Getting into the big leagues of any sport is a long, tortuous road for young aspiring athletes. Especially in very expensive sports, it would take so much grit and talent for anyone to catch the attention of corporate sponsors.
But almost 20 years ago, Red Bull attempted to create an American Formula 1 dream team, which didn't end the way they had wanted. And as one of the participants in that driver development program said:
"I think it’s fair to say that Red Bull destroyed more careers than it created. For every Sebastian Vettel, there are a couple dozen guys who got chewed up and spit out by that Red Bull machine."
Learn more about the story of how Red Bull pissed off a generation of athletes at Road and Track.
Sometimes the things we do in the past come back to haunt us. Or in the case of Mike Shea, it came back as a nostalgic surprise in the form of a three-second frame in Ken Burns's "Country Music" documentary wherein he saw himself with his guitar in tow. So he contacted the photographer, John Van Beekum, who shot the photo and found out that he has also contributed to Texas Monthly. Read their correspondence on TM.
Meet Sanford, the once “broken dog” who cannot stop smiling now. Why was he described as broken?
On April, Sanford got hit by a car, which left him unable to walk. Sanford was then rescued by animal control and was taken to a small municipal shelter in Dallas, Texas, where he stayed for a week. The facility, however, was short on resources, and so he didn’t get any medical attention there.
When a volunteer for Dallas DogRRR, a local dog rescue group, first saw Sanford at the shelter, she knew she had to help him.
“He was physically broken … and when the volunteer went to see him, he didn’t really make any effort to come and say hello,” Kerry Anechiarico, executive director of Dallas DogRRR, told The Dodo. “It’s almost like he had given up, and he was just waiting for his time to come.”
Fortunately, everything changed for Sanford when Karen Velazquez took him to her home.
“He came to my home on May 1, just a few days after he was released from the hospital,” Velazquez said. “He has been all smiles ever since. I think the minute he came to my home, he realized he was in a safe place.”
Let’s be honest here. October really has not that much significance, except that it’s the 10th month of the year, and it’s the countdown to Halloween (an additional exception is if it’s your birth month, or it’s a loved one’s birth month). And now that we are adults and we have our own bank accounts, that means that we can buy all the Halloween-related stuff that we want.
A network is a set or group of people or things that are connected to one another, forming a system. In our daily lives, we encounter different types of networks. From the communication networks to which our devices are connected to the social networks with which we interact daily, networks are everywhere.
But within the interwoven fibers of networks lies an important concept that makes their dynamics work. And that is diffusion in networks. Kevin Simler elaborates on this concept in his article on Melting Asphalt.
Yes, you’ve read it correctly. Every single item in this deli is handmade out of felt.
This is contemporary artist Lucy Sparrow’s sixth installation in her felt shop series, Delicatessen on 6th, located at the Rockefeller Center. Despite the items being made of felt, they are still available for purchase, which is a surprise.
Located on the corner of 49th street and 6th avenue, Lucy Sparrow‘s Delicatessen on 6th is a fully functioning retail experience mimicking an upscale deli, all in felt, where all items are available for purchase. The site-specific, interactive installation, which opened yesterday, October 1, 2019, invites customers into a parallel universe where hand-stitched, bejeweled artworks in the form of cheese, fish, seafood, and other fine food produce take center stage. Most of the items are adorned with tiny eyes and smiles, encouraging the viewer to examine their relationship with the food they purchase and to consider their own thoughts about consumerism.
Created by filmmaker Daisy Jacobs and animator Chris Wilder, dimensions collide in this multi-award winning short film titled “The Full Story”, as “painted animation on walls, combined with sculpture components like moveable papier maché limbs, and regular ‘real world’ objects”, and human actors, merge and interact with each other to create this fantastic world. But how did they do this?
In order to merge the real and imagined, Jacobs and Wilder explain that they made the sets more realistic and the actors more ‘painterly’ to find a stylistic middle ground. “To make the sets more realistic we emphasized textures and brought out shine with lighting and varnish. With the real people we did the opposite–painting their clothes, minimizing shadows on their faces with make-up and making them more graphic with wigs.”
Using a watercolor background and detailed ballpoint pen illustrations, Manabu Endo creates these impressive portraits of dreamy animals, plants, and occasionally, humans. What’s more impressive, however, is Manabu Endo himself.
The 38-year old Endo is entirely self-taught, and began his career as an artist just a few years ago, which is surprising given how developed his style is. “Mountains from a distance look like moss. Moss from up close can look like a mountain,” says Endo, describing his his philosophy “and in some sense, everything can be thought of as a forest.” In that context, one can begin to see the circular nature of Endo’s works as an inter-connected forest with blades of grass becoming wood, which becomes fur, which then gives life to flowers.
Cracked challenged readers to illustrate how their view of pop culture stories have changed over time. It's a question of maturity: they all show the difference between watching a movie as a child and then as an adult. Amazing how your perspective can change, huh? I had to laugh because I was an adult when every one of these movies and TV shows came out, with the possible exception of the example they chose for James Bond.
Annalakshmi is an Indian vegetarian buffet restaurant which lets its customers pay how much they want to, following the Hindu philosophy of “guest is God”. According to this philosophy, if God were to come to your house and have a meal, would you ask God to pay for the meal? Harish R. Menon, a third generation staff at Annalakshmi clarifies to Our Grandfather Story that they simply do not price their food, and that they only want their customers to eat home-styled food without worrying about the price.
