Tuariki John Edward Delamere of New Zealand threw a big wrench into the sport of the long jump when he launched into a front flip in competition in 1974. This move can add inches to a jump, although it seems like magic of some sort to us non-athletes. A gymnast would understand, and an article from Wired explains the physics. Anyway, the track and field folks call this a somersault jump instead of a flip, so you know they are completely separated from gymnastics. Delamere made quite a splash when he debuted the move at a championship meet. And officials ultimately deemed the somersault jump to be too dangerous, which also tells you they had never even watched gymnastics. Something tells me the real reason that this move was banned is because everyone would do it until the long jump would be completely out of reach for track and field athletes who weren't also gymnasts. Delamere went on to serve in New Zealand's Parliament. -via Kottke

This sea border is only 22 miles across at its narrowest, but even birds and fish don't cross it. In 1859, British scientist Alfred Russel Wallace identified it and another scientist later named it the Wallace Line in his honor.

The animal life on either side of this line in the East Indies evolved separately because the Wallace Line marks the boundaries between tectonic plates. The straits along this border are narrow, but very deep. It's not completely unknown for animals to cross it, but modern scientists still see the Wallace Line as the site for an abrupt change in the distributions of many species.

-via Laughing Squid

Sky News reports that David Game College, a private school in London, has created a class of 20 students that are taught entirely by artificial intelligences. These students are preparing for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) that assesses completion of secondary education.

The AIs evaluate what students need help with to prepare for the exam, then creates customized computer-based lessons for them. Much of the instruction is conducted in virtual reality. The school's administration argues that the AIs avoid mistakes that human teachers make and offer precise teaching based on the ongoing evaluation of teach student in the class.

The college still employs human teachers--for now--who teach soft skills, such as public speaking.

-Thanks, Bruce!

A kitchen is built for work, and the placement of the tools involved is important to the work flow. For safety and efficiency, a microwave should be placed between waist-high and the user's head level. But that's not the only factor to keep in mind. My microwave is bigger than it should be, and sits too low over the stove. I have to use a light to see the oven controls underneath and I have to pull out the stove to use the canner.

Not everyone puts thought into how an appliance will be used before they decide where to put it, meaning landlords. Homeowners may find they have little choice in where to put a microwave. A fairly new subreddit called Microwave Too High is starting to take off. It chronicles awkward microwave placement from on top of the refrigerator to hanging from the ceiling, and sometimes even near the floor. All these places make a microwave difficult to use and even dangerous when hot food comes out. Check them all out, and keep all this in mind when you arrange your own kitchen. -via Boing Boing

If you enjoyed those pictures, you might also like TV Too High and WTFaucet.

(Image credit: jamesross801)

We all love seeing a dog (or a cat) ride a skateboard, and some have become very good at it. You'll see that a dog climbs on a skateboard, and then pushes off with one back leg. Simone Giertz (previously at Neatorama) has a dog that cannot do that, because Scraps only has one rear leg. How can she rig up a skateboard so that Scraps can use it? Giertz wanted to make it so that Scraps could steer the contraption by balancing on her front legs, and Giertz could control the forward motion. She enlisted the help of a children's robotics club that she met while making a LEGO ad, for which she was apparently paid in LEGO blocks.

So what we have here is a video that contains a dog, kids, robotics, LEGO, skateboarding, and Simone Giertz. There's even a cat cameo. What else could you ask for? No, there's no flamethrower, sorry. -via Nag on the Lake

I had two hamburgers for breakfast this morning. This fixings were pretty simple, including pickles and onions. They were certainly nothing as exotic as this culinary marvel from, of course, Japan. Perhaps I should have scrounged for a pear, sliced it up, and added it to my burgers because Sora News 24 tells us that adding pear slices to a hamburger really works.

Dom Dom, a well-established hamburger chain in Japan, now offers Asian Pears (pyrus pyrifolia) on teriyaki burgers for about $5.30 USD. Reporter Casey Baseel says that the sweetness of the pear mixes perfectly with the mayonaise and teriyaki flavors.

-via Joseph Mallozi

Cosplayer Ashley Ruhl calls this her "Badonkagonk" costume. She wore it to the recent Dragon Con in Atlanta. It's inspired by the GNK power droid, commonly known as the Gonk in its occasional appearances in the Star Wars franchise.

What does a Gonk do? Well, this Gonk spits out a ribbon that says, "GONK" from its printer slot. Within Star Wars, though, it's basically a battery that walks around on short, stubby legs. Ms. Ruhl's fishnet-covered legs are quite different and give the hapless Gonk a more aesthetically appealing appearance.

Dustin Ballard's There I Ruined It project continues to enchant audiences with its inventive juxtopositions of musicians with radically different themes and genres. In this video, Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath mixes it up with the wholesomeness associated with the late folk singer John Denver.

"War Pigs" is a vigorously anti-war song from 1970, the same time that Denver's career was beginning its ascent. Black Sabbath was vaguely referring to the Vietnam War, of which the UK was not a participant. Denver was largely silent about Vietnam, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of detente between the US and the USSR. So this musical synthesis isn't too far from reality.

The trouble with fantastical legends from antiquity is that they change over time. Storytellers embellish the accounts to make them more exciting or more meaningful. The oldest versions of these stories may have been lost forever, but the best yarns begin with a grain of truth. Evidence of those grains of truth emerge when archaeologists discover the remains of the places where those stories were supposed to have occurred.

