Mountain goats are being airlifted out of Olympic National Park in Washington State because according to the National Park Service:
the fluffy ungulate has begun harassing visitors at campsites “where they persistently seek salt and minerals from human urine.” Goats are known to “paw and dig” where people have relieved themselves, causing the animals to become a nuisance.
They are attracted to sources of salt and minerals to supplement their diet. These nutrients are a lot harder to come by for this non native species in Olympic National Park.
The mountain goats are being relocated to the Cascade Mountain Range of Washington State, where they are a native species. As of September 28th, 98 mountain goats had been relocated and released. Read more at Motherboard.
You know about Tokyo Rose, but did you know the Nazis had their own woman on the radio, feeding propaganda along with popular music? “Axis Sally” was the nickname of American citizen Mildred Gillars, who had dreams of becoming an actress. Instead, she followed a series of lovers to various countries and ended up broadcasting in Berlin.
For her part, Gillars vacillated easily between playing hot swing-era, big-band hits and denouncing the Jews, Franklin Roosevelt and the British on air. “One thing I pride myself on,” she’d say in a typical broadcast, “is to tell you American folks the truth and hope one day that you’ll wake up to the fact that you’re being duped; that the lives of the men you love are being sacrificed for the Jewish and British interests!”
She was very calculating, though, pushing back whenever she worried the text she was given to read on air went too far—“If she had something in the script that she thought was going to make her liable for treason in the future she fought it,” Lucas says.
It didn't work, and Gillars was convicted of treason in 1948. Read the short version of Axis Sally's life as told by Richard Lucas, author of the book Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany, at Smithsonian.
Chicago Cubs fans didn't have a lot to cheer about last week as their team lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-0 at Wrigley Field. But if you're a fan, you gotta cheer! When a rat tried to jump a wall, an entire section rallied to give the rodent some encouragement. It took him three tries, but he did it, as the crowd celebrated the small victory. Will Byington caught the incident on video. -via Digg
"Home sweet home" is the literal truth in case of this chocolate house, made by artisan chocolatier Jean-Luc Decluzeau as a promo for the travel aggregator Booking.com.
Approximately 3,000 pounds of chocolate was used to create the 200-square foot home - and yes, everything is made out of chocolate!
Actually that's Asteroid 2015 TB145 as spotted by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, when it zipped past Earth - missing it by just 300,000 miles - on Halloween three years ago.
It's making the rounds again on the Internet, but its likely won't come that close to Earth when it comes around again this year.
The YND239-20 cafe (named after its street address in Seoul, the capital of South Korea) looks like an optical illusion: everything in it - from the walls to the chairs and even the dishes - look like hand drawn black and white cartoon!
“We wanted to supply a place that looked like a cartoon to our customers,” the cafe’s marketing manager, JS Lee, told Lonely Planet. He also said they’re all happy to see that guests take pictures and make good memories in the cafe because that is “exactly what we wanted.”
Turns out that this little corner of black and white design and stellar Instagrammability gained its popularity exclusively through word-of-mouth. “Famous bloggers, Facebook stars, magazines and TV programs all talked about us,” JS Lee remembered. “Then we became famous very naturally.”
When Jeremy and Krista lost their wedding venue before the big day, they decided to have the wedding ceremony over at Jeremy's place of work: a fire station in St. Paul Park, Minnesota.
"We talked about it, 'What if there's a call?'" Krista told KARE11, and said "You can let the other guys go; you're not leaving our wedding."
But after the ceremony, there was an urgent "all call" request to fight a nearby fire ... and Jeremy had to go.
You might see this picture around the internet claiming that these are the same people as the original stock image, just a few years later. That's not it at all. This spot-on recreation came about almost by accident. Charlie Todd, the guy in the middle, explained what really happened.
Hey! I'm the guy in this photo. This was at a Know Your Meme party at the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC. They had a gallery of memes hanging on the wall. I noticed my wife was wearing a red dress so I suggested she pose in front of the girl in the photo. While I was taking her picture someone came up to me and asked if I wanted to be in it, so I hopped in. Then the girl in blue walked up and said, "Hey! Let me be the other girl!" The whole thing was spontaneous and random, and of course it happened on the one day in my life I'm not wearing a plaid shirt.
Pretty funny that our silly photo of us in front of a meme is now a meme itself (just tweeted by Zach Braff). I Air Dropped the photo to the girl in blue after we took it a few weeks ago. She put it on Facebook a few days ago. I guess the person who first put this on Reddit must have seen it there and decided to imply that we are older versions of the people in the meme, but we are not. As others have pointed out, I'm the dude from Improv Everywhere, and my wife is an actress, and we host a political podcast together. I don't know much about the girl in blue, but she was nice!
House-moving wasn't uncommon in the early era of photography. When you've spent years building a nice, roomy home for your family, you'll do whatever it takes to save it. For some, that meant moving the entire house with horse power. Maybe it was an urban renewal project. Maybe the railroad was coming through your land. In one case, the railroad came, but not close enough.
