When he was 19 years old, Robert W. VanSumeren stood before the bench of Judge Michael Smith in Hillsdale County, Michigan. His life had gone out of control and he had committed a series of robberies, including a bank. Judge Smith sentenced him to six years in prison.

It took him a long time, even after he got out of prison. But VanSumeren took the help that people in his life offered him and began climbing upward. He went to community college, then university, then graduate school, then law school. He married a good woman and fathered two sons. The Washington Post shares his story:

“The feeling of being on the wrong side of the law makes such a powerful stamp on a person,” he said. “I felt strongly that the judicial system needed people like me at the table.”

After passing the bar exam in July 2018, VanSumeren underwent a lengthy investigation by the Michigan bar’s character and fitness committee. Last month, he got approval to be sworn in.

VanSumeren then asked Judge Smith to administer the attorney's oath. The judge agreed:

“I didn’t know if the judge would go for it, but I thought it was worth asking,” said VanSumeren, who lives in Jackson, Mich., and passed the Michigan state bar exam on the first try.

Smith said he was astonished by the request. But he was also delighted.

“I have to take my hat off to him — he has changed his life,” Smith said. “It’s really quite remarkable and rare. Very seldom do you see such a successful turnaround.”

-via Instapundit | Photo: Dana M. VanSumeren

You've seen, or heard about, a trick to keep cats off the counter by covering it with aluminum foil. Cats just don't like to walk on foil. Maybe it's the reflectiveness, or maybe it's the way it crunches and makes noise. Pusic (previously at Neatorama) is a much beloved pet and a YouTube star. What will he do when confronted with a floor made of aluminum foil? -via Digg

Cyriak Harris (previously at Neatorama) has gathered up all his Teddy bears for his latest video adventure into surrealism. Also buildings, cats, cars, sheep, and spider webs made of rope. This one could easily be looped into an endless sequence of weirdness. Other news from the YouTube page is that Cyriak wrote a novel about a horse.

Life was simple for Buttercup the horse. Chewing grass in a field, gazing dreamily at passing clouds or standing at a hedge to watch the world go by. Perhaps a light nap followed by a gentle canter and more grazing, and then off to the stable for a programme of psychological tests designed to expand the boundaries of horse consciousness.

For Betty and Tim, life was also simple. Or at least as simple as life could be when you are scientists conducting neurological experiments on a horse. That is until the day they discovered their horse was conducting an experiment of its own.

-via Laughing Squid

Cracked gives us a pictofacts list that everyone can relate to. We all have moments of utter unfairness in our lives that stick with us forever, while the perpetrator probably never thought a thing about it, never considered it wrong, and wouldn't recall it today if their life depended on it.

Honestly, these stories are so egregious and so sadly commonplace that it was hard to choose just a few to share here.



See all 36 stories at Cracked.

The Pantone Color Institute has announced its Color of the Year for 2020: Pantone 19-4052 Classic Blue.

A timeless and enduring blue hue, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue is elegant in its simplicity. Suggestive of the sky at dusk, the reassuring qualities of the thought-provoking PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue highlight our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era.

Imprinted in our psyches as a restful color, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit, offering refuge. Aiding concentration and bringing laser like clarity, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue re-centers our thoughts. A reflective blue tone, Classic Blue fosters resilience.

It's a nice color, although way more conservative than their past choices. Classic blue is especially nice to see in nature. But "nice" never set the world on fire. Fast Company thinks it's an awful choice. Dezeen thinks it should have been green. What's your opinion?

This is the N63A, one of the largest supernova remnants of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy. At least 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the LMC first reached our planet. The rampaging explosion can now be seen to be moving out — “destroying or displacing ambient gas clouds while leaving behind relatively dense knots of gas and dust,” which have been themselves compressed and may further contract to create new stars. Some of these stars could probably explode in a supernova, and continue the cycle.

Featured here is a combined image of N63A in the X-ray from the Chandra Space Telescope and in visible light by Hubble. The prominent knot of gas and dust on the upper right -- informally dubbed the Firefox -- is very bright in visible light, while the larger supernova remnant shines most brightly in X-rays.

(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, Chandra ; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt)

Wichita Falls, Texas, was once an oil boomtown, so investors thought they were getting in on the ground floor of the coming real estate returns by building a skyscraper. Whether the story behind the "world's littlest skyscraper" is true or not, it's a great story. Tom Scott tells us what he knows.   

In Qiliang, the village where Liu Xiaodong lives, papermaking is a craft that has been handed down from generation to generation for a thousand years. This bamboo paper is used in traditional calligraphy. Liu has developed a new way to make this bamboo paper--after pandas have processed the bamboo a bit. Xinhua reports:

Noting the abundant bamboo fiber in the poop of pandas, Liu came up with the idea to make paper with it. He hoped that the beloved animal could help him save the dying craft.

For three years, Liu worked on realizing the idea and finally made it in 2017 after hundreds of experiments. The panda waste was collected from a nearby panda conservation center.

Workers first rinse the poop and beat down the fiber into a pulp, and then add the juice of kiwi fruit vines and stir the pulp. Finally they add the mulberry bark, screen the paper, and press and dry it.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: George Lu

This is Gordon. He's an English Mastiff--a mountain of a dog. Every morning, when his little human and her friend wait for the morning bus ride to school, he watches them. No harm befalls her. When that duty is discharged, he jaunts back to his manor to await the little human's return.

