Tipping is a subject that sparks arguments every time it comes up. We want to do what's right, but the system itself is truly weird. Basically, you go to a restaurant and pay separately for the food to be brought to you, because the restaurant isn't paying their servers much at all for their labor. So why is the customary tip based on the price of the food? The host of Casually Explained takes a somewhat cockeyed and definitely casual look at the weird American system of tipping.
We are seeing a tremendous shift in the political climate of major powers of the world. The sentiments of the public lean toward and long for the old days when they felt governments were more stable.
Far from innocuous, the infatuation with a mythicized past is shaping politics in risky ways. Nostalgia induces citizens to find comfort in a time when the world was less flat and governments (apparently) had the power to protect their citizens from external threats.
This nostalgia affects everyone. Perhaps, we can't prevent people from looking back to "happier" times when things felt secure and there were less uncertainties plaguing their daily lives. But I wouldn't say that applies to all.
Though there are people throughout the world who remember better times in the early 20th century, there is an equal number of people whose identities were forged through suffering and hardship which led to reforms that enable the newer generations to enjoy freedoms which their predecessors did not.
Despite its Romantic flavor, nostalgia is actually a malaise—and should be treated as such. From a purely psychological point of view, nostalgia represents a coping strategy for dealing with moments of deep uncertainty and radical discontinuity.
It removes its victims from an unpleasant present and throws them into a familiar past, reinforcing their self-esteem and the self-confidence, which are needed to navigate periods of sustained stress. But nostalgia is usually accompanied by amnesia. It depicts the past in such an idealized way that some details, often not irrelevant, are lost.
Which is why in an age of nostalgia, people need to be more aware and proactive in imparting the truth of history to their children. Of course, we can only share those which we know and given that we live in a world of disinformation, let us just be sure that we know what happens in reality.
(Image credit: Ryan Parker/Unsplash)
Though many people, especially media executives in traditional media, think that the new generation of children and teenagers have very short attention spans and simply flip through their smartphones not caring about the kind of content they consume, that's not necessarily the case.
Kids of today crave for high quality shows and content too. The only thing is that there are limited shows catering to these demographics with the kind of quality that say something like the MCU has.
Most shows oriented toward teenagers have the same boring tropes. And those that try to shake things up, have skewed perceptions of what teenagers of today are really like, what they value, what their habits are, and what kind of content they want to consume.
Fishman thought teenage girls were being fed “empty calories” rather than high-quality narrative shows. Historically, they were limited to shows by Nickelodeon and Disney — geared toward younger eyes — while MTV skewed older, says Carter Hansen, who founded Different Entertainment and previously worked at Generation Z media company Awesomeness. And for a generation increasingly literate with social platforms and distant from traditional TV channels, there was “nobody creating content in ways they wanted to consume it” back in the early 2010s, Hansen adds.
People assume Gen Zers have 20-second attention spans, content to flick through Instagram feeds and watch stories that disappear. Fishman diagnosed them differently: If you serve a whole generation with disposable assets, he argues, you’ll train them to throw things away. This climate spurred Fishman to launch Brat, a YouTube-first digital production company, in 2017, with partner Darren Lachtman.
The concept of Brat's shows has been modeled after the MCU, in which characters' storylines overlap with other shows such that viewers can get to see them interact with each other. This would also let them expand the direction in which they take the narratives.
Despite casting social media influencers without any acting experience, Brat has seen quite some success with at least 4 billion minutes consumed by the audience on Youtube to date. Each episode has at least 50,000 concurrent viewers while the channel itself has garnered 3.1 million subscribers.
The shows are meant to occupy the space between casual vlogs and scarcer high-budget Netflix series — as Brat seeks a piece of the fast-declining traditional television market, with its nearly $70 billion in ad dollars.
Now, this is not to say that Brat won't be facing any challenges. Though it is true that Youtube's platform has good reach, that doesn't mean Brat has dominance over the market. And they still have to contend with traditional media and streaming services like Netflix who have also been churning out good original shows aggressively.
Brat is operating in an increasingly crowded, or “unprecedentedly fragmented” space, as Napoli puts it. And Brat’s use of influencers is hardly breakthrough, as other media companies like Awesomeness — founded years earlier in 2012 — leveraged already-popular YouTubers.
We are yet to see whether Brat's strategy will pay off in the long run.
