How do you know that the cantina that you're working in is a rough place? It's not that some guy gets his arm chopped off. It's that everyone treats it like a normal event and not a major crime.
It was stressful enough that even Doikk Na'ts, a Dorenian Beshniquel player in the Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, slips and calls his elegant instrument from a more civilized age a "space clarinet."
-via Super Punch
Janelle Shane works with artificial intelligence algorithms, and when she sees something weird or funny, she tells us about it on her blog AI Weirdness. For the third year in a row, she is challenging her readers to produce art for October, or as the algorithm calls it, "Botober." You can see art inspired by Shane's AI-generated prompts in previous years here.
This year, five different algorithms have produced lists of art prompts that should inspire you to create something really strange in the categories of animals, Halloween, more Halloween, more animals, and landscapes. Check them all out, and when you've done your part, post your contributions to social media and tag them with #botober.
Here's something that will surely lift your spirits! Listen to "Ordinary Day" joyously performed by Alan Doyle and the Shallaway Youth Choir.
Ordinary Day is a song that reminds us about the power of positivity and the beauty of overcoming life's biggest obstacles. As we look for our new normal, we’re grateful for kids and youth and the example of resilience they continue to show us every day.
-via Nag on the Lake
What happens when the software Cyriak Harris uses to animate his disturbing ideas decides to crash? Well, he's not going to let that stop him! In this video, Cyriak uses meatspace tools to construct his own animation machine, complete with his signature style of movement and general weirdness.
A Canadian friend of mine learned Polish from her parents. She traveled to Ukraine and was surprised to find she could understand people speaking Russian. Another friend from New York said he could understand people in the Netherlands easier than he could people in Tennessee. And my daughter spent years learning French, but then picked up Spanish in about a month. Languages flow into each other, but sometimes they grow apart. So what really defines a language as distinct from a dialect? And how different must a dialect be before it is considered another language? The answer may surprise you, but when you think about it, you won't be surprised.
You forgot that the Dungeons & Dragons game starts in two hours and you're the gamemaster. Sure, you could just toss some goblins at the players, but if you're going to have a village encounter in the countryside or even make a map, you'll need some placenames. VillageBot is here to help.
There are at least 18,804 village names in England. VillageBot will spit them out to you in helpful lists like this one:
That will do in a pinch. Now you can focus on pretending to have a plot for your players to ignore.
-via Nag on the Lake
"Won't someone think of the children?" Apparently, when some people think of children, it's to protect them from the real world, even at an age when we should be preparing them for it. When a child has developed the skills to read general circulation books, there's really no controlling what they will read, and many parents are just glad they are reading at all. But time and again, people try to limit what students are exposed to in school libraries and reading lists. Books by Judy Blume have been a particular target over the years.
2. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
There's something about books depicting the real young adult experience that upsets people—which perhaps explains why so many Judy Blume books get challenged or banned. In the ‘90s, five Blume books were on the most frequently banned list: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Published in the 1970s, Are You There God explores the challenges of growing into yourself as a young girl, and it's often challenged, mainly because it talks about puberty and teenage sexuality. In 1982, the Fond du Lac school district in Wisconsin challenged the novel for being “sexually offensive and amoral.” In fact, Blume even wrote about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”—you know, something every teenage girl deals with. (Although it's arguably better than when Forever was banned for depicting “disobedience to parents.”)
The reasons for banning other books are even weirder, from the word "sweat" to a possible connection to other books by a completely different author. Read the stories of eleven of those books at Mental Floss.
Sometimes you see an opportunity to make a statement or a visual pun and you just can't help yourself, right? Well, we don't condone vandalism, but sometimes we can appreciate it. Even so, most of these images gleaned from the subreddit Mildly Vandalized are harmless. Some could even be called "street art" or "enhancements." Some just correct spelling or grammar on a sign that asking for it, and others are just captions added with a Post-it Note or something.
See 37 such public "enhancements" that will make you smile at Buzzfeed.
