But how ?!
Watch how young magician Eric Chien performs his magic trick "Ribbon," which won him the 2018 World Championships of Magic, as organized by FISM or the International Federation of Magic Societies.
via Twisted Sifter
The chances that you would fly in the same plane with a celebrity may seem to be quite slim seeing that most of them would probably fly on private planes or business class so you won't be able to have a personal encounter with them.
Moreover, these people would usually have guards around them to provide security so the chances get slimmer and slimmer that you would be able to get close.
But what if, you find yourself on the plane with royalty. Not just that, but they are actually serving as the co-pilot who is flying you to your destination.
Recently, the Dutch King Willem-Alexander revealed that he has been serving as co-pilot twice a month for the past 21 years, flying commercial passengers incognito. Though it is known that he had been a "guest pilot" before ascending the throne, what was unknown until now was that he often flew as king with KLM Captain Maarten Putman:
Willem-Alexander once said that if he had not been born in a palace, his dream would have been to fly a big passenger plane such as a Boeing 747, so it is no surprise that he intends to retrain for the updated plane.
He told De Telegraaf that he never used his name when addressing passengers and was rarely recognised in uniform and wearing his KLM cap. However, he admitted that some passengers had recognised his voice.
"The advantage is that I can always say that I warmly welcome passengers on behalf of the captain and crew," he said. "Then I don't have to give my name."
Read the full story over at the BBC.
(Photo: Natascha Libbert/@KLM)
Kaplamino (previously at Neatorama) has really outdone himself this time. This marble run is relatively short, but it's densely packed with moves that will astonish you. Physics and timing. He said it took 40 attempts to get it right, to which I respond "Only 40?" -via Digg
Three different genetic studies were released on Thursday that indicate the migration of people to North and South America is far more complex than we thought. We think of migration in the Americas as a slow movement of people from the Bering Strait going south until both continents were populated. But over those thousands of years, distinct populations of people would swiftly move to a far off new land, in any direction. In some of these instances, their genes would disappear, and in others they are found in the current population. One of the studies, led by anthropologist John Lindo from Emory University, took a look at the differences between the people who settled in the Andes mountains and those who stayed at lower elevations. It only took a relatively short amount of time (thousands of years) for the highlanders to evolve different ways of coping with their environment.
Archaeological evidence suggests this group began to occupy the Andean Highlands around 12,000 years ago. The new genetic evidence shows what happened as a result. Similar to the ancient inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau, this group quickly adapted to the high altitude extremes, gaining resistance to cold temperatures, low oxygen, and UV radiation.
Fascinatingly, the Andean highlanders also acquired the ability to digest potatoes, a domesticated crop derived from wild tubers.
“We see a different configuration of a gene associated with starch digestion in the small intestine—MGAM—in the agricultural ancient Andean genome samples, but not in hunter-gatherers down the coast,” said Lindo in a statement. “It suggests a sort of co-evolution between an agricultural crop and human beings.”
So we have to thank the Andean highlanders, because otherwise, French fries wouldn't be a thing today. Read an overview of all three studies at Gizmodo.
Pictured: Lake Titicaca, at an elevation of 12,507 feet.
Filmgoers today are so inured to CGI special effects that they forget how things were in cinema just a couple of decades ago. Way before CGI, a technique called matte painting was used to create the desired effects on film that would otherwise be extremely expensive or outright impossible. A good example is the closing shot of 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a nameless worker wheels the crated Ark to a distant location inside of an unnaturally immense government warehouse.
The fact that the public never really knew anything about the deliberately concealed trickery was thanks to overly protective studio bosses who often went all out to deny that the wonders up on that silver screen were anything other than great insightful film making. Those same studio tyrants did their utmost to try to prevent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from establishing a category for special effects.
The story of the matte painting wizards and many samples of their work, including some that will be a surprise to you, may be found here.
Banana Surprise is a gadget you can use to add chocolate, strawberry syrup, honey, peanut butter, or any other liquid flavoring to a banana. You insert a tool into the banana and pull out the "core," which forms a channel into which you inject your liquid of choice. Like this:
Get yours at Amazon for $27 plus shipping. I have a few thoughts about this.
1. Bananas are one of the few fruits that kids will eat without coaxing. They are already soft and sweet and if you need to add sugary flavor to them, we've lost the battle.
2. Bananas are simple. They come in their own natural container that even children can handle. The Banana Surprise is very complicated and turns a quick snack into a 5-step process that involves extensive dish washing. And $27.
3. Bananas are phallic. Even the instructions for this can turn anyone into a giggling 12-year-old.
-via Boing Boing
According to writer Thersa Matsuura, one of the best things about rural Japan is coming upon a mujin hanbai ("unmanned selling") - an unmanned country roadside produce stand.
Some of the people who offer a mujin hanbai are just people who have large family gardens, & others are farmers with big fields who find themselves with produce that has small defects that can't be sold at market.
She states that in her, "28 years of living in Japan, I've never seen or heard about anyone taking advantage of these unmanned, self-serve, roadside stores."
via Boing Boing
Photos by Thersa Matsuura
Edward Otto had a better idea. As a safer alternative to the penny-farthings of his day, he improved on the bicycle by inventing the dicycle. The dicycle had two huge wheels, but instead of front and back, they were parallel to each other with the cyclist sitting between them. Otto built almost a thousand dicycles between 1880 and 1883.
