A man just broke his own Guinness World Record of 67 days in a barrel atop a pole — and he’s still going as of this moment.
The man, named Vernon Kruger, had set the Guinness World Record in 1997, when he spent 67 days living in a barrel at the top of a pole. Just this week, Kruger surpassed his own record atop an 80-foot pole in Dullstroom.
"I have broken my own record now - 22 years ago I broke it, it was a British record, of 54 days. I took it to 67 [days] and this time I'm going to try to push it to about 80."
He said it was "not too lonely" adding that: "This time we have social media so I feel more connected.
Mountain Dew cheesecake might seem like an abomination if you don't drink Mountain Dew, but to those who consider it the nectar of the gods, it could be your new favorite dessert. James Lamprey shows us how to make No-Bake Mountain Dew Cheesecake. The recipe is close to mine, although I use lemon juice and berries instead of the soda pop syrup. Also eggs, because I bake mine. A baked cheesecake tastes a little more traditional, doesn't need to set for several hours, and most importantly, doesn't require a springform pan. Laughing Squid has a second video showing a different way to make Mountain Dew Cheesecake, using cheesecake and Mountain Dew Jell-O in separate layers. While I am not inclined to put either Mountain Dew nor Jell-O in a cheesecake, I am intrigued by the swirling colors. That I might try!
So many of our modern pop culture stories are about good vs. evil in that every character must pick a side, and we know that one side is right and the other is wrong, and we are supposed to root for good over evil. In Star Wars, these two factions are explicitly named, to shape our expectations and label who we are to identify with. It doesn't always work as intended, since while Darth Vader may be evil, you have to admit his menace is thrillingly cool. The dichotomy of good guys and bad guys is clear in superhero movies, Westerns, murder mysteries, horror, fantasy, and even history books ...is there any doubt that World War II reads like a morality tale? But it wasn't always that way.
Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.
The situation is more complex in epics such as The Iliad, which does have two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the world from the other team. They don’t symbolise anything but themselves and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the reason to fight the good fight. The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one.
The shift to battles of morality only began a couple hundred years ago. Robin Hood had been around a long time, but didn't rob the rich and give to the poor until 1795. Grimm's Fairy Tales added some morality to old folk stories soon after. Read about the rise of the good guy trope at Pocket.
Click on the image above to start the video. The first rule of building a complicated ball run, domino fall, or Rube Goldberg contraption is that you must first put the cats away somewhere. However, when you spend ten hours getting it right, keeping the cats locked up begins to border on animal abuse. In this case, people who watch this -and you have to watch it at least a couple of times- tend to agree that the cat made it all worthwhile. You can watch this in a somewhat larger format at reddit.
We know from Western movies that a cowboy always rode high in the saddle, his six-shooter by his side in case of outlaws or Indian attack. But cowboy life in the Old West wasn't like that, outside of Hollywood. Herding cows was hard work that fell to youngsters and minorities, those with few opportunities for a better job. While ranch work was poorly paid drudgery, it was nirvana compared to the work involved in a cattle drive.
Driving two or three thousand cattle over 1,000 miles required a dozen or so cowboys, each with four or more horses, working for three to six months. The trail boss, who might be the ranch owner but was more likely an experienced ranch hand, rode ahead of the herd to control the pace and direction of travel and tolerated neither unruly cattle nor rebellious laborers. Cowboys took orders and worked for wages typically lower than skilled factory pay.
Each herder had a regular position in the herd, from lead to flank to swing to drag, with status and sometimes pay according to position. According to Montana cowboy Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott, drag riders had it the worst. Responsible for bringing along the poor, weak, or wounded animals, drag riders would end the day “with dust half an inch deep on their hats and thick as fur on their eyebrows,” Abbott said. Even worse was the dust in their lungs, which had them coughing up brown phlegm for months after the drive.