-via Ian Miles Cheong

The Royal Household posted a job opening with the heading “Head of Digital Engagement.” Apparently, they’re looking for tech-savvy candidates experienced in digital communication content strategy and digital platform usage. The job description sounds pretty normal enough, aside from the fact that you’ll be working for the longest-reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. 

Apart from reporting to the queen (or, more likely, a chain of command that eventually makes its way up to the queen), the job sounds pretty typical. The head of digital engagement for the Royal Household will work Monday through Friday, 37.5 hours per week, and be paid 45,000-50,000 pounds (about $60,000-$67,000) per year depending on experience.

Do you meet the minimum qualifications? There is still time to apply, though obviously the demand for this job is very high and slots may be running out soon. 

According to The New York Times, 200 people had already applied for the job as of Friday, December 13, but if this sounds like your dream job, you have until Christmas Eve to submit your application.

Find out more from Apartment Therapy.

Photo: S. Hermann & F. Richter / Pixabay

Estimated value of Portrait of a Lady by Gustav Klimt was $66 million--assuming that anyone could ever find it. The painting vanished 23 years ago from the gallery in Piacenza, Italy where it hung. Recently, a gallery worker found it inside one of the walls.

On Feb. 22, 1997, thieves broke into the gallery through a skylight. It is likely that they discovered that the painting was too large to get out through the skylight and so decided to store it on site. The BBC reports:

That was until a worker clearing ivy from the wall of the gallery where it was stolen stumbled on a metal panel.

Behind it lay a recess, within which was a black bag containing what appeared to be the missing painting.

Checks are still being carried out on the recovered work, which has been handed to police.

But gallery director Massimo Ferrari is confident the original has been found, because it has the same stamps and sealing wax on the back of the painting.

Police are investigating whether the thieves had left the painting hidden with the aim of removing it when worldwide media attention moved away from one of the most notorious art thefts in years.

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Yorck Project

Both my grandmothers were wonderful cooks, as far as I can remember. I also recall my mother's culinary skills as superb, even though she quit cooking at all some time ago. But my father used to tell stories of when Mom was young and burned everything. I don't recall those times myself. And I've had enough mothers-in-law to realize that you do not became a great cook just from many years of doing it. They were never masters of the kitchen like my grandmothers were.   

But none of it would really matter, because scientifically speaking, the greatness of her cooking goes so far beyond the simple spectrum of palatability. “Food memories feel so nostalgic because there’s all this context of when you were preparing or eating this food, so the food becomes almost symbolic of other meaning,” Susan Whitborne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, told HuffPost in 2017. “A lot of our memories as children, it’s not so much the apple pie, for example, but the whole experience of being a family, being nourished, and that acquires a lot of symbolism apart from the sensory quality.”

Which is to say that every time I eat my grandmother’s cooking, my tastebuds act as a sort of time machine for my subconscious, transporting me back to all those times she let me eat a jar of Nutella and go ape on the drum kit she bought me. In that way, my draw to her cooking is sort of like Pavlov’s dog experiment, only in this case, I’m the dog who’s been conditioned to believe that her stews are culinary Valhalla.

That explains why your grandma's cooking is so good, while other people's grandmas could be complete failures. Science tells us the same factors may be at work to make you really hate particular foods. Read more about these findings at Mel magazine.

As part of a zero-gravity experiment, a U.S agricultural tech company is sending cannabis and coffee to the International Space Station. Via the next SpaceX resupply mission, which is scheduled for March next year, tissue cultures of java and hemp will be transported. (Hemp is a variety of cannabis that contains low levels of THC, the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis.)

Up to 480 plant cells will be housed for about 30 days in a special incubator, which regulates temperature and allows astronauts to examine how plant cells undergo genetic mutations while in space.

[...]

After a month away, the cells will return to Earth, where researchers at Front Range Biosciences can examine the plant samples to determine how microgravity and space radiation exposure altered their genes.

“This is one of the first times anyone is researching the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on hemp and coffee cell cultures,” Front Range Biosciences CEO Jonathan Vaught said in a statement.

Check out Geek.com for more information about this news.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: herbalhemp/ Pixabay)

Despite growing to 70 to 100 kilograms, giant pandas typically weigh 100 grams at birth, which is very very light compared to when they grow up. Human babies are much heavier, weighing 3.4 kg at birth on average. With this in mind, why are giant pandas born so tiny? This unusual size difference between adult and baby pandas had left scientists puzzled for years.

With a few exceptions among animals such as echidnas and kangaroos, no other mammal newborns are so tiny relative to their mothers. No one knows why, but a Duke University study of bones across 10 species of bears and other animals finds that some of the current theories don't hold up.

More about this study over at ScienceDaily.

(Image Credit: Cimberley/ Pixabay)

Scavenge for food, find water, heal yourself from injuries and sickness, craft weapons and materials, and look for a safe place: these are some of the usual mechanics of a survival game, which is pretty much like real life. In some games, you’ll have to protect yourself from zombies at night, while in others you have to try to stay alive while competing against other players. But what are some of the best survival games ever made? Popular Mechanics offers their list to us. Why don’t you check it out?

(Image Credit: Mojang/ Popular Mechanics)