My son has parked his bike by this lamppost just about every day for the last year. This morning, this sticker had appeared. Absolutely made our day. People can be so brilliant. Thank you, whoever did it pic.twitter.com/rYC8jCTD5L
Some observant stranger noticed that Christie Dietz's son parked in the same spot every day. That someone would take the time and trouble to produce this sticker is just adorable. Next, they need to take another photo of the post with the sticker on it to produce a meta-notice. -via Metafilter
Professional photographer and mother of two Samantha Bishop of Roaming Magnolias Photography wanted a nice family photo of her kids. Her son Levi, however, has autism and doesn't like having his photos taken.
So Bishop came up with a genius solution. She wrote:
My son, Levi, is autistic. He doesn't like having his photos taken because he gets uncomfortable with things like eye contact and smiling on command. So instead of begging and pleading for a few good photos, this year him and Lola went a different route. Why not let him wear a t-rex costume and make the best of it?
Remember the water bottle flipping craze that swept the Internet a couple of years ago?
The premise of bottle flipping seems simple: throw a plastic bottle filled with water, have it flip once in the air and then land upright. Turns out, it's not as easy as it sounds.
Enter physics! A team of first-year physics students from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have solved the secret of the perfect bottle flip:
"In physics, this is called conservation of angular momentum," [study co-author Mees Flapper] said.
With the right amount of fluid to slow the bottle's spin, the container loses rotational speed and appears to pause at a horizontal position. The maneuver culminates in a descent that is nearly vertical, "followed by a smooth landing," the study authors reported.
Saturday Night Live is aired live from New York, of course, so the production team are always on their toes. At the same time, the skits feature cast members impersonating real people and characters wearing over-the-top silly costumes, which must be completely changed during commercial breaks. The wardrobe department handles all this, plus finding, designing, making, and rehearsing with those costumes, with only a week to get it all right. Then they start all over again. -via Laughing Squid
A Pennsylvania dachshund named Patches developed a brain tumor the size of an orange. The cancer invaded her skull and pushed her head up in a large lump. Patches' family was referred to the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, where veterinary surgical oncologist Michelle Oblak recommended surgery.
Normally in a case such as this, the tumor and a portion of the skull would be removed, and a titanium mesh fitted in place, Oblak told the Canadian Press. Instead, Oblak and her colleagues used a new procedure in which a 3D-printed skull cap is specially fitted for the canine patient, which the researchers claim is more precise and less costly than conventional methods. Incredibly, the titanium cap replaced 70 percent of Patches’ skull, which had to be removed during surgery. Oblak said researchers in the UK have done something similar, but on a “significantly” smaller scale.
Naturally, this kind of surgery raises questions about the expense, but the article does not address that. The surgery came through a teaching hospital that does research, which may contribute to the development of such techniques for humans eventually. Anyway, the surgery was successful, and you can see before and after pictures of Patches at Gizmodo. -Thanks, WTM!
In the Prague City Hall in Prague, Czech Republic, there's a paternoster elevator that's always running. All you have to do is hop on ... but don't miss. There's an obvious reason it's also called the "elevator of death!"
During the first of Ernest Shackleton's three Antarctic expeditions, he brought along some "fun stuff" for when they were isolated indoors, which included a printing press, ink, and paper. Over the winter of 1908, the men published a book called Aurora Australis, which they wrote, illustrated, printed, and bound themselves. The content was an eclectic mix (as were the binding materials).
Shackleton served as editor, and solicited submissions from the crew. He chose to include everything from an interview with an Emperor Penguin to a tongue-in-cheek, faux-Biblical account of the expedition. In one chapter, an anonymous messman details the trials and tribulations of his job. In another, the geologist Douglas Mawson describes an journey to an imaginary place called Bathybia, hidden inside an Antarctic volcano, where fungi grow and temperatures reach a balmy 70 degrees.
Sumter County in South Carolina is the home of a family enclave that has baffled outsiders since the Revolutionary War. The several hundred people of the community claim Turkish Ottoman roots, as descendants of Joseph Benenhaley, who served under General Sumter and was granted land after the war. For over two centuries, they've kept to themselves, with six family names dominating the group.
For many years the Turkish people’s origin story was usually considered no more than myth, a fable concocted to sustain an out-group through unpleasant realities of hard history. In 1973, a historian put it this way: “A stranger visiting Sumter County today may come across a baffling breed called ‘Turks’…. So meager are the facts relating to them that the wildest conjectures, based on what must surely be flight of fancy and geographical ignorance, have been advanced to support their origin.” Still, members of the group persisted in claiming Turkish descent, and now we—a political scientist and a Turkish descendant—have confirmed the group’s traditional narrative and beleaguered history, through original research and oral interviews.
The Turkish people didn’t fit cleanly into the broader black-versus-white paradigm in that part of South Carolina. They adhered to an ancestral understanding that they were “white people,” but outside the Dalzell area, where most lived, they were shunned. Like their black neighbors, they were subject to insults, intimidation and systemic oppression. The Turkish people had to go to federal court to be able to send their children to “white schools” during the 1950s, and only in the past few decades have they begun to enjoy things like getting good jobs in mainstream society, accessing health care at local hospitals, shopping at community businesses, or participating in Little League baseball, without being turned away or treated as second-class citizens.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is the first of all the Star Wars movies I didn't see during its theatrical run. People have said that if you try to forget that it's a Star Wars movie, then it's an okay film. Faint praise, indeed. Screen Junkies breaks that down into a quick but thorough critique in this Honest Trailer.
Biologist Toshihisa Yashiro of the University of Sydney and colleagues have discovered the first-known asexual termite colony in the world. But why get rid of the males?
So why did all-female populations evolve at all? To puzzle out the answer, Yashiro and his colleagues pitted the asexual and sexual termites head-to-head—literally. When they measured the noggins of soldier termites from the all-female and mixed-sex colonies, the researchers found that, unsurprisingly, those in female-only colonies looked a lot more alike. But in this case, uniformity wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
With their relatively unarmored bodies, termites aren’t built for the offensive. Instead, when the colony is under attack, the insect’s main mode of defense often involves plugging the entrances to their nests with their own heads. A variety of head sizes could actually be a burden rather than a boon, meaning the loss of males may have actually empowered these female fighters to survive an assault.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. The shampoo prank goes on for quite some time before the victim realizes someone is messing with him, and even then he suspects the guy showering beside him. Stay for the visual punch line at the end. After all, that's a lot of soap! -via reddit
The United States dropped from 50th to a tie for 54th in the annual Bloomberg Health-Efficiency Index. The index tracks health costs and life expectancies, using the latest data available, which in this case is from 2015. The drop in ranking may be due to four countries being added to the index this year, all of which placed in the top 25. Read more about how the index was calculated, and see the stats for the top 56 countries at Bloomberg. -via Digg
While looking for YouTube videos on how to create flame patina on copper, I came across Czech metallurgic artist Ladislav Vlna. He creates distinctive portraits on a steel canvas using flame from blowtorches. Ladislav uses differing temperatures from the heat of the torches to create a range of colors on his artwork. The artist has been perfecting his technique for over 16 years. And his works have sold for up to $9,400 US.
