Akkodha has an answer to everything, and it's "okay." But that's not the only way she's agreeable. She's pretty, affectionate, and an all-around sweet cat. That alone would be enough for her to be a Instagram star, but her command of the English language clinches it. When everything's "okay," what else needs to be said? Maybe just an indication of where Akkodha lives on the internet. -via Laughing Squid
The Power of Decision is both a thrilling movie and an official US Air Force training film. Its production origin is unclear, although George Washington University has some details about this film gleaned from the National Archives as well as the Air Force.
The 55-minute film begins with the narrator, who is identified as Colonel Dawes, introducing the audience to operations at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. At 9 minutes into the video, it switches to a dramatic presentation of how the Air Force would respond to a surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
For a training film, this is remarkably good filmmaking. There's good camera framing and skilled acting by the participants who are obviously trained thespians instead of Air Force personnel who were conveniently nearby during filming.
I'm trying to find the identity of the actor who plays the narrator, Colonel Dawes. He is also the star in the 1963 US Army training movie The Battalion Commander. If you can find his name, please note it in the comments.
Comprehensive smart green lighting systems can save a ton of money for large institutions. When Minnechaug Regional High School in Massachusetts built a new high school in 2012, they equipped it with a computerized system to control all 7,000 lights in the 248,000-square foot facility. The lights would automatically dim when less light was needed, and turn off at night. What could possibly go wrong? In this case, everything. In 2021, nine years after the system was installed, the software crashed. And the lights have been on ever since.
1. The company that installed the lights has changed hands several times.
2. No one currently at that company was familiar with the software. But they found someone eventually.
3. The software cannot be fixed.
4. A new system would cost $1.2 million.
5. The system could be patched with hardware, but the parts have been backordered from China for a year. You know, supply chain issues.
Meanwhile, the people of the school district are wondering about the electricity bills, and teachers have to remove classroom light bulbs to show a film. The story of the lights at Minnechaug Regional High School reads like a situation comedy or a snowball rolling downhill. -via Fark
(Image credit: John Phelan)
Every time we revisit the Voyager spacecraft, we confront statistics that are hard for the human mind to grasp. The intrepid space probe Voyager 1 has been traveling for more than 45 years, and is now more than 23 billion kilometers (14.817 billion miles) away, in interstellar space. It's still communicating with earth with its 1970s technology. That technology might be obsolete, but it was built to last. Sadly, the programming involved is no longer being taught. After taking amazing pictures of our solar system for a decade, Voyager's cameras were turned off in 1990. There's more than one reason why they won't be turned on again, but the ability to do so is a testament to the durability of vintage hardware.
Also, if you recall the launch of the two Voyager probes, this will make you feel old. The video has a one-minute ad starting at the four-minute mark. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A collective refusal to do business with someone is an ancient tactic, but it finally got a name in 1880. Charles Cunningham Boycott owned some land himself in Ireland but also worked as the land agent to the 3rd Earl of Erne, who owned a large amount of land, on which tenant farmers made their living. Boycott was a ruthless landlord, levying fines against the farmers and raising their rent even in years of crop failures. The farmers formed a league for collective action in 1879. In 1880, their pleas for rent relief went unheeded, and several families were evicted from their farms.
The league then organized a personal shunning of Boycott. No one would deliver goods to his home, no one would provide services like laundry, and no one would harvest his crops. People even stopped greeting him on the street. Read how the scheme played out and how Boycott's name became a verb we use to this day at Amusing Planet.
The hog calling contest is a staple of midwestern county and state fairs, but Iowa puts a different spin on the idea with a husband calling contest! You may have seen a viral TikTok video that's racked up more than a million views in the last six days featuring an edited version of some of the contestants from the 2017 competition. The video above is the original uncut report, which gives some context to the silliness. The winner receives a ribbon, a $5 cash prize, and bragging rights, which is what makes it so competitive. The Iowa State Fair also has a mom calling contest for kids, and of course, the traditional hog calling contest, too. -via Boing Boing
The Lunar New Year, often called Chinese New Year even though it's celebrated in many Asian cultures, is Sunday. Or is it? While the lunar calendar synced with the Gregorian calendar begins on January 22 this year, some cultures in Mongolia and Tibet follow a different calendar, which puts the New Year on February 20th. If that's not confusing enough, the zodiac animal associated with the year varies this year. The twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac are universal every year except when the fourth animal comes around. In China and most countries, this will be the year of the rabbit. But in Vietnam, Tết will usher in the year of the cat. Al Stewart would be proud.
