's xkcd comic.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed in using dead bodies for practical purposes, instead of fearing or revering them in a religious sense. When he died in 1832, he willed his body to science, directing that it be used for medical dissection, then preserved for display, difrected by his protege Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith. And so it was, but you know what they say about the best laid plans. The only part of Bentham's body that was salvageable after medical dissection was his skeleton, which was firmly wired together and covered with stuffing and clothing.
But not everything went quite according to plan. The philosopher had asked to have his head preserved in the "style of the New Zealanders," which Smith attempted by placing the head over some sulfuric acid and under an air pump. The result was ghastly: desiccated, dark, and leathery, even as the glass eyes Bentham had picked out for it during life gleamed from the brow.
Seeing as how the results "would not do for exhibition," as Smith wrote to a friend, the doctor hired a noted French artist, Jacques Talrich, to sculpt a head out of wax based on busts and paintings made of Bentham while alive. Smith called his efforts "one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen"—a far more suitable topper for the auto-icon than the real, shriveled head, which was reportedly stuffed into the chest cavity and not rediscovered until World War II.
This "auto-icon" sat in a glass case at University College London for over 150 years. Bentham always wanted to visit America, and that has finally happened, 186 years after his death. The auto-icon is now at the Met Breuer museum in New York as part of an exhibition called Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now). Getting the auto-icon to the U.S. was quite an undertaking, requiring meticulous cleaning, packing, and transport procedures. Read about Jeremy Bentham, his remains, and how they came to America at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: ceridwen)
A hungry corpse in London's Trafalgar Square meets a friendly pigeon. Now, when we think a hungry corpse, the first thing to come to mind is a zombie that is going to try to eat us. In this case, no, all he wants is food, but he is missing the proper organs to consume it. The poor guy just wants a sandwich!
This lovely animation, despite the subject matter, is from Gergely Wootsch as part of the Collabor8te project. -via Laughing Squid
An architectural oddity that is almost exclusively found in Vermont is the "witch window." These are windows mounted on a slant, just under the roof line of a house. They are sometimes referred to as "Vermont windows" (for obvious reasons) or "coffin windows." The tale told is that crooked windows are harder for a witch to fly into. That doesn't make much sense. There was one witch trial in Vermont, but it was a couple hundred years before the witch windows became a thing. Other explanations don't make sense, either.
“You’ll also hear them referred to as coffin windows,” explains the Historical Society rep, “The idea being that it’s difficult to maneuver a coffin with a body from the second floor down to the first floor in these narrow staircases, so slide it out through the window and down the roof.” Then again, she says, that “does not seem any easier.” At the end of the day, every conclusion drawn about the curious windows ends with a question mark. Why on earth create a completely lopsided, and by all means impractical, window?
The real answer may be that it's the only way to fit a decent-sized window into a room that sits in an offset gable. But that explanation is no fun! And can you imagine trying to hang a curtain in one? Read about witch windows and see more pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.
(Image credit: Piledhigheranddeeper)
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