This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present its 95th annual awards to the movies of the previous year. While Hollywood is excited, the nationwide ratings for the Oscar awards show have been declining for years now. The show is too long, scheduled for four hours but often running five, so even avid movie fans tend to skip watching it live.
The problem is that the producers are working with obsolete concepts of drawing a television audience: keep them tuned in, and keep them waiting. In the 20th century, the audience had no choice. If you wanted to see how many awards your favorite movie won, you had to sit through production numbers, technical awards, and stand-up routines. With the internet, you can get notifications for the parts you really care for. Yet movie fans all have different parts they care about.
The Ringer proposes a plan to bring viewers back to the Oscar ceremony by breaking the telecast into three parts aimed at different kinds of movie fans. It sounds ingenious. On its face, the plan appears to be sacrificing a captive four-hour audience, but those viewers are already gone. It could bring back many of those viewers, albeit for shorter segments. The reasoning behind each part of the new plan is explained in detail, and it might just work. The sad part is that this plan is not only too late for the ceremony coming up March 12, but also that it was not proposed by the Academy itself. -via Digg
💧 If the gentle sound of trickling water is supposed to lull you into sleep, then the gushing water from this bed-and-waterfall combo in a New York City apartment will definitely slam you into slumber. Just don't fall off the side!
🦈 We can't believe this masterpiece didn't win the 2023 Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest. Travesty!
🎬 How many of these 100 Greatest Action Movie One-Liners do you remember?
🐶 I get tired just looking at Nori the Italian greyhound AKA the world's most energetic dog zooming around the house. Oh, and those teeth!
🪁 It turns out, you can fly a kite indoors. There's even an actual competition for it.
🍖 When he's not fighting Foo, Dave Grohl fights hunger by bringing his giant smoker and barbecuing to feed 500 homeless people in Los Angeles. What a great guy!
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You can often tell where someone is from by the way they pronounce the letter "r." Bostonians and the British don't pronounce it at all when it's in a word, but sometimes tack one on the end of a word when you least expect it. But some linguists say that under some circumstances, "r" can be a vowel. That theory won't change our spelling, and probably won't change any pronunciation. We won't soon be seeing bird spelled "brd," even though we do see it spelled "birb" quite a bit these days. The series Storied from PBS explains the different ways different languages and cultures use "r" and how it could be considered a vowel, under the strange standards of linguistics. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Illness and disease were once inescapable parts of life before germ theory, antibiotics, and vaccines. People did what they could to avoid diseases, but sometimes just had to work around them. That affected clothing and fashion styles. When just enough men discovered that wearing a codpiece protected their junk while undergoing the useless syphilis treatments of the 16th century, the look caught on with the general public. But their hair still fell out, which led to powdered wigs, which had an upside in that they attracted lice away from the rest of their bodies. Are you keeping up?
Tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox were not easy subjects to talk about, but they were all too common once upon a time. Read about five bygone fashion trends that were instigated by people either trying to prevent these diseases or trying to live with them, whether their fashion followers knew it or not, at Cracked.
(Image credit: Wellcome Images)
Yes, we're familiar with robotic cameras that enter the human body rectally. But the new F3DB robot arm from the Medical Robotics Lab at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia can do much, much more.
The Daily Mail reports that the tip of the robot is equipped with a bioprinter that permits it to add biomaterials deep inside the body, effecting healing repairs. The length and rigidity of the arm is adjustable to suit the needs of particular procedures. It is partially controlled with artificial intelligence to provide an enhanced printing experience.
-via Dave Barry, who jokes "We were promised flying cars."
Image: UNSW Medical Robotics Lab
There is a ceiling in computing and artificial intelligence. For professor Thomas Hartung, we are getting closer to approaching that ceiling. But this doesn't mean we will stop trying to improve the efficiency of our computers. The better course of action is to try to overcome the limit, or in this case, shoot past the said ceiling. Hartung hypothesizes that the key to overcoming the current technological limits is biocomputing — computers with biological components.
A $600-million supercomputer in Kentucky has recently been able to exceed the computational capacity of a single human brain for the first time. However, as Hartung states, it did so "using a million times more energy."