There were small and memorable parts of a cowboy's world that fed into what became the cowboy myth in dime novels, Wild West shows, and eventually Hollywood movies. Read about the real life of a cowboy at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting
Sugar is one of the essential ingredients in our food. From confectionaries to actual main course dishes, our sugar intake might be more than what we can imagine. In a time where many would worry of excessive consumption of sugar, it’s better to know more about sugar. Katie Couric consults Dr. Mark Hyman, a family physician, on what sugar does to our bodies:
Our hormones, taste buds, and brain chemistry are all hijacked by sugar. Not metaphorically, but biologically. Simply put, you get addicted, like you would be to some of the deadliest drugs on the planet, to sugar and anything that turns to sugar in your body, like white flour.
This is because food contains not just calories or energy to fuel our cells; food contains information. When we eat sugar, it increases our blood glucose and it tells our body to increase insulin, in order to shuttle that glucose into cells. But when we constantly eat sugar and have chronically high blood glucose, we develop insulin resistance, which is the predicator to developing type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance usually comes with increased fat storage, high blood pressure, and a poor cholesterol profile. Elevated blood sugar and insulin promote inflammation and cause a hormonal cascade that makes it hard to think clearly, maintain a healthy weight, stay in a good mood, have a healthy sex drive, and so much more.
A new type of T-cell has been accidentally discovered by researchers at Cardiff University. The researchers were analysing blood from a bank in Wales when they found the new type of immune cell. The cell carries a receptor that has never been seen before, allowing the newly-discovered immune cell to latch on to most human cancers, ignoring the healthy cells. Yahoo News has more details:
Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study and an expert in T-cells from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, said it was “highly unusual” to find a cell that had broad cancer-fighting therapies, and raised the prospect of a universal therapy.
“This was a serendipitous finding, nobody knew this cell existed,” Prof Sewell told The Telegraph.
“Our finding raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population. Previously nobody believed this could be possible.”
Asked if it meant that someone in Wales was walking around completely immune to cancer, Prof Sewell said: “Possibly. This immune cell could be quite rare, or it could be that lots of people have this receptor but for some reason it is not activated. We just don't know yet.”
It’s time to address the elephant in the room, er, hotel. An elephant in Sri Lanka wandered into a hotel, and surprisingly enough, is on its best behaviour. Twitter user upidaisy shared a video of the wild elephant, gently wandering around and poking stuff with his trunk. Maybe the elephant is aware that it might cause further disturbance if it thrashes around the hotel!
Amp up the romance this coming Valentine’s Day by taking your lover to a vacation in Juliet’s historic home in Verona, Italy. Yes, you heard that right, Juliet’s home (from the Shakespearean classic Romeo and Juliet) is available for reservation. Airbnb will grant one lucky couple a stay at Casa di Giulietta, letting them use the actual bed used in the 1968 movie adaptation of the play. It’s all romance and fate, no poison included, as CBS News details:
"Juliet's House is the most important museum in the City of Verona, attracting millions of visitors every year. Partnering with Airbnb brings the widely-known Shakespearian myth of Romeo and Juliet to life in a way never before offered," said Mayor of Verona Municipality Federico Sboarina. "We are excited to promote our cultural heritage, share traditions that were previously safeguarded, and bring international visibility to the City of Verona."
The trip also includes a personal butler, a candlelight dinner and cooking demonstration by two Michelin starred Italian chef Giancarlo Perbellini, an opportunity to read and answer some of the 50,000 letters addressed to Juliet every year, a private tour of the home and a tour of Verona, the city of love, through the eyes of Shakespeare himself.
"This stay will give one couple the unique chance to celebrate their love in what is possibly the most romantic home in the history of literature," said Giacomo Trovato, Airbnb's general manager for Italy.
In this work called “REGULAR RAIN”, Russian artist and photographer Slava Semeniuta (also known as VISUAL SCIENTIST) retouches digital photographs of puddles on wet streets to make rain look more colorful, and it does look more colorful.
