Crazy Coffins is a company in Nottingham, UK that makes unique coffins and urns for people who wish to depart this world in style. Each one is custom-designed and built to suit the specialized tastes of the deceased customer.
Great art takes time, though, so be sure to order yours before your expiration date. This kind of work can't be done quickly. Browse the gallery and read the stories behind these designs as you plan your own.
Meredith Root-Bernstein, an ecologist, observed Visayan pigs for three years at an anthropological museum in Paris. During that time, she saw two mated pigs repeatedly digging in the ground with sticks. The Daily Mail reports:
Whenever nesting season would return, the warty pig would find a stick and burrow, though the pigs didn't shows signs of tool use at any other time during the year.
Over the course of three years, she observe both the mother and father pig using tools a total of 11 times.
As part of her research, she introduced four kitchen spatulas to the pig habitat to see if they might prefer those slightly more efficient tools.
Root-Bernstein observed one pig try the spatula out on two separate occasions, but sticks seemed to be their preferred helper.
It's only a matter of time before they start building and using spears and other weapons once they realize that we humans regard them as food.
-via Dave Barry
Are you more likely to use the light on your phone or an actual flashlight? Do you open your car with a car key? Randall Munroe of xckd shows how the phone is becoming a universal multi-tool.
I grate enough cheese that I'd probably try a cheese grating app.
One tool that could be added to this graph: dice. I see many young Dungeons &Dragons players using dice rolling apps instead of actual physical dice. It's unsettling for reasons I can't explain, but Douglas Adams could:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Because the cats have found a wonderful new toy: an ice machine. Just press your paw here to annoy the humans.
-via Super Punch
Antonio López de Santa Anna was a hero of Mexican independence, fought at the Alamo, and was President of Mexico. But with all the stories about him, his influence on the development of chewing gum kind of flies under the radar. It's still part of his legacy.
Two years before he died senile and broke, the disgraced Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna lived in a modest residence in Staten Island. Known variously as the executioner of hundreds at The Alamo, the man who lost Texas, and “His Most Serene Highness” and “The Eagle,” Santa Anna was missing a leg and had recently been conned out of tens of thousands of pesos. He spent his exile moving among high society, plotting to get rich or return to Mexico, and chewing on something called chicle.
Santa Anna hoped that his supply of chicle, a natural latex harvested from trees in the same fashion as rubber, would make him rich. He’d pitched Thomas Adams, a local inventor, on developing this foreign substance into an inexpensive replacement for rubber. It never worked.
But chicle was just perfect for chewing gum, even though the success of the product never benefitted Santa Anna. Read about the exiled Mexican president and the history of his chewing gum at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Carlos Paris)
Michigan's band went all-out for the halftime show with Iowa on Saturday. During that spectacular show, band members held a drummer upside-down while he performed flawlessly.
The football team did well, too, beating Iowa 10-3.
We can only hope/fear that some enterprising bagpipe band will attempt the same stunt at Michigan's drummer.
-via Super Punch
Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze adjectives used to describe men and women in 3.5 million books written in English between 1900 and 2008. They contained around 11 billion words. The results from this large data set confirmed what we already knew.
“We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men. Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level,” says computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein of the University of Copenhagen’s computer science department.
***
Their analysis demonstrates that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times as often for female figures as male ones. The analysis also demonstrates that positive and neutral adjectives relating to the body and appearance occur approximately twice as often in descriptions of female figures, while male ones are most frequently described using adjectives that refer to their behavior and personal qualities.
Augenstein explains why these words matter to artificial intelligence, as such algorithms are made to detect recurring patterns as "true," while humans understand that just because something is prevalent or long-lasting doesn't make it right. Read more about the research at the World Economic Forum. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: The University of Copenhagen)
Fifteen ships entered the Suez Canal in 1967, expecting to traverse to the Arabian Sea in about 12 hours. Instead, they were stuck there for eight years! They couldn't just leave and take the long way around the horn of Africa, because both ends of the canal were blocked. RealLifeLore tells the story -which is only eight minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg
The very first sad thing about this video is that you knew it was going to be a gender reveal without having to be told. In order to hide whatever is inside, the balloon had to be heavy duty. So it made no sense to whack at it with bats instead of poking it with pointy things. But they whacked away until the mooring gave way. What now? Chase it, of course, to the point of falling on your butt, even though the balloon was already quite out of reach. I suppose they won't learn the baby's sex until the birth. -via reddit
Little green army men have been a mainstay in toy boxes for generations, but they are rarely updated. When you see them, you get a World War II vibe, particularly from the green color that isn't reflected in more modern military uniforms. However, if the color were changed, they wouldn't be little green army men anymore, now, would they? But that's not the reason they are what they are. These plastic soldiers actually predate World War II, having been introduced in 1938. And if you take the time to look closely, they aren't era-specific or consistent at all.
Those very first soldiers from 1938 were based off World War I troops and were fairly accurate models. Over time, however, they’ve become less and less accurate, mixing time periods with little regard for history. As the Wikipedia page for them explains, “They are equipped with a variety of weapons, typically from World War II to the current era, often depicting the 1964 Vietnam-era M16 rifle with fixed M7 bayonet. … Army men are considered toys and not models; due to this fact, historical and chronological accuracy are generally not a priority.” So they actually aren’t just from World War II, yet somehow they still seem to be from that time. “The little green army men sold in buckets are usually used like WWII GIs, although they more resemble Vietnam War era soldiers,” explains Kent Sprecher, the owner of Toy Soldier HQ and an expert on the history of toy soldiers.
