The Death Star is the most iconic space stations in the history of sci-fi and one of the most recognizable symbols of Star Wars, and yet Luke and the Rebel Alliance figured out how to destroy it with two well-placed proton torpedoes.
They knew about the Death Star's built-in flaw thanks to some stolen plans, but we never got to see how the massive space station was built in the movies.
But now thanks to the hard work of two geeky and talented brothers named Benjamin and Isaac Botkin we can see how hard it would be, and how many pieces it would take, for the Empire to build a Death Star.
And with Benjamin's epic score accompanying the complex timelapse animation it's a mesmerizing look at the making of a legend.
Oh, if one person only had the power to do this! But alas, cultural shifts take a critical number of people cooperating, and we don't even know what that number is, much less know how to get them to cooperate, especially on something that's not critical. But you never know what will catch on. Language is always evolving. Speculating on what a society in the far future will think about the artifacts we leave behind can be amusing, and it's purely optimistic to think that there will even be a society in the far future. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Check out the hovertext and push the red button for more at the comic page.
When Luca Iaconi-Stewart thinks of a paper airplane, it's not the kind you fold up and toss, hoping it will glide. He's thinking about his intricate sculpture of a Boeing 777. The one he's been building for years, in excruciating detail, all from paper.
It's not a toy; it's art. He's recreating all the details of a real airliner, from the wing struts down to the rows of passenger seats. The doors swing on their own hinges, the landing gear retracts, and you know that eventually, he'll have a little paper pilot. He even keeps the "plane crashes," the discarded parts that didn't quite work. Now, that's dedication! -via Digg
At the NeatoShop our love of the old school will never die, and whether you're in to radical retro looks from the 80s and 90s, funky and groovy graphics from the 70s or something fun from way, way back the NeatoShop has what you're looking for!
And until January 14th all shirts in the NeatoShop are on sale up to 20% off, including longsleeve t-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, and even the shirts for kids and babies are on sale through Sunday!
It's not a crime to love the looks from a different decade
Languages are different, and use sounds that are different from each other. But people who learn a new language often retain an accent from their original language. How does that happen? Folks tend to retain bits and pieces of their original language when operating in a new one. This happens at such an elemental level that we don't even realize it. You don't see it in people who learned two or more languages in their early childhood, because they are both his "native language."
This picture was taken by Staff Sergeant Martin Riley of the Marine Corps in Korea. The image of a Marine feeding a two-week-old kitten with an eyedropper offered a tender moment in a brutal war, and was published in over 1,700 newspapers in 1953.
In the middle of the Korean War, this kitten found herself an orphan. Luckily, she found her way into the hands of Marine Sergeant Frank Praytor. He adopted the two-week-old kitten and gave her the name “Miss Hap” because, he explained, “she was born at the wrong place at the wrong time”.
When you trace the roots of certain alien creatures you might be surprised by what you find on their family tree, and you may discover their distant relatives aren't so far out after all. Take the Porgs for instance- they look like a cross between a guinea pig and a penguin and that's exactly what they are, but between the cross-breeding of such different species and their harsh life on the coast of Ahch-To the Porgs have become a bit of a pest. And if you're ever looking to clear a Porg's nest from your starship give Chewie a call and he'll light up the barbecue for you!
Share some knowledge about sci-fi critters by wearing this Porg Fusion t-shirt by NemiMakeit, it's a fun way to show love for your favorite new space creatures and may result in people going "squee!" at the sight of your awesome new shirt.
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!
The live shot from KTVU's camera overlooking a neighborhood of San Francisco was definitely live yesterday, because an unexpected visitor showed up during the mere half-minute that the weather report used it. The result was not unlike a 1950s monster movie.
The curious crow took all the attention away from the actual forecast, but meteorologist Mark Tamayo took it in stride. A viewer is a viewer, even when it's a crow looking in from the other side of the camera! -via Digg
Romy McCloskey raises butterflies. She's also a costume designer. One of a crop of ten butterflies emerged with a torn wing, caused by her cat playing with the chrysalis. She knew it would never fly on its own. So McCloskey got her tools together and repaired the wing, using a wing from another butterfly that had died. A wing transplant, so to speak. It sounds really risky, but without a new wing, the butterfly's chances of flying, or even surviving, were zero.
Ta-da! He's finished! You can see that the black lines in is upper right wing don't match up 100%, and if you look at his lower right wing is missing the black dot that indicates male gender. Oh, and the white on his wing is the talc used to make sure any stray glue doesn't make the wings stick together.
Fast food workers meet hungry people at the drive-thru window on a daily basis, and they also get to meet the customers' dogs who, if asked, are usually just as hungry as their owners.
That's why most dogs greet the person at the drive-thru window warmly, because they can smell the food cooking behind them so they're hoping for a handout.
Einstein Bagel Company employee Natasha Jones takes a picture of all the dogs that greet her at the drive-thru window whether they're friendly or full of snarls, then she shares their pic on her Instagram account EBDogs4096.
