Magda Boulet, 47, and Cat Bradley, 27, are both professional ultrarunners who compete with each other race after race. They chase each other down and exchange top podium spots in some of the biggest 100-mile events in the world. One of them has a problem, however: she has to make sure her workouts don’t interfere with her 14-year-old son’s schedule.
“It hit me just the other day that I’m racing women who are 20 years younger than me,” Boulet says from her home in San Francisco. “I didn’t even know what ultrarunning was when I was 27.”
Boulet grew up in Jastrzebie-Zdroj, Poland, and immigrated with her parents to the U.S. when she was in high school, becoming a citizen in 2001. She ran track at the University of California at Berkley, focusing on the 1,500-to-5,000-meter events, but switched to marathons after college. Working with legendary distance coach Jack Daniels, she came to dominate the distance, racing for the U.S. in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. After almost a decade running the marathon, Boulet started to become restless. “I felt I was getting the most out of my mind and body that I could in the marathon distance,” Boulet says. “I got invited to a local half marathon trail race, and it was captivating. I ended up walking for the first time in a race—I could not run up a certain hill. Instead of being discouraged by it, I suddenly realized there was so much I still had to learn. Recognizing that there’s room for improvement is a beautiful thing.” In 2013, Boulet transitioned again, this time to ultramarathons.
Twitter states that it has mistakenly used phone numbers and email addresses, that users have provided for security purposes, to show advertisements to them. The social network company has stated on Tuesday that they “inadvertently” used the aforementioned numbers and emails to let advertisers match people to their own marketing lists. Twitter, however, does not say how many users were affected by their mistake.
The company also says that it did not share personal data with advertisers or other third parties. Twitter says it fixed the problem as of September 17.
One of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States is California’s Central Valley. It is the world’s largest supplier of canned tomatoes, and a third of the country’s produce is grown here. When a seven-year drought hit the land, however, it has threatened the viability of the valley’s farmland, leaving many local communities to suffer greatly as a result.
Joris Debeij’s short documentary When a Town Runs Dry offers a window into the front lines of the water crisis. In the film, which is based on Diana Marcum’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting, we hear from several residents of Stratford, a farming community in which much of the land was decimated by the drought.
“Being able to work with the ground and with nature has been very satisfying,” says one farmer, “but of late, when the water becomes scarce, we don’t get a lot of help from the people who want the food that we grow.” The man, who inherited the farm from his father, has been forced to sell land as a result of the aridity. “This year, half of the farm has not been put into cultivation, because of a lack of water,” he says. “Without food production, there’s no jobs out in the rural communities.”
I remember the scene in the film "The Help" in which Viola Davis' character Aibileen teaches the little girl, whom she was taking care of, three phrases to affirm herself: "You is smart. You is kind. You is important."
Similar to that, this video of a little boy named Ayaan reciting affirmations, which his mother taught him when he was two, is one of the cutest and most inspiring things I have seen of late.
The Asian snakehead fish is an invasive species from China that can grow up to 3 feet long and survive for days at a time on land. They're on the loose in Georgia. Wildlife officials urge members of the public to immediately kill them. You can't afford to wait. The New York Post reports:
An angler’s report allowed them to “confirm the presence,” after identifying the fish’s mottled brown coloring, a dorsal fin traversing the back and the serpentine noggin from which the fish takes its name. [...]
Even scarier, these serpentine swimmers can breathe air — allowing them to exist on land for days at a time.
To combat the invasion, Georgia’s Wildlife Resources Division posted a notice on their Facebook page, urging fishers to “immediately kill and freeze any suspected snakeheads, as well as snap photos of their quarry.”
I won't have to be warned twice. I just hope my .458 is heavy enough for the job.
A couple of years ago, Eddie Deezen told us the history of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." In it, he revealed a verse that was part of the original composition, but almost unknown now, concerning a girl named Katie Casey. There were actually two verses about Casey, and historians now believe they were inspired by lyricist Jack Norworth's girlfriend, vaudeville star and suffragist Trixie Friganza.
“Trixie was one of the major suffragists,” says Susan Clermont, senior music specialist at the Library of Congress. “She was one of those women with her banner and her hat and her white dress, and she was a real force to be reckoned with for women’s rights.” In 1907, Friganza’s two worlds—celebrity and activism—would collide when she began a romantic relationship with Jack Norworth.
Norworth, a well-known vaudeville performer and songwriter in his own right, was married to actress Louise Dresser when he met Friganza. (When news of the wedded couple’s separation hit the press, Dresser announced that her husband was leaving her for the rival vaudeville star.) The affair was at its peak in 1908 when Norworth, riding the subway alone on an early spring day through New York City, noticed a sign that read “Baseball Today—Polo Grounds” and hastily wrote the lyrics of what would become “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on the back of an envelope. Today, those original lyrics, complete with Norworth’s annotations, are on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Hayakawa Kintarō didn't set out to be a Hollywood movie star. He traveled from Japan to Chicago to get a degree in economics. But after graduating in 1912, while waiting for a ship to take him back to Japan, he caught the acting bug and became a movie star under the stage name Sessue Hayakawa.
