The latest song project from Playing for Change (previously at Neatorama) is the song "The Weight," originally recorded by The Band. For the song's 50th anniversary, musicians from five different continents collaborated, led by Robbie Robertson and Ringo Starr, to recreate the sound. -via Laughing Squid
There was a time when all the undertakers of Paris associated together in a cartel of sorts, and shared space at a huge building that became an even bigger complex. This was at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers, also called simply Le 104. The building, originally built as a slaughterhouse in 1849, was bought by the funerary syndicate in 1873. It comprised 35,000 square meters, and offered every service one could possibly need for a spectacular funeral. At the height of business, a thousand employees produced 150 funeral processions each day.
The subterranean level was accessed by two huge ramps, and was home to some 300 horses in over two-dozen stables. It’s the first thing you see when you step through the doors of Le 104 today, along with little reminders of its equestrian past.
The ground floor contained 100 funeral chariots, 80 hearses, and 6,000 coffins. On the periphery of the ground floor there were also public workshops and stores that specialised in funeral painting, ornament making, tapestry, and other crafts.
It was a veritable Parisian micro city powered by the business of death.
Le 104 is now an arts center that has plenty to offer to visitors. Read about the magnificent funeral home that served an entire city at Messy Nessy Chic.
Long before online quizzes and the Myers-Briggs personality test, Robert Woodworth’s “Psychoneurotic Inventory” tried to assess the recruited soldiers’ susceptibility to shell shock. Shell shock was an incident wherein a private and two other soldiers survived a shell explosion, but eventually woke up in a hospital with a cloudy memory and an irritable auditory nerves.
According to Michael Zickar, a professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, World War I was actually a watershed moment of psychological testing. After the shell shock incident, the soldiers were observed in a hospital camp after every war exposure.
Less than two years after the United States entered World War I, around 1,727,000 would-be soldiers had received a psychological evaluation, including the first group of intelligence tests, and roughly two percent of entrants were rejected for psychological concerns. Some of the soldiers being screened, like draftees at Camp Upton in Long Island, would have filled out a questionnaire of yes-no questions that Columbia professor Robert Sessions Woodworth created at the behest of the American Psychological Association.
What about the psychological and personality tests?
The questions on what would become the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, or Psychoneurotic Inventory, started out asking if the subject felt “well and strong,” and then tried to pry into their psyche, asking about their personal life—“Did you ever think you had lost your manhood?”—and mental habits. If over one-fourth of the control (psychologically “normal”) group responded with a ‘yes’ to a question, it was eliminated.
Here are some of the questions that made the cut in the personality tests:
Can you sit still without fidgeting? Do you often have the feeling of suffocating? Do you like outdoor life? Have you ever been afraid of going insane? The test would be scored, and if the score passed a certain threshold, a potential soldier would undergo an in-person psychological evaluation. The average college student, Woodworth found, would respond affirmatively to around ten of his survey’s questions. He also tested patients (not recruits) who’d been diagnosed as hysteric or shell shocked and found that this “abnormal” group scored higher, in the 30s or 40s.
Find out more about this story here.
Image Credit: US National Archives
Andrew Booker (Bristol University, UK) and Andrew Sutherland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have found a big solution to a math problem known as the sum of three cubes which asks the question of whether an integer or whole number can be represented as the sum of three cubed numbers.
There were already two known solutions for the number 3, both of which involve small numbers: 13 + 13 + 13 and 43 + 43 + (-5)3
But mathematicians have been searching for a third for decades. The solution that Booker and Sutherland found is:
5699368212219623807203 + (-569936821113563493509) 3 + (-472715493453327032) 3 = 3
According to Booker, when a number can be expressed as the sum of three cubes, there are infinitely many possible solutions. And they’ve just found the third one!
