Ally the Piper is a master of the ol' pipes and offers classic and modern performances with the world's most beautiful musical instrument. Everything, yes, everything sounds better when performed on bagpipes.
We can see that demonstrated quite well here. Ally does a cover of the iconic 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song "Freebird." She moves her fingers at incredible speed to keep up with the fast tempo of the song.
The results are all the more impressive considering how limited an instrument the bagpipes are. In an interview last year, Ally explained that one can play only nine notes with strict limits on sharps and flats.
Some of the presidents are rendered much hotter than they really are (or were): Biden, Trump, W, Buchanan, Lincoln. Harless doesn't say, but one might suspect that artificial intelligence is involved here and automatically gave quite a few presidents a model's square jaw. Some others came out uglier than their photographs: Bush the Elder, Nixon, Eisenhower, etc. The earliest presidents don't look all that different from their portraits, because they rocked that long haired look in real life with their powdered wigs.
John F. Kennedy looks more like his brother Bobby. Or his son, JFK Jr. In the comments, we learn that LBJ really grew his hair out after leaving the White house, and even wore a ponytail in retirement.
I rather doubt LBJ ever wore an earring. After showing us all the presidents, Harless added mullet portraits of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Hilary Clinton by request. All the presidents' images are available on a poster titled Mullet America at Etsy. See the good, the bad, and the ugly in the Twitter thread or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter
Try to guess what would be the loudest sound on record for the earth we know. Those qualifications discount prehistoric events and celestial events like exploding stars. Would it be a nuclear explosion? A Who concert? The Tunguska Event? Your toddler throwing a tantrum? How about none of the above? Great Big Story reveals what experts consider to be the event that caused the loudest sound in recorded history, an eardrum-splitting 310 decibels that really did split eardrums for some folks who managed to live through it. More than 39,000 people did not.
But first they explain the decibel scale so we can get an idea of how very loud it was. Spoiler for those who can't wait for a two-minute video: you can read more about the deadly event at Wikipedia. -via Laughing Squid
For more than a thousand years, the church had inordinate power over the lives of Europeans. When someone died, they had to be buried under consecrated ground in the parish cemetery. But that could be quite a long way from the small villages across the parish. Therefore, paths were made to get the deceased to the church in the straightest line possible, even if it cut through farms and forests. Even better if such a road could avoid passing by houses, because a funeral procession might bring bad luck to a household. These are called corpse roads, and there are many of them still in existence. Britain alone has 42 documented corpse roads.
Of course, when the purpose of the road is to transport the dead, there will be superstitions that grow up around them. There will also be stories of lights and apparitions. Messy Nessy Chic tells us about those traditions and superstitions, as well as the "rules" for building and using a corpse road. Oh yeah, there are plenty of pictures, too.
In the image image above, your eyes tell you that you are looking at two bowls and a wooden cutting board. But your brain instantly recognizes recognizes Johannes Vermeer’s painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." This version is by digital artist Emil Schwärzler. Vermeer's masterpiece is so iconic that mere shapes and colors bring us back to the original. Artists all over the world have reinterpreted the painting in many different ways, with different models, different themes, and even different media. The original normally resides at The Mauritshuis in the Hague, Netherlands, but is out on loan right now. So the museum is hosting a different exhibit called My Girl with a Pearl, featuring 170 modern interpretations of the painting, which are shown on a loop in the spot where Vermeer's masterpiece is normally displayed. My Girl with a Pearl will run until June 4, even after the original is scheduled to return to the museum on April first. But you don't have to go to the Netherlands to see the artworks- you can peruse 89 of them at your leisure at Instagram. -via Colossal
Wouldn't it be cool to be granted a super power? But then you find out that power of "superpropulsion" is the ability to fling drops of urine at high speeds. Comic book editors are going to love that. Although they've come up with worse.
The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a kind of leafhopper and an agricultural pest. It sucks fluids out of plants. Since the sap is 95% water, they drink a lot to get the nutrients they need, and have to expel a lot of water. Lucky for them, they have an anal catapult that expels a drop of water, and when it reaches a certain size, flings it away with a lot of force for a tiny insect. The physics and fluid dynamics of this pee-shooter are explained at Ars Technica. The upshot of this complicated mechanism is that it actually uses much less energy than just streaming urine like civilized animals. Flinging urine far away makes it harder for predators to smell their exact location. A study out of Georgia Tech gives us the visual above.