Contemporary reports from the period reveal that screenings of Hayakawa’s films would routinely be filled largely with young women who’d scream incessantly whenever he appeared onscreen- no doubt not only enjoying his good looks, but also his calm and collected portrayals of the bad boy or forbidden lover characters that he so often appeared as.
Despite being a symbol of pure sex, an interesting thing to note was that in the films themselves, Hayakawa was almost never actually allowed to get the girl, even in the ones where he was the primary love interest, nearly always losing the girl in the final act.
You see, at the time Hayakawa was a star, the idea of a Japanese man with a white woman was scandalous to the extreme, despite that the theaters were lined with said white women coming to see the Japanese heartthrob.
Hayakawa raked in the money, but was frustrated with being typecast. His films were not well received in Japan due to the racist way his characters were portrayed. So he took matters into his own hands and opened his own film studio. But the twists and turns of history worked against him in several ways. Read the story of Sessue Hayakawa at Today I Found Out.
"Well, you know, with the jokes and snide comments, I just think it's time we stood up and said, we're not going to take this anymore,'' Ed Sheeran states in the video, as he came over Prince Harry’s house. Sheeran, however, was not on the same page with the prince. "We are ginger and we're gonna fight."
"Slightly awkward,'' Harry replies, realizing that his fellow redhead might not be talking about the same thing. "Maybe a miscommunication, but this is about World Mental Health Day."
"I definitely knew that,'' as Sheeran erases the title of his presentation, which was “Gingers Unite”.
Jokes aside, Harry then turns to the issue that has been a focus for him and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
"Guys, this World Mental Health Day, reach out, make sure that your friends, strangers look out for anybody that might be suffering in silence," he says. "We're all in this together."
[...]
His focus on removing the stigma around mental health issues stems from the loss of his mother, Princess Diana, who died in a car crash when he was 12.
He revealed in 2017 that he began suffering panic attacks following her death and that he eventually sought counseling 20 years later to deal with his grief.
It’s good to raise awareness about mental health issues, and, in my opinion, it’s even better that influential people are bringing this matter and matters like this one on the table.
(Video Credit: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex/ Instagram)
A man named Darren Hickey has died after sampling a fishcake so hot it burned his throat and caused him to be unable to breathe, an inquest has heard. His voice box swelled up over the following 12 hours, which eventually caused him to choke.
The 51-year-old wedding planner was given the small fishcake to try by a chef at a wedding venue on 4 April.
It burnt the back of his throat and as the pain grew worse during the afternoon, Mr Hickey visited the urgent care ward at Chorley Hospital, Lancashire.
The inquest into his death heard how he would have had difficulty breathing and swallowing because of the pain and swelling.
Patrick Waugh, a pathologist who performed a post-mortem examination, said the case was very rare, only seen normally in people who have breathed in smoke in house fires, which burns the airways.
“The patient can appear well, they will be talking to you, but then the swelling starts,” he said.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, the unbelievable arrest came months after Jiangsu province police had been on the hunt for a man by the name Guo Bing, who was suspected of gang crimes, fraud, and extortion.
(...)
China’s use of facial recognition technology has been integral in aiding authorities to find suspects on the run. Indeed, according to China Daily, China’s facial recognition technology is now so accurate that it can positively identify 98.1 percent of human faces within 0.8 seconds.
But in the case of Guo, things weren’t that simple. While police were able to locate the building in which Guo had been hiding, they couldn’t narrow down which exact unit he occupied. The building’s high number of tenants also made it more difficult to determine his location, according to Detective Ge Lei.
Upon installing a 24-hour surveillance camera, the police still failed to determine the unit he was in. Instead, they were left with a clue:
“We saw him buying vegetables and hotpot soup base at a market one afternoon,” Ge said, “so we guessed he was going to have hotpot that day.” It was an unorthodox way to track down a suspect but authorities were left with no other option.
With the smell of hotpot in mind, the police started the search and found Guo at the seventh floor of the building.
Wikipedia has a list of Humorous units of measurement, in addition to their List of unusual units of measurement. The humorous units are better, although the two lists are not mutually exclusive. the humorous units all have funny stories behind them, but some stand out because they are actually used.
One mickey is the smallest resolvable unit of distance by a given computer mouse pointing device. It is named after Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoon character.[15] Mouse motion is reported in horizontal and vertical mickeys. Device sensitivity is usually specified in mickeys per inch. Typical resolution is 500 mickeys per inch (16 mickeys per mm), but resolutions up to 16,000 mickeys per inch are available.
