We are coming to the end of another Shark Week, and once again we must confront the difference between real shark research and the exciting movies in which they play the villain. Jill McAndrew of the Long Island Aquarium knows sharks, and is happy to burst your bubble about the biggest shark films. -via Buzzfeed
Antique piano keys, scrimshaw, and those weird hooks that grandpa hangs his hat on... they are all made from the solid parts of animals. But what's the difference between ivory, bone, antler, and horn, and what makes some more valuable than others? Ivory, which is dental material from elephants, whales, and walruses, may be valuable because of scarcity due to legal restrictions, but there are other reasons it was once so popular.
Ivory is also valued and appreciated for its structural properties. The layers of dentine within the tusk form a wavy, interlacing pattern (or 'grain'). This offers different surface effects and also gives ivory its strength, making it suitable for long-lasting, detailed carving. An oily substance within the pattern's cavities helps reduce brittleness and give a smooth finish that can be enhanced with polishing to reveal a range of colours from bright white through to shades of yellow-brown. Indian elephant ivory is generally whiter and softer than African ivory. When soaked in warm water ivory expands very slightly making it easier to carve. In China master craftsmen may have used this process to ease the manufacture of the multi-layered 'puzzle' balls, where each ball is a detached layer carved within another, and which together represent principals of Chinese philosophy. The Northwest Coast Style drumstick-head is an excellent example of how the individual characteristics of one piece of ivory have been used to show off the skills and traditions of the Haida people of North America.
Bone, antler, and horn have their own unique properties, and are available from a larger number of species. Read more about these various materials at the Pitt River Museum. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Victor H. Billings)
Star Wars: Episode IX, expected in December of 2019, will complete the nine-movie Skywalker saga. Filming is set to begin, so there's really no way to keep the working cast a secret. Therefore, Disney has announced who will be returning to work on the film, who will not, and who has been hired for new roles. That announcement contains spoilers, although you will probably encounter those same spoilers again and again in the next year-and-a-half. The biggest one, or maybe second biggest, is:
Show Quote
Read what we know so far at Star Wars. -via Digg
Yeah, America is big, so we developed four lane roads to get us from town to town faster. Then four-lane roads were extended into town to alleviate traffic. But do we really need four-lane roads in a city? City streets are safer with traffic going slower. To achieve that, some cities are putting their streets on a diet, making them smaller and slower. So far, that's making street use easier for pedestrians and cyclists, while still not causing worse traffic for drivers -in most places. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended. -via Laughing Squid
Source: WalletHub
This map shows which cities are the "most educated," meaning the percentage of educated adults combined with the measured quality of schools. And by "cities," they mean the 150 largest metropolitan statistical areas, which often combines nearby cities and their suburbs. The top five are no surprise.
1. Ann Arbor, MI
2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
3. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
4. Durham-Chapel Hill, NC
5. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA
What can you do with this information? It depends on what you want. If you are competing for a job, you may want to avoid an area with so many highly educated rivals, but if you want to cultivate a stimulating circle of friends, make a beeline for those places. You know what they say, "If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room." You can see the complete ranked list and some explanation of the methodology at WalletHub. -via Thrillist
An apartment in San Francisco seems odder the more you look at it. It has three levels, and you enter into the apartment through the kitchen on the lowest level. To get through the kitchen, you need to avoid the diagonal building brace. Why is that in the middle of the kitchen? Was this a required addition for earthquake reinforcement, or a leftover from the original construction? The building is a conversion, but there's no reason to leave it out in the open like that. Why couldn't they have put a counter or a partial wall over the obstruction? That would have been as easy as customizing the cabinets around it. Imagine trying to evacuate the building in a hurry at night.
This is listed as a two-bedroom loft, but looking at the floor plan, I do not see a second bedroom. The top floor has a "sitting room" which could be used as a bedroom, but the occupant would have to go down two flights of stairs to reach the main bathroom, or else walk through the master bedroom on the floor below. There's an elevator listed, but I don't see it.
The real kicker is that this apartment recently sold for a little over a million dollars. You can explore the listing at Movoto. -via Boing Boing
The annual St. Teresa's Charity Pantomime Horse Race pits teams of humans dressed as four-legged beasts against each other in a mercifully short race.