Natasha's account is a sweet look at the friendly canine faces she sees at work every day, and since she hooks them up with a free doggie bagel they've stopped wanting to go for a walk and now want to go for a ride in the car- straight to the drive-thru!
If you had an email address in the late 1990s, you probably received a video file titled “badday.mpg” at least once. It was big- 5MB, and took a while to download, if you were lucky enough to have a video player on your computer. The 26-second video was worth it, though, as we saw a man sitting in his office cubicle losing his temper at a computer. He picks up his keyboard and whacks the monitor so hard it falls off the desk! It was one of the earliest examples of a viral video, and it made Vinny Licciardi a star. Twenty years later, the video is still shared.
That the clip still resonates is a testament to our broader cultural feelings about technology, especially vis-a-vis the workplace. “I’m kind of amazed it’s still going around as much as it is, but I think everyone can relate to that moment,” Licciardi says. “They’re so ticked off because their software is not working, or there’s some glitch, and everybody’s wanted to do that at one point in their life.”
At least one sneaker containing a human foot washes ashore in the Pacific Northwest every year, and while this sounds like the premise of a murder mystery it's actually a fairly normal occurrence and not the result of foul play.
In December, 2017 human Mike Jonz and his dog Taz discovered a left foot wearing a white sock inside a black sneaker with a Velcro closure on a beach in British Columbia, the tibia and fibula still attached. So more of a leg than just a foot but a creepy find nonetheless, the kind which is so common on these coastlines there's a Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries Wikipedia page.
So where are all these feet coming from:
“The BC [British Columbia] Coroners Service has been able to identify eight of the previous 12 feet, belonging to six individuals,” the agency said in a statement. “In none of the cases was any foul play involved.”
For starters, there are simply a lot of corpses in these waters. Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has jurisdiction along the Seattle-Tacoma coast of Puget Sound, explained that this is a consequence of having a densely populated area on the coast.
Suicides and drownings are somewhat regular events around any body of water, and sometimes people who die of natural causes on the shoreline also get swept into the ocean.
Why do they wash up so often in this particular area?:
As for why body parts so often end up on the shore in the Salish Sea and not around other metro areas bordering water, like the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, Parker MacCready, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, said the story is simple. “Things that float at the ocean surface move with the currents, but also are pushed a bit by the wind, and this can be significant in getting them to shore,” he wrote in an email. “The prevailing winds here [around the Salish Sea] are west to east, and so floating stuff in this part of the Pacific gets blown to the coast effectively.”
Entertainment took some strange forms before movie theaters and television. There were circuses, sing-alongs, and running down to the morgue to see the dead bodies. At least they did that in France in the 19th century, when the Paris Morgue had picture windows set up for the public to peer through.
The Morgue may have existed so that friends and family of the dead could identify anonymous bodies, but few visitors came with any intention of looking for a missing person. They had a single goal: to see the dead up-close. The more gruesome or mysterious a person’s death, the more tourists showed up to see their body.
As USC history professor Vanessa R. Schwartz writes, “The Morgue served as a visual auxiliary to the newspaper, staging the recently dead who had been sensationally detailed by the printed word.” Whenever newspapers reported on an unknown decapitated person or a bloodied trunk on display, tens of thousands of people flocked to the Morgue to see it.
Not only did the visitors augment the news stories with a visual inspection that photography would later fill, but they imagined themselves as amateur sleuths, speculating on the cause of death. Read about the crowds who flocked to the Paris Morgue, and some spectacular cases they witnessed, at Atlas Obscura.
Most of us have an image of our ideal selves cemented in our minds, an image we can see clear as day in our heads but can't seem to properly render or describe so that others can see how we'd really like to look.
But photographer Scott Chasserot came up with a pretty clever way to discover how people wish they looked based on their brain waves for his idealized portrait series Original Ideal:
Chasserot took simple and unadorned head shots of his volunteers, then by using an editing software, he made dozens of altered versions based on the “scientifically established canons of beauty.”
By presenting the edited photos to the volunteers while they wore EEG headsets, Chasserot was able to analyze their brain waves and identify which version they preferred the most based on positive neural reactions. The preferred photo was then labeled as their “ideal” appearance.
“What do we find instinctively beautiful in the human face and how does this translate to self-image? What assumptions would we make about another person if we could see their ideal self-image? Original Ideal combines portrait photography and neuroscience to isolate the subjects’ ideal self image, a cerebrally sincere preference obtained by circumventing conscious thought.”
There's always an answer to your health questions. Not necessarily the right answer, but an answer anyway. Some are from tried-and-true adages handed down from generation to generation, while others are from experts with diplomas. Then there's WebMD, a modern phenomenon that will convince you that you have cancer or some horrible condition you've never heard of. There's always one of those conditions that will match your symptoms, even if you probably just have a cold. This comic is from Alarmingly Bad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
