Stockholm syndrome is the sympathy that a victim, usually a hostage, develops toward their captor. Whether it is through the prolonged exposure to the captor whereby the victim's perspective is being changed and they see some humanity in the other or the captor's charisma or character persuades the other that they are doing such an act for a noble cause, the end is still the same.
It was first coined after the Norrmalmstorg robbery in which the hostages, four bankers, after being held captive for six days and released thereafter, developed a certain trust for their captor and even considered the police to be the ones endangering their lives.
But the original Stockholm hostage crisis revealed much more: Due to Olsson’s unique disguise, the robbery served as a commentary on the American outlaw—and demonstrated how poorly this swaggering figure translated.
In particular, most of the Swedish people had been surprised at such a thing happening in their country and would associate it more with other places like the US.
More than this, the hostage taker himself admitted that he was inspired by an American outlaw he saw in a movie which he used to come up with his disguise. And so began the six-day standoff between Jan-Erik Olsson, the captor, and the Swedish police.
One wouldn't know it from watching the pathetic Disneyfied versions, but the original Muppet Show of 1976 was in its prime one of the slickest and smartest series ever seen on television. The writing was wonderful, the characters unique and appealing, and their execution was flawlessly funny. Every so often they would use a running gag that ran for the length of the show (early in its history, the Pigs once took over the show as a prime example of such) and that is what we have here.
When Mac Davis was the guest star in a late 1980 episode, a running gag involving Beaker, the hapless laboratory assistant performed and voiced by Richard Hunt, ran throughout the episode, culminating in a very unique ending. Below are linked the segments of this show that comprise the running gag in full, followed by its IMDb data. So grab the kids and watch wholesome comedy at its peak; you won't find it many places today.
Don’t be fooled. They may look like fangs, but they are actually tusks. This is the Chinese Water Deer (or “Vampire Deer” if you want to call it this way), but despite its name it is found across Europe “and possess remarkable survival tactics that allow them to thrive in varied climates.”
When you look closely at the Chinese water or “vampire” deer, it is obvious that they are different from any other type of deer you’ve seen. The most noticeable aspect of its appearance is the two robust tusks that protrude from the edges of the Chinese water deer’s mouth followed by a relatively adorable set of teddy bear-like ears.
These unusual “fangs” have earned the water deer the nickname “vampire deer” and when combined with the soft round ears, give the deer’s otherwise cuddly appearance a goofy and somewhat intimidating look. Aside from their prominent tusks, the Chinese water deer appears harmless. But just like any other natural defense, its protruding tusks can cause serious damage against threats and other animals.
The fangs may indicate that this deer is a primitive type of the species.
A couple of the stereotypes about Germany are efficiency and engineering, but this story shows the opposite. Construction began on the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2006, but it has yet to land a plane. Half As Interesting tells the Story.
The rest of the world wonders why the US doesn't use the metric system of measurement. The easy answer is our resistance to change, but that's not the entire picture. There have been various plans to change America over to metric since we broke away from the British Empire. In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey set out on a mission to discuss metric measurements with Thomas Jefferson. He never made it, which set the tone for conversion schemes ever since, including the 1975 Metric Conversion Act.
Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, in the decades since, the United States actually has largely switched to the metric system, just the general public (both domestic and international) seem largely ignorant of this. The U.S. military almost exclusively uses the metric system. Since the early 1990s, the Federal government has largely been converted, and the majority of big businesses have made the switch in one form or another wherever possible. In fact, with the passage of the Metric Conversion Act of 1988, the metric system became the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”.
In the medical field and pharmaceuticals. the metric system is also used almost exclusively. In fact, since the Mendenhall Order of 1893, even the units of measure used by the layperson in the U.S., the yard, foot, inch, and pound, have all been officially defined by the meter and kilogram.
Schoolchildren learn more about the metric system than ever before, and even change-resistant folks know what a 5K run, a 2-liter bottle, or a gram of weed is. Read the history of the metric system in the United States at Today I Found Out.
We know that males and females have minor and major differences in many aspects — attitude included. Generally, males of most species are more aggressive, while the females are less aggressive. Researchers from China, Taiwan, U.S, and U.K have found evidence that might suggest that aggressive tendencies may lead to a shorter lifespan.