The King Arthur legends may have been based on a real person, although not in the form he takes in the stories. The places associated with Arthur are real, and more discoveries are made in those places all the time. The city of Troy figures heavily in Greek mythology, and has been unearthed gradually over 150 years of excavations in Turkey. The lost city of El Dorado could be hiding right under our noses. The Pool of Siloam was lost in Jerusalem for thousands of years before it was discovered in 2004.  Read about these and other ancient places that were relegated to mythology until they were found, at Smithsonian.

"Equal protection under the law" is part of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, but it's not always practiced. There is a city ordinance in Cleveland, Ohio, that states a woman cannot wear patent leather shoes. The reason behind that is the fear that men will use the reflective surface to see up a woman's skirt! Another Cleveland regulation stipulates that a woman cannot show her cleavage. Not that anyone is enforcing these rules today, but why are they still on the books?

Some states once had laws that prohibited women from working night shift jobs, because they were so weak and frail. Up until 1923, many states had laws against women wearing pants. Women in Washington State were prohibited from sitting at a bar until a lawsuit in 1969. They could be served if they were sitting at a table, though. These are all part of a roundup of strange, sexist laws in the United States. Most have been overturned, but you may be surprised at how recently that happened. A few of these laws are still valid, although not enforced, because who has time for such nonsense?

Europeans who colonized Africa had trouble sending their horses to sub-Saharan countries, because they would be bitten by flies and died of the diseases those flies carried. The obvious answer was to domesticate zebras to ride and carry cargo instead. Not a good idea. While zebras had some immunity from the diseases that killed horses, they did not want to be domesticated. Zebras aren't just striped horses; they are wild animals that are distantly related to horses. And the reason they could survive among all those disease-carrying flies were the distinctive stripes they developed. Nature knew that fly bites were more dangerous to these creatures than the lions that ate them, so zebras invented their own kind of dazzle camouflage. This TED-Ed lesson from Cella Wright covers the research done to find out why zebras abandoned the kind of brown camouflage most animals use for flamboyant stripes. -via Laughing Squid

A scientific study our of Spain does not refer to prehistoric cave people, but a community of Christians weho lived in manmade caves carved out of the cliffside at Las Gobas for hundreds of years. Data from burials in their cemetery are dated from the 7th to the 11th centuries, so the community was founded after the Roman Empire receded from Spain, while the Visigoths ruled. The community stayed in the caves during the Muslim conquest, and then built a small village outside the caves in the 10th century, although they kept using the cave church for another hundred years.

DNA from human remains tells a story of a small group founded by related men, in which marriages were kept within the community, leaving evidence of inbreeding. Genetic material from the bacteria and viruses they carried tell us more about where the people came from and who they encountered over time. Injuries indicate the group was no stranger to violence. Still, each discovery raises more questions. Read what science can and cannot tell us of the cave-dwellers of Las Gobas despite their lack of documentation at Ars Technica.  

(Image credit: Iapmetoj)

     

Instagram user @nn.hcafe prepares astonishing meals that look almost too good to eat. They're true works of art that wow our senses with their surreal forms.

This cake, which resembles a piece of skyline, is one of her more exemplary pieces. Both the clouds and the outside atmosphere are made of coconut-flavored gelatins. She makes the clouds first, then adds them to the transluscent gelatin as it hardens. You can see a video and how-to video here.

-via Totally Gourmet

It's always a good idea to keep control over the rights to a song you wrote. A famous case is Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You." Elvis Presley wanted to record the song in 1974, but Colonel Tom Parker demanded that Elvis get half the publishing rights, and Dolly said no. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston sang the song and made Dolly "enough money to buy Graceland." But it doesn't always turn out so well.

The song "Without You" went to number #1 when Harry Nilsson released it from his album Nilsson Schmilsson in 1971. Mariah Carey's version in 1994 became a global hit. What you might not know is that the song was written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans for their band Badfinger. They recorded for the 1970 album No Dice, but it was never released as a single. The songwriters were thrilled when Nilsson's cover became a hit. Surely they would enjoy royalties from the song, but it was not to be. Ham committed suicide by hanging in 1975, after their business manager ran off with the band's money. Evans did the same in 1983, after an argument over the royalties to "Without You."

You can hear Badfinger's original recording of "Without You," along with five other songs that became big hits in cover versions, but not for their obscure original rock recordings, at Cracked.

Animals of the Namib desert in Namibia flock to a waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park, and you can follow them anytime with a dedicated live stream. At five this morning (11AM in Namibia), I watched some wildebeests, a litter of young warthogs, and an ostrich hanging around. This particular waterhole was built in 2006 and is connected to a reservoir with a solar-powered borehole, equipped with a float to signal a refill when the water level drops. That reliability ensures that animals will show up to get a drink, since the size of the hole matters little when it's always filled. The park is adjacent to the Namib Naukluft Park, and there are no fences, so animals can roam over 21,830 square miles of reserved land.

In the video compilation above, you'll see how the animals take their turns at a drink depending on species. If one species takes too long, they may be chased off so that others can drink. Sometimes a fight breaks out, like when an ostrich challenges an antelope. When the cheetahs gather, all the prey animals move back a respectful distance to watch until the coast is clear. The leopard arrives at night. All of them hope to get a drink before the warthogs take a bath.

If you like the compilation, you'll want to check on the livestream during different parts of the day to see what's going on in Namibia. Since the park relies on ecotourism, you may sometimes catch a human on camera. The live discussion to the right will identify animals as they arrive. -Thanks, gwdMaine!