The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure the locations of accidents and incidents on the bridge. When the original markings were removed or covered over during bridge maintenance, the police had to request that someone reapply the Smoot scale markings.[19] During a major bridge rebuild, the concrete sidewalk was permanently divided into segments one Smoot in length, as opposed to the regular division of six feet.[20]
A Wiffle, also referred to as a WAM for Wiffle (ball) Assisted Measurement, is equal to a sphere 89 millimeters (3.5 inches) in diameter – the size of a Wiffle ball, a perforated, light-weight plastic ball frequently used by marine biologists as a size reference in photos to measure corals and other objects.[21][22] The spherical shape makes it omnidirectional and perfect for taking a speedy measurement, and the open design also allows it to avoid being crushed by water pressure. Wiffle balls are a much cheaper alternative to using two reference lasers, which often pass straight through gaps in thin corals.
A scientist on the research vessel EV Nautilus is credited with pioneering the technique.[citation needed]
A barn is a serious unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei.[23] It is one of the very few units which are accepted to be used with SI units, and one of the most recent units to have been established (cf. the knot and the bar, other non-SI units acceptable in limited circumstances).[24] One barn is equal to 1.0×10−28 m2. The name derives from the folk expression "Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", used by particle accelerator physicists to refer to the difficulty of achieving a collision between particles. The outhouse (1.0×10−6 barns) and shed (1.0×10−24 barns) are derived by analogy.
In nuclear physics, a shake is 10 nanoseconds, the approximate time for a generation within a nuclear chain reaction. The term comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", meaning quickly.[41]
The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome. It is named after astronaut Jake Garn, who was frequently sick during tests and on orbit.[50] A score of one Garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated.[51]
You'll also want to go read about the Sagan, the milliHelen, the Wheaton, the beard-second, and the megaFonzie at Wikipedia. -via Metafilter
When Da Vinci and Botticelli painted their masterpieces, did they wonder if their works would last for hundreds of years? Did they ever think that even if they did, they might look different? Successful painters use the best paints that were available at the time, but they were formulated for their color, not their longevity. And in many of those paintings, what used to be a brilliant green is now a muddy brown.
“Noli me tangere,” which hangs today in a gallery of the Louvre, is one of many Renaissance paintings that features a copper-based pigment called verdigris. When fresh, its shade of bluish green is rare and luminous. But like many pigments popular in the 15th through 17th centuries, verdigris is toxic and unstable, Arthur DiFuria, an art historian at the Savannah College of Art and Design, explained in an interview with Copper.org, the website of a trade group that represents the copper industry. By the 19th century, verdigris had fallen out of fashion—mostly due to its poisonous nature—but no one ever figured out why the brilliant green pigment darkened so severely. Now, researchers in France have sleuthed the chemistry behind verdigris’s shadowy tendencies in a study in Inorganic Chemistry published in September, 2019.
To do that, they had to take tiny samples of the paint from famous paintings, which had to be a pain to arrange. Read what they did, and what they found out at Atlas Obscura.
Around 1 AM on Oct. 7, Curly the dog nudged and pushed his owner, Vietnam veteran Brian Rand, until Brian woke up from his slumber. Upon waking up, Brian was shocked to see heavy smoke in his home at Beaufort.
Though the blaze destroyed half of the house, firefighters were able to save the man’s medals from his military service – but more importantly, the man credits the pup for saving his life.
"Got up and started walking, but when I got up, the house was overly smoky. Saw the flames through the side window," Rand told WJCL 22 News.
Rand, who lives alone, quickly grabbed Curly as he ran outside and called 911.
HONK HONK! Want to inhabit the body of a goose and wreak havoc in a village and taunt its people with your mighty honk? Well, look no further, for here is a game for you.
Welcome to “Untitled Goose Game,” the video game in which you are a goose and the worst nightmare of the people who live in a once-peaceful village.
As a goose, you can walk, run, pick up objects, flap your wings and honk. We’d say it’s improbable that such a simple game would go as viral as it has in recent days…
… but it did become viral, and, as a marketplace for memes, the game has also become a meme.
Preliminary government data suggests that Japan’s fertility crisis is worsening, as the data from the first seven months of this year shows the sharpest drop in births in 30 years.
Data from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare show that births fell 5.9% percent from January to July year on year, and the number of women in their childbearing age are shrinking, not to mention the increasing number of women who decide to delay having children, or decide not to have any children at all.
During this period, the total number of births was 518,590. For the whole of 2018, the official tally of births was 918,397, a figure which however excludes babies born to foreigners in Japan and Japanese babies born abroad.
The decline in births is "happening faster than official projections had envisioned," said Yasushi Mineshima, a spokesman for the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
Japan's birth rate has been falling since the late 1970s. In 2005, it reached a record low of 1.26, but then seemed to be on a path of recovery until it started to fall again in 2016, according to government figures. By 2018, it was at 1.42.
To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of 2.1. Last year, it was 1.72 in the United States but only 0.98 -- or less than one baby per woman -- in South Korea, where fertility rates have fallen to their lowest level since records began.