The reason why the two zodiacs differ is not quite clear. One theory is that the zodiac term for the year in Chinese sounds like the Vietnamese word for cat. Another theory has to do with the differing stories of how all the animals raced across a river to decide who would be represented in the zodiac. You can read those stories and find out more about the Lunar New Year celebrations at the Conversation. Now if we could just figure out how the mousedeer came to represent this year in the Malay zodiac, we'd know a lot more.
Until 1998, a point of order during a vote in the House of Commons could only be made while wearing a hat.
— Ned Donovan | فارس دونوفان (@Ned_Donovan) January 17, 2023
A collapsible opera top hat was kept with the doormen solely for this purpose, as seen worn by Tony Marlow in this clip from 1994. pic.twitter.com/evVm033phH
In its modern form, the British House of Commons dates back to 1801, although its origins can be traced to 1341. That's several centuries of developing tradition, including the rule that, if a member wishes to raise a point of order to the Speaker, s/he must be "seated and covered" -- the latter of which means wearing a hat of some sort.
Since headwear was in decline during the late Twentieth Century, it became customary to keep a single collapsable opera hat nearby. The member must retrieve it and then sit down before raising the point of order. One advantage of this practice is that it has:
...has undoubtedly been retained to deter honourable Members from raising points of order during divisions by making them appear ridiculous and feel acutely embarrassed.
This noble tradition was eliminiated in 1998.
-via Marilyn Terrell
It is not obvious what works of literature will enter into a literary canon by becoming assigned reading in college classes. The Pudding, a website devoted to data-driven longform journalism, notes that it is difficult to predict the future fame and respectability of recent books.
Herman Wouk's 1951 novel The Caine Munity won a Pulitzer Prize, was lauded by critics as a masterpiece, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for months. Yet rarely does it appear on college class syllabi now. All of Zora Neale Hurston's novels were out of print by the 1970s, when scholars elevated her from postmortem obscurity. Now Their Eyes Were Watching God is often required reading at colleges.
If we look at three sets of data--the New York Times bestseller list, Goodreads rankings, and literary prizes--what can we discover about literature from the 90s? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was a collossal success in the 90s, but is absent from most literary couse syllabi. Tim O'Brien's short story collection about the Vietnam War titled The Things They Carried is, though, widely assigned reading even though it was obscure at the time of its publication in 1990.
Ultimately, The Pudding offers no answer, only questions. What causes a work of literature to enter a literary canon (and how that canon can be defined) requires more research and study.
-via Marginal Revolution | Image: manhhai
(Image source: dandagent)
Ain't modern technology wonderful? Machine translation allows us to read news articles on non-English websites, but if you've done that a few times, you know that certain details have to be taken with a grain of salt. Today I read about a skating rink in South America, but if you look closely at the picture, it's obviously what we would call a skate park. That's a minor detail. But when you are posting a sign in more than one language, it may be rather important to get some feedback on the language you don't know.
(Image source: Gucci1827)
What was, we assume, supposed to be a "no exit" sign has turned into something way more dramatic and memorable. Sure, a machine translation is cheaper, but you're taking a chance that may result in your sign becoming an internet meme. See 50 examples of poor translations that turned out to be quite funny in a second language at Bored Panda.
Japanese gamer and live streamer Mutekimaru has a great stunt going, but recently found out how wrong it could go. He has a popular series in which his pet fish play Pokémon. Yes, really. He installed a motion-tracking circuit board on the wall of his aquarium, divided into sections corresponding with keyboard commands. When a fish swims across a sensor, it trips a command of some sort. By activating random commands, the fish slowly play the game. Cool, huh? Maybe not so much. There's danger in automating a live stream, no matter how cool it is, and you should never trust a fish.