Scientists have been theorizing about the reason for females of most species living longer than males for many years. Some have suggested it has something to do with the differences in hormones, others that it has to do with deleterious mutations in mtDNA passed down from mothers. But the strongest argument has been that it comes down to aggression in males—mostly due to competing for a mate. In many species, fighting for a mate results in both injuries and high stress levels.
Blind and visually impaired children can enjoy learning while playing with the new Lego Braille Bricks. The bricks have braille studs and their equivalent letters in the alphabet, thus making them easy for sighted people to read and comprehend the words.
Set to fully launch on 2020, Lego management is excited to bring a positive impact to the world through this great product.
David Clarke, director of services at the RNIB, said in a statement that the bricks would "improve education for children with vision impairment and encourage inclusion."
"Thanks to this innovation, children with vision impairment will be able to learn braille and interact with their friends and classmates in a fun way, using play to encourage creativity while learning to read and write," Clarke added.
Maybe it's a bit exaggerated but we are crossing the threshold from fiction into reality as artificial intelligence becomes more and more sophisticated and advanced. We might even be able to develop technology where computers would have an autonomous decision-making process far beyond its programming.
Despite certain doubts that computers will take over the world, it would probably be best to preempt and prevent that from ever happening without compromising our advancement in technology. In other words, we need to maintain our control over computers without their hatching a plan of an uprising.
There are several solutions that different groups of researchers and scientists have developed. A new app developed by Princeton University scientists allows one to be notified if their smart speaker is spying on them. Yes, the internet of things can be used for that purpose considering that tech giants are being given leeway over consumer data.
The app, called the Princeton IoT Inspector, uses a common hacking technique called ARP spoofing, according to a slideshow that the team published along with their app. That technique lets the app intercept all of the activity on a WiFi network to track what information is being sent to whom. For instance, the app could track which TV networks and ad agencies see the shows you watch on a smart TV or how much of your personal data gets sent out by a smart speaker.
On the other hand, computer scientists and engineers in MIT say that we need to consider studying machine behavior. A simple counter-strategy, if machines learn about our behavior, so can we.
“We’re seeing the rise of machines with agency, machines that are actors making decisions and taking actions autonomously,” MIT’s Iyad Rahwan said in a blog post. “This calls for a new field of scientific study that looks at them not solely as products of engineering and computer science, but additionally as a new class of actors with their own behavioral patterns and ecology.”
Rahwan and colleagues call this new field “machine behaviour” — and it could ensure we reap the potential benefits of AI while avoiding the pitfalls.
If you've seen films bearing elements of machines acting out on their own, then you would know that despite the rational behavior of these computers, there are limitations still, since nothing can be totally perfect without flaws, not even computers which have the capacity to learn and adapt based on new data and information.
Finally, we turn to a rabbi who is fighting back against this "AI revolution". The rabbi echoes the same sentiments with regard to harnessing AI for human flourishing instead of human destruction.
“The development of AI has the potential to be the source of enormous blessing for our world by augmenting human capacity, and not by replacing it,” Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi in the Commonwealth, said on BBC Radio, per Jewish News. “But it is imperative that this technology be harnessed to serve us, rather than the reverse.”
Much is still unknown about the Chernobyl accident, mostly because of all the cover-up that has been done to keep the details of the event hidden from the world. But the effects of that event still haunt many today. Even the site of Chernobyl lingers with remnants of nuclear contamination.
Some writers tried to shed light on Chernobyl but details of the actual event - the backstory, the response, and the cleanup - were scant until several people came out with books that tackled the underlying sequence of events that surrounded Chernobyl.
Over the years, a few chronicles of the disaster by Soviet writers have reached Western readers, most notably “The Truth About Chernobyl,” by Grigori Medvedev, a former engineer at the plant, published in 1991. But aside from Piers Paul Read’s 1993 “Ablaze,” good reads by Western writers have been scant.
That began to change last year when Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian, weighed in with “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.” But Plokhy’s work focused more on the political aftermath, including the downfall of the Soviet Union that followed just five years later, than on the details of the accident.
Higginbotham, a British journalist, takes account of the political fallout as well, but the bulk of his book is about the accident and the response and cleanup — primarily the first seven months, which culminated with the rushed completion of the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that entombed the remains of Unit 4.
In Higginbotham's book, he recounts the interviews he had with the central people who were concerned in Chernobyl, not just within the context of the accident but also outside it such as Maria Protsenko who was associated with Chernobyl for being the architect of the nuclear city of Pripyat.
