This is a lovely way to visualize the relationships in a family! Redditor OrbDeluxxxe posted this photo of his family reunion, mentioning that the couple at the top have been married 60 years. Their children and spouses are below, and the third and fourth generation are at the bottom -five of them babes-in-arms. You know who came from who by the color-coordinated shirts. If you look closely (enlarge the image here), you'd guess that they are arranged in order of age from the left. A lot of planning went into this picture, and the results are stunning, even though four people are missing from the bottom row. OrbDeluxxxe added:
Nearly everyone on the bottom row at least has a BA or BS, there’s a PhD, an MD, an MBA, and a masters in social work on that row, and two who are hoping to get MDs in the near future. There is also a handful of engineers and 2 teachers.
Also: What a neat cabin to have a reunion in! -via reddit
If you went to school after 1980, you probably learned that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a huge asteroid smashing into the earth 66 millions years ago. If you went to school before 1980, you probably heard that it could be any one of a dozen different reasons and we possibly might never know the exact cause of the dinosaurs extinction. One of the competing ideas is that the mass extinction was caused by the Deccan Traps, a group of volcanoes that erupted for thousands of years, so long that they poisoned the entire earth. This hypothesis has been promoted by paleontologist Gerta Keller for decades, but it was overshadowed by physicist Luis Alvarez' discovery of the iridium layer that pinpointed the date of the asteroid. Scientists are still arguing over the reason for the death of the dinos, which you can read about at The Atlantic. -via Digg
King Chinhung of Korea's Silla Dynasty conceived of a training program to shape the country's most promising young people into a skilled class to serve the monarchy. The students were drawn from the aristocracy, and originally included girls, until one of the founding members pushed another into a stream and drowned her out of jealousy. After that, the program was called the Hwarang Boys Academy, which produced the the Hwarang Knights, an elite group of warriors who were known for their beauty, from their makeup to their jeweled shoes.
Roughly translated as “flower boys” or “flowering youth,” the Hwarang were male aristocrats who comprised an elite corps founded in the sixth century B.C. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot we don’t know about the Hwarang,” says Courtney Lazore, historian and author of The Hwarang Warriors — Silla’s Flower Boys. “We often liken them to knights, but they were much more than just fighters.” With their focus on religion, education and the military, it was “possible for [them] to become well-rounded leaders.”
They were warriors, but also nobility and cultural ambassadors. Read an overview of what we know about the Hwarang at Ozzy.
When Jennifer Anne Kaufman fled the stolen vehicle she was driving Monday, she cut across some pastureland, trying to evade police. After all, it was dark and maybe the Seminole County Sheriff’s helicopter couldn't see her well. But she didn't count on a herd of cows following her! Cows know that a person in their field might mean getting fed, or at least something novel to see. In this case, they saw an arrest. A search of the stolen SUV yielded a gram of cocaine. Read the story at the Tampa Bay Times. -via Boing Boing
We take video calls for granted these days, but it wasn't so long ago that such a thing was science fiction, fantasy, or pure moonshine. AT&T promoted the idea in 1964 when they demonstrated a picture phone call at the World’s Fair in Queens.
The trouble was it was insanely expensive. A 15 minute video call would cost about $600 (adjusted for inflation). So, it wasn’t exactly an instant success.
Yeah, those were the days when long-distance phone connections were charged by the minute, and video cameras were huge and pricy. For decades, video calls were always just around the corner as developments were made. Meanwhile, we dreaded it, because we couldn't see that there would be several other ways of communicating to someone that you weren't fit to be seen at the moment. The microchip was a leap forward in miniaturization, and the internet gave us the connectivity to really do it, finally. See an illustrated overview of the journey we took to FaceTime, Skype, and all the other methods of video chat we have today at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake
Poolbowl must be some kind of combination of billiards and bowling. All I know for sure is that Jason Belmonte and Florian "Venom" Kohler have a lot of time on their hands, and have used it to perfect some glorious tricks. So what if they have terabytes of outtakes, this compilation video is cool! -via Metafilter
San Diego Comic Con has come and gone for 2018, and once again, you didn't get to go. But here's a way to experience all the best cosplay anyway! Or maybe you did go, and you want to see it all again. Jill Harness and Zeon Santos attended (their tenth year!) and took tons of pictures, and posted them, sorted into different galleries you'll enjoy.
Would you like fries with that beatdown? Is it just me, or would Loki have to be the Burger King in this world?
