What happens when you place one clock at the top of the mountain, and place another on the beach? Each clock will eventually tell a different time. This is because time moves slower as you get closer to Earth.

… as Einstein posited in his theory of general relativity, the gravity of a large mass, like Earth, warps the space and time around it.

Scientists first observed this "time dilation" effect on the cosmic scale, such as when a star passes near a black hole. Then, in 2010, researchers observed the same effect on a much smaller scale, using two extremely precise atomic clocks, one placed 33 centimeters higher than the other. Again, time moved slower for the clock closer to Earth.

These findings imply that absolute time does not exist.

For each clock in the world, and for each of us, time passes slightly differently.

(Image Credit: obpia30/ Pixabay)

A dumpster-diving teenager found a notebook in 1970 and kept it for many years. It was full of varied and detailed illustrations, but the artist was not named. The only clue as to its provenance was the fact that it was a decades-old billing pad for State Hospital #3 in Nevada, Missouri -a mental asylum.

These drawings weren’t an afterthought. They were 300 pages of someone’s life. The dumpster-digging teen who’d made the discovery waited more than three decades before he decided to sell the book on eBay in 2006, when a collector in St. Louis didn’t hesitate to snatch them up for $10,000. Today, a single page fetches around $16K at auction.

Who was the artist – or, artists? The element of mystery only added to public intrigue. The St. Louis collector in turn sold the notebook on to New York City collector Henry Diamant, who decided to call the mystery artist “The Electric Pencil” due to the letters “ECT” on some of the drawing – electro-convulsive therapy.

Dark things had been happening inside the hospital, which was long gone by the time Diamant was investigating the Electric Pencil Artist. Today, we know that it was underfunded, understaffed, and a breeding ground for caretaker and patient abuse. The colourful notebook was likely one patient’s coping mechanism. Compiling a nameless portfolio of wide-eyed Victorians and baby blue rivers; circus animals and steamboats, the notebook was both impeccable, and troubling.

The identity of the artist was eventually revealed, but the inspiration for his art remains mysterious. Read about the notebook and see a sampling of the artwork at Messy Nessy Chic.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all things are improved with the addition of bagpipes. Thus it is right and meet that managers of a McDonald's restaurant in Sacramento, California are bringing joy to their neighborhood by playing bagpipe music 24 hours a day over loud speakers. CBS 13 News reports on the delighted responses of neighbors:

“The first couple of days they had it on 24/7. If we wouldn’t have said anything or reported it to the police, they would have had that thing going on still,” Arnold Phillips said.

Phillips lives across the street and says it’s making him crazy.

“It actually penetrates through the walls. We can hear it [when] I’m trying to watch TV or whatever and it’s going through that,” Phillips said.

The music is intended to drive the homeless away and doesn’t appear to be working. [...]

“It sticks in your head when you’re going somewhere else not even in this neighborhood because you’ve heard it for so long,” Phillips said.

The pipes do have that effect on people, as they sing from the collective unconscious of humanity. Even when bagpipes are not actually playing, they still play upon and from our psychic need for melody within our souls.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo by Flickr member Kevin Walsh

One of the better Second of Video a Day projects out there -- you can watch the wedding get planned, go down on Memorial Day (exact middle of the year) and then the honeymoon and the couple living together. 

All set to "Call the Police," by LCD Soundsystem

Turns out 2019 was a pretty good year if you look in the right places. 

It doesn't matter that you aren't a Phish fan, you'll enjoy this story. Phish played an elaborate New Year's Eve concert at Madison Square Garden in which each band member was elevated on a separate platform high above the stage. And then at about 21 minutes into the show...

...midway through the next song, Sand , the platform holding guitarist Trey Anastasio came to a sudden halt , tilting a bit and requiring the frontman to grab his microphone stand to keep his balance.

After the song ended and the rest of the band was lowered to the stage, there was a few minutes of awkward silence and darkness as the automation team and choreographer tried to figure out what to do. When it became clear to the guitarist that he wasn't going up or down any time soon, he made a few jokes about falling to his death , and then did what he does best, he improvised.

Anastasio was still up there are the concert ended. You can see the relevant (meaning funniest) parts with timestamped and additional videos linked at the Metafilter post. Concert contains NSFW language.   