Like most of the Soviet Union’s privileged atomic cities, Pripyat was a clean, comfortable place, a glorious testament to the Soviet system, and Protsenko’s job for seven years had been to make it even more glorious.
The country’s space probe, Hayabusa2, has successfully made the first man-made crater on an asteroid, said Japan’s space agency last Thursday.
Hayabusa2 had shot a projectile at the Ryugu asteroid around 340 million kilometers from Earth as part of the probe's mission to explore the origin of life and the evolution of the solar system.
"The asteroid's terrain has clearly been altered," said Yuichi Tsuda, an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Hayabusa2, which began its descent toward the asteroid Wednesday afternoon, captured images of its surface to determine the existence of the crater after it successfully shot a metal projectile at Ryugu on April 5 in an experiment deemed the first of its kind.
An underground storage facility and protected by a 9-inch steel vault door, the Folger Shakespeare Library houses over 260,000 books, manuscripts, costumes, and documents that are historically significant. This library is a sanctuary for the things of the past that shaped the present day that we live in today. But, could this library have stored more than just the books and documents, but also the people behind these historically significant objects? Specifically, could this library have stored a fragment of one of the most influential figures in the history of literature — the remnant of William Shakespeare himself?
That possibility is the longest of long shots, but it’s one potential outcome of an ongoing effort at the Folger dubbed Project Dustbunny—so named because it involves analyzing human DNA and proteins harvested from dirt inside the Folger’s old books. Some microscopic bits could, in theory, have once dropped off of Western literature’s greatest genius, preserved for hundreds of years without anyone knowing they were there. So far, the results of Project Dustbunny have been much less dramatic. The experiment started in 2015, when the library asked NIH geneticist Julie Segre to test some gunk scraped out of a 400-year-old Bible in its collection. The process took almost a year, but eventually Segre was able to sequence mitochondrial and microbial DNA found in the sample. The person it belonged to was from Northern Europe, she determined, and had skin bacteria consistent with acne.
These were obviously not foundation-shaking discoveries. But while nobody much cares that a spotty European once dropped a skin flake into an old religious book, the fact that any concrete information could be extracted from centuries-old gutter dust was a revelation. “Just the answerability of some questions gets people excited,” says Folger director Michael Witmore. “It gets me excited. We don’t know everything yet. I want to always be learning that there’s more to know.”
It is a well-known fact that the Japanese love art. And we also know that they love to go the extra mile in what they do. Such is the case on this one.
A Kunsthalle (art gallery) in Munich is currently showing selected pieces from the Samurai Collection of Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller in Dallas, Texas. The selection has armors and weapons, but the most eye-catching and impressing of all are the majestic samurai helmets.
Set among a graveyard of over 200 ships, there is a series of seven islands which is located 70 nautical miles off the coast of Key West in Florida. The Dry Tortugas is a massive 19th century fortress (once hosted Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon and an influx of marauding pirates), which is now a bird and wildlife sanctuary and a national park.
In the 1960's, sitcoms finally came into their own, having been minor players in television up to that point. And few sitcoms were ever so perfectly encapsulated as was That Girl, which featured a beautiful, perky, and chaste young woman, Marlo Thomas, her handsome and equally chaste boyfriend/fiance, Ted Bessell, a catchy theme song, and a gimmicky opening where at the end of each introductory sequence, dialogue ended with 'That Girl', the speaker motioning toward Marlo Thomas. From the IMDb:
To many of us born in the fifties and becoming teen-age girls by the mid-late 60's, THAT GIRL was THE show to tune in to and see the hair and fashions and enjoy the comedy. The chemistry between the two actors is just great. The show was well casted and polished. My best friend in the 60's and I never missed an episode on Tuesday nights. Hollywood did not spoil Marlo, as she went on to author several wonderful books and of course, carry on her father's work for St.Jude Hospital for the children. This was the first show to feature an independent woman who wanted to make it on her own without having to rely on her parents or her boyfriend. The humor was very broad and Ann, even though she was independent, often found herself in some very awkward situations. I especially loved the last season in which we saw Ann's relationship with Donald really blossom as they finally became engaged. Too bad it ended before they walked down the aisle.
I used to have to suffer through this series in my teens, but in retrospect I have to admit that it was a really good program, one definitely worth your while to watch. YouTube features many if not all episodes, and all are available on Hulu. I've embedded a couple below, in case you are interested in seeing what grrrrrl power looked like 50+ years ago.
