Jeff Permar was trying to grow a vegetable garden, but found signs of vandalism. So he installed a motion-sensor camera and discovered the culprit was a groundhog. This groundhog is a performer, though, and would eat his ill-gotten gains right in front of the camera! Jeff named him Chunk, and now he's a star. You can see more of Chunk at Facebook and Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort
Having trouble sleeping at night can be a pain in the butt. You don’t get the ideal hours of sleep, you wake up not feeling refreshed. You also tend to be forgetful, as well as moody, throughout the day.
In a survey conducted a few years ago, it was found out that 27% of people have trouble sleeping at night.
Are you one of those people who have trouble sleeping? Gizmodo lists the best apps that might help you go to sleep. Check it out over at their site.
(Image Credit: LOLOGO/ Pixabay)
Rhetoric, which is also known in varying titles, namely, The Art of Rhetoric, On Rhetoric, and a Treatise on Rhetoric, is a book written by Aristotle dating from the 4th century BCE. The book is about the art of persuasion. In order to persuade people, a person should be a good speaker, and a good speaker, according to Aristotle, should have these three things under control. These three things are the argument (logos), the presentation (ethos), and the audience (pathos).
Aristotle’s Rhetoric is still as valid today as in the ancient times. The tools that he gave his readers still hold true today.
Aristotle considered rhetoric to be not a tool to convince the audience but an art form that could help present a persuasive argument. Because people with good ideas are often poor speakers, he provided them with a toolbox full of rhetorical resources. You might say that Aristotle was the first person to prepare academics for their TED Talks and keynotes.
Check out the various tools that Aristotle laid down for his readers over at Medium.
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Wasps, when in excessive numbers, are considered pests. They can present a danger when people come in close contact with them, as they sting. While their stings usually just cause a lot of pain, sometimes they can put people in life-threatening situations.
But when not seen as dangerous pests, wasps are seen as one of the most interesting and most mysterious creatures here on the planet. A comic series from The Highlight tells their story.
See the comic strip over at Vox.
(Image Credit: JMK/ Wikimedia Commons)
One of the things I get annoyed about is the fact that we have different types of charging cables for different types of smart devices. It seems that I’m not the only one annoyed by this, as the European Parliament just voted in favor of setting a standard for charging cables.
“Continuing fragmentation of the market for chargers for mobile phones and other small and medium-sized electronic devices translates into an increase in e-waste and consumer frustration,” the resolution said.
For the resolution to become a law, the European Commission would have to draft a law and vote on it in July. But the idea of adopting a charging cable standard has overwhelming support in Europe, as evidenced by the 582-40 vote. With some exceptions, chargers use either USB-C, micro-USB, or Apple’s Lightning Cable. The vast majority of the industry uses micro-USB and is slowly adopting USB-C.
Apple’s Lightning Cable will be most affected by this law, should it ever be made.
More details over at Vice.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: FelixMittermeier/ Pixabay)
Scientists have been studying an extremophile fungus growing at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for years. This fungus apparently grows toward radiation the way plants grow toward sunlight. It consumes the radiation and uses it for energy, like little power plants!
How can this fungus process radiation in this way? Because it has tons of very dark melanin pigment that absorbs radiation and processes it in a harmless way to produce energy. Scientists believe this mechanism could be used to make biomimicking substances that both block radiation from penetrating and turn it into a renewable energy source.
Chernobyl is a special case where extreme ambient radiation is a huge danger to anyone who enters, and having a “radiation blocker” to treat protective suits or even the entire inside of the plant to reduce ambient radiation could be a huge boon. Besides reducing danger, though, the world is filled with machinery and devices that safely use radiation, from medicine to manufacturing. Even low levels of contained radiation could be used to make energy that could reduce the energy burden of those devices.
Materials made of this fungus could also be useful to shield spacecraft from radiation. Read more about this discovery at Popular Mechanics. -Thanks, WTM!
Have you ever wondered how IKEA’s naming system goes? I sure didn’t know it works this way.
Apparently, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the aforementioned furniture company, struggles with dyslexia. When Kamprad found out that nouns helped him remember the products better compared to using code numbers, he created this unusual naming system that the company still uses up to this day.
A bookcase, for instance, is probably always going to be named after a profession, if it doesn’t have a boy’s name like Billy. Rugs tend to be named after cities in Denmark and Sweden, while outdoor furniture is named after islands in Scandinavia, like Kuggö, an outdoor umbrella named after an island about 125 miles west of Helsinki. Expedit, the beloved, discontinued shelving unit, means “salesclerk,” while its replacement, Kallax, is named after a town in northern Sweden. Curtains are named for mathematical terms.
Unfortunately, should the Swedish names sound like dirty words in another language, the product name will be changed in that country.
Not only do you buy furniture from IKEA, but you also get to know a bit of the Swedish language.
(Image Credit: IKEA International Group/ Wikimedia Commons)
It is said that practitioners of the Balinese martial art, called Yellow Bamboo, have the ability to blow their opponents away with their “chi” believed to be charged by a god. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on non-believers of the martial art.
There’s also George Diliman, a master who claims that he can knock out and even knock down his opponents without touching them; a claim that his students very much believe.
Finally, there is Yanagi Ryuken, a Japanese man claiming to possess psychic abilities. Described as a master of Daito Ryu Aikido, he defeats his students with ease. But in 2006, then 65-year-old Ryuken was challenged by then 35-year-old journalist and mixed martial artist Iwakura Tsuyoshi. Ryuken was, unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, defeated.
