Twitter user Enfys J. Book (Lucky) accompanied their cousin to the Ax-Man Surplus store in Fridley, Minnesota. They found an odd collection of items, as expected, but what struck them most were the signs labeling the goods, which are well worth sharing.
Staff members have a lovely sense of humor. They see that the goods are odd, and their impressions reflect what customers are thinking anyway. We don't know what these are or what they are for, either, but they are darn cheap!
There was a time when all we knew were the nine planets (now eight) that revolve around our sun. Then we developed amazing space telescopes that can capture images outside our solar system. On March 21, NASA confirmed the 5,000th exoplanet. To celebrate this milestone, NASA put together a data visualization, a timeline on a 360° map, showing when each exoplanet was discovered.
As each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle indicates the relative size of the planet's orbit and the color indicates which planet detection method was used to discover it. The music is created by playing a note for each newly discovered world. The pitch of the note indicates the relative orbital period of the planet. Planets that take a longer time to orbit their stars are heard as lower notes, while planets that orbit more quickly are heard as higher notes.
The big blue blob that appears on the left in 2013-14 represents data picked up from the Kepler space telescope. That data confirmed 1,284 exoplanets and hinted at thousands more possible exoplanets. -via Metafilter
The would-be viral skateboarding star failed on his first attempt at the trick. Although he did flip successfully, he also lost control of his board. It was up to a Mercedes Sprinter work van passing by to rescue the recording. It performed an impromptu trick when the errant skateboard slipped under a back wheel.
Although the driver brought the van to a quick halt, it was a lot of force for a board to hold. Still, it held together remarkably well and the human was able to complete the trick, despite the damage to at least one truck.
For almost a hundred years, Tavira, Portugal, was a town centered around the tuna fishing industry. When the supply of tuna declined, the town focused on other things, but a remnant of that legacy remains. No one knows who first arranged out-of-service boat anchors on the beach at Praia do Barril, but after they did, it became a custom for others to add to the collection any time they discarded an anchor. Now hundreds of them stand in formation as a monument to bygone days of fishing. It's called the Anchor Graveyard, and draws tourists to Tavira.
The Anchor Graveyard is just one of the many specialty scrapyards, er, cemeteries around the world where old objects go when they are no longer useful. Messy Nessy Chic takes us on a tour of graveyards for bicycles, airplanes, fiberglass statues, concrete statues, phone booths, rickshaws, tanks, firetrucks, and even ice cream.
An awful lot of "family movies" (translation: for kids) involve talking animals interacting with people, or some other feature that doesn't happen in the real world. That's done almost exclusively with CGI today, but there was a period of several decades in which robots were used for those animals, often with some CGI used to smooth over the finished scenes. Working with animatronics not only displays the uncanny valley effect, but seeing these robot animals -or even humans- without their skin or with their heads removed can scar you for life. Let's hope the child actors who had to witness such carnage are okay. A few animal characters were played by humans, which can also be traumatic. See the nightmare fuel behind "live action" animations from five beloved movies at Cracked.
Dr. Ernesto Di Maio is a professor of Materials Science and Technology at the University of Naples. He is also allergic to yeast. Naples is the birthplace of pizza. In a confluence of biology and geography, Di Maio was destined to develop a way to make pizza crust without yeast. In a normal pizza crust (and most bread), yeast produced carbon dioxide bubbles as it ferments, which causes the dough to rise, making it light and airy. Di Maio's team looked for a way to infuse raw dough with carbon dioxide artificially.
To artificially aerate the crust, the team placed the dough—a mixture of flour, water, and salt—into an autoclave, a chamber with controlled pressure and temperature settings. They then flooded the golf ball–sized dough with gas at high pressure, similar to carbonating a soda. When they gradually released the pressure and increased the heat inside the chamber, the team watched the dough rise.
They ended up with several mini-crusts, which they declared tasty. This experiment may lead to specialty pizzas and even breads that can be tolerated by people with yeast allergies. Read more about the experiment at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting
😺 It's a fact of life that cats shed (and sometimes, they throw up a hairball) but you don't have to let all that fluffy fur go to waste. Instead, just do what Twitter user @MiniraDairy did and needlefelt some house slippers for your cat. A-meow-zing!
🎹 There are many cover of this famous video game theme music, but Scott Bradlee of Postmodern Jukebox has managed to give us chills some playing the Super Mario Bros. theme music as ragtime piano medley. Fantastic!
🤖 Doctor Frankenstein, I presume? Scientists have made lab-grown living "xenobot" robot that can replicate and make more of themselves. And they're shaped like Pac-Man!
💑 Hollywood rom-coms are wrong: science has debunked "opposites attract" as researchers found that friends and lovers actually tend to share beliefs, values, and hobbies.
🦥 Got a home gym? Perhaps a Peloton that's now serving as a laundry station? Then this comic title "Smart" Home Gym Equipment for the Less Active by Gemma Correll will surely resonate.
🎵 "Every song has been tempo matched, beat synced, harmonized and spliced together perfectly. Honestly, it's a work of genius": 600 Songs from 1990 to 1999 remixed. What a fun musical blast from the past.