In traditional Western culture, women's fashions change with the seasons, as fast as designers can produce something women will buy and wear. Men's fashions, on the other hand, change glacially. The basic suit and tie have been the business uniform for a couple of centuries now. Worldwide, the figures who change that trend tend to be political leaders, some who changed what men wore in direct defiance of colonialism.

After years of Western domination, swaths of the developing world that had long been forced to follow the norms set by European and American powers wanted their own alternative to the Western suit and tie. So they came up with their own formalwear. China had the Mao suit, India the Nehru jacket, the Jamaicans wore the Kariba suit and the Congolese donned the abacost.

All of those are either untucked shirts or button-up coats, which would easily fit in the wardrobe of any present-day 20-something fashionista. Similar ensembles were featured in Phoebe English’s show at London Fashion Week in 2018, while Chinese brand Pronounce brought pink Mao jackets to the runways that same year. But right after World War II, these garments had a more radical message: They showed how recently decolonized countries were trying to go their own way. “Politics and fashion are very much related,” says Sean Metzger, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television who has written about the Mao suit. “It’s a way to show conformity, but also resistance, to certain political regimes.”

It might surprise you to know that Mao Zedong was not the first to popularize the Mao suit. Read the history of some of these anti-colonial fashions at Ozy.

You've probably seen this photograph somewhere on the internet in the last couple of weeks. It appears that the devil himself is rising from the ocean. Is it an omen? Maybe. Is it a Photoshop? No. Amateur astrophotographer Elias Chasiotis planned carefully to take images of the December 26 solar eclipse in Al Wakrah, Qatar.

The images aren’t results of pure chance and luck. Chasiotis intentionally chose a place with the open horizon where he got a perfect view of the eclipsed sun emerging from the sea. “I hoped that optical effects like inferior mirage would be visible and I was lucky enough to capture them,” he said. “The weather conditions didn’t look good in the beginning as there was a lot of haze and low clouds in the southeast.”

“I was worried that nothing would come out of the eclipse. However, when the sun finally began to rise, it looked like two separate pieces, some sort of red horns piercing the sea. It soon took the form of a crescent, with the so-called ‘Etruscan vase’ inferior mirage effect visible. Due to its shape, the phenomenon was nicknamed the ‘evil sunrise.'”

Read more about the image, and see the entire series of photographs Chasiotis took that morning at Bored Panda.      

(Image credit: Elias Chasiotis)

You already know that the first child born via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was Louise Brown in 1978. She was the result of research that went back to the 1940s. Dr. John Rock (who would later develop the birth control pill) was determined to cure infertility, and hired Miriam Menkin to perform experiments in fertilizing a human egg with sperm.

Week after week, Menkin followed the same routine: chase eggs on Tuesday, mix with sperm on Wednesday, pray on Thursday, look into the microscope on Friday. Every Friday, when she looked in the incubator, all she saw was one cell – an unfertilised egg – and a bunch of dead sperm. She did this 138 times. Over six years.

Until that fateful Friday in February 1944, when she opened the incubator door, and screamed for Rock. “As usual he was at the other end of town in the hospital getting a real baby for a mother,” she recalled later, in a talk to a classroom of schoolchildren. “We telephoned him… When he saw what was in the dish, he became pale as a ghost.”

The story of how that first IVF came about is fascinating, but Menkin's story is a sad one. She was a brilliant scientist who earned several degrees, but couldn't get into medical school, probably because of strict limits on the number of women admitted at the time. Instead, she married a medical school student and worked to pay his tuition. Menkin's husband was also the reason she later had to leave Rock's laboratory and her fertility work. Read the story of the first in-vitro fertilization and the woman who accomplished it at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

Victor Ribeiro made a simple city builder web toy called Iso City that lets you place streets, buildings, and trees wherever you want by clicking your selection and then clicking on the grid. The neighborhood I constructed in a hurry, shown above, is rather simple. I could have made a canal instead of a pool, and I'm sure with time I could have made a better traffic pattern. But it's fun! -via Kottke

If you truly want to be both economical and environmentally-friendly, the best thing you can do with a car is to drive it forever. That negates the manufacture of a new car somewhere, and avoids car payments for you. If you like your car and want to extend its life, Andrew P. Collins shares some tried-and-true tips for making that happen, like getting into the habit of setting your parking brake before setting your parking gear.  

An off-road pro once told me, in the cab of a late-model Range Rover I was parking on a steep hill, to “hit the parking brake while it’s still in drive, then put it in park.” His explanation was that this way, kinetic energy from the vehicle’s weight gets transferred to the parking brake instead of its transmission.

