Can you guess what year a photograph was taken just by looking at it? Then test yourself with Photo Roulette. The game will give you a picture, and you have ten guesses to get it right. Wrong guesses will give you a hint, but it's not as easy as you might think. If there are people in the photo, you can easily narrow down the era by what they are wearing, but landscapes and buildings are really hard to peg. Once you guess the right year (or run out of guesses), you'll get a "view photo" button that takes you to its Library of Congress page and all the information about the image. The picture above is listed as "between 1900 and 1910," but the game made me use several guesses to get to 1900. Try Photo Roulette here. It could be addicting. -via Metafilter
This guy is getting the works: medical check, pressure suit, air supply, mission control team, escort vehicle. He's not an astronaut going into space, but he comes pretty close. This pilot flies a U2S spy plane, cruising at 70,000 feet, so high he can see the limits of our atmosphere.
The U2 is considered the most difficult plane to fly, as it it was designed for minimum weight. At altitude, the pilot must maintain a constant speed, since the difference between the stall speed and the "never exceed" speed is only 12mph. Outside that narrow window, the plane could fall apart. Landing requires contact with a chase car because the pilot cannot see the ground near him, and the slightest angle could drag those wide wings. -via Digg
It's a debate all dog owners have been a part of at one time or another, a debate that many pet owner have a passionate opinion about- should you feed your dog raw meat?
Some dog owners swear by the healthful properties of raw meat, insisting dogs were born to consume raw meat just like their wolven ancestors, but many vets insist feeding them raw meat does more harm than good.
According to a recent study posted on VetRecord bacteria and parasites such as E. coli and Salmonella found in commercial frozen raw meat may hurt a dog's stomach, but the real danger comes from them spreading the bacteria to people:
The recent study in the Veterinary Record analysed 35 commercial frozen raw meat products from eight different brands. It found E. coli in 28 products, Listeria monocytogenes in 19 of them and Salmonella species in seven. Several products also contained parasites. Other studies have previously highlighted similar contamination of raw pet food in Canada, North America and New Zealand.
By comparison, unprocessed raw meat from the butcher is less likely to be an issue than the products in the study, in the same way it is safer to eat rare steak than raw mince.
For dogs, the bacteria and parasites found in food aren’t actually that much of a problem. Dogs are pretty resistant to many of the possible bugs that can be isolated from raw meat and they rarely become ill, though they can suffer gastric illness as a result of Salmonella.
But dogs can become carriers of these bacteria and spread them through their faeces, which can lead to serious illness in humans.
What is especially significant is these food products’ level of contamination with bacteria that are resistant to treatment with antibiotics. This is a concern for both pet and human health. Infections with these bacteria are increasingly difficult to treat, and the spread of antibiotic resistance is a critical public health issue.
If you were a kid in the 1970s, you probably remember the horrors of the health food craze, when carob was said to be a perfectly good substitute for chocolate. So what was wrong with chocolate? It was grown and harvested by mistreated farmers, enriching companies that did other nefarious stuff, and it was expensive. But the word going around was that it was unhealthy, especially the edible sweetened version, for having too much sugar and caffeine. So conscientious mothers made "healthy" cookies, candies, and desserts with carob instead, and we were all cheated of anything resembling the taste of chocolate.
In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a COINTELPRO mission to alienate the left’s next generation. “Delicious in brownies, hot drinks, cakes and ‘Confections without Objections,’ ” the 1968 vegan cookbook “Ten Talents” crowed, noting, too, that it was a proven bowel conditioner. “Give carob a try,” Maureen Goldsmith, the author of “The Organic Yenta,” encouraged, but even her endorsement came with a hedge; in the note to her recipe for carob pudding, she confessed that she still snuck out for actual chocolate from time to time—though less and less often! No one under the age of twelve could stand the stuff. Not the candy bars that encased a puck of barely sweetened peanut butter in a thin, waxy brown shell, nor the cookies—whole wheat, honey-sweetened—studded with carob chunks that refused to melt in the mouth, instead caking unpleasantly between the teeth. My mother—who, to her children’s lasting gratitude, never compromised her pie recipes, even during her peak whole-foods years—told me recently that she was never that fond of carob, either.
