The Carnival season ends at midnight tonight, with the start of Lent. In the days leading up to the Christian tradition of fasting, celebrations of excess take place all over the world. In Oruro, Bolivia, it's the Carnaval de Oruro. The festival itself pre-dates the arrival of Europeans, but took on Christian traditions over time. The festival features a parade of more than 28,000 dancers and over 10,000 musicians, which takes about 20 hours to complete. Since the city of Oruro is set 12,000 feet high in the Andes, performing in the parade is quite a physical challenge!
Carnaval de Oruro also involves an elaborate dance called the Diablada, or Dance of the Devils. It illustrates a battle between good and evil, or more specifically, a battle between Satan and his minions and the archangel Michael. You can guess who wins in the end. Read more about Carnaval de Oruro and see gorgeous pictures at Atlas Obscura.
There's no need to check out, either from a human cashier or self-checkout.
The New York Times (paywalled article) reports that Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, debuted this new technology at a store in Washington, D.C. When you walk in the store, either scan a QR code with your phone or let a kiosk scan the palm of your hand. Then start shopping.
As you walk through the store, a vast array of cameras track all of your movements. When you put something in your cart, computers add it do your tally. When you're done shopping, walk out the door. Amazon will bill your account automatically. Appropriately, Amazon calls the system Just Walk Out.
Would you use a store like this one?
-via Kottke | Photo: Whole Foods
You remember Charlotte's Web, the 1952 book that made us all cry about a spider. Oops, spoilers. Even if you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the 1973 animated movie or the 2006 live-action movie. Author E.B. White took a lot of liberties with reality to make a charming book about talking barnyard animals, featuring a spider who could spell words out in her web. What you might find even more unbelievable is that it's based on real life. The farm was a real farm. Wilbur the pig is based on an actual piglet that White loved dearly. Even Charlotte was a real spider, although White only saw her once. But saving her egg sac was a true story. White himself was the hero of that episode.
When he was getting ready to go to New York City for the winter, he decided to take the egg sack with him. He cut it down with a razor blade and put it in a candy box with holes punched in the top. Then he left the box on top of his bureau in his New York bedroom. Soon enough, the egg sack hatched and baby spiders emerged from the box.
Read the rest of that story and nine more about the truth behind the book Charlotte's Web at Mental Floss.
Imagine that just getting to your workplace involved scooting along the face of a rock cliff, hanging onto a chain for dear life. Fighting traffic doesn't seem too bad compared to that! But that's exactly why the Elie Chainwalk was developed, to help fishermen get to their boats in Fife, Scotland. Maybe they have a road by now, but the chain walk is still there, and Tom Scott tries it out so we don't have to. It doesn't look all that difficult going down to the beach. It's even faster if you let go of the chain! But climbing back up, working against gravity, seems quite a bit harder. And if you let go climbing back up, well, you'll either have to start over again, or they'll have to call a helicopter ambulance to come get you.
The Elie Chainwalk is an optional part of the Fife Coastal Path, and should only be used during low tide.
In March of 1980, Mount St. Helens was showing signs of activity such as earthquakes, gas vents, and small eruptions. The mountain was closed off to visitors. That didn't stop Robert Rogers, who had spent his whole life going to places he shouldn't have. He spent that spring exploring Mount St. Helens, bringing back samples for scientists, who didn't ask too many questions. On May 18, the day the top of Mount St. Helens blew off in a huge eruption, Rogers was on the mountainside, getting ready to climb the summit with Francisco Valenzuela, another climber he'd met the night before. Rogers had encountered quite a few other people on the mountain. Some were authorized to be there; some weren't. Some made it back alive, others didn't.
When the eruption happened, Rogers jumped into his car, but became disoriented and took a wrong turn. Both he and Valenzuela drove off the road in a panic, and when they got back on the road, Rogers insisted on going back to their campsite to find a roll of film. All the while, the ash in the air got thicker. Read the story of the serial trespasser who couldn't leave Mount St. Helens alone at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to the story in a podcast at the same link.
