We've seen several artists sketch out floor plans for the homes and apartments in our favorite TV shows. Now we get to see how some TV workplaces are laid out. After all, some shows revolve completely around the workplace and the bizarre cast of characters who have little in common besides working together.
Bizdaq presents the floor plans of Dunder Mifflin from The Office, Moe's Tavern from The Simpsons, Central Perk from Friends, Paddy’s Pub from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the office of Sterling Cooper from Mad Men, and the comic book store from The Big Bang Theory. There's also a bonus in the floor plan of the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars, which is not a TV show and only appeared in one scene in a 40-year-old movie, but still feels familiar to everyone. See all the enlargeable fictional workplace floor plans here. -via Digg
Astronaut Mark Watney survived on potatoes when he was stuck on Mars in the movie The Martian, but that was fiction. The Great Famine in Ireland came about because of potato blight, and although lack of potatoes caused starvation, they weren't the sole food eaten by the Irish. Andrew Taylor ate a potato-only diet in 2016, but he flavored them with other ingredients and took supplements. Could someone live off only potatoes of they had to?
Technically, the traditional white potato contains all the essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells, and fight diseases. And eating just five of them a day would get you there. However, if you sustained on white potatoes alone, you would eventually run into vitamin and mineral deficiencies. That's where sweet potatoes come in. Including these orangey ones in the mix—technically, they belong to a different taxonomic family than white potatoes—increases the likelihood that the potato consumer will get their recommended daily dose of Vitamin A, the organic compound in carrots that your mom told you could make you see in the dark, and Vitamin E. No one on a diet of sweet potatoes and white potatoes would get scurvy, a famously horrible disease that happens due to a lack of Vitamin C and causes the victim’s teeth to fall out.
But there are drawbacks to potatoes as a life-sustaining food. Personally, anytime someone asks the question, "If you could eat only one food, what would it be?" the answer is supreme pizza. However, that is technically more than one food, which is what you need. Read about the nutritional bang for your buck in potatoes at Popular Science.
For much of history, children were dressed in relatively simple garments that allowed for the fact that they couldn't yet dress themselves. As clothing became more structured, both boys and girls were dressed in skirts and dresses, which allowed for easier diaper changing and toilet training. The day a boy began wearing pants was a momentous occasion, and signaled that he was now a man-in-training.
With the power of pants came an understanding of manly responsibility, writes Jennifer Jordan in an essay on 17th-century masculinity. “The breeching ceremony stands out as one of the most significant milestones in a boy’s journey to acquiring manhood.” This seems to have been understood by even very little boys. Samuel Coleridge, the English poet and philosopher, described his five-year-old son Hartley being breeched in an 1801 letter. “He did not roll and tumble over and over in his old joyous way,” he wrote. “No! It was an eager & solemn gladness, as if he felt it to be an awful area in his Life.” These parties were usually held over a weekend at home, with relatives invited to stay. The pockets of Hartley’s breeches jingled with “a load of money,” Coleridge wrote, likely gifted to this fledgling man by visiting family members.
After his "breeching," a boy would spend his time in the company of men and other boys, while girls stayed near their mothers and learned the gentle arts of the home. Read about the historical tradition of a boy's transition to pants at Atlas Obscura.
Merriam-Webster has added 250 new words to their online dictionary. Their selections say a lot about the times we live in. Cultural trends are represented with terms such as "sriracha" and "froyo" for food and "troll" and "ransomware" for tech. Politics made it into the dictionary -not the word itself, which has been there for a while, but new terms like "alt-right" and old terms terms like "dog whistle," which has been used for decades, but is now understood more widely.
And sometimes a biological term develops a second life as something analogous and less specific, as we see in the case of hive mind; what began as a way to talk about the coordinated ways that colonies of social insects like bees and ants behave has come to be applied also to the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people seeming to function as a single mind.
Liam Neeson has 118 acting credits on IMDb. He recently announced he was retiring from action films, citing his age He's 65). No need to mourn just yet, because he has already filmed several movies that haven't been released, and he didn't say he was retiring from acting completely. However, he leaves a huge catalog of action roles behind him, many you probably haven't seen. Check out some clips of Neeson's best action scenes in movies you may or may not know at TVOM.
I managed to get all of these right by picking out the ailments and leaving the rest to Greek philosophers. I just know the ailments. But you can see how it would be confusing to those who don't know the words. This is the latest from John Atkinson at the comic Wrong Hands. He also did an earlier quiz with Renaissance artists and coffee orders, but I couldn't guess any of them because they are all just Italian names. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Big LT is an amputee who has been living on disability payments. He saw a Navajo blanket on the TV show Antiques Roadshow and realized he had a family heirloom that was like it. Watch him find out how much it is worth.
So he started out thinking he might get $5-10 thousand for it. Then the appraisers come out. This story might lift those Monday blues for you by the end. And the kicker is that LT might even be able to go visit his blanket in some museum somewhere. -via reddit
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Salient points from research on or about skunks by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research “The History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research,” William F. Wood, The Chemical Educator, vol. 4, 1999, pp. 44–50. The author, at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, explains:
The striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) is widely known for the highly odoriferous defensive secretion it uses to repel predators. Chemists have sporadically investigated the chemical composition of this secretion for many years. In this research, a number of chemicals have been incorrectly attributed to this secretion and the errors incorporated into the chemical literature. The major component in skunk spray was erroneously believed to be 1-butanethiol, until it was later shown that the actual compound was (E)-2-butene-1-thiol. More recently, two studies identified the third major compound in the secretion as either (E)-2-butenyl methyl disulfide or (E)- 2-butenyl propyl sulfide. These structural assignments were incorrect and the compound was later shown to be (E)-2-butenyl thioacetate.