(Image credit: Zoe Valentine/Brat)
There's certain advantages to being old. I'm probably the only Neatoramanaut who has ever met Kirk Alyn, the original movie Superman, James Doohan, 'Scotty' on Star Trek TOS, Robert Goulet, and George Pal, the producer and director of low-budget sci-fi films such as When Worlds Collide and The Time Machine.
I met George Pal in 1974, when he was lecturing an audience of nostalgia buffs about his upcoming (and truly awful) Doc Savage film. One of the questions posed concerned his 1964 film 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, which I thought was a good film but was a bomb at the box office. George Pal said that he had wanted to cast Peter Sellers instead of the then-unknown Tony Randall, but the studio would not approve the cost to do so. Randall did a good job, but name recognition is everything even these days. From the IMDb:
There aren't many movies like "7 Faces of Dr. Lao." It's an amazing feast for the eyes and the mind. Tony Randall plays the title character, Dr. Lao, the ringmaster of a magical circus that comes to the troubled town of Abalo. Not only does he play that role, but several attractions at the circus, creatures and characters of legend. (He even provided the voice-over for the trailer!) The circus not only provides entertainment, but also teaches the residents of Abalone a few lessons. At times, the story is campy, and some of the special effects are cheap (about as good as could be expected for 1964!). But it also produces food for thought, and makes you think about the magic of everyday life. It's one trip to the circus you won't soon forget!
It should surprise no one to learn that I have read the original novel, and the film follows it fairly closely with a few notable exceptions. Unfortunately, YouTube does not feature the entire film, which is available through other common venues such as Amazon Prime, so I have embedded a few clips, among them the near-seduction of Barbara Eden by Pan, probably the most erotic sequence ever seen in a PG film. Nonetheless, this is a good family film and no one should be surprised to learn that I own the DVD.
Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvqqD8kVw0&t=2s
Most Important Parts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWXJrZ2nW08
Serpent's Tongue-lashing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5b2uilviiI
Barbara Eden and Pan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtJHRAbQczY
Medusa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85DCwzgWbJI
You've heard the line, "If anyone objects to this marriage, speak now or forever hold your peace." More likely you've heard it in movies, because it is rarely included in wedding ceremonies anymore, except in places and cultures where it is required. What happens if someone objects depends on what he or she says, and whether or not it is necessary to move the movie plot forward. But where did the tradition start?
As to the ultimate origin of this idea, it came about thanks to a few changes to marriage law within the Catholic church in and around the 12th century. Essentially biblical scholars of the day were attempting to figure out how to properly define what a marriage really was, when it started exactly, and what was required to make it happen. Many of these changes were made to try to make it easier for people to wed, which was deemed a good thing to keep people from sexual sin.
This all culminated in Pope Alexander III decreeing that two people were married when they both declared such to one another in the present tense. If done in private, this created a clandestine marriage. The problem, of course, was this allowed people who the church would not normally deem legally able to marry given church rules to get married anyway. This also allowed some unscrupulous individuals to take advantage of, say, a buxom young lass by declaring his marriage to her privately and then deny he ever did so the morning after, or a variety of other similar situations.
There's a lot more to it. Read about the history and legality of marriage objections at Today I Found Out.
(Image credit: ChrisFigueroa/Chris Fig Productions)
Mexico City is one of the worst in the world for traffic jams, and commuters there can expect an extra hour a day in their cars because of it. That "captive audience" got the attention of Burger King. They monitor traffic and have a campaign to target drivers via Waze and banner ads that can be changed instantly and are location-specific.
The hamburger chain recently introduced the “Traffic Jam Whopper,” a delivery platform that brings Burger King food to people stuck in traffic, reports AdAge. Basically, peckish people sitting in their cars while Mexico City traffic crawls along can use the Burger King app to order food and have it delivered right to their car via a courier.
This could turn "Honey, I'll be late for dinner because of traffic," into "Don't wait dinner, I've already eaten." But does it seem a little creepy that your local fast food place now has the ability to find you in your car while you're stuck in traffic? Read more about the scheme at Jalopnik.
Art and life has its way of coming together once again as is reflected in a "once in a lifetime" chance to portray several paintings, drawings, and prints by the artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder which will be exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
For 450 years, these works have been separated - some stolen, others seized, and still others went missing - but now, under the auspices of the KHM, the Bruegels will be reunited once more.
Of the original six Seasons, one found its way to the Prince of Lobkowicz, another was seized during the Napoleonic Wars and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a third was lost forever. For many of the paintings, this year’s exhibition was a homecoming. The Lobkowicz family, having reclaimed its collections after the Velvet Revolution, generously lent Haymaking, uniting four of the five surviving Seasons (the Met deemed The Harvesters too fragile to send).
