What’s a fun way to make your online chat conversations more interesting? Here’s one: create your own personalized emoji!
Emoji Maker gives you a simple interface for customizing your favorite emoji templates to create a brand new one. You can build on a blank template and add as many layers as you want or use the randomizer tool for a surprise.
The only downside for now is that you cannot add it to an emoji keyboard, but you can download it as a png file and easily send it as a sticker.
"Good photos come from experience; experience comes from bad photos," says Nigel Danson, a landscape photographer with over 150k subscribers on his YouTube channel where he gives tips and techniques for landscape photography.
In his recent video, he analyzes some of his “bad” photos and gives 5 points to consider in order to tell whether a shot is good or bad (I have added explanatory questions to go along with them):
Balance - Do the various elements in your photo complement one another?
Flow - Is there a simple and easy-to-follow direction for the viewer’s eyes?
Attention - Which details stand-out and are being emphasized?
Simplicity - Can your viewer understand what’s going on in the photo?
Distractions - Is there too much going on at one time in the photo?
Danson discusses what makes a photo a good one at 8:11.
These tips are just a guide and he cautions that,
It’s a good idea to get other people’s feedback, but then you’ve got to treat it with care; if you just take everyone’s feedback, then everyone’s gonna have something different and you’ll end up with nothing.
So, get feedback from other people but remember to stay true to your vision for each image because it’s easy to get lost in the woods.
“Electric Night” photographed by Ivan Pedretti was featured on Wednesday’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website with the caption:
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian Island of Sardinia in early June. The foreground rocks and shrubs are near the famous Capo Spartivento Lighthouse, and the camera is pointed south toward Algeria in Africa.
In the distance, across the Mediterranean Sea, a thunderstorm is threatening, with several electric lightning strokes caught together during this 25-second wide-angle exposure.
Much farther in the distance, strewn about the sky, are hundreds of stars in the neighborhood of our Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. Farthest away, and slanting down from the upper left, are billions of stars that together compose the central band of our Milky Way.
NASA selects a different photo of the cosmos each day. Here's the latest one!
Kids love Frozen. It’s obvious from the animated feature film’s box-office success to the seemingly endless sale of books, video games, dolls, Broadway shows, and even cereal! Now Princesses Elsa and Anna, two fictional but larger-than-life characters, have made it to Google.
Google is bringing the leading ladies even closer to fans with a skill available by default on all Google Assistant devices. Just say, “Hey Google, tell me a Frozen story” and...
When you do, you’ll launch the skill (there’s some music and an intro), which takes you to a campfire with some of the film’s main characters. After the intro has finished playing, you or your child can select a character you’d like to tell you a story.
It’s a fun trick, and a free one, and is bound to impress younger kids.
Emoticons and emoji are used to bring nuance to short text passages that might be misunderstood otherwise. Of course, some folks use it for decoration, emphasis, and humor, but that wasn't the original idea. Written language was first used to convey information, but as time passed and technology enabled communication over distances, humanity has struggled to imbue text communication with implied emotion that can get lost when you can't see the speaker's facial expressions and body language. At their core, such symbols are a form of punctuation, which was an early innovation in writing -even before spaces between words. Emoticons and emoji were not so much invented but instead evolved from the long process of refining written text. To understand this evolution, it helps to have a timeline of punctuation. The digital revolution ramped up the need for shortcuts in passing along in idea in text.
This all inspired the users of, for example, the PLATO IV system in 1972 to actually use a facility of that system to solve the problem, creating a whole slew of the first emojis and emoticons in the process.
And if you’re wondering about the distinction here, “emoji” derives from the Japanese for “picture” and “character”, so “picture character”. In contrast, “emoticon” derives from the English “emotion icon”. Thus, while you might think given the two words’ similarity and what they represent also being similar that one came from the other, this is actually purely coincidental.
In any event, going back to the PLATO IV system, with this system, users could press SHIFT-space and then a character to have that character plotted over the previous character without overwriting it. Particularly clever users used this fact to come up with all sorts of little images to represent various emotions and otherwise add context and meaning to a given bit of text, or sometimes to just have the thing stand alone to communicate something, like some sort of modern hieroglyphic. Eventually there were many hundreds of such symbols being used on this system.