Years after the backlash died down, people started to realize that carob was okay if you used it as carob. It's nutritious, has its own taste, and doesn't melt on a long hike. But treating it as chocolate caused youngsters of that time to hate it forever. Read about the rise and fall of carob at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Cari Vander Yacht)
Liz Climo is offering her cute comic characters in Valentine form for your home-printed holiday cards. She says,
Hey everyone! I love you ❤ so I made you some valentines! Click here to get your free, downloadable Liz Climo Valentines! Print out as many as you’d like, cut them out, give them to friends, keep them for yourself, make a little house out of them.. whatever floats your love boat! (Note - there are two files, front and back, and are meant to be double-sided. For best results, print on card stock - I did that at my local print shop, and they turned out great!) ❤ HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY
That's a neat way to have Valentines for your child's entire class that won't be identical to the discount store cards all the other kids will bring. Yeah, you could hand them out to your co-workers, or make a little house out of them. If you do that, please send us a picture.
The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, was the home of Sarah Winchester, widow of rifle magnate William Winchester. She spent 30 years having the house built and expanded and rebuilt and remodeled until it was a sprawling jumble of strange architectural details that made no sense, like staircases that ended in a wall and closets that were only an inch deep. The house was turned into a tourist attraction after Winchester's death. But there were plenty of places that tourists didn't see, due to disrepair, safety concerns, or the fact that some rooms were never finished. Locking up some areas also made taking tourists through just plain easier -after all, the tour already went through 100 rooms. When new manager Walter Magnuson took over in 2015, he made it a point to unlock those rooms.
He did eventually gain access to these hidden spaces, and what he found was both astounding and in keeping with the home’s reputation for eccentricity. Some rooms were missing floorboards, others had been closed off after sustaining severe damage in the 1906 earthquake, and still more were just full of broken tiles. There were entrancing finds, too. He saw jewel-like wallpaper that scattered sunlight into tiny orbs, rows of stained-glass windows mounted inexplicably at waist height, and secret balconies that offered a bird’s-eye view of the many-gabled roof. “It was just in a constant state of becoming,” says Magnuson, who came to Winchester from a senior position at Disneyland. “Some of these spaces, you have a lot of questions: What was this room’s purpose? Who stayed here? What was Sarah thinking?”
Two years of work ensued, and now those hidden spaces are open the public. Read about the restoration project at the Winchester Mystery House at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Spiel)
A.I Artificial intelligence (black) by Geek Me That
People keep saying a future with artificial intelligence will be bleak, with robots and androids either self destructing or destroying us all thanks to their newfound "consciousness", but if C3 and R2 are any indication A.I. is going to be awesome! Who wouldn't want a droid that speaks every language in the known galaxy by your side while adventuring? And if you don't think R2 would be the most radical robot friend ever you must be an anti-droidite- because he's been bip-bop-booping in my heart since he first rolled on screen!
Get geared up for some out of this world adventure with this A.I. Artificial Intelligence t-shirt by Geek Me That, it's a great way to alleviate people's fears about artificial intelligence and show love for your favorite movie droids at the same time!
Visit Geek Me That's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more designs that do compute:
| Michelangelo | this is not a democracy anymore | The guardians team | I'll find you |
View more designs by Geek Me That | More Sci-Fi T-shirts | New T-Shirts
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
A couple of hundred years ago, doctors discovered a horrifying -and possibly fatal- medical disorder caused by "abuse of the genitals." They called it spermatorrhoea, which means involuntary ejaculation. France's preeminent physician of the time, Claude François Lallemand, wrote about the disorder in the 1830s.
During a period of fourteen years, I have collected more than one hundred and fifty cases in which involuntary seminal discharges were sufficiently serious to disorder the health of the patients considerably, and even sometimes, to cause death.
You know that today this would be called "nocturnal emission" or more colloquially "wet dream," which is correlated somewhat with masturbation, but neither is considered harmful. However, in the early 19th century, young men died of all kinds of unknown causes. If he was known to suffer from spermatorrhoea, it could easily be blamed for his death. But rather than studying the reason behind the, uh, event, doctors tried ways to keep it from happening, such as the invention detailed above. It delivered a small electric shock at the first hint of an erection, which woke the patient up and saved him from a wet dream. And it's not the most horrifying device invented to combat spermatorrhoea, which you can see and read about at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company
Brutalist architecture looks exactly like it sounds- cold and stony, devoid of embellishment but made to last, with an overall look that says "you have to be tough to live here".