Still, there are reasons that the World War II vibe is preserved in the little green army men -even as they are joined by little green army women. Read about the iconic plastic soldiers and how they became what they are at Mel magazine. -via Digg
The concept of nation states in Africa only arose after the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the following scramble for Africa by European superpowers of the time, which makes the concept a little over a century old. It therefore should not be a surprise that the names of most African countries are remnants of a colonial legacy.
Nearly every country on earth is named after after one of four things—a directional description of the country, a feature of the land, a tribe name or an important person, most likely a man. For the most part, Africa mirrors this trend with a few exceptions. The stories of how African countries got their names ranges from the more mundane, to the fantastical and sometimes even the mind-boggling.
Take Kenya for example.
… when the British came upon an imposing snow-capped mountain that the Kikuyu people called Kirinyaga (Where God dwells.) As they struggled to pronounce, Kirinyaga, they called it Mt. Kenya – the country would be named after this mountain.
Check out the others over at Quartz.
(Image Credit: Martin23230/ Wikimedia Commons)
Virtue, for the ancient Greeks, is not a goal in and of itself; it is a route to a well-lived life. According to them, a person would flourish and would come to a life filled with meaning and find enduring happiness by being honest and generous, embodying diligence and fortitude, and showing restraint and kindness. This view hasn’t changed much until today.
If it’s true that virtue leads to a life well lived – a view that receives more empirical backing with each passing year – the question “How do I become virtuous?” takes on a bit of urgency. For the majority of ethicists, both ancient and modern, the answer is clear: virtue comes from living an examined life, one where deep deliberation leads to the embrace of noble qualities such as honesty and generosity, no matter how difficult it can be to enact them.
In considering moral character, the Roman orator Cicero said: ‘Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.’ And while I think it’s an overstatement, Cicero’s view does offer up the tantalising prospect that, simply by cultivating gratitude, other virtues will grow. If correct, it suggests that there’s an entirely different way to improve moral character – one that is rapid, easy and efficient.
Check out Aeon for more details on this topic.
What are your thoughts on this one? Do you agree with Cicero?
(Image Credit: GingerQuip/ Pixabay)
In 1752, in the ruins of Herculaneum, one of the towns that was buried in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D, particular scrolls were unearthed. The scrolls were discovered in the library of a grand villa, which is believed to have been owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The site became known as the Village of the Papyri, and the documents were considered as a major find. However, these scrolls were charred up into rolled up logs, making the texts more or less useless.
“Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not anymore,” Brent Seales, director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky, tells Davis.
That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to access the writings, most of which, it’s believed, were lost to history. Attempts have been made to unroll about half the scrolls using various methods, leading to their destruction or causing the ink to fade.
Seales and his team are now seeking to read the text using the Diamond Light Source facility, a synchrotron based in Oxfordshire in the U.K. that produces light that can be billions of times brighter than the sun. They will test out the method on two intact scrolls and four smaller fragments from L'institut de France.
More details at Smithsonian.com.
I hope that the researchers will be able to finally shed light (literally and figuratively) on the scroll, as I also wonder what the text contains.
(Image Credit: Diamond Light Source)
A thread ask AskReddit poses the question: "Chefs of Reddit, what are some 'red flags' people should look out for when they go out to eat?" There's plenty to digest in the answers. Buzzfeed lists some of the more notable.
4. "Specials are just leftovers — they're things that we'd rather sell than throw out."
5. "Ask where your seafood comes from. If they don’t know, you don’t want it."
7. "Watch for 'No Substitutions.' If the place makes its own food, they can sub virtually anything for anything else. While they may try to play it up as 'Our food is perfect and we refuse to change it on moral grounds,' it's almost always a sign of 'This was made two months ago and all we do is reheat it.'"
You can read the entire thread here, or check out the short version in 15 Restaurant "Red Flags" You Should Look For When You Go Out To Eat at Buzzfeed.
Once you have reached the level of the elite, you get introduced to other wealthy and famous people, whether they are in the same field or not. If you are a coveted dinner guest, you'll get to meet other coveted dinner guests. Which can lead to friendships that may go unnoticed, but surprise people when they find out. But there are also cases where one person is famous, and the other is not ...yet. For example, H.P. Lovecraft was paying his dues as a writer when he found himself a ghostwriter for Harry Houdini.
Harry Houdini was famous the world over for his escape skills, so when he visited Egypt in 1910, the locals knew all about him, and had a surprise in store. A guide took him on the expected sightseeing trek, but then delivered him into the hands of a gang of thugs. They tied him up and dropped him down a shaft in a pyramid, leaving Houdini to pass the test or die in the attempt.
At least, that's the story Houdini liked to tell. But his publishers wanted it written up as a proper story and so dug up a ghostwriter, settling on a young H.P. Lovecraft, who did a little fact-checking and found Houdini had made the whole thing up. So when writing the story, he figured there was no harm in exaggerating things even further, turning it into full-fledged cosmic horror. He wrote that in the bowels of the pyramid, Houdini met hippo-headed men worshiping strange artifacts and an ancient god, and raised the possibility that the guide who betrayed him was a time-traveling pharaoh. Basically, he took a pulpy tale that was pretty illogical already and went full Cthulhu with it.
Houdini liked it, and that started a relationship that lasted for some time. Read the rest of that story, plus those of four others that may surprise you at Cracked.