We take lace for granted in the age of mass produced textiles. Lace in the modern era is priced in the range of other fabrics, although that range can be quite wide. But before machine looms, lace was a precious commodity because it was hand made, and the finest of lace was made in Alençon, France. Point d’Alençon needle lace was very expensive because it was so labor intensive. Every square centimeter (less than half an inch) required around seven hours of painstaking labor. It took entire teams to produce the lace, from the designer who drew it to the finisher who polished it with a lobster claw. Lace was so expensive that wearing it was naturally restricted to the very wealthy or royalty. The lace industry involved so much money that there were importers, smugglers, tariffs, trade wars, and a campaign to produce domestic lace that gave rise to Alençon lace. Read what made Point d’Alençon needle lace so special, which entails a description of how it was made, at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company
Mass production can be a beautiful thing. This video is a compilation of machines that we rarely get to see, and the amazing way they get things done. You probably won't learn a whole lot from watching this (or you just might), but how they do what they do is almost like art. We get to see materials we don't recognize perfectly formed into things we suddenly recognize. But it's not just manufacturing. Get a close up view of large equipment farming, cooking, street cleaning, earth digging, and more. None of the clips are long enough to get boring. They just move on to the next machine. -via Nag on the Lake
Sin taxes are taxes on behaviors that the taxing authority (a government) wishes to discourage. They are punishments for socially disreputable actions such as, for example, remaining unmarried. This specific type of tax is called a bachelor tax, as it is designed to encourage men to settle down, get married, and have children in wedlock.
In 1900, Argentina had a bachelor tax in place. To avoid paying the tax while remaining single, the bachelor had to swear that he had proposed marriage to a woman, but was rejected.
This situation created a perverse incentive: some women, dubbed "professional lady rejectors", would reject marriage proposals for a fee.
Today, on Twitter, I ran across the calculated weight of Koolaid-Man, the mascot of the Kool-Aid drink brand. Canonically, he's 6 feet tall. So, assuming that he's made of glass 3.6 inches thick that contains 607.6 gallons of water (plus the Kool-Aid mix and sugar), then he would weigh 11,000 pounds.
Kool-Aid man already exists as a monster in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. He has many powers, including magic resistance, the ability to charge an enemy, and what amounts to bardic inspiration.
These statistics made me wonder how much damage Kool-Aid Man could do if he was dropped on top of someone, which would be a useful action during combat. Although official sources address falling damage (how much damage a character takes by falling), it is silent on damage inflicted by falling objects. There is, though, someonline debate upon it.
One set of house rules assumes that an object in excess of 200 pounds falling 10 feet would do 20d6 (twenty six-sided dice) points of damage. For Kool-Aid Man, that would scale up to 1,100d6, which would be, on average, 3,850 hit points. Since almost all player characters would have hit points in the low double digits, a drop attack by Kool-Aid Man would leave a mark.
I am, of course, assuming a straight drop. If Kool-Aid Man is moving along a parabolic trajectory, the damage could be different. We might need to consult a physicist. Alex hired me for Neatorama based on my good looks, not my brains.
So, in short: Kool-Aid Man can do lot of damage. Maybe your party could avoid combat by having the bard attempt to seduce Kool-Aid Man.
My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand
Dr. Dani Rabaiotti, author of the book Does It Fart?: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, posted a Tweet that went on to tell the story of tracking an urban fox when she was an undergrad. The fox just sat under a shed for three months, which isn't all that interesting and probably sounded sketchy to her supervising professor. But it is a tale that all animals scientists know, because they have all encountered a "Lazy Geoff."
Have you heard about the latest custom controller for the Xbox? Announced just on March 22, 2002, Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox Series S custom console and controllers featuring characters from Sonic. The most eye-catching in this reveal are the furry controllers, which come in red and blue, to represent Sonic and Knuckles. Reactions to this recent reveal are mixed to meme-worthy at best, with some laughing at the thought of grabbing the controllers with sweaty hands. Do the controllers look a little cursed? Yeah, a little bit.
Collectors will pay a huge amount of money to get the last items they need to complete their collection. It’s also interesting to find out what are the hardest objects to procure, say for example, for 3DS collectors. It turns out that it’s a Barbie game. Yep, you’ve read that right– one of the Holy Grails for game cartridge collectors of the Nintendo console is a game calledBarbie Groom and Glam Pups.
One of the factors that made the game such a rare find was because it was released in Canada, Europe, and Australia only. One collector spent $1,600 for a copy that was sold in Canada to complete their North American collection. "A few years ago it was around $700," they said. "Should have bought it back then."
Russian artist Kristina Loginova developed her passion for art after working in a bank for a long time. Calling herself a real miniature art maniac, Loginova creates small living spaces for fictional creatures such as fairies inside walnut shells. These small works of art look like a Polly Pocket toy, where a capsule has two slots inside, one for the doll, and the other showcasing the design and some props for the room accompanying said toy. Check out more of Loginova’s work here.
