The source material for Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the 1958 suspense novel Red Alert by Peter George. However, Red Alert was not at all funny, just a terrifying story of nuclear armageddon. In Kubrick's hands, the tale became absurdist satire all around. Cinefix tells the tale of how the transformation took place and left us with a classic black comedy. -via the AV Club
Dutch sculptors Adrie and Alfons Kennis are the artists behind many of the recreations of early man you've already seen, like Otzi the Iceman and the recent Cheddar Man. They are also twin brothers. The Kennises are most renowned for their sculptures of even older people -Neanderthals and other hominins. Their third display in the UK will open in October at St Fagans National Museum of History in Wales. To do the work they do, the Kennis brothers have studied human anatomy, evolution, DNA, and anthropology. The results are sculptures that appear startlingly lifelike while still being different from what we know.
This alien-ness is tempered, however, by their particular skill for facial expressions, giving life and personality to the clay. Each full-sized reconstruction takes half a year, but a face alone can take a whole month, and although the brothers refuse to refer to themselves as artists, this is obviously the area that gives them the greatest artistic freedom and satisfaction. “There are some things the skull can’t tell you,” admits Adrie. “You never know how much fat someone had around their eyes, or the thickness of the lips, or the exact position and shape of the nostrils.”
This personal quality is what makes Kennis models so captivating, and so desirable to museums: they don’t simply depict a generalised early man, but a specific man or woman, an effect that allows onlookers to glimpse human prehistory with immediacy, even familiarity. But while curators and museum-goers are sometimes surprised by the vivid, emotive features of the Kennis models, there is only one person Adrie needs to impress: “If Alfons doesn’t like the face, I am disappointed. But if he likes it, if we are both satisfied, then we can handle the whole world.”
Read about the sculptors' process, and get a preview of their Neanderthal recreations at The Guardian. Article contains some Neanderthal nudity. -via Metafilter
Gravity wins again! The Apollo moon landings were the first time humans walked on a celestial body besides Earth, and the astronauts found that it was quite different. While there is less gravity, it still works. But the other forces of physics were no different, so just moving around was a learning experience. And those cumbersome spacesuits didn't help. YouTuber Martian Archaeology put together a blooper reel of sorts from NASA footage. It's okay, since 50 years on, we know they made it back home in one piece. -via Tastefully Offensive
Nappone at the upholstery shop.
Italian photographer Marianna Zampieri presents a series called C-AT Work that features cats who go to work with their humans. Librarians, hair stylists, musicians, craftspeople, office workers, and store owners go about their day as their cat presides over their domain.
Fulvio in his theater.
The goal of this project is always to try to capture the beauty of the relationship that is created between cats and people with whom they share most of the time, demonstrating the great dignity and incredible adaptability of these animals in any situation. All seasoned by the setting that the most diverse work environments can give, creating the astonishment that can be born seeing the cats placed in environments where we are not used to see them.
Nando at the newsstand.
You can see the series in slideshow format at Facebook and more of Zampieri's cat photography at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
Ze Frank suddenly has another True Facts video. This one isn't about some weird animal, but the weird plants that eat animals. He talks about plants eating bugs as payback for us eating plants, but that only works if you feel closely related to insects. And if that's the way you feeel, the video might strike you as a bit gruesome. Contains NSFW language.
In 1958, America's new space agency called NASA launched an extensive search for men who would become astronauts. Of 508 candidates, the Mercury 7 were selected via a battery of physical, psychological, and intellectual tests.
Hopefuls sat in extreme heat and cold, did math in 145-decibel rooms (normal conversation is 60 dB), and spent hours in isolation chambers. On top of all that, candidates took 12 intelligence tests. These exams sought to predict a wealth of unknowns: how the men would maneuver spacecraft, if they could problem-solve midflight, and whether they grasped the science that would keep them aloft.
While the physical tests can't be taken online, Popular Science is offering us the chance to try a small portion of the intelligence tests those men took 60 years ago. I tried it; all I can say it I'm glad the questions aren't timed. Good luck! -via Mental Floss
We know crows are intelligent and good with tools. We know they learn from watching others do things. And in case you didn't know, they hang around train stations in Japan. This crow is using an automated kiosk to buy a ticket. When the machine says "insert credit card," the crow realizes he doesn't have one, but the women at the next machine does -so he takes it! The video stops before we find out if he got a ticket; let's assume the woman took her credit card back. Sure, he could have flown to his destination, but why flap your own wings when you can use someone else's money to ride? -via Digg
Wisteria sinensis, or Chinese wisteria, is blooming all over London. It's been a favorite in the city for a couple of centuries now.