(Image credit: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the collection Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte; Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
In 1973, Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for discovering the meaning of the “waggle dance”. The waggle dance is a bee’s way of communicating to other bees that it has found a new nectar source near them. The bee dances to the designated “dance floor”.
Honey bees aren't waggling willy-nilly, though. Certain aspects of the dance communicate details about the nectar source. How long the dance lasts corresponds with the distance to the source, for instance, and the angle of the bee's dancing body relative to the sun indicates the direction of the source.
However, there’s just one problem. Each bee tells of the same nectar source but dances differently. That is what Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, both researchers at Virginia Tech, noticed.
The husband-and-wife duo decided to develop their own "distance-duration calibration system" that factored in "noise," or variation between bees who visit the same source. They discovered that that bee-to-bee variation is so high, it renders the location and sub-species of the bee biologically irrelevant. That made it possible for them to create a universal calibration for decoding waggle dances.
Why would humans want to understand bees, anyway? To start, the universal calibration makes it possible for researchers worldwide to understand where bees are collecting food. This knowledge can inform bee-friendly planting practices.
Understanding waggle dances also makes it possible to use bees as a way to monitor the environment, Couvillon said in a press release.
"The bees can tell us in high spatial and temporal resolution where forage is available and at what times of the year," she said. "So, if you want to build a mall for example, we would know if prime pollinator habitat would be destroyed. And, where bees forage, other species forage as well. Conservation efforts can follow."
More at Curiosity.
(Image Credit: PollyDot/ Pixabay)
Shenzhen, China — The 2019 OCT Phoenix Flower Carnival found its venue to be full of air, literally.
The ‘Air-Mountain’ is a multi-purpose pavilion designed by Aether architects with two concepts in mind: “Micro-ecological geometry” and “multidimensional relationship, multidimensional phenomenon.”
The idea of ‘micro-ecological geometry’ centers on creating a final architectural form based on the environmental demands and requirements of the event. The bubble-like geometry of the pavilion is constructed using air and layers of plastic to create the domed structures, allowing users to bounce on the inflatable surface. At the top of the larger domes, a hole has also been implemented to allow the flow of air.
The concept of a ‘multidimensional relationship’ relates to the idea of architecture having not just one single function. For Air-Mountain, the architect envisions the form not as an independent physical entity, but a fusion of architecture and surroundings, the fusion of different activities, the fusion of different states and behaviours, and the co-relationship between something man-made and nature.
During the event, the interior of the pavilion served as the venue, while the external served as a public leisure space for the visitors.
(Image Credit: Zhang Chao/ Design Boom)
Plans for lunar settlements aren't the only things that NASA has in its sleeves. There are possibilities of further advancing national security through developments in space exploration.
NASA estimates that these projects would require at least $1.6 billion to fund. These funds will be allocated for the production of lunar landers, development of technology in exploration, and other missions that the space agency will conduct in preparation for the Moon Plan. However, they would take some of those funds away from the lunar Gateway.
The Trump administration has prioritized an acceleration of America’s space exploration program, with the ambitious vision of returning astronauts to the moon’s South Pole by 2024 and establishing a sustainable human presence by 2028 using NASA’s new deep space exploration systems, the powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew vehicle.
With a renewed emphasis on space, the Trump administration is reasserting American leadership in an area that is not necessarily front of mind as a strategic concern. Fortunately, the administration’s efforts are bolstered by the fact that Congress has a history of acting in a bipartisan manner to protect and strengthen America’s interests in space.
(Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls, Flickr; CC by SA 2.0)
She is one of many role models for women in science who advocated for better treatment of women in the workplace. She was also a brilliant aerospace engineer who worked on Pioneer, Apollo, and the Hubble missions.
(Image credit: Neil Siegel/USC Viterbi School)
When you were growing up, your family may have had a strange name for a regular meal, most likely with a story behind it. Or maybe a parent whipped up something odd from what was in the house and it became a hit, even though you never encountered that dish anywhere else. HelloCullen mused about this on Twitter and began a landslide of discussion about weird family meals people either ate or encountered elsewhere.
Had a friend growing up whose mother made "fluffer nutter" sandwiches with peanut butter and Miracle Whip and the kid was none the wiser
— John Rodriguez (@spilledleche) May 15, 2019
My dad would make "pizza sandwiches" with one slice of bread, salami, cheese, ketchup, and spices, warmed in the toaster oven. That was good. He also made "Tang toast," which was not.
