Before there were memes and funny video clips on the internet, webcomics dominated. Even now though, artists still share their funny strips online although with much more competition online, their reach is more limited in terms of capturing people's attention. Still, their influence on online communities is big.
The Verge asks several artists to share their thoughts on the early days of webcomics and how their experience was in creating this internet culture.
I'm not really sure what the name of this French game is, but the opening window says Play For Good. The rest of the instructions are in French, but you really don't need them. The goal is to jump a ball from one column to the next. To do that, hold your mouse button down for the right length of time, and then release to jump. The audio cues will help you know how long to hold it when you get used to the game. The game is over the first time you miss, but it's easy to restart. My guess is that it gets harder as you progress, but I haven't progressed much ...yet. -via Boing Boing
Let the children run free and explore things that interest them independently with supervision. That's the philosophy that a lot of these new outside preschools, or forest schools as they are now being called, uphold. But people in the community of North Park Village are getting annoyed by some of the things purportedly being done in these schools.
One concerned citizen, Janita Tucker, who lives opposite Walking Stick Woods where these schools operate, read out a letter in a community meeting regarding the forest schools.
Tucker began to read a letter from “Residents Living Adjacent to NPV,” listing complaints about the open fire, an accumulation of junk, and a lack of appropriate licenses.
Forest schools were developed and became a trend in early childhood education because people thought that it would be better for children to have a more carefree development compared to the more restrictive environments that try to foster learning with rigid curricula.
Inspired by traditional European outdoor preschools, these programs are, in large part, a backlash to helicopter parenting and overly structured, tech-oriented teaching environments.
So far, all of the complaints against the forest schools have been answered and there will be no further meetings regarding them. Whether these programs will help children's development and learning, separate studies need to be made as to their effectiveness.
Nothing inspires me more than to read stories of people's adventures, whether it be in far-flung, remote areas or within the confines of the urban realm. But within these singular pieces of people's lives strewn together, we can find the resolve within ourselves to go and venture out ourselves.
This is the story of Andrew A. Schafer who spent two years in Sichuan, a southwestern province in China, to teach English in university, his struggles with Mandarin and getting around in a culture completely unfamiliar to him.
He recounts how he worked his way toward developing relationships, speaking the language, and learning from the people and students he worked with as much as he taught them about his own culture and language.
From there, he went back home to the US and he talks about the adjustment phase of reintegrating yourself into a society where not too long ago you had been a part of but after being away only for two years seems somewhat a bit unfamiliar. And he moved on from one deep end to another.
As a philosophy and English teacher, he tried looking for jobs that might sound interesting. After much searching, he landed on a tech job in one of the rising companies in Silicon Valley. Another set of learning opportunities and hard work lay before him.
The experiences he had in China worked to his advantage. Though he had no clue about tech culture, he applied the same principles he used in China to learn the ways of tech. The more he immersed himself, the better his understanding of tech became. And down the rabbit hole he went, finally emerging fluent in the ways of tech.
In all that, he tells us what he learned throughout those years and how he came out from them all the wiser and more well-versed in the environments he delved into. His is a fascinating story of continuous learning and development, something of which I feel deeply inspired.
Neatorama readers know that Tristan de Cunha is the most isolated community in the world. It has fewer then 300 residents, and they were mostly born there. But which city is the most isolated in the world? Living in an isolated city means a high cost of living, since supplies have to be shipped in. And going anywhere would mean taking a plane. To find the answer, first you have to define "isolated" and "city." For this video from Half As Interesting, "city" is eventually defined as any place with more than 100,000 people, which is a low bar to clear. "Isolated" means the furthest from another "city" of 100,00 or more people. When you find out which city it is, you will understand why so many people want to live there. -via Digg
We live in confusing times. I'm old enough to remember when Captain Marvel was male and had a costume that looked a lot like Superman's except for the colors. Then Captain Marvel became part of the MCG and was an alien in a totally different costume. Now Captain Marvel today is female and has a different costume still, with totally different powers than had her predecessors. I'd give it all up and just read Nick Fury, who used to be white but is now black, or the Hulk, who used to be green but now also comes in red and also in an assortment of versions - immortal, world war, world breaker, and so forth. What's a confused comics fan to do?
The obvious answer is to blame it all on DC Comics and the above video will tell you why.
Called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the first defense mission will be an interesting one seeing that there are so many possible threats on our planet, not just from within it but from without as well.
In order to preempt any asteroid from hitting earth, NASA has now embarked on creating measures to counter any cataclysmic event like that from happening with this new mission.
The mission, led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will be the first to demonstrate the kinetic impactor technique, which involves slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speed to shift it off course.
Several complications and diseases can come from diabetes one of which is blindness. My aunt has been afflicted by this and it's great news to know that there are possible treatments that we can derive from certain plant compounds.
The research was conducted by the University of Surrey in partnership with Indiana University in America and Kingston University. The cause for these degenerative eye diseases is an abnormal growth of new blood vessels in the eye. So in order to prevent and hopefully treat these conditions, the researchers looked into compounds found in plants.