Is that better? Well, brakes are a lot cheaper than trannies. Any opportunity to move stress from a more expensive component to a lesser one seems prudent, I guess.

In my experience, taking this step eliminates that big clunk you might hear when you shift from P to D on even just a moderate hill. Clunks bad. So, parking brake trick good. And that’s as technical as we’re going to get because I promised superstition here, not science. (I should do that more often.)

That won't help with my '97 Camry, since it doesn't having a parking gear. But there are other tips for promoting a car's longevity that involve vehicle maintenance, behavior in traffic, and even paperwork, at Jalopnik. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Bull-Doser)

The world is full of wonders, and that includes some that even scientific research hasn't figured out yet. But curious scientists are working on them. Some are fairly inaccessible and difficult to study, some have been studied but have more than one plausible explanation, and some are just baffling. The picture here seems to show what's at the end of the rainbow, a bubblegum pink lake named Lake Hillier.

This small, saltwater lake on an island off Western Australia is only one-third of a mile long, but its bubblegum-pink color makes it especially striking. The lake was documented in 1802 by British explorer Matthew Flinders, who took a sample of its waters but failed to understand how it got its startling hue. Tourists can visit only by helicopter, though it is safe to swim in the waters.

Scientists today suspect the color is due to the presence of a pink alga, Dunaliella salina, and/or a pink bacterium, Salinibacter ruber. But unlike other pink lakes around the world, such as Lake Retba in Senegal, Lake Hillier’s color doesn’t fluctuate with temperature or sunlight—so the investigation goes on.

That explanation leaves us with another question, though- hasn't anyone taken samples from the lake? Are the helicopter pilots charging too much? Lake Hillier is only one of many geologic mysteries around the globe that scientists haven't yet solved. Read about six more of them at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Kurioziteti123)

Deepfake video technology is scary when applied to news, or the concept of using actors without paying them to act. But it also gives us delights like The Beatles starring in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this video, Paul McCartney is Frodo, George Harrison is Gandalf, Ringo Starr is Samwise, and John Lennon is Gollum. However, if producer Alex Skorkin had dispensed with the deep fake faces and just gone with the music mix, this still would have been delightful. Also- why didn't he call it Lord of the Ringo? -via Geeks Are Sexy

It's a story of another of the many men who immigrated to America and then made their way to California to make a great fortune in the boom following the Gold Rush. Griffith J. Griffith dealt in real estate, among other ventures, and is best known for his bequest of land that became Griffith Park, sometimes referred to as the Central Park of Los Angeles, but much bigger.

At the entrance to Griffith Park, off Los Feliz Boulevard, stands a 14-foot bronze statue of a proud, portly Victorian gentleman. He is Griffith J. Griffith, who donated 3,015 acres of the former Rancho Los Feliz to Los Angeles in 1896, to be used specifically as a park for the “plain people” of the city. His face, decidedly noble and assured, lords over his “princely gift” to the city, which is no doubt one of L.A.’s greatest public resources. While portraits and photos of Griffith are plentiful, there are hardly any in existence of his wife, Tina — from whom a great part of his fortune and prestige sprang — and none after the year 1903. Because that year, Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife in the face, permanently disfiguring her. 

As you can guess, the prominent city benefactor led a private life that was more complicated than his public persona would lead one to believe. Read the story of Griffith J. Griffith at KCET. -via Metafilter

We all know someone who is going to be late. If it's someone in your family or friend circle, the group will count on their tardiness and plan around it. But what causes someone to be constantly behind schedule? Psychologist Philippa Perry found there can be many reasons people develop a habit of running late.

Punctual people may believe that late people are passive-aggressive and that their time is more valuable than those who wait for them. But reasons for lateness are generally more complex. The reason may be the opposite of arrogance. It could be that they don’t value themselves enough. If this is the case, might they be unable to see how others could possibly mind their non-appearance?

But that's just one explanation. There are others, which you can read at the Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake

Stained glass artists Eugene Koksharov and Anna Dobrunova in Vladivostok, Russia are masters of their craft. The most spectacular piece in their Etsy shop was this 41-inch tall panel showing a female version of the comic book hero Hellboy.

It contains 1,470 individual pieces from a palette of 45 colors, which makes it 21 times more complex than any stained glass panel I have ever made. It's a truly incredible work of precision craftsmanship.

-via Super Awesome