Folklore asserts that tomato juice will neutralize the odor of skunk spray, but human olfactory fatigue can explain the apparent disappearance of the odor on sprayed pets. The odoriferous thiols in skunk spray can easily be neutralized by oxidation to sulfonic acids.
Details from Wood’s study “The History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research.”
Skunk Spray Maliciously Deployed “GC/MS Based Identification of Skunk Spray Maliciously Deployed as ‘Biological Weapon’ to Harm Civilians,” Robert Wennig, Serge Schneider, and François Meys, Journal of Chromatography B, vol. 878, nos. 17–18, May 15, 2010, pp. 1433–16. The authors, at the Université du Luxembourg, report:
Cows just kind of do what they do; They stand in fields and graze and moo, But they also do other things that make us stop and say, “Ooh!” So here are some cow stories, strange but true.
I’M OK, YOU’RE OK. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COW?
One morning in January 2005, traffic backed up on Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida. The cause: A cow was standing in a swamp beside the road… and she appeared to be sinking. Concerned drivers called the Highway Patrol, who quickly determined that the cow wasn’t in danger, but was merely grazing in the two-foot-deep bog. The officers left, but the worried calls kept coming in, so they went back out and put up an electronic sign on the shoulder that read: “THE COW IS OK.” Shortly after the officers left, however, the cow wandered off …but the sign remained.
Now motorists were really confused: What cow was okay? Was this some kind of spiritual message, or news of some event they hadn’t heard about? Those were just a few of the questions the Highway Patrol received over the next few hours. And as more and more drivers slowed down to look for the nonexistent cow, a second, larger traffic jam ensued. Officers eventually went back out and removed the sign.
It's no wonder his films always feature a chase scene on foot! The word "climb" doesn't really do it justice. It's more like he dances over obstacles. In one minute, Chan gets over over eleven barriers, and makes it look effortless. -via Tastefully Offensive
In 1832, a British Navy doctor, David Burnes, was approached by a sailor who had pain and infection in his back. It took a while, but it became apparent there was something in there -something made of metal. After several weeks of trying to extract it, the doctor cut out a dining fork! How did it get in there?
Strange as it may seem, even after its extraction, the man persisted in adhering to his original statement of his being ignorant how and when it had been introduced; and during the two months I remained in the ship I was not able to gain further information in the matter. He seemed to have no defect of memory in any way, for he, without hesitation, gave me every information I asked as to his former life and habits.
One of the tines of the fork was incomplete. Several years later, the same sailor approached the doctor again with a pain in his neck and -you guessed it- the missing end of the tine was extracted. You can read the painful story of the sailor with a fork in his back at Thomas Morris' blog. -via Strange Company
PS: The image above is not the exact size of the fork.
The Soviet Union founded quite a few towns during the Cold War that never appeared on maps; secret sites where research was done, bombs were built, or nuclear armaments were made ready. One such "closed city" on the eastern edge of Russia was called Gudym by the locals, but its official designation was Anadyr-1.
Gudym was built in the late 1950s, complete with an underground base for storing nuclear warheads. Over five thousand residents (military and their family) lived there beginning in 1961, residing in buildings above the secret facility that stored three RSD-10 pioneer nuclear missiles, allegedly intended for Alaska, Washington state, California and South Dakota in the event of nuclear war.
The nuclear weapons were removed in 1986, and eventually the town was abandoned. All that's left are the empty facilities, which haven't been updated since the '60s and are now quite run down. See a gallery of images from Gudym as it appears in the 21st century at Messy Messy Chic.
A textbook uses the analogy of a donut to explain how social media sites differ. It's in the way that people use them. And Google+ is the punchline. Who says textbook writers don't have a sense of humor? The price they expect us to pay for them would be funny, too, if it weren't so tragic. Be sure to like and follow! -via reddit
As civilization continues to encroach on the natural world, we set aside places for nature to remain intact. We have forest reserves, wildlife preserves, and soon, the U.S. may have a dark sky reserve in central Idaho. It would be the first such designation in the U.S., where artificial light would be severely limited order to allow people to see the stars in the sky as they were meant to be seen.
Researchers say 80 percent of North Americans live in areas where light pollution blots out the night sky. Central Idaho contains one of the few places in the contiguous United States large enough and dark enough to attain reserve status, Barentine said. Only 11 such reserves exist in the world.
Leaders in the cities of Ketchum and Sun Valley, the tiny mountain town of Stanley, other local and federal officials, and a conservation group have been working for several years to apply this fall to designate 1,400 square miles (3,600 square kilometers) as a reserve. A final decision by the association would come about 10 weeks after the application is submitted.
Maymo the lemon beagle wants to play with all of them, of course. The video description sets this up as a "prank" on the dog, but he's just plain delighted. -via The Daily Dot