Other insects are "frass-shooters," "butt-flickers," and "turd-hurlers," but the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only insect we know of that is blessed with superpropulsion. -via Fark
If you take a spill while on your motorcycle, you don't have to break your knees and hips as you roll to a stop. Core77 tells us about airbag pants developed by two different companies. Both have a similar premise: a small container of compressed air, when triggered, instantly inflates bladders in these pants, providing shock protection against sudden impacts.
They also, in a manner that would bring a smile from Sir Mix-A-Lot, add some junk to your trunk. The Swedish firm Mo'cycle offers these jeans, which cost $499. Just wear them as ordinary jeans. When you mount your bike, attach the belt to the frame. A hard jerk on the belt triggers inflation.
Local residents in Lincoln County, Tennessee are now complaining about an out-of-control black “whiskey fungus” in their area. Also known as Baudoinia compniacensis, it is capable of smothering homes, porches, and cars.The fungi’s spread is fueled thanks to the ethanol vapor coming out from the popular liquor maker Jack Daniel’s facilities. The company actually built six barrel houses in the County in 2018 and still has plans to build 14 more.
With the spread of the fungi and the announcement of more barrel houses, residents are enraged with the company. They are currently demanding the local government and Jack Daniel’s to answer for the damage and the sinking property values thanks to fungi and the ethanol-filled air.
According to Patrick Long, one of the residents of Lincoln County, the community has two main demands: an air-filtration system for blocking the ethanol, and an environmental-impact study evaluating the amount of ethanol emanating from the barrel houses and any health risks it poses.
"I'm extremely concerned. My wife has breathing problems. One of the neighbors got cancer," Long said. "It's in the air. And you really, probably don't want to be breathing that in. But nobody has done a test to determine if it's poisonous."
Shipping containers have been a favorite material for building tiny homes in recent years. It provides another way for these metal objects to be reused again. They have also been hyped as an eco-friendly material and a viable structure for sustainable housing.
Now, we can probably see more tiny homes made from these containers as extra shipping containers were made during the pandemic due to supply chain issues. Approximately, there are around 4.3 million containers left in ports in the United States. So here’s the question: is this kind of material really sustainable?
The general answer is yes, but there’s something else here– the builders need to have enough knowledge, resources, and money to make it a sustainable home. While they can be bought second-hand, people still need to retrofit the containers to create a home. “There are still many alterations that need to be made in order for [them] to be habitable,” architect Alex Gore shared. “You need to frame out the walls, floors, and ceilings in order to run electrical and plumbing lines, as well as insulate.”
Provided that these revisions will be made with eco-friendly materials, then these structures can be more sustainable. However, these materials aren’t really commonly used.
In addition, the architect also believes that these containers are not the right housing material. “Containers are scaled to house goods, not people,” Gore said. “Their proportions make it hard to accommodate human activities.”
Mankind loves thinking about other living creatures on other planets, or even living away from our communities. From our visualizations of dwarves, elves, tabaxi, and more in fiction, we’ve always wondered the possibility of whether or not we’re the only species living on Earth.
In an interesting turn of events, it’s not a group of scientists sharing a photo of what looks to be an elf. It’s the president of Mexico. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador posted a photo of what looks like an elf on his social media. He didn’t seem to be joking in the caption of the photo too. According to him, this was a sighting of an “aluxe,” a woodland spirit in Mayan folklore. “[the photo] was taken three days ago by an engineer, it appears to be an aluxe,” he wrote. “Everything is mystical.”
The political figure is known for having a deep respect for indigenous cultures and beliefs. Do you think this is an actual aluxe, or is it just a trick of the light?