This austere style of architecture was popular in the USSR and eastern Europe for obvious reasons, and this circular apartment building in Moscow nicknamed "Bublik" is the pinnacle of Brutalism.
"Bublik" was built by Soviet architect Eugene Stamo and engineer Aleksandr Markelov in the Ochakovo-Matveevskoe district of Moscow in 1972, and although six "Bubliks" (Russian for bagel) were supposed to be built only two were ever made:
This massive building holds 913 apartments and as far as architects claims, five more similar buildings were supposed to be built before 1980 Summer Olympics.
Five buildings resembling the Olympic sign were intended to be constructed, but as they were too massive it would be hard to associate them with actual Olympic rings. Soviet housing was oriented strictly on practicality and affordability but it turned out these buildings were expensive to maintain so the whole project was abandoned and only two stand to this day.
-Via design you trust
There are football fans, and there are Jeopardy! fans, and sometimes there is an overlap, but not on this day. Alex Trebek did not hesitate to scorn these nerds about their lack of gridiron savvy. I'm not surprised; I didn't know any of the answers, either. These contestants have spent years learning about authors, geography, and potent potables instead of the NFL.
It's true that American football is losing ground among audiences. I read somewhere that the reasons are mainly 1. that television overall is losing its audience, and 2. concussions and brain damage. -via Tastefully Offensive
There's a lot more to wine than just type, color and alcohol content, but you really don't need to know a whole lot more than that to enjoy wine. Wait, let me rephrase that- there's not much more to know if you want to enjoy wine casually rather than embracing the science and the culture like a vintner or sommelier.
Most of us started out drinking wine for that warm and fuzzy feeling the alcohol provides but soon found ourselves wanting to learn more about wine to enhance our enjoyment of the drink.
Well, whatever you want to know aside from a breakdown of varieties, flavors or prices is probably covered on this chart created by Wine Investments appropriately entitled A Beginner's Guide To Wine. Cheers!
-Via Lifehacker
Some domestic dog breeds have floppy ears, although the wolves they descended from do not. Charles Darwin puzzled over this as far back as 1869. But what's even weirder is that some domestic pigs, rabbits, goats, and cows have floppy ears, too, even though their wild counterparts do not. Does the act of domesticating animals make them relax their ears? It can't be that simple. And it's not.
Scientists believe it has to do with neural crest cells, which are explained in this video from Skunk Bear. You can read more about the Neural Crest Cell hypothesis here. -via The Kid Should See This
Did you ever get accused of cheating as a kid because your test had the exact same answers as another student in your class?
It's one thing if the person was sitting right next to you, but when you were sitting on the opposite side of the room from each other it makes you feel like the teacher's got it out for you.
But as this Lolnein comic shows, if you're friends with a copy machine it's your own damn fault!
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
Nina Paley brings us a new episode in her grand project Seder-Masochism, in which Moses is confronted by a slew of ancient goddesses. They sing "You Gotta Believe" by the Pointer Sisters, from the 1976 movie Car Wash. Paley is into experimental methods of animation (as we've seen in other posts), and this one uses gifs animated from still pictures.
The goddess gifs used are available here. You may recall Paley's other awesome musical sequences from the movie-in-progress, like Death Of The Firstborn Egyptians and This Land is Mine. The new one is quite a bit less gruesome. -via Laughing Squid
Redditor spacecatapult is a technology teacher at an elementary school. He/she posted this time-lapse of a project called Pixel Place. Each student places a "pixel," or a small piece of paper, on the board during every class. You can see that they started out with no direction at all, but as time passed, they started working as a team. Spacecatapult took a picture every day.
I've branded this activity as "Pixel Place" because it allows students to make a physical connection with the term pixel. It's actually been very helpful when we talk about pixels in the context of coding and computers. It's also been great for all of the social reasons you are likely considering in your thesis already. At the start of the year, we mostly just had chaos. Students wanted to just make their mark somewhere. Students are seeing that they can do more and better things when they work together. They even leave sticky notes on the walls to communicate idea with students from other classes - this is truly a collaboration between 500 students. There is also a real sense of a "greater good". Sometimes kids are upset by random pixels or attempts at ruining something made by others. The larger group always seems to value making it look good though, so most vandalism is quickly undone. It's been pretty powerful, especially for something that students only spend about 30 seconds a week doing.
-via Kevin O'Connor