Wisteria Sinensis was unknown in Europe before 1816, when several agents of the East India Company working in China sent cuttings back to England.[3] A 200 year-old vine, growing at Griffin's Brewery in Chiswick, London, planted that same year, is often cited as England's oldest living wisteria plant.[4][5] Over the next several decades the plant became, and remains, one of the quintessential ornamental vines in English gardens. The white-flowering form, Wisteria Sinensis Alba, was discovered in a garden by Botanist Robert Fortune in 1844, from whence he took cuttings for the Royal Horticultural Society.[6] It is most commonly trained along garden walls, along the exterior of buildings, or over a pergola to create avenues of overhanging blossoms during bloom.
The Londonist has a roundup of Instagram pictures of London's lovely wisteria in bloom from just the past week or so. If you want to see more, unrestricted by date or location, check out #wisteria at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake
One thing we don't have enough of is Western movies with giant monsters. There's Valley of the Gwangi (1969), and uh, that's about it. But now Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) brings us a mashup with gunslingers defending the Alamo from a swarm of giant mutant insects! Far Alamo stars John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Yul Brynner, Richard Widmark, James Coburn, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Lee Van Cleef, and a host other actors you'd expect in a classic Western. This shoot-em-up was pieced together from a dozen different films, listed at the vimeo page. -Thanks, Fabrice!
What’s a weird thing your family did that you thought was normal till you moved out? We kept birthday candles in the freezer.
— Georgia Hardstark (@GHardstark) April 19, 2018
It all started with this tweet by podcaster Georgia Hardstark, who asked her Twitter followers what weird thing their family did that they thought were completely normal, until they learned otherwise. "We kept birthday candles in the freezer," Hardstark added.
More than 2,000 tweets answered her questions, including these gems:
When I was 4 my Mum convinced me that every so often fish and birds would change colour. So whenever a pet died and she replaced it she didn't have to tell me.
— JadeSmith (@smithy_jade) April 22, 2018
Our family had a metal gong with a padded mallet that we banged to alert the many siblings that dinner was ready. Ringing the dinner gong was a privilege and guests always freaked out when they heard it. I thought everyone used a dinner gong...
— Christina Roger (@christina_r2013) May 4, 2018
My mum used to randomly declare that we were having a “gross dinner” which meant that we didn’t have to use forks or be polite. My lil bro loved it & would spend the whole meal burping & farting & eating with his mouth open. I hated it.
— Rachael Dean (@rachaelispoetry) April 26, 2018
Ever seen an insulated vest and thought to yourself, there has to be a pants-equivalent to that thing? Well, wonder no more: insulated shorts do exist. But ... why? Are they meant to keep only the upper half of your legs warm?
Via Gear Patrol
The Salem (Illinois) Police Department posted a courtesy alert for its citizens at Facebook.
This message was written on one of our city sidewalks today with sidewalk chalk. As a courtesy, we want to keep our citizens informed. Please, if you have satin sheets or pillowcases, keep them under lock and key as someone apparently wants to worship them!
This is your periodic reminder that if you want to strike fear into the hearts of your fellow men, it helps if you know how to spell. (via reddit)
Great Scott! Someone actually created a children’s book based on the Back To The Future Movie written by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale. I’m in heaven and so will anyone else who is proud to have been raised in the 80’s.
I admit it! I am totally biased when it comes to this book. I am a huge, huge Back To The Future fan. When this book came into our office I practically became giddy.
The book is about 40 pages long and goes through essentially the entire Back To The Future Story line. It starts out by introducing us to Marty McFly who is appropriately gliding around Hill Valley on his skateboard. We meet Doc Brown and Marty’s family. Of course we also meet Biff.
Cats who have human servants know they can dillydally as much as they want. They flaunt their superior position by taking their own sweet time. Why should they be in any hurry for a mere human? And so it is with Simon's Cat. My big tomcat will interrupt work and demand to be let outside, but then after I get up, it takes him forever to actually make it to the back door. He's just asserting his dominion over me, I am sure. -via Tastefully Offensive
Archaeological discoveries of ancient humans keep pushing our knowledge about our species further back in time. The Americas haven't been populated by people as long as other parts of the world, but exactly how long they've been here and how they got here are open subjects we still have a lot to learn about. Occasionally, a skeleton or a skull is found that dates back to the beginnings of their settlement. Real Clear Science give us a list of some of the biggest such discoveries.
Kennewick Man, perhaps the best known and most controversial ancient human remains in the United States, was found jutting from a patch of eroded dirt along the Columbia River near Kennewick Washington just 22 years ago. In life, roughly 9,000 years in the past, he spent much of his time moving around by water, hunting and eating marine animals and drinking glacial meltwater. In death, his remains were constantly the focus of lawsuits between indigenous peoples who sought to bury the remains and archaeologists who sought to learn from them. After DNA tests confirmed that Kennewick Man was closely related to modern day Native Americans, his remains were returned and reburied at an undisclosed location.
Read the stories of five other people who lived thousands of years ago in what is now the United States at Real Clear Science.
(Image credit: Ghedoghedo)