There’s a reason the third solution for 3 was so hard to find. “If you look at just the solutions for any one number, they look random,” he says. “We think that if you could get your hands on loads and loads of solutions – of course, that’s not possible, just because the numbers get so huge so quickly – but if you could, there’s kind of a general trend to them: that the digit sizes are growing roughly linearly with the number of solutions you find.”
Discover more interesting information about this here.
Image Credit: Miguel A Padrinan/Pexels
You read it right. A company is planning to put up a snow park in Florida and they have already received approval from the Board of County Commissioners on the project. It seems far-fetched but the people at Point Summit Incorporated are looking to make it happen. Read more about it on Your Mileage May Vary.
(Image credit: Ethan Hu/Unsplash)
After taking the first photo of an actual black hole, the Event Horizon Telescope collaborators have all been recognized with the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and received the $3 million prize for the work they did on the EHT.
The EHT is a network of eight radio dishes in Antarctica, Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona and Spain that creates an Earth-sized interferometer. Its ultra-high angular resolution images of radio emission from a supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87* opened a new window on black holes and other phenomena.
Recently, a team at Brookhaven National Laboratory used the EHT image to disfavour “fuzzy” models of ultra-light boson dark matter.
(Image credit: EHT collaboration)
Making something a habit or routine could be difficult when you're just starting out. But at some point, it becomes such a part of your daily life that it would feel like you're lacking something when you skip a day.
In the case of David Martin, he has flown every day for 1,826 days, which is quite a feat and a record-setter as well. Know more about his story and how he was able to achieve this record on Air Space Mag.
David Martin has always loved to fly. From the time he got his pilot’s license, at 17, he knew that flying for him was more than a casual pastime.
He loved it so much that, even as a teenager, he started thinking about what it would be like to fly every day—for a whole year. In 2014, he decided to find out. He flew every day that year, and the next year, and the next.
(Image credit: David Martin Aerobatics)
Vehicular traffic and road congestion have been an issue ever since the first cars were mass produced. In Paris, the problem grew so unbearable in the 1920s that they launched a competition wherein people submitted proposals to ease congestion.
With the help of the father of the Paris metro system, Fulgence Bienvenüe, the Office des inventions was tasked with examining the projects.
Of the 38 proposals from engineers, 25 were eliminated outright and 13 were examined. The expert report by Mr. Ott, the head engineer of the Paris metro's technical service, left just two projects on the list.
These projects involved moving walkways with two systems. Two prototypes were built and tested at the Office nationale de recherche scientifique et industrielle et des inventions at Meudon.
The first system, called "arbres cannelés" (ribbed shafts), used "parallel bands at graded speeds," similar to the platforms that operated at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892) and the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900).
The second was a system using "belts" and "single direction of traffic": it operated in stations and was equipped with special devices for loading and unloading passengers. It was equipped with a starter and a decelerator for transitioning by stages up to the speed of 15 km/h.
(Image credit: Fonds historique/CNRS Phototheque)
One of the most tragic things that could happen to someone is to slowly lose their memories, which is what happens to people with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
Having your cognitive function, sense of self, awareness of your surroundings, and the ability to recall important events or memories in your life can be agonizing. It is disheartening.
So many scientists have been searching for a possible treatment or cure to no avail. But this mother-daughter pair may have just done it.
One very encouraging development has come out of the work done by Dr. Chang Yi Wang, PhD. Wang is a prolific bio-inventor; one of her biggest successes is developing a foot-and-mouth vaccine for pigs that has been administered more than three billion times.
In January, United Neuroscience, a biotech company founded by Yi, her daughter Mei Mei Hu, and son-in-law, Louis Reese, announced the first results from a phase IIa clinical trial on UB-311, an Alzheimer’s vaccine.
(Image credit: NIH/Flickr)
On the evening of August 30, the police responded to an emergency call and they went to the Osaka home of Kazuya Ogawa. Upon arriving there, they were confronted by a horrifying scene: there was Ogawa’s wife who was found lying on the floor in the bedroom of their two daughters, 5-year-old Risa, and 3-year-old Juri. All of them have sustained serious stab wounds.