There are other important moments in the development of emoticons, such as the time a theoretical discussion about a pigeon, a candle, and some mercury inside a falling elevator leaked outside of the chat forum at Carnegie Mellon University and almost caused a panic. Discussion of the incident emphasized the need for a way to denote something as a joke, which led to the sideways smiley face being widely adopted. Read a fairly in-depth history of punctuation that gave rise to emoticons and emoji at Today I Found Out.
Every time an eel farts, a Christmas tree grows brighter. Well, not exactly. The sound is generated from the setup at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Any time the aquarium's star electric eel Miguel Wattson produces an electric current, the nearby Christmas tree gets a boost that brightens the Christmas lights. The aquarium named the project "Shocking Around the Christmas Tree."
“Whenever Miguel discharges electricity, sensors in the water deliver the charge to a set of speakers,” explains Joey Turnipseed, the Aquarium’s audio visual production specialist. Turnipseed is responsible for tackling the unique engineering challenge of translating Miguel’s electric pulses into a glimmering yuletide display. “The speakers convert the discharge into the sound you hear and the festively flashing lights.”
You can almost imagine the discussion on this. Can't we convert the sound into bells instead of fart noises? Sure, but the kids will like the fart sounds better. Okay, then. -via UPI
Meghan Hughes used her powers to transform into a unicorn. Then she brought the warmth of her love to her neighbors by clearing snow in her neighborhood in Schenectady, New York. CBS 6 Albany reports:
She says she's pleasantly shocked by all the attention.
“I thought it would be fun to put the Halloween costume on and bring some joy to something that isn't very joyous,” she said.
Meghan says she may have a business on her hands! She tells us people have asked her to snow plow their driveways and even attend birthday parties for kids.
Artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach and sold the artwork for a tidy sum. But that's just the beginning of the story. Next, performance artist David Datuna came along and ate the banana!
Gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin was about to head to the airport when he heard that the banana was eaten. He darted to the space, clearly upset. A fair goer tried to cheer him up and handed him his own banana.
Perrotin and a gallery assistant re-adhered the borrowed banana to the wall just after 2 p.m.
The annual Sleepy Skunk movie trailer mashup is here! Clips from boatloads of movies from 2019 have been artfully edited for maximum impact. It starts out lively, kinetic, and goofy, then slides into an epic action section, followed by a tense and dramatic emotional section. If any of these clips pique your curiosity about a movie you haven't yet seen, there's a timeline listing them here. -Thanks, Louis!
Chemotherapy is scary and debilitating, but that's nothing compared to cancer. Chemotherapy harnesses dangerous poisons to kill cancer cells, which also harms healthy tissue. However, modern medicine is making great strides in targeting cancer cells exclusively. But there did that idea come from? Strangely, it began with a World War I chemical weapon. Learn about chemotherapy in the TED-Ed lesson. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Researchers have been following the migratory movements of a golden eagle named Harper for five years. This year, they also tagged his mate Athena with a solar-powered tracker. The two eagles spent the summer on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, then flew south for the winter. Harper took off a couple of days before Athena, and they took separate routes. But they both ended up in Bernheim Forest near Clermont, Kentucky ...and they found each other!
Bernheim Conservation Director Andrew Berry said Athena traveled down toward Fort Knox then used the Crooked Creek Wildlife Corridor to make her way back to Bernheim Forest.
Athena spent the first night alone in Bernheim, but found Harper the next morning — likely after calling to each other. Together, they flew to the top of a knob and sat together, Berry said.
“It was really awesome to see her fly 1,700 miles back to Bernheim and then within 24 hours be able to relocate her companion Harper,” he said.
Dog lovers can't help but let out a tiny 'aww' when they watch this video of a dog enjoying a soak in a tub of water. I know I did. The sheer excitement of our furry, black friend cannot be contained as he flails about in the water with enough energy to harness a small town. Such random, internet gems remind me of the simple joys in life.