Semeniuta tells Colossal that he was inspired to create the photo series a couple of weeks ago in Sochi. The way the light shimmered on the wet plants, tiles, and asphalt compelled him to return home for his camera to shoot “everything that seemed to me impressive, something that touched me. I especially liked the look of the reflection of neon light in the water,”...
Marijuana is currently legal in 33 states, as well as in Washington, D.C. in the United States. Millions of people in the world have used this drug to treat various health conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, cancer, and others.
As it gets increasingly legalized in the country, many people are curious about how cannabis can be used in treatments for insomnia and pain management. However, new research casts doubt on the aforementioned drug’s effectiveness towards these two.
Two new studies aiming to shed more light on the health effects of cannabis were published in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care on Monday, in response to the World Health Organization’s recent request for more data on the use of cannabinoids in pain management. Together, they suggest that weed might not alleviate people’s pain and sleep issues as conclusively as previous research has indicated.
The first study is among the first research to primarily look at how medical cannabis affects sleep. Chronic pain makes it hard for people to sleep through the night—simply shifting sleep positions can trigger a pain flare-up and cause them to wake. The study found that weed may be able to help some people sleep more soundly, but negatively affect the sleep of people who use cannabis heavily.
Mindar is a new priest serving at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple located in Kyoto, Japan. Like other priests, Mindar can deliver sermons and move around to interact with worshippers. Mindar, however, has some peculiar features: he has a body made of aluminum and silicone, as he is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.
For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.
Mindar is not the only robot in the religious circle.
In 2017, Indians rolled out a robot that performs the Hindu aarti ritual, which involves moving a light round and round in front of a deity. That same year, in honor of the Protestant Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Germany’s Protestant Church created a robot called BlessU-2. It gave preprogrammed blessings to over 10,000 people.
Then there’s SanTO — short for Sanctified Theomorphic Operator — a 17-inch-tall robot reminiscent of figurines of Catholic saints. If you tell it you’re worried, it’ll respond by saying something like, “From the Gospel according to Matthew, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Sharks have been around here on Earth for a very long time; they emerged over 400 million years ago. But did you know that some of them can walk? New research shows that nine million years ago, these walking sharks appeared. This makes them the most recently evolved shark on the planet.
New research published in Marine and Freshwater Research describes nine species of walking shark, all of whom live in the waters off northern Australia, eastern Indonesia, and near the island of New Guinea. Walking sharks have been documented before, but the new research—a collaboration between the University of Queensland, Conservation International, and several other institutions—describes them [in] an evolutionary context, including how they came to be a distinct genus.
But don’t worry! Even if they can walk on land, they are harmless to humans.
Toxic chemicals might be lurking on your home. But where are they? You might think that this is not that dangerous, but the ink printed on mailing labels and cardboard boxes might be deadlier than you think.
Ink typically makes up only about 1% of the total weight of packaging, according to Lumi, a company that creates packaging and manages supply chain logistics for brands. (Lumi sometimes receives questions about possible toxins in ink, and recently published a comprehensive, well-researched blog post written by staffer Ian Montgomery about the subject.) But even though inks are tiny in terms of volume, they often contains high concentrations of heavy metals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are bad for both the environment and human health.
While the risk to customers, who shop online and interact with these packages directly, is relatively low, people who work at warehouses and post offices who come in contact with larger volumes of ink daily are in a more dangerous position.
The current transportation system is not at its best, with longer commute times, the extreme traffic, and the hassle of finding a public transport you can hop in for the day. It seems by 2030, things might get better. Transportation options such as hover cars are projected to be available by 2030. This is because of improvements in technology, as USA Today details:
"Transportation planning has always been around how to get a vehicle from place to place using roads and traffic lights. But that's changing," said Thom Rickert, a risk and insurance specialist at Trident Public Risk Solutions.
The mobility industry's next objective is to focus on moving a person through multiple modes of connected travel.
That's where air taxis, e-scooters, connected trains and semiautonomous cars come into play, powered by widespread 5G connectivity, Rickert said.