In Hartung's laboratory at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering, Hartung and his team are busy studying the brain cells (which Hartung himself grew and assembled using reprogrammed cells from human skin samples).
As supercomputers are gradually becoming unsustainable, computers powered by lab-grown brain organoids could be a favorable replacement, as they are energy-efficient. Hartung, however, thinks that creating organoid intelligence capable of powering systems that are at least as smart as a mouse could take decades.
But organoid intelligence is not only limited to the field of computers, states Johns Hopkins assistant professor Lena Smirnova; it could also be of use for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration research.
(Image Credit: Jesse Plotkin/ Johns Hopkins University)
At a glance, this teeny tiny cuboid looks like some sort of fragment chipped off from an electronic device. It would be understandable to think of that when seeing this.
But don't be fooled. This is not a fragment. This is a camera. The world's smallest camera.
That's right. This cuboid the size of a grain of sand is a camera, and it's the world's smallest one, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Called the Omnivision OV6948, the camera boasts a size of 0.65 x 0.65 x 1.158 mm. It can capture 200x200 resolution images at 30 frames per second. The raw images taken from the camera are blurry at first. But with some clean-up help from a custom algorithm to process the images, the pictures become recognizable.
Of course, we'd be asking, "what could we do with a tiny camera?" Well, for one, it could be used in the medical field. As the camera is designed to fit inside human veins, this camera becomes a helplful tool for doctors when they diagnose or perform surgeries.
The OmniVision OV6948 is developed by scientists at the University of Washington and manufactured by the semiconductor manufacturing company OmniVision Technologies.
(Images: OmniVision OV6948 Worlds Smallest Camera via Laptop-Spec)
Biodegradable plastics, or bioplastics for short, are marketed as a better alternative than the old traditional ones. Unsurprisingly, people have embraced this new type of plastic simply because it is environmentally-friendly. Already, stores are filled with products with labels such as "sustainable" or "compostable plastic." Big companies also support the idea of using bioplastics for their products. The Wrigley Company, for example, plans to roll out Skittles in biodegradable packaging sometime next year.
But is it true? Does the use of biodegradable plastic products help in preserving our planet? In theory, it is. In reality, it isn't. In fact, promoting the use of bioplastic could "encourage more wasteful consumption," which leads to more harm to the environment.
While bioplastics do break down faster than traditional plastics, they require something else: proper disposal. We either put them in an industrial compost facility or dispose of them via home composting. Unfortunately, many of us only dispose of trash via the garbage bin, which is taken by the garbage truck. This means that bioplastics "generally end up in... landfills."
As bioplastics are promoted as less polluting, Zero Waste France advocacy manager Moira Tourneur thinks that consumers might overconsume bioplastic products.
The question is: if biodegradable plastics could still do damage, then what is the best way to preserve the environment? The answer is less plastic usage. Of course, plastic products will always be in use, especially in healthcare and transport systems. And so, experts agree that governments need to create better disposal infrastructures for bioplastics.
(Image Credit: LillyCantabile/ Pixabay)
— booteen (@booteen1) February 20, 2022
Roman Booteen is a Russian artist who specializes in carving images into coins. In past years, we've shown some of his works. Since then, he's really stepped up his game. This symbol-laden coin shares the story of Lilith, a figure in Jewish folklore. A counterpart to Eve, she converses with the serpent at the Wood of Life (Lignum Vitae). When a tiny button on the edge of the coin is pushed, Lilith moves her leg and a key pops out of the tree.
I can't tell what is written beneath the key when it falls out. Can you?
-via Massimo
When you drape a big city over a group of mountains, you end up with a lot of stairs, hairpin streets, and workarounds. Wellington, New Zealand, is such a city. Public transport is offered by cable cars, which lift people uphill and then downhill like in San Francisco. But there are also around 100 private cable cars that people install just to reach their house! While that may seem extravagant, it will come in handy when you buy a new table, or break your leg, or come home drunk, or want to invite Grandma to visit, or when you're just too tired to climb many flights of stairs to get home. And if you want to stay in your Wellington hillside home through your advanced years, a private cable car, or "inclinator," makes a lot of sense. Tom Scott shows us how these private cable cars work in Wellington.