Growing up we ate a dish that was baked beans, hot dogs, canned corn, and crumbled saltine crackers called beanee-weenee-corny-worny-cracker-wacker.
— Pecan (@rumpbuns) May 14, 2019
It's embarrassing to type that out.
Some of those stories are downright disgusting.
Reminds me of my cousin. Always went to this friends house after school. They had something called “sweet milk” and he loved it. Then he slept over. Sweet Milk is when you finish your cereal and pour your leftover milk into the Sweet Milk container.
— Jake Drury (@SocksUnterShoes) May 14, 2019
Read more of them at HuffPo, or in the original Twitter thread.
-via Metafilter
Why is Florida Man so good at ball handling on the court? When police met him at Candyland Park in Longwood, Florida, he insisted that nudity is the key to success at basketball. The New York Post reports:
When approached on the court, Anderson told officers he was “working on his basketball skills” and “feels playing naked enhances his skill level.”
He followed orders to put his clothes back on, then was arrested on misdemeanor charges for indecent exposure, according to the police report.
A superhero just can't catch a break these days.
-via Glenn Reynolds
Photo: Wendy Berry
Back to the late 1950's, when B-movies were in their prime. And they don't hardly get more prime than 1959's The Monster of Piedras Blancas.
Really nothing more than a blatant ripoff of the earlier Creature From the Black Lagoon, this film followed B-movie formula pretty closely (including the hero kissing the girl at the end), but it does offer a few new twists. For one, it features a handicapped boy, probably a nod to the polio epidemics, and it features what may be the first screen appearance of a severed head. Mothers everywhere were outraged by this, as they were trapped inside cars at the drive-ins with their screaming terrified children. From the IMDb:
One of my favorite 50's monster movies! For some reason this priceless little gem is always overlooked in the lists of B-movie monster faves of the 1950s. You have one of the better amphibious creature costumes designed by Jack Kevan (No zipper!!), a great sea coast location, decapitations and gore, some very decent acting by A-list party girl and pin-up queen Jeanne Carmen, and last but not least, Les Tremayne - He is only in 85% of all classic B-horror/sci-fi films of the 1950s! What's a film without him?! All right guys, I know its formula, but this obscure little tale holds a special place in my heart since I was 9-years old! The film has drama, subtext, coastal atmosphere, sex, and about 5 or 6 headless corpses lying about! John Harmon as Sturges, the crusty lighthouse keeper who feeds the hungry cave-dwelling beast meat scraps from the local deli, does a credible job here as a man who has closed off all emotions to the world, including those of his fetching daughter Lucy (Carmen), in exchange for companionship with the hungry creature. Jeanne Carmen is a natural beauty equal to the Mara Cordays' and Allison Hayes' of her decade. Too bad the studios didn't use her a little more proficiently. Psuedo-teen heartthrob Don Sullivan is thrown in for some romantic interest and all that biology jazz and the musical score (which is never credited) is rich, layered and 'original.' So, sorry guys! The Monster of Piedras Blancas always wins with me!
YouTube offers the complete film, which is embedded below. This was prime drive-in theater fare and so it is generally suitable for family viewing. (The TV versions which we used to watch on Saturdays edited out the severed heads.) But kids of the 50's were tougher than today's snowflakes, so Viewer Discretion is advised.
In the case that a doomsday asteroid hits Earth, researchers say that we have the assurance that life on Earth will bounce back or rather, fall back to Earth after the initial impact.
Steinn Sigurdsson and colleagues conducted a computer simulation of a massive asteroid said to potential wipe all life on Earth. But hold your horses because this doesn't necessarily mean all life will become extinct and the Earth would be blasted to oblivion.
"If you have a sterilizing impact — if you have a beyond dinosaur killer, something that’s going to flash fry the entire planet — there is a significant probability that some biota is ejected and returns to the planet, hopefully gently, fast enough to reseed the planet," he added.
The existence of such "space refuges" is supported by computer simulations Sigurðsson and his colleagues recently performed, which tracked the trajectories of rock blasted off Earth and the other rocky planets into orbit around the sun.
They added that what caused the dinosaurs' extinction 66 million years ago might have been a global firestorm that blazed through the surface of the Earth as the rocks were falling back to Earth.
(Image credit: TBIT/Pixabay)