Sunday, the fish were playing Pokémon Violet (and live streaming) when the game crashed. They kept swimming, got into the eshop (apparently, the computer was set to bypass the password), went into the wallet, and exposed Mutekimaru's credit card information! The fish bought some items, sent Mutekimaru an email, logged back in and selected a different game, joined a chat group, and generally caused chaos along the lines of a six-year-old on his dad's computer. Turn the closed captions on to get an English narration for the video. You have to wonder how long all this took before Mutekimaru caught on to what had happened, but it is hilarious. Mutekimaru has now suspended his fish play videos. -via Metafilter
It has been estimated that up to 10% of the Union Army was made up of volunteers below the age of 18 in the Civil War. Boys as young as 14 would sign up by lying about their age. Their parents tried to retrieve them, and the law was on their side, but the army dragged its feet in releasing the young soldiers. After all, they were useful. The 16- and 17-year-olds often distinguished themselves in battle, and the younger boys provided badly needed support services. There could have been as many as 200,000 underage boys serving in the Union Army. On the Confederate side, records are spotty, but estimates of underage soldiers range up to 100,000, which was a bigger percentage of their military than the larger Union Army.
Conscription laws, verification procedures, and enforcement varied on both sides over the course of the war. Both armies were considerate of the tender age of these soldiers, but needed every warm body they could get. While families and the general civilian populace objected against such young men serving, expediency in the war effort won out in most cases. Read about the young teenage soldiers of the Civil War and how they got away with serving at Smithsonian.
Batman is globally popular, but has not always been available in every language. So the knockoffs began, and each culture puts their own spin on the Caped Crusader. Weird Media shows us three of the strangest Batman incarnations in entertainment history. In South Korea, the Golden Bat has superpowers. In Mexico, Batwoman is a wrestler/detective/swimsuit model/superhero. In the Philippines, everyone just decides to become various comic book characters from Gotham City and everyone else buys into it. And sings about it. This video contains a little NSFW language.
And in case you were wondering about it, here is the Spider-Man around the world video mentioned at the beginning in the above video.
-via Boing Boing
The first six days of January bring a local custom in the town of Píllaro, Ecuador, called Diablada de Píllaro. That's when men dressed as the devil parade through city streets, yelling and teasing onlookers, waiting for an opportunity to feed them chili peppers or alcohol. Other characters in this procession are bailarines, representing rich colonial overseers, and capariches, the lower class workers who sweep the streets ahead of them. It's all in fun, but the traditional characters are all acting out the evolving story of how Diablada de Píllaro became what it is now.
The city of Píllaro didn't exist until Spanish colonizers came and exploited workers from the surrounding villages. The rich landowners partied early in January and forced local men to clear the streets. Now those "bouncers" are devils and the surrounding villages send groups to participate in Diablada de Píllaro. The festival isn't all that well known in the rest of Ecuador, but it is becoming a tourist draw for Píllaro. Read more about Diablada de Píllaro and see some awesome pictures at Atlas Obscura.
The Sentinel Chickens are performing their protective duty in New South Wales, Australia, but it's nothing like what a guard dog would do. In fact, it's more like the canary in a coal mine scenario, except for the fact that these chickens send a warning of danger not by dying, but by having their blood drawn once a week to check for specific antibodies. It's an all-around cushy job for a chicken, spending all their time doing important chicken things in a yard and eating, right up until the time they develop permanent antibodies for some mosquito-borne disease. Then the chickens are sent off to who knows where; let's hope it's a free-range egg-producing farm or backyard coop instead of someone's frying pan. After all, they've done their bit to safeguard humanity. The chickens were already unlucky enough to be in a place where they're going to get bitten by mosquitoes constantly. Tom Scott explains the procedure, and you can read more about it at NSW Health.
