British artist Ernest Howard Shepard became internationally famous for his illustrations included in the first edition of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.
In 1966, Britain commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which was recorded for future generations in the 230-foot long Bayeux Tapestry. It was also, Victoria Botkin informs us, the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard marked the occasion by designing a Pooh version of the Bayeux Tapestry, which you can see below:
But that was just on paper. Kate Jarman shares on Twitter that her mother has used her embroidery skills to turn Shepard's illustration into an actual piece of fabric art.
We live in a world that offers an amazing array of consumer goods. Thanks to the internet, our range of choice is wider than ever before because now we can order consumer goods from not only out-of-town vendors, but from all around the world. That's not always a good thing, because we can become confused or even paralyzed by the prospect of making the wrong selection. It's not only online stores, but online reviews and rankings of goods that can cause confusion -not to mention a serious commitment of time. And who's to say which reviews and rankings are valid?
An article at the New York Times (non-paywalled here) describes the phenomena of people who do endless online research to make sure they are buying the absolute best toaster before making their purchase. These people are called maximizers, as opposed to others who look around for a "good enough" deal on a toaster and are called satisficers (a word that combines satisfy and suffice). Of course, legitimate concerns over what we can afford will impact our decision-making style. I used a toaster as an example, but this phenomenon can apply to everything from groceries to college choice to dating sites to real estate.
The research tells us that maximizers often do make the best choices, but that doesn't necessarily leave them happy, as they can feel anxiety over possibly making the wrong choice before the purchase. After the purchase that anxiety may continue as regret, because there might have been a better option after all. Satisficers are more likely to buy the first thing that meets all their personal criteria, and will save time and cognitive energy by not worrying about their decision once it's made. People rarely fall completely into one category or the other. Most of us will devote way more time and energy into researching large decisions like a new house than small ones like tonight's restaurant. Yet there are folks who will spend so much time reviewing restaurants that they forget to go to dinner.
The discussion at Metafilter makes it clear that many of us are checking listicles and reviews mainly to avoid buying crap that will fall apart before the purchase is justified, because there is an awful lot of subpar goods for sale in our modern throwaway society.
A shake table is not where you pick up your milkshake, nor is it furniture for a strip club. The shake table at the University of California San Diego is a stretch of ground intricately engineered to simulate various forms and strengths of earthquakes. Underground pressure pipes are constantly upgraded to cause different kinds of tremors so their effects can be studied. Tom Scott visited the shake table at UCSD to talk to the engineers and find out how it works. Then he went back to witness a test of a ten-story building with innovative architectural features designed to withstand an earthquake. So you can see that it has to be extremely strong, plus it must have plenty of redundant safety features for the sake of the engineers who work there and for the expensive items they test. Not to mention, the shake table itself has to survive the work it does.
Well, that’s our entire weekend schedule right there.
Sometimes with the many struggles in our daily lives, we tend to look for small, fun things to do to relax. Mindless tasks can help us unwind after a long day or week of doing nothing but work and stressing over problems. Coloring, while considered a childish activity, is now one of the few adult hobbies considered one of the best methods for destressing.
Now there are a lot of adult-oriented coloring books (by this we mean more details and intricate compared to the usual ones), but they can be a bit expensive. However, Color Our Collections is now offering new pieces that you can color in your downtime for free. This campaign, initiated by The New York Academy of Medicine Library, collects coloring pages from over 100 cultural institutions from across the globe and makes them free to download online.
Check out all the available art you can color on their official website here!
Beth Bogar, an American tourist, was having a good time in Mason Elephant Park and Lodge, located in Bali, Indonesia, with her husband when she got one of the most shocking and a bit traumatizing moments in her life. It started quite innocently: she was in a resort that had animals in it and wanted to pose for a photo with one of the animals in the area.
Bogar shared that she only realized the situation she was in when she heard the cracking of her bones. An elephant apparently decided to grab her arm and put it into his mouth while she was taking a picture. “I couldn’t get my arm out, I could just hear cracking, and I started to panic,” she told WMUR.