(Image credit: Jmkdouglas)
A "useless machine" is one in which you turn it on, and all it does is turn itself off. They can be pretty funny, and the early internet was full of videos about them. We've posted them here before, both plain and fancy, and even political. This one is a bit more dramatic than the simple box that turns itself off. In fact, it has its own personality!
YouTuber fritend1 shares pictures of the inner workings, and the Arduino code that makes it work. -via Fark
🐶 It's not wise to upset a Wookie ... or Brussels Griffon. Meet Proshka, the Brussels Griffon dog that looks like Chewbacca.
🕹️ Who are the best pets in video games? See if your favorite goodest boy (or girl) made the list of the 15 Best Pets in Gaming.
✈️ During Storm Eunice, Jerry Dyer of Big Jet TV livestreamed airplanes struggling to land at Heathrow airport due to strong crosswinds. The live stream was so popular that it hit a record of 200,000 concurrent views - more than the Olympics at some point. Dyer's excitable commentaries as the planes land (or make a go-around) are pure Internet gold.
🏠 Model homes look so enticing (no mess and no clutter) because no one actually lives in those houses. Designer Nick Lewis dishes out the details of home design trends that are beautiful but actually impractical for daily life.
🦠 The world's largest bacterium can grow up to 2 cm (three quarters of an inch) long and is visible to the naked eye.
🎨 Fantastic ice art: David Popa draws ephemeral portraits on an ice float in southern Finland.
🐱 Akkodha is a cat that says "OK" to everything. Like, would you like to become a TikTok Star? "OK," she said and got over 95K followers.
🧟 For those of you who love Halloween 365 days a year: Here's how to make a ghoulish cake brain with cherry blood. It's the perfect zombie food!
🤣 Boba Fett wasn't too happy with Mando muscling in on his series The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+. But apparently, a duel isn't the way sophisticated and modern bounty hunters resolve internal conflicts anymore. So Boba Fett and Mando went to couples therapy instead.
🍬 Lastly, in the name of art, here's E.T. made from Tootsie Roll candies.
Images: @griffy.girl/IG and @david_popa_art/IG
More neat posts over at our new sites: Supa Fluffy, Infinite 1UP, Pictojam, Pop Culturista, Laughosaurus, Homes & Hues and Spooky Daily - Thank you for checking 'em out!
You've heard of the infinite monkey theorem. It states that "a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare." It has been used to describe the work here at Neatorama, but we don't have any monkeys. It's really about the idea of randomness. No one expects monkeys to learn how to write, but how much time would elapse before a certain set of words could be produced by random typing? There have been actual experiments to test this theorem.
Getting your hands on infinite monkeys is a bit challenging, let alone hiring infinite zookeepers to clean up infinite piles of feces, so computer programmers have attempted to simulate the monkeys using random text generators. One of the first attempts, in 2004, saw a tiny bit of success when one of the monkeys bashed out the phrase 'VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t', the first part of which was in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
That took the simulated monkeys 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years. The entire works of Shakespeare, it's fair to say, would take a long time.
That's close enough to an "infinite amount of time." That wasn't the only experiment using random text generation to crunch the numbers. Only once has it been tried with actual monkeys, at Paignton Zoo in Devon, England. Learn how that and other such experiments turned out at IFLScience. -via Strange Company
Weird Al has ventured into the world of arcade games with a unique pinball machine themed with his illustrious career. You can get one as a standalone or buy it as an upgrade if you already own a P3 pinball platform. The name of this machine by Multimorphic is Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity. It features a video screen, camera, hamster wheel, ball run course, five flippers, and plays 17 Weird Al Yankovic songs.