Where I live, there are a lot of houses that cling to the sides of mountains, too, but they are spread out enough that we can build access roads and bridges to reach them. I can tell you from experience that some of those roads out in the middle of nowhere are terrifying.
The 1939 film Gone With the Wind was a sweeping epic soap opera about one Georgia woman's life during the Civil War, based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Mitchell. The finished product featured big Hollywood stars and beautiful cinematography, won eight Academy Awards, and was the top movie of all time for 30 years. But putting that story in its historical backdrop was a struggle behind the scenes. Director David O. Selznick went through a dozen script writers, and working scripts were changed constantly.
The script writers were divided into two camps: The "Romantics" who wanted to depict the South as a genteel and honorable place where enslaved people were happy, and the "Realists" who were keen to show an accurate depiction of the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. The Romantics won out, and the movie projected a whitewashed version of the Confederacy that pleased white audiences in Atlanta but gave generations of viewers a distorted idea of the Civil War era South. The movie was shaped by many scenes that were written and some even filmed, but were then discarded. Evidence of the battle between the Romantics and the Realists remain in surviving working copies of the script, with notes from Selznick and others, that the director had ordered destroyed.
Read about the script decisions that shaped Gone With the Wind and the scenes that never made it into the film at The Ankler. Then imagine the same film with the deleted scenes retained. It would have been six hours long, but it would have told a more complete story. -via Mental Floss
It's been almost seven years since we first saw the amazing puppet designing skills of Barnaby Dixon. With more videos over the years, we've also come to appreciate his ability to operate them in such a way as to trick our minds into seeing them as real characters separate from the puppeteer. This is because Dixon spent years studying anatomy and movement in order to make stop-motion animated films. The puppets came later because he was looking for a way to save time! And since he had no background in puppetry, he was free to think outside the box. In this video, we learn what goes into Dixon's puppets, in designing them, building them, and bringing them to life. -via Digg
The idea that alien beings come to earth in flying saucers has been a thing in the US since 1947. The saucer shape of our pop culture UFOs is due to a misinterpretation of that 1947 sighting. Or is it? Documentation of a UFO in Japan in 1803 involved a saucer-shaped vessel. In this case, UFO stand for unidentified floating object. It has become known as the utsurobune legend, although there are contemporary accounts that describe the event.
During the Edo period, Japan was officially closed off to foreigners, and any "invasion" should have drawn officials and caused a diplomatic incident. But this incident is a simple tale. A strange, saucer-shaped vessel floated to shore, and when it opened, people could see it was hollow. A woman emerged, speaking an unknown language and carrying a box. The vessel had writing on it no one could read. Unable to communicate, the Japanese witnesses sent her back to the ocean, never to be seen again.
While later accounts varied as to the date and place of the incident, there are several from 1803, placing it in the city of Hitachi. That lead researchers to believe that something really happened, but what it was is a mystery. -via Nag on the Lake
Street Art Utopia introduces us to the work of Russian street artist @fruktyvrukty. Five years ago, during the Carte Blanche Fest in Ekaterinburg, Russia, he added what appear to be paper cutouts of ballet dancers performing pirouettes to rings of fungi growing on local trees.
Street Art Utopia tells us that this tree is in Moscow. Marilyn Monroe innocently experiences a "delicious" breeze in an iconic scene from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch.
Build in the 11th century, Colditz Castle is an imposing fortress overlooking the town of Colditz, Germany. Rebuilt in the 16th century with 700 rooms, it was used as a political prison by the Nazis and during World War II it became a POW camp called Oflag IV-C. Since the fortress was considered impossible to escape from, it was a destination for Allied troublemakers and those who had attempted to escape from other prisons. However, these prisoners considered that a challenge.
The POWs at Colditz collaborated with each other on escape plans. They built trap doors, tunnels, shafts through the buildings, and even set up a telephone system to communicate warnings. Over five years, there were 300 escape attempts, 30 of which were successful. One prisoner was catapulted over the wall by his fellow inmates. Two men managed to tunnel to a guard house, where they donned German uniforms and then walked out as if they were going home from work. The most audacious escape plan was when prisoners worked together to build a glider on the roof! Read about the World War II prison at Colditz Castle and the many escape attempts at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Jörg Blobelt)