For balance, the rider used a slender trailing arm with a rubber roller on the end to stop himself (or, more unusually for the period, herself) from toppling over backward.
The rider sat between the wheels, above the axle, and pedaled using a treadle-style system fixed to the axle by long rods. The treadles turned pulleys at each end, which drove the road wheels via rubber belts.
Within reach of the rider were two levers with which either of the pulleys could be disengaged. This basic form of steering was achieved by stopping the drive to one of the wheels while the other continued to turn. There was a simple hand brake lever for each hand too, each connected to a different wheel.
They were safer than bikes of the day, but you can imagine they'd be more difficult to steer and more difficult to park than a regular bicycle. There are still a few dicycles around. See one up close at vintage.es. -via Everlasting Blort
Look at this beautiful kitty! Her name is Lotus,and she's a large Swedish Maine coon cat with Ron Perlman's face and long fur like a lion's mane all over. She's also an Instagram star with over 108,000 followers. Continue on to see why.
Being able to see the person on a call is something we now take totally for granted. However, once upon a time, the idea of a “video phone” was pure science fiction. The notion that we could actually SEE the person on the other end of the call was something from The Jetsons, not reality.
The earliest models were insanely expensive, much as were the first PCs. Films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey popularized the concept so much that AT&T spent hundreds of millions of dollars over three decades attempting to develop an economical device for the home consumer. They were unsuccessful and finally abandoned the effort in 1994, leaving the market wide open for others.
Who would have guessed that, just a few years later, quite independently of all of AT&T’s efforts, the “picture phone” would become a reality? It turned out a bit different than AT&T envisioned – where video communication was just an optional function of the new phones. As optimistic as the company was, even they could not have imagined that by 2018 it would be on portable devices in the hands of approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide.
The full story and many more illustrations may be found here.
I Love Stem by happinessinatee
Today, November 8, is the National STEM Day.
To help you celebrate all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), take a look at 15 of NeatoShop's neatest STEM inspired T-shirts. Click on the images to view them.
See More: Science T-Shirts | Math T-Shirts
The Good Thing About Science by kgullholmen
Learn About Gravity by Steven Rhodes
A mechanic from Greenpoint, Brooklyn breaks down a 1974 Harley-Davidson shovelhead motorcycle. The classic Harley is taken apart, piece-by-piece, as the mechanic explains the importance of each part.
AMC once stood for American Movie Classics, but when they began to do their own drama series, they went big, with Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad. And now they are getting into movies again- their own movies, based on their hit TV shows. The strange departure of Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead was followed by the news that star Andrew Lincoln will reprise the character in several Walking Dead movies to air on AMC. And Vince Gilligan is said to be working on a two-hour film set in the Breaking Bad universe. The news of the Breaking Bad movie came from unnamed sources.
It's unclear if the movie would be another prequel — like AMC's Better Call Saul — or a follow-up of some sort. It's also unclear is if any of the original stars, such as Bryan Cranston or Aaron Paul, are involved in the new project, which sources stress will be set in the existing Breaking Bad franchise.
Gilligan, sources say, will pen the script, executive produce and possibly direct. Breaking Bad and prequel series Better Call Saul exec producers Mark Johnson and Melissa Bernstein are also said to be attached to the film project, which is said to follow the escape of a kidnapped man and his quest for freedom. Production is expected to begin this month in New Mexico.
That sure sounds like a Jesse Pinkman plot, considering he escaped from slavery in the final Breaking Bad episode, don't you think? -via Mashable
Quick: think of a place you'd associate with self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.
Chances are, you'd think of Silicon Valley and not Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya (actually, the largest slum in all of Africa).
But the poor Kenyans from Kibera actually play an important role in teaching self-driving cars how to drive by providing "training data" that computers can understand.
Each day, Brenda leaves her home here to catch a bus to the east side of Nairobi where she, along with more than 1,000 colleagues in the same building, work hard on a side of artificial intelligence we hear little about - and see even less.
In her eight-hour shift, she creates training data. Information - images, most often - prepared in a way that computers can understand.
Brenda loads up an image, and then uses the mouse to trace around just about everything. People, cars, road signs, lane markings - even the sky, specifying whether it's cloudy or bright. Ingesting millions of these images into an artificial intelligence system means a self-driving car, to use one example, can begin to "recognise" those objects in the real world. The more data, the supposedly smarter the machine.
Dan Robbins turned you and yours into artists. By following his guide that matched numbers on a printed canvas to the corresponding colours supplied in small paint pots, you blossomed. America was getting rich, and with “the art of leisure” you could put your free time to good use. Dan Robbins became “the most exhibited artist in the world” through his Paint-by-Number concept.
Paint-by-Number reached a high point in 1956 when Thomas Edwin Stephens, Eisenhower appointment secretary, arranged a White House exhibition that came to be known as the Stephens Collection. Stephens distributed twenty Paint by Number kits to Eisenhower cabinet members and Oval Office visitors. Among those returning completed oils were FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, special assistant to the president Nelson A. Rockefeller, former president Herbert Hoover and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge.
Read about Dan Robbins and see other examples of his revolutionary concept https://flashbak.com/paint-by-numbers-dan-robbins-art-407356/.