The two girls were rushed to hospital but were later pronounced dead. Ogawa’s 40-year-old wife underwent treatment for knife wounds to her abdomen and was reported to be in a stable condition.
There were no signs of forced entry into the house, and nothing was stolen, which led the police to conclude that the mother stabbed her daughters to death and tried to commit suicide after. The question is: why?
In recent years, there has been a growing number of cases in which children were harmed by their own parents or guardians. The killings of Risa and Juri Ogawa, however, were “the first in a series of similar attacks across Japan by middle-aged mothers on their own children,” which leave experts baffled.
“It’s complicated,” admits Fujiko Yamada, who set up the Child Maltreatment Prevention Centre 21 years ago and agrees that the number of cases being dealt with by police appears to be rising inexorably.
[...]
“There are many reasons why we’re seeing more children being hurt, but a big one is domestic violence between couples,” Yamada told the South China Morning Post.
Many women who are victims of physical abuse at the hands of their partner tend to try to shake it off and play down the problem – even when one incident becomes a regular occurrence, Yamada says. Women who are exposed to such violence in the family have a tendency to then become violent with their own children.
Yamada also states other factors which could lead violence against children.
More details over at the South China Morning Post.
(Image Credit: Reuters)
Check out these dinner recipes which only take five or fewer ingredients but still look like expensive dishes you order at restaurants. What’s more, if ever you have leftovers, you can eat them at lunch the next day as they store well!
See them over at the Los Angeles Times.
(Image Credit: Leslie Grow/ For The Times)
It turns out that cats love us humans more than we thought. According to a recently published research from Oregon State University, cats form close emotional attachments to people who take care of them, similar to what babies and dogs do. But cat owners already know this, and The Guardian asked their readers to tell them their experiences when they realized that their pets loved them very much.
For one Twitter user, Fletch Williams, it was when her cat “brought me a tissue when I was sick in bed. Something he did only a few times, and never when I was well.” Elizabeth Booth, 60, from Kettering, Northamptonshire, says her black-and-white cat, Billy, would “stroke my hand with his paw while he lay outstretched next to me on the sofa”.
Many readers say their cats helped them through heartbreak or grief. “My boyfriend broke up with me when I was 16,” says Ludovica from Italy. “My cat came to me while I was crying alone in the house. She licked the tears on my face and then curled up on my lap. I really appreciated it.”
How about you? Do you have moments with your pet similar to these ones?
(Image Credit: KatinkavomWolfenmond/ Pixabay)
It is inadvisable to mess with Mother Nature. It is something we humans have known for quite a while. Some researchers from the Russian Geographical Society learned a new lesson during their expedition in the Arctic Ocean: don’t mess with a mother walrus either, or you’ll face undesirable consequences.
The scientists were aboard a Russian Navy tugboat known as the Altai on an expedition to the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic Ocean this week right before the unusual human-animal interaction occurred. They boarded a small rubber landing craft and were en route to the shore to study its flora and fauna when a female walrus attacked, sinking the vessel.
"During the landing at Cape Heller, a group of researchers had to flee from a female walrus, which, protecting its cubs, attacked an expedition boat," the Russian Military's Northern Fleet said in a press release.
More details on CBS News.
Scary!
(Image Credit: Joel Garlich-Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/ Wikimedia Commons)
J. Kenji López-Alt is mostly a stay-at-home dad responsible for all the meals in his household. As an essential part of his planning, he relies on a supply of boiled eggs in the refrigerator.
During one of the years in his egg-citing cooking adventures, he became curious and asked himself, “What's the best way to boil an egg?” This question would then lead to a multi-decade endeavor.
See more details on The New York Times.
(Image Credit: minree/ Pixabay)
Adult Swim television co-host Max Simonet offers bystanders egg nog on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia.