We know the outlines of the story of television. In the early 20th century, great minds across the globe, like Scotsman John Logie Baird, German Paul Nipkow, and American Philo T. Farnsworth were trying to combine motion pictures and radio broadcasts, with varying success. Which technology was best had to be decided before anyone would invest in a vast infrastructure of broadcasting networks, content, and receivers, and then selling to idea to the public. These competing systems were put on hold for World War II, and then Farnsworth's electronic television system emerged victorious. But let's back up to 1939, when a British boy's magazine printed an article about "television." The British were proponents of John Logie Baird's mechanical television system, and the history the medium was still short. When no one had a receiver, they turned to "television theaters."
Northern holiday crowds at Blackpool and Morecambe in July, 1934, were the first to test the pleasures of real television theatres in which reproductions of events happening up to 20 miles away were projected on the screen. A slight last-minute hitch prevented Morecambe's Television Theatre opening on the day planned, so for a short while the Blackpool venture, located inconspicuously near the Central Pier, stood unchallenged as the only place in Britain where the public could enter a darkened room and see a televised moving picture on the screen.
The inventor of the apparatus used at Morecambe was Mr. F. Cockcroft Taylor.
Actors and actresses who were willing to permit themselves to be televised in 1934, had, in the studio, to make-up like cannibals in full war paint. First they had to paint their faces dead white, then thick blue lines were put down the sides of their noses to bring that part of the face out properly. Their eyelids had to be painted mauve, their lips blue, and their eyebrows were made enormously big and heavy, like George Robey's. The rest of their faces were left dead white.
By 1939, things had improved somewhat. Read a contemporary account of early television in Britain at Malcolm's Musings: Strange but True. -via Strange Company
See also: TV's Father: Philo T. Farnsworth and Nazi TV.
French navy officer Jérôme Chardon knew how dangerous it is to travel between New Zealand and Alaska. An individual who dares to do that has to face ferocious storms formed in the Pacific Ocean. And so he was surprised to hear on the radio a story of a bar-tailed godwit doing just that — migrating successfully between the two places — and being unscathed at the end of its 14,000-kilometer journey. “Can learning how these birds navigate help coastal communities to avoid disaster?” he thought to himself.
Last January, a team from France’s National Museum of Natural History decided to test Chardon’s idea, five years after he thought of it.
Researchers with the new Kivi Kuaka project, led by Frédéric Jiguet, an ornithologist at NMNH, equipped 56 birds of five species with cutting-edge animal tracking technology. The French navy ferried the team to remote atolls and islands in French Polynesia, where the scientists attached tags using ICARUS tracking technology. These tags transmit the birds’ locations to the International Space Station, which bounces the data back to scientists on Earth who can then follow the birds as they forage, migrate, and rest—all the while waiting to see how the birds respond to natural disasters.
The Kivi Kuaka project is focusing on birds’ ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound inaudible to humans that the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis. Infrasound has myriad sources, from lightning strikes and jet engines to the songlike vocalizations of rhinoceroses. Even the Earth itself generates a continuous infrasonic hum. Though rarely measured, it is known that tsunamis generate infrasound, too, and that these sound waves travel faster than the tsunami wave, offering a potential window to detect a tsunami before it hits.
If ever we do learn more about the birds’ ability to hear these sounds inaudible to humans, and how they respond to such sounds, then it would greatly help us indeed.
More about this over at Smithsonian Magazine.
(Image Credit: Frédéric Jiguet / MNHN-Kivi Kuaka)
2D Beat ‘Em Up games have become less popular. Over the years, the genre has been overshadowed by hack and slash games. But it seems that we’re going to see a rebirth of the beat em up genre. This new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Shredder’s Revenge, is set to release some time next year, and it looks and feels like it came from the 90s, but much cleaner.
Check out the trailer!
(Image Credit: IGN via YouTube)
When Reddit user Beefball1010 asked people on Reddit about facts they know that could make another person ask them “why do you know that?”, he was not expecting his post to blow up. A mere 3 days have passed, and the post already has over 34,000 upvotes. But of course, it is not the upvotes that make Beefball1010’s post intriguing — it is the answers. Some answers are straight-up horrifying, while others are just plain weird. But there are interesting ones, too!