We know from stories of the Old West that newspapers of the time were more dedicated to sensationalism than facts. A good yarn sold papers, especially in areas for away from the place where the story occurred. But over time, journalism changed and "fact checker" became an occupation, although a grinding one usually relegated to women. Publications that wanted to build a reputation as reliable began to filter stories through fact checkers before publication, but it wasn't a popular innovation with everyone.
If writers were pitted against fact checkers, it was because the former resented a check on the idea of the lone genius whose words were unassailable. In the era of New Journalism, The New Yorker’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.
Can a person’s fate be subject to randomized chance? In this context, the “chance of induction” or the likelihood of being drafted for military service in Vietnam was entirely up to a lottery system.
Participants in the draft lottery could not have known until decades later that they were taking part in one of history’s largest and unprecedented randomized experiments that forever changed the way social scientists understood large-scale data collection. Soon, researchers began investigating the life-altering consequences the lottery had on the men who were drafted.
“The lotteries” not only changed how the Selective Service chose men for the conflict in Vietnam, they also marked a turning point in the history of science. By assigning military induction via an arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits, the lotteries amounted to an experiment.
Eleven years after the fall of Saigon, Norman Hearst, Thomas B. Newman, and Stephen B. Hulley used their knowledge of the Selective Service Lotteries to design a study that would answer that question. They could not simply examine the correlation between service in Vietnam and mortality, because serving in the military might correlate with other factors—such as a willingness to take risks—that would independently make individuals more likely to die. Hearst, Newman, and Hulley recognized this problem and knew the solution: a randomized experiment, which assigns treatment (here, to military service) by chance.
But how exactly did the system work?
The draft lotteries worked in just this way. In each lottery, dates—representing the birthday of draft-eligible men—were randomly paired with the numbers 1 to 365 (or 366 for lotteries covering a leap year). In the first lottery, the succession of birthdates drawn from a vase determined the assigned lottery number—the first date drawn received lottery number 1; the second date, number 2; and so on. In subsequent lotteries,officials improved the randomization by simultaneously drawing numbers and birthdates from different receptacles. The number paired with each birthdate determined the order in which men were called for military induction.
The influence of the lotteries was far-reaching, sowing the seed for numerous other studies that had practical implications for politics, economics, psychology, mortality, and socioeconomic life.
Recognizing the parallels between the draft lotteries and an experiment, Hearst, Newman, and Hulley began scanning the birthdates of men who died in California and Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1983. The team tallied the number of birthdates called for induction and compared that with the count of birthdates not called for induction. If the draft lotteries did affect death rates, the tallies would differ.
In an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the team reported a greater frequency of birthdates that had been called for induction among the death certificates. Specifically, in results still relevant to today’s veterans, the team reported that having a draft-selected birthdate increased mortality among draft-eligible men by about 4 percent, including a 13 percent increase in the rate of suicide and an 8 percent increase in the rate of motor-vehicle death.
Consider, for instance, the puzzle of how life experiences interact with individuals’ genetic endowments. According to research by Lauren Schmitz and one of us (Conley), being drafted propelled men who were already genetically disposed toward smoking to start doing so. Normally, one cannot randomly assign smoking in a scientific study; each lottery effectively did so because of the greater access to cigarettes that it provided draftees.
In 1990, the MIT economist Joshua Angrist became the first to use the draft lottery as an experiment for studying social and economic experiences.
In political science, researchers studied the lotteries to understand how exposure to public policy influences civic life. Tiffany C. Davenport found that parents whose sons received lottery numbers likely to be called for induction turned out to vote at a higher rate than parents whose sons did not receive such low lottery numbers—an effect that was most pronounced in towns with a war casualty.
Studies on the Vietnam Lotteries were possible because they took place right before the Information Age (around the 1970s) when digital records and databases were being introduced.
This year marks the 50th anniversary since the Vietnam Selective Services Lottery was inaugurated in the United States.
Read more about the impact of “The Lotteries” at The Atlantic.