The St. Teresa’s Charity Pantomime Horse Race at the UK’s Catterick Racecourse raises funds for St. Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington. In its third annual running, the race welcomed four entrants: Heavy Brigade in the cow suit, racing for the Royal Dragoon Guards; Unicorn on the Cob in the unicorn suit, racing for marketing agency Purple Creative; #Professionals in the horse suit, a last-minute entry from Racing UK; and Wonky Donkey, racing for Lookers Volkswagen.
Spectators will be forgiven for thinking that alcohol may have been involved. -via Metafilter
What makes a great special effects movie? Showing us things that aren't seen in real life, and making us believe them. Whether a movie is good at that depends on a lot of things, not the least of which is audience expectations. Seeing two copies of one actor in a frame isn't a big deal these days, but 100 years ago, it was a spectacular use of available technology. The emergence of the Imperial cruiser at the beginning of Star Wars was very impressive in 1977 because of the clever staging of the shot, but it only worked the first time you saw it. Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation was amazing in its time, as was CGI in the '90s, before we got used to it. But special effects keep getting better. Just ask anyone who saw the 1958 movie The Fly (which was a great story) and then saw the 1986 version.
Most of the time, you’re lucky to get one good monster design out of a monster movie. The Fly, David Cronenberg’s remake of the ’50s sci-fi schlock programmer, offers half a dozen: all stages of horrific deterioration experienced by scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) after he accidentally splices his DNA with that of a housefly. Chris Walas’ Oscar-winning makeup work—all deformed flesh and detaching body parts—is unforgettably repulsive. But even as The Fly makes very literal the real-life horror of looking in the mirror and not recognizing what you see, the effects keep Goldblum himself recognizable even as he becomes more insect than man. In other words, he’s still able to act under all those prosthetics, which makes this the rare “special effects movie” that will drop your jaw and break your heart. [A.A. Dowd]
This progression of movie special effects over time is the reason why the AV Club put their top 50 picks for special effects movies in chronological order instead of ranking them. Reading through them is a lesson in film history that you're sure to enjoy.
Everyone has weird workplace stories, or at least everyone who is old enough to have held a job or two. I once had a summer position where the job description involved an activity that was technically illegal -I stapled posters on telephone poles. What was the weirdest thing your boss ever asked you to do?
Yeah, that's weird. I have a degree in psychology, and I know interpreting dreams is a fool's errand. The upside is that these people have some good stories to tell years later.
You can see 27 pictofacts about weird orders from bosses that you are glad aren't your boss at Cracked.
This is how I feel hearing my daughter and her new husband speaking French. The difference is that I don't even pretend to understand. The closed captions on this video have a lot of [speaking French], so I don't know if Keegan Michael-Key is speaking actual French or French-sounding gibberish. The auto-translate doesn't help, because it translates the English captions, not the spoken language. -via Digg
Update: It's real French. Not a real French menu, though.
Got bit + dragged by a 10 ft (3 m) croc and all I got were these scars. Today all wounds have healed (finally!), bruising gone, + can walk w/o (much) pain. || Me mordió y arrastró un cocodrilo y esto es como se ve mi pierna! Gracias que estoy bien y puedo caminar! #SharkWeek pic.twitter.com/Rdp0R6IrO1
— Melissa Cristina Márquez (@mcmsharksxx) July 24, 2018
Australian marine biologist Melissa Cristina Márquez was looking for a hammerhead shark south of Cuba while filming a documentary for Shark Week. Her mind was on sharks when she felt pressure on her leg. She thought it might be her flipper caught on something, but it was a crocodile... which began pulling her away by her leg! Luckily, while Márquez had never before encountered a crocodile up close, she knew something about alligators, and was calm enough to realize she must not move her leg even the slightest.
I was in its mouth, which is highly receptive to texture, to taste. I hoped that it wasn’t not biting me too hard. It didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel pain. I felt really, really hard pressure, but no actual pain. So I was hoping, “Alright, hopefully, because I have the scuba suit on, no blood is coming out, so it doesn’t taste that. It doesn’t feel the meat, essentially, of my leg. It just tastes the neoprene, and it’s gonna let me go.”