Take a character from column A and a character from column B and see what you can do. Bonus points if the combination makes a pun. Deadpool and Batman got mixed up with everything under the sun at Comic Con. See them here.
There are always plenty of great cosplayers at Comic Con, but some of the most fun are those highlighting Rule 63 (that for every pop culture character, there is another version of the opposite gender).
I did a little research before we left and found that even though anyone under 13 can go to Comic Con for free, they still need a badge. Since my husband had to pick his badge up in person, we were able to get little Rigby’s badge printed at the same time. That being said, it turns out that if you have a kiddo under walking age, they don’t actually need a badge.
That said, if you plan to take a child next year, read all the tips and confirm any questions you may have before arriving in 2019, to see if any rules have changed.
In this goofy episode of Aaron's Animals, Aaron Benitez and his cat Prince Michael go fishing. They are not expert fishermen, like everyone else at the lakeside appears to be. But hey, fishing is supposed to be fun, not a competition! -via Tastefully Offensive
Serious question for #medtwitter: If you show up at a code, and the patient is a centaur who had a cardiac arrest, ignoring the joules question, where do you think the defib pads should go? A, assuming the heart is in the human part, or B, assuming the heart is in the horse part? pic.twitter.com/OJt9haEgx3
Dr. Wu and Dr. Funk had a discussion on Twitter about the proper treatment of a centaur having a heart attack. Where is the heart? Does he have more than one heart? After all, the hagfish and the octopus have auxiliary hearts, and a centaur has a lot of body to power. And what about the lungs? The conversation turned to centaur anatomy in general, which can get technical between medical doctors. Read their speculations and conclusions at Dorkly. -via Metafilter)
Terri Metz has a unique but simple way to fold a fitted sheet -yeah, right, as if there exists such a thing as a simple way to fold a fitted sheet. If I were to try this, I'd probably fall asleep in the middle. But I can't try this, because I'd need to vacuum the rug first, and I don't want to do that. See, I know how to fold a fitted sheet real nicely, but instead I just launder my sheets and put them back on the bed. -via Everlasting Blort
You've heard about people trying to date someone "out of their league," and people who manage to "marry up," but how can you really measure that? There are so many different qualities that go into desirability: looks, education, income, age, and of course, virtue and personality. However, online dating gives us the digital tools to actually measure an individual's desirability in relation to others -at least during initial contact. Sociology professor Elizabeth Bruch of the University of Michigan crunched the numbers of 186,000 heterosexual users of one online dating system in four cities for a month.
Imagine for a second that you are one of the users Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”
The study found that online daters commonly approach or respond to people who are an average of 25% more desirable than they are. Some reached even higher, but hardly anyone reached out to potential dates who are less desirable. What is most intriguing (and depressing) about the study are the factors they found that determine the desirability score. For example, women's desirability peaks at age 18, while men's score holds pretty steady through adulthood, peaking at 50. Read about more factors that go into one's desirability score at The Atlantic. It might cause you to swear off online dating forever. -via Digg
A family in Marlborough, New Zealand, has a pet sheep named Bacon, which you have to admit is a slightly better name than Mutton. Bacon is having a great time on the backyard trampoline. I don't think this is his first time playing on it. It's a pretty good life for a sheep, even with that weird name. -via Tastefully Offensive
The American version of The Office ran on NBC from 2005 to 2013. In the five years since, its popularity hasn't waned at all. Nicole Gallucci is a fan who knows that other fans have their favorite scenes they'll never forget. She compiled 65 of the most important, iconic, funny, emotional and/or memorable scenes from The Office so that you can relive the entire series. Most have video evidence, and all are illustrated in one way or another. They are not ranked, but are listed in chronological order, so that you can follow along in sequence at Mashable.
This is a watermelon. It's been skinned, brined, smoked, basted, and grilled like a ham, so it resembles a ham. Duck's Eatery in New York City offers it as an entree, but you could make it at home, with some skill, particular ingredients and tools, and lots of time. What does it taste like? My guess is that it tastes like a watermelon, no matter what it looks like. My guess is also that it looks better than it tastes. -via Laughing Squid
Americans are known around the world for our size. The country is big, our people stand tall, and in the last 50 years, we've become increasing fat. There are quite a few reasons why, and some of them multiply each other. You can probably guess some of those reasons, but you may not know them all, and you might be shocked at the extent of the changes over time. As you can see here, portion sizes have increased greatly. We're also eating out more. We consume more sugar. But there's more, including ideas for what we can do about it at Vox. -via Digg
