The term "alt-right" has become quite popular during the past several years due to their increasing influence in the political arena. But what is the alt-right and who can be considered as the alt-right? Michael Anton explores these questions and more as he takes a deep dive into the concept of the alt-right.
(Image credit: Mark Dixon/Flickr; Wikimedia Commons)
When you go to the gym, the equipment you see will usually be big and bulky, not really something that would pop or be eye-catching. They're just your ordinary gym equipment. But Work in Use, a Rhode Island-based design studio, has created gym equipment with a minimalist aesthetic that not only looks visually stylish but is also quite functional.
(Image credit: Work in Use)
Back when there weren't any airplanes or big ships to deliver goods and other high-value products, people had to use other means like caravans to transport such products.
In the case of Britain's diplomatic mission to the Shah of Persia, there were many fragile items including crystal chandeliers. So, in order to bring them safely to their destination, the head of the mission, Edward James Matthews had the items carried on men's shoulders the whole way.
The journey took five months – ‘an undertaking of infinite difficulty… I may say danger’. Thankfully the glassware arrived intact, and was ‘most graciously received by the King.
His Majesty expressed his approbation and praise of the great care and diligence evinced by Mr Matthews’. Letters of thanks from both the Shah and Mirza Abul Hassan Khan arrived back in London with Matthews, together with a gift to the Company of the Shah’s portrait.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Quick, which event happened first: the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the death of the last woolly mammoth? The Great Pyramid was around for hundreds of years before the last mammoth died out. While mammoth populations began disappearing around 15,000 years ago due to climate change, the population of mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean held on until 4,000 years ago, when they died fairly suddenly. So why did the Wrangel Island mammoths live so much longer?
The team of researchers from Finland, Germany and Russia examined the isotope compositions of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium from a large set of mammoth bones and teeth from Northern Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, and Wrangel Island, ranging from 40,000 to 4,000 years in age. The aim was to document possible changes in the diet of the mammoths and their habitat and find evidence of a disturbance in their environment. The results showed that Wrangel Island mammoths’ collagen carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions did not shift as the climate warmed up some 10,000 years ago. The values remained unchanged until the mammoths disappeared, seemingly from the midst of stable, favorable living conditions.
This result contrasts with the findings on woolly mammoths from the Ukrainian-Russian plains, which died out 15,000 years ago, and on the mammoths of St. Paul Island in Alaska, who disappeared 5,600 years ago. In both cases, the last representatives of these populations showed significant changes in their isotopic composition, indicating changes in their environment shortly before they became locally extinct.
That opens up another question: why did the Wrangel Island mammoths go extinct? We do not have a definitive answer, but we do have a few possible explanations, which you can read about at the University of Helsinki. -via Kottke
(Image credit: Miss Barabanov)
The manufacturer calls it the "SteerMaster." If riding the range is too hard on your joints, you can still get a thorough cardio workout on this custom-built stairclimbing machine by eBay seller Gym Store.
It's built onto a StairMaster 4400CL stairclimber. The spur and nose ring are a nice touch. Now go burn off those calories you picked up at the chuckwagon.
-via Dave Reaboi
Tiki culture was born in Southern California in 1933 as a fantasy escape from reality, a patron's trip to an exotic culture where everything was perfect for the short time they stayed. Authenticity and cultural sensitivity were minor concerns, so the trappings included both sexism (topless hula dancers) and blasphemy (cups modeled on tropical deities). As the aesthetic spread, it also became cheap. But those fruity cocktails, both authentic tropical drinks and those created for tiki bars, are so delicious!
“The pina colada is a natively Puerto Rican drink,” García Febles says, meaning that it was created in Puerto Rico, with Puerto Rican ingredients, by a Puerto Rican. “It became associated with ‘the tropics’ at the same time tiki was commodifying the concept and was sold to tourists, hence the confusion.”
The subsuming of anything with a hint of rum and fruit under the category of tiki is a misappropriation that has persisted precisely because of tiki’s original sin: What gave birth to it was a far-reaching act of cultural pillage, one that swiped broadly and unabashedly from Caribbean drinking traditions, then forced them into a pastiche molded by Polynesian aesthetics, all for U.S. consumers.
With the modern tiki revival, bartenders are working to undo that original sin, or at least toward some form of absolution — to hang on to the fun and the orgeat, just without the appropriation. But what does it mean to create a distinct sense of place when that place is not your own?
While tiki bars are now rare compared to their heyday in the 1950s, bartenders still want to offer customers tropical cocktails, but without the cultural appropriation. Read about the resurgence of tropical drinks and the issues that come with them at Eater. -via Digg
(Image credit: AlejandroLinaresGarcia)
Yes, a tree that bears fruits in its trunk exists! Jabuticaba tree, also known as the Brazilian Grape Tree, is native to South America. It proudly shows off its fruits that can be easily harvested since its trunk is accessible to both human beings and animals. At most twice a year, the cauliflorous flowers themselves appear naturally on the tree. It is a common ingredient for jellies, juices and even for liquors.
Image Credit: Pedro Bezerra / Flickr (tree with fruits); Mariana Soares / Flickr (tree with flowers)
We rely on journalists and the news media to receive information about the daily happenings around the world and for the most part, we get what we need. But there is no denying the fact that news media in general can be an ideological device. It all depends on the way the news and other information is presented.