Mussels are shellfish that spend almost all their lives attached to rocks and filtering the passing water for food particles. But before that, in their larval stage, they are parasites, and grow up inside a fish that their mother has caught for them. Yeah, nature is metal. Some species of mussel mothers snatch up a fish for this purpose, while others arrange their eggs and/or larva into a sort of pod that's shaped like something a fish would want to eat, which achieves the same purpose in the end. There's no one better to explain this weirdness than Ze Frank in his True Facts series. I mean, admit it, you wouldn't be exploring the reproductive habits of a mussel if it were from any other source. There's a one-minute embedded ad at 4:30.
Redditor Ok_Journalist120 presents us with a mystery. His father keeps bees in Florida, and one honey harvest was green! How did that happen?
The most common reason for odd colored honey is sweet industrial waste that the bees feed on. You might remember the 2012 story in which French bees produced green and blue honey. It was discovered that the bees had been feeding on uncovered candy waste from a nearby Mars plant that was making M&Ms. Then there was the 2015 case of Arthur Mondella, whose marijuana growing operation came to light after bees started producing red honey by eating illegally discarded syrup from his maraschino cherry factory.
Redditor Steadyandquick found all kinds of examples of green honey. Honey can be green if the bees have been consuming the nectar of yellow star thistle, which flourishes in California.
An expensive honey from Borneo is green due to chlorophyll in the exotic flowers found on the island of Banggi. Another study on the same type of claim for green honey from the Palawan forest of the Philippines found no hives, hinting that this type of honey is faked.
Beekeepers in Greece found their honey green in 2016. They believed it was because of kiwi plants, but kiwi plants do not produce nectar, which is what honey is made from. An investigation found that the bees had been feeding on the juice of mature kiwi fruits that were unharvested after a hailstorm damaged the crops. What bees make can't officially be called honey unless it is made from flower nectar. While the "fruit juice honey" was delicious, it was not good for the bees, and they didn't survive the next winter.
As for the honey pictured here, Ok_Journalist120 has been eating it a little at a time for a year now, and hasn't suffered any ill effects. But there's no definite answer yet for this particular case of green honey.
Yes, in the past, we've looked at various inventions that allow challenged young men to experience simulated relationships. Those wondrous machines, though, did not require the assistance of another person.
This invention does require a second person to function properly. I'm sorry if this news brings you disappointment.
The South China Morning Post reports that the invention, who is named Jiang, developed his idea to allow him to be intimate with his long-distance girlfriend. Plug in paired smartphones and you can virtually smooch your partner with plastic lips that are close enough to resembling a human pair. Each one costs about $38.
Remote kissing device recently invented by a Chinese university student. The device is designed specifically for long-distance relationships and can mimic and transfer the kiss of a person to the "mouth on the other side" pic.twitter.com/G74PrjfHQA
Baby bottles are capped with plastic nipples that only vaguely resemble the real thing. Usually babies accept this alternative to human nipples and feed. But Fast Company reports that startup company Emulait thinks that it can provide a better alternative.
Plastic nipples commonly have just a single hole perforating the top, unlike the more porous human nipple. Emulait's design more closely resembles milk ducts--an approach that the company calls "biomimetic." The plastic nipples themselves come in one of five shapes that reflect the five major shapes that a study of 1,000 scanned nipples determined the most common.
Five different colors are available to reflect different skin tones and the bottles themselves are available in a variety of shapes that reflect actual human breasts.
The end result is a bottle feeding experience that, Emulait speculates, will be more successful because it closely replicates natural breastfeeding.
The Beakfasteur is a doctor and a mother. She makes anatomical models out of Playdough and other materials to show her little boy (and the rest of us) how surgery is done. In the video above, she does a Lichtenstein tension-free mesh repair on an inguinal hernia. No bleeding and no stitches, because it's Playdough! Still, it may be disturbing for the squeamish. If you'd rather see a cochlear implant, thyroidectomy, cesarian section, gallbladder removal, cleft palate repair, or coronary artery bypass, she has those videos, too, all using homemade anatomy. In fact, you can find a very wide range of the Breakasteur's Playdough surgeries at both YouTube and Instagram. Those who know will warn you that the knee replacement surgery is the most likely to squick you out. The lumpectomy video shows a Playdough breast, but if you aren't at work, it's worth watching for the child's comments at the beginning. -via Metafilter