To really understand how awesome this pinball machine is, you probably need to be at least a little familiar with the Multimorphic P3 pinball system, which is way beyond anything I've ever played. But if you know what you're getting into, the whole machine, upgrades, and various accessories are for sale here. Yeah, it's expensive. If you start from scratch and get all the upgrades and accessories, you're looking at around $13,000. But it sure looks cool, doesn't it? -via Boing Boing
After years of research on coffee, experts have found the optimal amount of the delicious caffeinated drink we need to drink for maximum health and brain benefits. Three cups of coffee a day is good enough, according to Harvard-trained psychiatrist, trained nutrition specialist, and trained chef, Dr. Uma Naidoo.
Studies that focused on coffee consumption and its effect on the cognitive health of men and women show us that coffee drinkers had less than half the cognitive decline as the non-coffee drinkers did. Participants of these studies that had the least decline healthwise drank at least three cups a day. Now there’s my excuse when my parents tell me I drink too much coffee– I haven’t even passed the minimum recommended amount!
Image credit: Nathan Dumlao
Australian tech company Zero One Studio created an animation that depicts the destruction of the once glorious city of Pompeii. The video was formed from the bits and pieces of historical evidence obtained by experts through the years. Initially premiered in A Day in Pompeii, an exhibition held at the Melbourne Museum in 2009, the video can also be seen on the studio’s YouTube account. The animated short gives the viewers the perspective of someone atop a villa, watching Mount Vesuvius erupt and destroy the city over the course of 48 hours.
(via My Modern Met)
Scientists usually get prehistoric insects preserved in amber, perfectly holding their insides for analysis. In a new discovery, it seems that amber can also hold lizards well! A new extinct species of lizard was trapped in Burmese amber, perfectly preserved. The lizard, a member of the Retinosaurus hkamentiensis species, was discovered to still have its scaly skin and skeleton intact. The good quality of the lizard’s remains shocked paleontologist Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University and his team. “We were able to study not only a skeleton, but even the external appearance (scalation) of the lizard,” Čerňanský told SYFY WIRE. "In fact, we can study the animal in the same way that herpetologists study modern species.”
Read more about the discovery here!
Image credit: Joseph Bevitt/Edward Stanley/Andrej Čerňanský et al
A nine-panel glass mosaic was discovered during renovations for a new restaurant at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Now, the artwork is being displayed behind the bar at the rooftop restaurant, called Sant’olina. Seven of the nine panels display different figures from classical mythology. While the mosaic is stunning and pleasing to look at, part of its appeal comes from the mystery that accompanied it.
The creator of the artwork was initially unknown. Hints of letters that were enigmatically placed on the panel were the only clues the Hilton had. After hard digging, the company found out that it was created by Dale Owen and Robert Mallory, and was installed when the hotel opened in 1955. The artwork was hidden behind a wall in 1944, for it to only resurface now.
Image via The Art Newspaper
A 17-year-old discovered a calculus technique that solved integral equations. The high schooler, named Glenn Bruda, stumbled upon it when he woke up in the middle of the night to fetch a glass of water. He was ready to go back to sleep when the solution to a formula he had been trying to solve for months hit him.
After revisiting the notes he wrote that night, he cross-checked the newly formed calculus technique with professors at Santa Fe College and the University of Florida. With their encouragement, Bruda published his discovery to Cornell University’s “arXiv”, an open-access archive for scholarly scientific articles. Bruda named his technique the “Maclaurin Integration” after Colin Maclaurin, a famous 18th-century Scottish mathematician, where his solution was derived from.
Image credit: Jennifer Bruda
Musician Nahre Sol bought a tiny toy piano that has keys for only two octaves and has the rinky tink sound of a cheap glockenspiel. How do the songs we know and love sound played on this piano? Sol had to rearrange songs to fit into two octaves, and plays a bunch of them for us. Most of the songs are labeled classical, but there are also songs from movies and video games and some surprises. In other words, you've heard them all. Then she rates which ones work on this tiny piano and which don't. There's at least one note on this instrument that's out of tune, but it doesn't get used much. This is one of those videos that may seem long, but once you get started listening to the songs, you can't stop watching. -via Laughing Squid