In his piece, John R. MacArthur tries to elucidate just a bit of the news media's role not just in bringing the news to the public, but also in shaping the public's perceptions of what goes on in the world.
Not having the resources to “contradict these facts” or to reduce “the great gap between the real and the ideological,” the people remain at the mercy of the news media. Sauve qui peut, save yourself if you can.
(Image credit: newswatch/Pixabay)
Though plastic waste is arguably one of the most pressing environmental concerns today, there are other types of waste to which we should also give our attention. Like cigarette butts.
Here where I live, when you walk down the streets, whether it's early in the morning or late in the night, especially around busy districts, you will see a lot of cigarette butts on the ground. There aren't a lot of plastic bags, bottles, or cans, but cigarette butts abound. And well, there are a lot of consequences for that too.
(Image credit: Pawel Czerwinski/Unsplash)
DougDoug cooks real dishes based from the hit game Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild. Watch as they do it as seen from the game, from throwing ingredients into a boiling pot of water to creating scrumptious dishes that they happily eat for the camera. Who knows, you might also take some pointers and finally cook your favourite Zelda-inspired dishes or just laugh at the sheer hilarity of it all.
Lista lived in Montreal after college and there he lived a rather simple life. He was in love with a girl, and he would write poetry and didn’t know what would happen to him.
Back home, however, his parents were “breaking up in slow motion”, with the “first ominous sign” being his dad liquidating his closet.
A melancholy windfall came my way. Sometimes it was he who offered them to me, with the cheery derring-do of a man going off to war—here’s that old silver suit you used to love when you were a boy, that houndstooth blazer I wore to your graduation. Other times it was my mom who gave the clothes over, offloading them in a grief she could palliate by giving me a sad, sweet gift.
Nevertheless, Lista would be wearing his dad’s old clothes for almost a decade. Find out why on The Walrus.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Image Credit: Michael Lista/ The Walrus)
Huawei has always amazed us with its hardware capabilities. First was the Spring 2018’s P20 Pro, where Huawei was the first to offer the triple-lens system, as well as the “night mode” which were later adopted by Google, Samsung, and Apple.
Then came the Mate 20 Pro, known for its phenomenal battery capabilities thanks to its 4,200 cell, as well as its ability to use the wide-angle lens, which Oppo and OnePlus have adopted this year.
Six months after the release of the Mate 20, Huawei’s P30 Pro arrived, which beat Oppo to the punch as it introduced the “periscope” zoom lens that could zoom up to 50 times, as well as an image sensor that “took in drastically more light” compared to other phones in pitch dark conditions.
And now we have the Mate 30 Pro, and once again, there is a clear jawdropping hardware trick: the ability to shoot slow motion videos at 7,680 frames-per-second (fps).
In slow motion videos, the higher the fps, the better, as more frames means footage can be slowed down without animations appearing choppy. For many years, slow motion videos shot on smartphones maxed out at 240fps. Samsung grabbed headlines last year when it offered 960fps slow motion video, and that number has been the standard set for smartphones through 2019–until now, with Huawei’s 7,680.
What are your thoughts on this one?
(Video Credit: Ben Sin/ YouTube)
Can we talk turkey? Holiday cooking isn't for everyone. Don't let giblets and gravy get you down. You can still have a beautiful holiday turkey without all the fuss. Behold the Inflatable Turkey from the NeatoShop. This deliciously fun inflatable replica, complete with oven-roasted perfect skin, looks almost good enough to eat. Almost!
The Inflatable Turkey from the NeatoShop is a great way to put the fun back into your favorite dysFUNctional holiday get together.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great items. New items arriving all the time.
Don't forget to stop by the store to see our large collection of customizable apparel. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and holiday loving people come in every size.
The night of October 29, 1969, marked one of the most historic events in Internet history: it’s when the first data was transmitted over Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, blipped from a computer at the University of California, which is in Los Angeles, to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, in Palo Alto.
That evening, the team at UCLA got on the phone with the SRI team and began typing “LOGIN.” “We typed the L and we asked, ‘Did you get the L?’” the UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock recently recalled. “‘Yep’ came the reply from SRI. We typed the O and asked, ‘Did you get the O?’ ‘Yep.’ We typed the G and asked, ‘Did you get the G?’ Crash! The SRI host had crashed. Thus was the first message that launched the revolution we now call the internet.”
Stephanie Wehner has always been fascinated by the ability of networks to transmit data to each other, as well as their ability to behave unpredictably and crash.
“On a single computer, things will happen nice and sequentially,” said Wehner, a physicist and computer scientist at Delft University of Technology. “On a network, many unexpected things can happen.” This is true in two senses: Programs on connected computers interfere with one another, with surprising effects. And users of networks get creative. With the internet, Wehner noted, initially “people thought we would use it to send around some files.”
Wehner was a computer programmer back in the 90s, and then she grew bored. Now, she is “one of the intellectual leaders of the effort to create a new kind of internet from scratch”. This internet is the quantum internet.
Find out more about this over at Quanta Magazine.
(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)
The most recent rendition of the famous Batman villain Joker, in the film of the same name directed by Todd Phillips, has earned $93.5 million domestically over the weekend, making it the film with the biggest October opening in history, according to Variety. The record was previously held by Venom’s $80 million opening from last year.
But behind the film’s success lies scorn and derision, especially from the critics. But who’s laughing now?
(Image Credit: Warner Bros./ Slate)