Now this isn’t an illegal place to take photos of animals or pose with them. The Lodge usually promotes their photo booths on social media pages. The park generally has good reviews from other visitors. Additionally, as Bogar was taking her photo, she shared that she was being directed by the animal’s trainer as well. “I just feel like the guide was guiding me and he let my arm get too close to his mouth and I didn’t know how close too close was,” she explained.
She survived the incident, with a $10,000 medical bill after getting emergency surgery. Bogar and her husband claimed that the resort initially said they would help her pay the bill, but they stopped responding to all calls and messages. “They were assuring us all the while ‘Don’t worry we have insurances we can handle this situation we’ll get you taken care of’,” her husband shared.
Well, this honestly just made us want to go inside a mechanical typewriter. Do you ever get that feeling when you see the interior of something, and your brain just tells you that it looks explorable? Yeah. But this animation is amazing though.
Animagraffs’ Jake O’Neal decided to give people a tour of the inside of an early 20th-century mechanical typewriter. For those unaware, these are the machines that people used way before computers were in, okay? The detailed animation was created using descriptive language, with O’Neal also explaining each component and its purpose as the video further progresses.
The above picture is from the Instagram account Cooking for Bae, the title of which is a joke about inexperienced young people trying to make impressive meals for someone they love even though they don't know how to cook. The person who drained their macaroni, like it said on the package, obviously never bothered to watch their mother do it when they were a child. Nor did they ever learn about food safety. Macaroni and cheese isn't that difficult to make, but they have examples of inexperienced cooks jazzing it up with strawberries, avocado, and mint-vanillla milk. Those are three different cooks. Other abominations are clearly from school lunch rooms, restaurants, stoned experiments, or even a grocery store.
More macaroni! This person apparently picked up the wrong paper packet when making mac and cheese, and then decided to go ahead and use the cheese packet for a hot drink. The pasta is most likely a loss, but that drink, if made with real milk, might make up for it. Bored Panda has a ranked list of 30 of the best deranged cooking attempts from the Instagram account. Beware, there are some pictures of food that no one can confidently identify.
Even the most outlandish legends and cryptids may be traced to real experiences that made a good story for someone somewhere. A good story tends to get larger with each telling, and details are added when different people try to translate them or pass those stories down to younger people who have less context. We are familiar with medieval artists who tried to draw exotic beasts from nothing but an oral description. That same transformation could happen to any strange sighting when the witness and the artist are different people. As we gain more knowledge about the ancient world, we find more analogues to our modern legends, like the drop bear. A string of unreliable narrators can easily transform a natural phenomena that no one understands into a fantastic fairy tale. Weird History take a look at a whole string of mythical creatures, from cyclops to vampires to unicorns, and ties them to plausible natural but misunderstood origins.
The odds of an exoplanet being Earth-like in the sense that it could be successfully inhabited by humans are, well, astronomical. Many specific environmental qualities must be in place.
But a recently-discovered planet about 86 light years away from our solar system ticks off some of the essential factors. LP-791-18 b orbits a red dwarf star. It doesn't rotate, so one side is always facing its sun and the other is always away from its sun. But, NASA reports, it's volcanically active, so it could have water condensation on the dark side.
CalTech says that planet is about 1.46 times the size of Earth, so the gravity might be acceptable to humans. It orbits its star at a Goldilocks distance--not to hot and not too cold. These are essential characteristics of planet that could at least hope to serve as a refuge for humans.
Orcas, also called killer whales, have sunk three sailboats off the Iberian coast since 2020, the latest on May 4th. They've also attacked numerous boats without sinking them. Such attacks involve several orcas, and the younger ones appear to be imitating the behavior of older orcas. In many of these attacks, the orcas approach the rudder of the boat, which they bite, bend, or break, and then lose interest when the boat stops moving forward. You could call these interactions rare, as the orcas only attack about 1% of boats in the area, but since 2020, that's 500 cases.