In a paper published by the American Chemical Society, the University of Surrey, together with experts from Indiana University in America and Kingston University, detailed their testing of naturally occurring homoisoflavonoids found in the Hyacinthaceae plant family and their synthetic derivatives.
The team tested how well these compounds were able to stop the growth of new blood vessels and isolated several active compounds. One synthetic derivative in particular could be used to develop future treatments. Further work is continuing to synthesize more related compounds.
These days, it's pretty easy to imagine what a city looks like from above, because we are used to aerial photography and satellite imagery. How could you accurately visualize a city from above without them? Leonardo da Vinci did so in 1502, in an age when most city maps were angled to show what they looked like to the artist. Vox takes a look at the tools da Vinci may have used to translate his 16th century "street view" to an accurate overhead city map. Just one more thing da Vinci squeezed into his prolific life. -via Laughing Squid
Yep. Don’t be surprised, though. This phenomenon began tens of thousands of years ago. And it isn’t a secret, at least on the circle of anthropologists. Based on skull measurements, the human (scientific name: Homo sapiens) brain in the last 40,000 years has decreased roughly around 10% in its average volume.
Based on measurements from 122 populations, modern adult brains range from 900 to 2,100 mL, with a global average of 1,349 mL, which is smaller than our Stone Age predecessors. However, we can’t reach meaningful conclusions from these species-wide global averages, in part because methods of skull measurement differ between datasets.
There are many theories that have been proposed for this phenomenon, like warmer climates being the reason for this event (this idea was countered, however), but the most convincing theory is that we humans underwent self-domestication.
Does a smaller brain mean that we are less intelligent? Find out more on the article at Discover Magazine!
"Photo of a man wearing a helmet landshape with light going out from his eyes." (from Sacha Goldberger's Facebook post)
Posted on Facebook on October 2014 to March 2015, Olivier Castaing’s School Gallery showcases images of popular characters and gives them a classic feel.
DC Comics characters like the Joker, Superman, Batman and Robin, Marvel Comics characters such as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Hulk, and Star Wars characters like R2-D2 and Chewbacca appear on this series of images.
After Makoto Shinkai's massive blockbuster hit "Your Name" in 2016, he comes up with a new film that is very characteristic of what I would say his surrealist take on storytelling.
Not that I didn't think "Your Name" was a good movie, it was, but something had always nagged at me, something that didn't seem to draw me into the movie as much, an indescribable feeling of reverse catharsis. And it seems that this new film, "Weathering With You", would follow in the same vein as his last one.
But as always, the animation is a visual spectacle and makes me reminisce about the first few anime films I've watched, which were from Ghibli. With the success of "Your Name", much is expected from the new film though with the trailer alone, it definitely has good prospects.
Artist Toshihiko Mitsuya makes intricate creations using aluminum foil, proving that it is not the types of materials an artist uses that makes masterpieces, but it is how an artist uses that material to create great art.
From Beautiful Decay:
Mitsuya’s medium of choice is aluminum foil, which he cuts, shreds, and folds into astounding representations of medieval battles, mythical creatures, and undead warriors. Taking advantage of the foil’s malleability and reflective surface, the armor and weaponry look deadly; conversely, it also has been manipulated to convey the softness of feathers and hair. Mitsuya has brought to life an everyday, ordinary material that is often viewed as trash. In some of his installations, he has created epic battle scenes in ordinary rooms, so lifelike that you can almost hear the crash of miniature weapons. The foil, while appearing deceivingly formidable, represents the fragility of life.
Here are some of Mitsuya’s amazing creations! Visit his website for more of these!
Fort Montgomery sits on an island in New York, a the conjunction of Lake Champlain and the Richlieu River, withion spittin' distance of Canada. The three-story stone building, built over several decades including the Civil War era. It was decommissioned gradually around the turn of the 20th century, and was sold to a private owner in 1926. What was the purpose of Fort Momntgomery? To defend the US from Canada, of course.
The fort has the kind of wacky pedigree that might tantalize a history buff buyer. A previous fort built in 1816 on the same site was enough to launch a thousand face-palms: Because the engineers were a little murky on exactly where the border fell, a precursor meant to fortify the U.S. against northern invasion accidentally went up on the Canadian side. As James Millard, a historian who literally wrote the book on the moldering remains, has noted, that structure earned the nickname Fort Blunder. The highly visible, expensive mistake was eventually abandoned and plundered. Then, when the international border was redrawn in the 1840s, positioning the island in U.S. waters, Fort Montgomery went up in the footprint of the folly.
This is what happens when artificial intelligence tries to write a country song. Botnik Studios fed country music lyrics into a neural network to train it, and the algorithm came up with "You Can't Take My Door." This reminds us of something Bad Lip Reading would produce, but it has a catchy tune and is just silly enough to become a hit. I can tell you from experience, that it would be very possible to memorize the lyrics if you heard this enough. -via the Awesomer