The original Nintendo DS didn’t launch like a rocket in its time, with its launch titles being Super Mario 64 and a Metroid demo. What revolutionized the DS, however, were not action games, but high quality casual games such as Nintendogs, in which you can pet virtual dogs.
One of these high quality casual games is Brain Age, and a new Brain Age is coming to the Nintendo Switch.
Users take off the Joy-Con for multiplayer math fun. The IR camera tracks different hand shapes like 1-2 Switch. There’s still plenty of writing to do on the touch screen, though. And just like with Super Mario Maker 2, the Japanese version of the game comes with a capacitive stylus.
Brain Age’s actual ability to curb mental decline as you age has always been a bit suspect. But at the very least you’ll get a little better at math. Brain Age is coming to Nintendo Switch in Japan this December.
Now that we have had major advancements in the field of medicine, it is no wonder that our life expectancies today are much higher than those who lived before us. However, with age comes age-related diseases as well. Knowing this, scientists find ways in order to improve health in old age.
A new study led by UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing showed that through the use of triple drug combination, the lifespan of fruit flies increased by 48%.
The three drugs are all already in use as medical treatments: lithium as a mood stabiliser, trametinib as a cancer treatment and rapamycin as an immune system regulator.
"Here, by studying fruit flies which age much more rapidly than people, we have found that a combination drug treatment targeting different cellular processes may be an effective way to slow down the ageing process."
Head to Science Daily for more details of the study.
Professional chefs are proud of their recipes and techniques, as they should be. But they are professionals, while the rest of us cook during our personal time. JJ Goode co-authors cookbooks, meaning he translates a chef's work into instructions we can follow. He often tries to convince the chef to bridge the gap between the professional and the reader by pulling back on the difficulty of those recipes, with varying results. He tells us some ways we can save time and trouble without making much of a difference in the resulting culinary creations.
Having already told on myself for having an inferior palate, I will now deliver a broadside against chicken stock recipes. You know the drill: There are the chicken bones, the onions and carrots, the sprigs of thyme and parsley, the 12 peppercorns, and the bay leaf. And there’s the oh-so-gentle simmering and the straining, not to mention the occasional, criminally rude blanching of bones. I suppose some of you might be bothered by a little cloudiness in a stock and can detect the absence of that bay leaf. I’m not, and I can’t. My one-ingredient stock recipe—put rotisserie-chicken carcass in pot, cover with plenty of water, and boil until episode of Succession is over—has enabled countless dinner successes, because it’s twice as tasty and infinitely freer than the boxed stuff, and because its utter thoughtlessness precludes excuses not to make it.
Beginning in the 1830s, New York City had a curious business called the Phrenological Cabinet. It was owned by brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, and their sister and brother-in law, Charlotte and Samuel Wells. They studied phrenology, which entails the belief that a person's mentality and character can be determined by the size and shape of the skull, and that those characteristics can be generalized to entire racial groups. To this end, they collected evidence in the form of head casts, busts, portraits, and human skulls.
The Cabinet included replicas of famous busts depicting such men as William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and George Washington, as well as casts of “persons of eminence in talent and virtue.” They advertised specimens from “pirates, murderers, robbers, thieves, forgers, gamblers, pickpockets,” and more. Peter Robinson, who was described as having a “base, coarse, animal character,” sat among these.
Fowler & Wells spared no expense in filling the Cabinet. In his preface to an 1875 catalogue listing some conents of the Cabinet, which by then was located on Broadway near Astor Place, Samuel Wells described how “an artist was kept in requisition” to obtain casts of the famous and infamous, “and large sums of money have thus been expended sometimes, as a premium, for obtaining the head of some singular or vicious character.” In 1864, Wells specified that over the previous 25 years, they had paid “not less than $30,000” for busts, casts, and skulls. In today’s currency, that’s nearly half a million dollars.
As their reputation spread, people began offering skulls for sale from all over. As you can imagine, many of them came from suspicious circumstances. Fowler & Wells were not overly concerned about whether the skulls came from war, murder, or genocide. Read about the Phrenology Cabinet at Atlas Obscura.
Fright-loving couples can now spend 30 hours laying in a coffin, and get paid for it. Six Flags offers couples to join the Fright Fest 30-Hour Coffin Challenge, where they have to lie inside a coffin for 30 hours straight, with provided six-minute bathroom breaks. Contestants are required to leave all their gadgets (such as smartphones and gaming devices), but they can use their gadgets, take a toilet break, eat, or sit up from their coffins during their six-minute breaks. While the prospect of getting paid by lying around in a coffin (with your boo) for 30 hours sounds nice, Oddee details that it isn’t all convenient:
In 2018, the first 30-hour Coffin Challenge was in St. Louis last year and all the contestants won. It wasn’t easy though as they faced cold weather and had to literally sprint to the bathrooms to make it to and fro in the alloted 6-minute time frame.
Also, the entire top of the coffins were open the first time around. “The open top was brutal,” contestant Brian Johnson said on Facebook. “Lights everywhere, people talking, you could barely sleep.”