I was like, “Don’t struggle,” because two things can happen. Crocodiles will either bite down harder, and then I would start feeling pain, and then: There goes all my rational thinking, really. If it bit down harder, not only would it possibly be painful, but it also could have taken out a chunk of my leg. Or, the worst scenario is that it rolled. That’s how a lot of them incapacitate their prey.
Márquez suffered numerous bite marks, from which the biggest danger was infection, but is on the mend. Her new wetsuit, however, was completely destroyed. Márquez told the complete story of being dragged by a crocodile to Jezebel, with a unique science perspective, and it's a compelling story.
The New Yorker brings us an adventure set in a very flammable location -a city made completely of corrugated cardboard! When a vehicle ignites, it's panic time. Fighting this fire is a dangerous proposition, because even the fire hose is made of cardboard. The story is a mixture of funny, terrifying, and dumbfounding. What idiot opens a fireworks shop in a city made of cardboard? -via Metafilter
Most of the restroom graffiti I've encountered is "Anne loves John" or "For a good time, call..." plus some random words you don't want your kids to learn. But occasionally, there are clever gems that are worth taking a picture.
Of course, it's still vandalism, and I would never endorse taking a Sharpie into a public toilet. Or a private one, for that matter. But the quality of the thoughts behind those scribbles seems to have improved in the last few decades.
See 19 masterpieces of restroom graffiti at Buzzfeed.
Stonehenge was not always a protected treasure. Ever since it was noticed as something strange and different, people desired a piece of it, and literally took those pieces home with them. A visit to Stonehenge meant taking a hammer and chisel to get a piece of rock for one's collection or mantelpiece. During the Victorian era when travel and tourism was on the rise, the vandalism reached a fever pitch- people not only took chunks of rock home, they left their names carved in the stones.
In 1871, The Times published another series of letters regarding the state of Stonehenge, initiated by a writer who signed off as “A Vacation Rambler.” “There were many visitors,” the Rambler wrote of a recent visit to the site, “and a constant chipping of stone broke the solitude of the place.” The monument’s owner, Edmund Antrobus, 3rd Baronet, retorted in a published response a week later that “considering the thousands who annually visit it, I think the public deserve much credit for the very little damage done.” Antrobus did report several disturbing tales of vandalism, however, including an exchange with a “respectable paterfamilias,” who, upon being asked by Antrobus not to use his hammer and chisel, shot back, “And who the deuce are you, sir?” Told that Antrobus was the owner, the man responded that he believed the stones to be “public property.”
A hundred years ago, the last private owner of Salisbury's Stonehenge donated it to the British government. Only then was any real effort put into preserving the ancient monoliths, even though academics had been complaining about vandalism for centuries. Read about the desecration of Stonehenge at Atlas Obscura.
(Image source: Library of Congress)
Just because I'm a very boring tax lawyer doesn't mean I can't have an otter tape dispenser... pic.twitter.com/K9z5SFFT0e
— LT (@ladydoomfiyah) July 24, 2018
This question was posed at Ask A Manager:
I’m not in the business world yet, but I figure this will be relevant for when I am: in shopping for supplies to take with me to school, my dad made a comment about “lack of maturity” in my taste and how he was concerned it would hurt my reputation. (As he put it, “you’re going to be the weird girl at the weird school.”) In the future, will things like this really affect my credibility as a worker? I know things like a pencil case that’s also a stuffed sloth is probably too much for a workplace, but what about a bright pink three-hole punch, a glittery notebook and pen, or a file folder which has a snail design on it?
The answer, in a nutshell, is no, you're not weird, but you might dial it back just until you get your foot in the door. Various professionals jumped into a Twitter thread about the question to let the reader know she will be in good company on the job. Some of the office accoutrements displayed are causing envy.
Plus, my coworkers’ favorite: The Cat pic.twitter.com/2UyuOM7HTx
— Rachel Magargle, Mother of Kitties (@rjmagargle) July 24, 2018
-via Metafilter