Ryuken said he lost because his psychic abilities were temporarily weakened due to illness. It's impossible to know whether Ryuken's faith in his own psychic abilities was pummelled that day, but he reportedly continued to train students in his special style.
In any case, it's a brutal sight. It also highlights the darker, not-so-funny side of fake martial arts: people looking to defend themselves are being sold shoddy techniques that fail in real-world fights.
How are people convinced into fake martial arts? Super Eyepatch Wolf’s video titled “The Bizarre World of Martial Arts”, gives an answer to this question.
Well, what do you think?
(Video Credit: Super Eyepatch Wolf/ YouTube)
As humans, we do things that are, well, normal for us to do, like go outside to hang out with friends or work, put perfume, or wear clothes that change how we look. But for animals such as dogs, these actions can be seen as weird, confusing, or even threatening.
Take for example our love for hugs.
How humans use their forelimbs contrasts sharply with how dogs do. We may use them to carry large objects a dog would have to drag, but also to grasp each other and express affection.
Dogs grasp each other loosely when play-wrestling, and also when mating and fighting. Being pinned by another dog hinders a quick escape. How are puppies to know what a hug from a human means, when that behaviour from a dog might be threatening?
The Conversation lists 8 things that we do that make dogs confused. See them over at the site.
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Oftentimes, the young mind would think of illogical or nonsense things that make us adults annoyed. But sometimes the young mind can amaze even the old. Children can sometimes drop bits of life lessons that we either have forgotten or overlooked.
Check out 30 instances of these over at Bored Panda.
(Image Credit: Bored Panda)
In 1865, 17-year-old Mollie Fancher fell from a trolley in New York and was dragged behind by her scarf. She survived the accident, but spent the next 48 years in bed, until her death in 1916. Fancher became rather famous for the psychic abilities she developed in her invalid condition, and she reportedly gave up food and drink, saying she no longer needed it.
Fancher slowly recovered from basically being declared dead by her physician, and claimed to experience a series of trances. She had lost her sight, but, placing her hands behind her, claimed to see through the back of her head. “I am sometimes conscious of what others are not,” she said, and explains how she stopped eating. “I rejected it. My doctor thought I was insane, but, as a matter of fact, I had never been more rational in my life.”
She claimed she could read, even without use of her eyes, and predict the future; she created beautiful tapestries despite the fact that her hands were paralysed. You can actually find one of her creations on display at a hotel in Lily Dale, New York’s “Village of Psychics”, a blossoming Spiritualist community during the time of Mollie Fancher’s notoriety.
Fancher was never put to a test about her fasting, nor about her psychic abilities. But she was only the most famous of the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era, and others who were put under medical supervision actually died of starvation. Were they frauds, victims of anorexia nervosa, or was it something else entirely? Read about Fancher and the other fasting girls at Messy Messy Chic.
Smart light bulbs are, well, light bulbs, but with added features. You can turn them on and off without needing to press a switch; you just need a mobile app or a digital home assistant. What’s more, you can also change the color of the light bulb to your liking.
It turns out, however, that these light bulbs can be used to hack the computer networks in our homes.
So if one of your smart light bulbs starts to malfunction, it may be a sign that it is being hacked, and a sign that your home network is under threat.
More details about this over at Fast Company.
(Video Credit: Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd./ YouTube)
In 1963, Helen Klaben and Ralph Flores crashed their plane into a mountain in Yukon territory. No one could find them in the snow-covered wilderness. They were lost for 49 days, but lived to tell the tale! -via Digg
Freddie and Truus Oversteegen and their mother Trijntje were communists who lived in Schoten, Netherlands, during World War II. The sisters had been raised to always help the underdog, which included sheltering refugees in their home.
When the leader of a Dutch resistance group took notice of their radical bent, he asked Trijntje if she would permit her daughters to join. Freddie was 14. Truus was 16. Without knowing explicitly what they were agreeing to, the three women all said yes. And soon, the teenage girls were doing more than handing out literature. They were luring Nazis into the woods and assassinating them.
Before long, Freddie and Truus supplemented their resistance orders by freelancing their Nazi-killing. They were joined by 22-year-old Hannie Schaft in 1943, making them the real-life civilian girl equivalent of Inglourious Basterds. Read about the exploits of this girl gang at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Ministerie van Defensie)
Adorned with shades of gray, orange, blue, and white, the female kingfisher perches atop a driftwood filled with moss. Below her is a male kingfisher. With his wings half-open, he offers fish to her.
This realistic sculpture is called “The Mating Proposal”, made by a self-taught artist based on New Delhi, Niharika Rajput.
Over the past five years, the Indian wildlife artist has built around a hundred species.
When she was in college, she joined as an intern at People Tree, a craft boutique. There, she was able to sketch and build a lot of 3D stuff with various materials such as bamboo and rope, and many others.
“That is where I got introduced to building very basic models of birds with epoxy. But I wanted to experiment and make it more realistic. Later, in 2015, when I saw a flock of red-billed blue magpies take off from a pine tree in Himachal Pradesh, I started building birds. I experimented with different materials and landed on the process that I follow now.”
“The Mating Proposal”, which took three months to complete, has been Rajput’s most challenging and longest-running project.
More details about Rajput and her artworks over at Atlas Obscura.
(Image Credit: Kunal Rajput)
