Occasionally we have posted a nighttime satellite image that shows where the lights are on in one country or another. But now we have a composite image that shows the entire world on a Mercator projection and how it is lit up at night. Yeah, of course it would have to a composite, because it's never nighttime for the whole world. The huge number of individual images used to make this map also allows us to zoom in and see what the light -or lack of it- tells us about different regions. For example, there are no lines normally visible from space to tell us where national borders are, but the policies of different countries can make it seem that way when one nation has plenty of light, while its neighbor has none. Comparing images taken over time can show population growth, economic growth, or the effects of war. -via Digg
Shawn Bradley played center in the NBA from 1993 to 2005. He is 7' 6" tall, making him one of the tallest NBA players in history. After retiring from basketball, Bradley became a coach and administrator at a school for at-risk youth in Utah. Then in January of 2021, he was struck by a car while riding a bicycle. Bradley suffered spinal injuries and was left a quadriplegic.
His life since then has been a struggle to return to any kind of normalcy. It is a paradigm shift for anyone to adjust to life in a wheelchair with professional aides for everyday activities, but for Bradley there are a few extra challenges. His very size makes everything more difficult. At 300 pounds, he must have a special crane to lift him from a bed to a wheelchair. His custom-built, 500-pound wheelchair causes his oversized van to list to the side when its lift is in use. During Bradley's initial hospitalization, the staff rigged up a padded table for his feet because he was too tall for the biggest bed they had.
There are also extra psychological challenges. Bradley's entire identity was centered around his height and his athletic ability. He went from looking down on everyone to looking up at anyone. His three-story home has a pool and gym he can't use and custom eight-foot tall doors he no longer needs. Read Bradley's story at Sports Illustrated. -via Damn Interesting
Watching a craftsman make something beautiful by hand out of raw materials can be so calming and satisfying. Watching omozoc build a milk crate is even more so, because he makes it look so easy! Don't tell anyone, but the secret is stop-motion animation, which can also be calming and satisfying. I particularly like the finishing, just as smooth as butter! He tells us this involved 2854 still photos. That's a lot of work, but the upside is that he ended up with a cool video and a really nice milk crate. -via Metafilter
🎨 Japanese miniature artist Tatsuya Tanaka compiled his best mini diorama art from 2021 and we are all in awe with his creativity.
🐶 Can't get a Covid test? Let these specially trained Covid sniffing dogs smell you to see if you have the virus.
🏠 The Chemosphere in Los Angeles is a modernist house worthy of a movie villain.
🧾 Tax season is almost here, so the IRS is warning criminals not to forget to report income from illegal activities in their federal tax return. After all, that's how they nabbed Al Capone.
📺 No, it's not your eyesight or your television monitor, movies and TV shows are indeed lacking colors these days.
🦀 Cheeky coconut crab tries to steal a golf club but ended up snapping it in half with its claws.
More neat posts: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, and Supa Fluffy.
Image: @tanaka_tatsuya
Featured art: Paper Wars by indie artist Dr.Monekers
Limited time special: Save up to 20% on all Anime T-Shirts, Video Games T-Shirts, Card & Board Games T-Shirts, and Books & Reading T-Shirts. Hurry! This sale ends soon.
Rubber hose animation is an animation style that arose in the 1930s, named for the characters' long rubbery limbs that bend in an exaggerated comic manner. The term became a catchall for the early animation style that so many cartoonists used. Younger people today might call it "Cuphead style."
Artist Kev Craven draws in many different styles, including rubber hose vintage style. Lately, he's been redesigning modern cartoon characters in rubber hose style. Of course you recognize Samurai Jack at the top, and Cow and Chicken from the late '90s cartoon above. And this is what Johnny Bravo would look like if he were in an early Popeye cartoon.
You can see the process of Craven creating these characters in videos featuring Phineas and Ferb, Ren and Stimpy, and even Spider-Man. Follow Craven's artwork at Instagram. He's asking for suggestions on which modern characters should be given the rubber hose treatment. -via Boing Boing
ダイヤル式電話でDOOMを操作する猛者が遂に登場
— Yoshino@連邦(20周年) (@yoshinokentarou) January 10, 2022
たぶん過去イチ操作性が悪い
1 - ctrl、2 - 左、3 - 右 4 - 上、5 - 下、6 -スペース pic.twitter.com/oAsaqudefy
It's a popular challenge among computer programmers and tinkerers to find ways to play the 1993 first-person shooter game Doom on decidedly non-standard video game equipment. Past participants have tried rats, potatoes, a smart refrigerator, and a pregnancy test as platforms, power supplies, or controllers for the game. Now a new player has entered the game.
This video shows a man playing Doom using an old fashioned rotary phone. Strictly speaking, he's playing the game on a laptop, but he's rigged the phone to be a functional controller. 1 fires the gun, 2 moves left, 3 moves right, 4 goes up, and 5 moves down. I haven't figured out what 6 is supposed to do.
-via Super Punch
The billboards will tell you that you can see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. However, three states meet where the mountain is, and when you look out from the summit, there are no boundary lines telling you what's out there. How far you can see from any particular place is normally limited by the curvature of the earth. Gaze out on a flat ocean or prairie land, and you can probably see about five kilometers away. However, if you are on top of a mountain, that sightline is exponentially longer. The same if you are looking at a faraway mountain jutting up from the earth. But air pollution also interferes with what we can see. The pandemic lockdown shut down factories and took so many vehicles off the streets, that one day people in Punjab were astonished that they could see the Himalayas, a sight that was normal for residents of the state some years ago when the air was cleaner.