In the 1920’s Lake Saskatoon was a bustling little community. When the railway bypassed the town by a few kilometres, that meant the end for Lake Saskatoon as a regional hub. The residents did what any sensible community would– put their houses and shops on sleds and had teams of horses pull them a few kilometres up the road.
The strength of the Earth's magnetic field is about 30 microtesla. The magnets in an MRI machine clock in at about 3 tesla, and the approximate magnetic field of a white dwarf star is about 100 tesla.
So just think about how powerful this 1,200-tesla magnet created by Shojiro Takeyama and his colleagues at the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo.
To achieve that intensity, Takeyama and his team pump megajoules of energy into a small, precisely engineered electromagnetic coil, the inner lining of which then collapses on itself at Mach 15 — that's more than 3 miles per second (5 kilometers per second). As it collapses, the magnetic field inside gets squeezed into a tighter and tighter space, until its force peaks at a tesla reading unimaginable in conventional magnets. Fragments of a second later, the coil collapses entirely, destroying itself.
The last time Takeyama switched on his super-strong magnet, it blew out the heavy door of the lab that contained the machinery!
Hotels are touting free hot breakfast to drum up business, but they may have lured in more than just travelers.
A few hotels in Dalton, Georgia, have been targeted by a daring thief that came in to eat at the breakfast buffet. Locals have dubbed him the Breakfast Bandit:
“He’s definitely still on the loose and we think he’s still hungry,” a Dalton police spokesperson told Thrillist over the phone. “I don’t know what he ate, exactly, but he definitely ate a lot of it.”
The low-stakes criminal reportedly told a Holiday Inn Express employee that he was “just checking how easy it is to get into hotels and get free stuff.” He was spotted wandering into locations across Dalton, pocketing bottles, towels, and plastic silverware, before demolishing the most holy of all hotel accomodations: the breakfast buffet. We’re talking pancakes, bacon, Cocoa Puffs, the whole charade.
When students at the University of Bristol learned that their beloved janitor Herman Gordon hadn't seen his family in Jamaica for more than a decade, they decided to do something about it.
Spearheaded by medical student Hadi Al-Zubaidi, the college students raised £1,500 so Gordon and his wife could visit his family in Jamaica as well as stay at a resort there for a vacation.
An October 4th auction at Sotheby's will feature 309 items from the collection of the late Robin Williams and his second wife Marsha. It will include several prized works of art, including three paintings by Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli, who was noted for being certifiably insane.
...a doctor at Waldau published a monograph on his patient in 1921 titled “A Mentally Ill Artist,” and even made the link between Wölfli’s “illness” and his creativity explicit by observing that “the effect of illness which dissociated and ravaged the superficial layers of his psyche, enabling the deeper layers, including his latent artistry, to develop.”
The same sort of thing is often said about all sorts of creative people—that their demons, if not their named “illnesses,” are also their sources of brilliance. When it comes to Robin Williams, it is hardly controversial to remark upon the unbridled, over-the-edge nature of his comedy. Indeed, many of us believed him to be at his best when he was on the verge of being out of control.
Read some musings on Robin Williams and his possible connection with Adolf Wölfli at Collectors Weekly. You'll also see the other two Wölfli artworks from the auction.
A gas pump will shut off when the tank is full; we've always taken that for granted. It's a fine feature that keeps gas from spilling all over us. But how does it know? The mechanism is a low-tech yet surprisingly complicated system. It's easy to understand the way Brain Stuff explains it in this video, but later on when you try to explain it to someone else, you'll end up just showing them this video. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The Detroit Meat Strike began in Hamtramck, Michigan, on July 27, 1935. The 500 women who swarmed the shopping district with signs and banners were not only protesting high prices, they blockaded the stores and attacked those who would cross the picket line. They were led by a 100-pound housewife named Mary Zuk.
In a state where unemployment topped 25 percent, and where layoffs by the burgeoning auto industry devastated working-class households, women like Zuk were still expected to put food on the table and stretch the family budget as far as it would go. Over the last three years, the price of meat had jumped 62 percent, according to author Ann Folino White’s Plowed Under. Butchers claimed it wasn’t their fault — they blamed President Roosevelt and the increased processing taxes caused by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) — but the women of the country would not be placated.
That spring, black and Jewish housewives in New York closed 4,000 butcher shops with picket lines, and housewives marched against rising meat prices in Chicago. They were peaceful; their aims were modest. The Hamtramck women felt no such restraint. They were cutthroat, boisterous, even militant. With Zuk at their helm, they would strike back hard, and change the nature of consumer activism in America.
Within a week of that first protest in Hamtramck, Zuk organized a crowd of 5,000 people in Detroit. Some butchers were forced out of business, and eventually Washington got involved. Read about the Detroit Meat Strike at Narratively.
(Image credit: Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University)