Scientists suspect the behavior started with a female known as White Gladis, who may have had a traumatic experience with a boat. Orcas are very social, and new behaviors can spread quickly among the population. And that population is rather small- the last census of Iberian orcas in 2011 found only 39 individuals. That subpopulation is listed as critically endangered. Five hundred boat attacks by such a small number of orcas is concerning. While the behavior was quickly spread among the orcas, experts don't know if it's just something fun they've learned to do, or if it may be a malicious and deliberate way for sea creatures to inflict harm on the human ocean interlopers. -via Damn Interesting
A drop bear is a cryptid that Australians love to warn tourists about. They resemble koalas, but are super vicious. A drop bear will hide in a tree until an unsuspecting person walks underneath and then drop onto them and rip them apart. Or at least that's the story. I don't understand why they try to scare tourists like that, since people visiting Australia from elsewhere are all primed to believe every living creature there is trying to kill you already.
But there were once real drop bears. Like koalas, they were not bears, but marsupials. The genus called Nimbadon roamed the rainforests of southern Australia 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene Epoch. Nimbadon looked somewhat like a wombat, but grew to be 70 kilograms (154 pounds)! While they were first considered something like a "marsupial sheep," scientists have determined that these creatures lived in the trees, slung underneath branches like sloths. Occasionally, a Nimbadon would fall out of a tree, just like a drop bear. They know this because some Nimbadons fell out of trees and into caves, where their remains were found 15 million years later.
The Cut staged a speed dating game for older people. It's awkward in places because older people don't really like the pressure of meeting others just for the purpose of evaluating whether to start a romantic relationship. On the other hand, I can tell you from experience that they don't want to waste any time with someone they aren't compatible with in some way. I've found the best relationships start when two people just can't stop talking to each other about anything and everything, whether it's toward a romantic end or not. In this sequence, there's an awful lot of rejection, and they aren't averse to explaining it. Speed dating is all about snap decisions, after all. But we finally get to a meeting between two people and find the one fact that makes them perfect for each other. You may be surprised, but you'll understand when you hear it. -via Digg
MGM made several pairs of ruby red slippers for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. That wasn't widely known until 1970, when MGM sold one pair at auction and ordered the others destroyed. The pair that was auctioned off was later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. But the other shoes weren't destroyed. MGM costumes worker Kent Warner took them home, and over the years they were sold and landed in private collections and museums.
One pair of the ruby slippers was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, (Garland's home town) in 2005. They were recovered by the FBI 13 years later in Minneapolis in 2018. The Smithsonian was consulted, and their conservators studied the stolen property and compared them with the cleaned and preserved shoes the museum owned, and determined they were original. But who stole them? Another five years went by as the FBI investigated the case. Now, 76-year-old Terry Jon Martin of Minnesota has been indicted in the theft.
Read what we know about the case so far at Smithsonian. One interesting part of the saga is the values involved. The shoes that MGM auctioned off in 1970 went for $15,000. The collector who owns the stolen shoes bought them from Warner the same year for just $2,000. A woman who won an original pair in a contest in 1940 sold them in 1988 for $165,000. The pair recovered from the FBI is now valued at $3.5 million. Not bad for a $2,000 investment.
(Image credit: National Museum of American History)
I'm a stickler for apostrophe usage, but it's hard to say if either of these signs is incorrect. It all depends on whether King Charles III has many scholars or just one scholar. Google Maps suggests a plurality of scholars, but I think that we need a headcount.
A couple of hedgehogs wake up from winter hibernation and find that a city has been built over their burrow! They aren't the only animals who were surprised by the change in their environment. How will they ever survive? But woodland creatures are keen to adapt, and soon learn the ways of the city. They actually learn better than the humans ever did, and manage to get by just fine, thank you. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but it has an unexpected happy ending.