There are other factors involved in how far one can see. Still, geographers have determined where the longest line of sight on earth is. Strangely, it is not the place where a person has actually taken the furthest photograph. Read about sightlines and where those places are at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Flickr user Sitoo)
Humans have laws that govern our interactions with others. Animals don't, but since they live with and among us, they sometimes get involved in human crime. Sometimes they are the perpetrators, and in a few cases are treated as such: jailed, put on trial, fined, or otherwise punished. Sometimes they are unwitting accomplices. Sometimes an animal can be a witness to a crime, or even the evidence that solves it. And at least once, a bird got right in the middle of a human crime scene.
In Canada, police had the opposite problem: Instead of dealing with an animal who fled the scene of the crime, they had to deal with one who wouldn’t leave their crime scene alone. A bird believed to be a crow named Canuck had already earned a reputation as a beloved troublemaker in Vancouver. In 2016, his antics got him in a tussle with the law. When police were dispatched to a car fire, they encountered a man wielding a knife. Canuck, who had been spotted sitting on the burned car, scooped up the knife and flew away with it. A cop had to chase him for a bit before the bird finally dropped his shiny evidential treasure.
So, did the bird save the day by stealing the knife, or was he tampering with evidence? The original account makes it clear that the police had already arrested the perpetrator and Canuck then made off with the evidence. This is just one of 25 stories of animals involved in real crimes that you can read about at Mental Floss. Or if you prefer, you can watch a video at the same link.
(Image credit: Shawn Bergman)
Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami, who is known for his bright and colorful art, is now doing his spin on the Tamagotchi virtual toys from the 1990s and 2000s. The artist revealed his project in an Instagram post, where he shared that he spent a year or so working on a children’s handheld nurturing game inspired by the old virtual toys. This marks Murakami’s first venture into game development.
The game will be played in a flower-shaped case, with its pixelated petals reflecting Murakami’s art style. Sonic Unleashed director Yoshihisa Hashimoto will develop the game.
Image credit: Takashi Murakami
Germany employed the help of 700 goats and sheep to encourage more people to get COVID-19 vaccinations. The animals formed a shape of a 100-meter syringe in a field at Schneverdingen, Hamburg. The campaign was aimed at people who remain hesitant to get the vaccine. “Sheep are such likeable animals — maybe they can get the message over better,” said Hanspeter Etzold, the organizer of the campaign.
Image credit: Philipp Schulze/dpa via AP
Very high definition!
Rembrandt’s artwork, The Night Watch (formally titled The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch or Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banning Cocq– that’s a long one), now has a 717-billion-pixel digital twin thanks to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum efforts.
The digital copy of the 1642 artwork was done by the museum’s "Operation Night Watch" research team. According to AP News, “the team laser-scanned the surface of the painting, fine-tuned focus before every shot, and used a neural network to ensure optimal color and sharpness for each exposure.”
Image credit: Rijksmuseum
Before anyone freaks out about a new genetic mutation– it’s merely an illusion. A pretty photographic illusion, that is. Photographer Renatas Jakaitis managed to capture an incredible shot of three deer heads that seem to sprout from one body. Jakatis was walking and taking photos behind a deer in Lithuania when he managed to make the animals turn their heads at the same time with the sound of his camera shutter, which in turn yielded the photo above. Now that’s incredible luck!
Image credit: Renatas Jakaitis via My Modern Met
A Real-life Santa Claus!
Basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal bought 1000 Nintendo Switches and PS5s for kids in Georgia. According to him, this was to make sure kids received ‘good toys’ for the holidays last year.
With the high demand for these consoles, how in the world did O’Neal obtain these units? There’s no issue with the money because he can certainly afford them, but how did he find 1000 units?“I called you to know, my friend from Nintendo Switch. Ordered about 1,000 Switches and 1,000 PS5s. I went to Walmart and got bikes. So you know yesterday, at this little elementary school in McDonough Georgia, kids were crying, kids were happy. And that’s what it’s all about,” he shared in Gary Vee’s podcast.
Forbes’ Paul Tassi theorizes on how the basketball legend managed to snag a lot of units of these in-demand consoles. Check his full piece here.
Image credit: wikimedia commons
🎬 A while ago, we told you that the Foo Fighters secretly made a horror-comedy movie. Today, the trailer for the Foo Fighters' Studio 666 has just dropped. It looks pretty good, so perhaps if that music thing doesn't work out for Dave Grohl, he can always be try the movie thing 😉
🪑 Psst, got an old piece of IKEA furniture? It may be worth a lot. Turns out, secondhand vintage IKEA furniture can be quite valuable.
👅 SilentSpeller lets you text with your tongue (without making a sound, that is).
🎉 Woman married the color pink in a fun wedding ceremony in Las Vegas (where else?), and we're red with jealousy that we didn't think of it first.
😸 A couple of days ago, we told you of cats holding a couple's blender hostage. Now, they're using this man's Starlink Satellite Dish as a chair. Cats are just a-holes.
For more neat stuff, check out: Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Pictojam, and Supa Fluffy.
🐺 Featured Art: Scoot at the Moon by Hillary White
From the NeatoShop: Animal T-Shirts and Science T-Shirts
The Matrix Resurrections is the fourth installment of the Matrix franchise that started in 1999. It premiered less than a month ago and suffered from high expectations. Oh, people went to see it, mostly due to the franchise's history and the star power of Keanu Reeves, but The Matrix Resurrections underperformed both at the box office and in critical reviews. Fans didn't really want to see Neo as a senior citizen, or see the fate of the Matrix hanging by a love story. Screen Junkies has plenty of other thing to nitpick in The Matrix Resurrections, as you'll see in this Honest Trailer. Does this video contain spoilers? I don't know, I have yet to see any of the Matrix movies, so I would assume it does if I were you.