Bored Panda has collected 40 of these comments. Here are some of them.
You can also go over at the original Reddit thread, too, if you like.
(Image Credit: Bored Panda)
Non-line-of-sight, or NLOS imaging, is a technique that allows a device (such as a camera) to see objects that are not visible to its line of sight. This is made possible through the use of light pulses, which will bounce off from surfaces, and then go back to the camera’s sources. Algorithms will then analyze the length of time it took these reflections to go back to the camera, and then proceed to create an image based on the information.
Scientists have been refining this technique over the years, but it had one weakness: it needed large reflective surfaces. However, researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab, may have overcome this weakness with their keyhole imaging technique. The results are worse than previous NLOS techniques, though, but the images generated are still enough in order for a person to make an educated guess on what the object is.
The research could one day provide a way for police or the military to assess the risks of entering a room before actually breaking down the door and storming their way inside, using nothing but a small crack in the wall or a gap around a window or doorway. The new technique could also provide new techniques for autonomous navigation systems to spot hidden hazards long before they become a threat in situations where the previous NLOS techniques weren’t practical given the environment.
(Image Credit: Stanford Computational Engineering Lab)
Back during the Tokugawa Shogunate, when Edo (now Tokyo) became the most populous place on Earth (with about 1 million people), the demae (which means “delivery men”) — men of great strength, flexibility, and endurance — roamed the streets of the city. On their shoulders were dozens of hot meals which they would have to deliver to the hungry people of Edo before the meals got cold.
“Basically, you had a lot of urban density and an extremely developed capitalist economy,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor of history of Japan and East Asia and the author of Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise After Anpo. “People had commutes, much like today. They would walk across the city, so they didn’t have time to go back for lunch. A whole restaurant industry evolved to serve these workers.”
Cheap, filling, and nutritious, soba and udon noodles were the preferred foodstuff of the proletariat. A skilled demae could carry dozens of packed soba lunches at once. “Bicycles hadn’t been invented yet, so they would carry these soba trays and bowls in baskets that were hanging down from a pole that they would carry on their shoulders,” Kapur says. “These guys were fast. They would jog through the streets to get the food where it was going while it was still hot.”
When bicycles came into the picture, the demae industry was revolutionized. No longer did the men have to jog. However, because the city was thriving more than ever at that time, there was also more demand for hot noodles.
“You want the noodles to still be hot when you arrive, so speed is of the essence,” says Kapur. “In a lot of cases, they would be carrying lunch to one entire company, so that’s why they’re carrying maybe 20 or 30 portions together.”
In the 1950s, however, automobiles became popular in Japan, and the roads became less friendly toward the demae. Accidents frequently happened with the delivery men. And, in 1961, the government finally intervened by officially banning the use of delivery bikes in the streets of Tokyo. However, the demae carried on with their business, and the police did very little to stop them, as the latter stated that the former “will lose half of their customers” if they became stricter.
Learn more about the story of these legendary men over at Atlas Obscura.
(Image Credit: RIDER GVNG via YouTube)
Can you hold your beer? No, I am not asking if you can chug a brew and not throw up. I mean can you physically hold a full glass stein of beer with your arm fully extended in front of you? That's the task involved in the sport of steinholding. If you're good, then you can complete with the US Steinholding Association. The rules are rigorous. Takeout highlights the most important requirements:
If any amount of beer spills or drips off of the stein, the competitor is disqualified. (During outdoor competitions or humid conditions, judges should be sure to differentiate between dripping resulting from condensation or sweat, and dripping resulting from beer spillage.)
Athletic compression clothing is acceptable, however stiff or supportive clothing (such as a bench press shirt) may not be worn.
The thumb may not rest on top of the stein handle; it must rest on the other fingers.
Limited arching of the back is tolerable, however only minimal leaning is acceptable. In the vertical plane, the competitor’s elbow must never cross behind the front of the hips or the front of the ankle of either foot.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: US Steinholding Association
