Princess Ka‘iulani was born into the royal family of the Kingdom of Hawaii, but it was only years later that she was considered to be in line for the throne. At age 13, as the next heir apparent, she was sent to England to be educated. She didn't spend all her time there studying.

But first and foremost, the princess was a surfer. Known to ride a long wooden board, a particularly heavy and demanding one at that, she had a reputation for outstanding performance in big surf. Hawaiian women, particularly those of royal blood, were noted for their prowess and power on the waves. The Hawaiian monarchy had surfed with passion until the late 1800s, when wave riding became almost extinct as a sport. The evangelical missionaries’ religious dogma had become the preeminent cultural power in the land—and for the most part they had succeeded in removing surfing from the everyday lives of the Hawaiian people. But Princess Ka‘iulani— second in the line of succession for the Hawaiian Crown—was a notable exception. Disregarding the missionaries’ efforts to eradicate all wave-riding activities, she continued to surf daily in full defiance of the western restrictions imposed on the Hawaiian culture. “She was an expert surfrider,” recalled early 20th-century surfrider Knute Cottrell, one of the founders of the Hui Nalu surf club at Waikiki in 1908. Riding a “long olo board made of ‘wili wili’ hardwood, Ka‘iulani was the last of the traditional native surfers at Waikiki.”

Ka‘iulani was still in England when word came that her kingdom had been overthrown by American business interests. She fought back, as fiercely as a 17-year-old princess could. Read the story of Crown Princess Ka‘iulani at Atlas Obscura.

Anyone got a spare $1.5 million? A sealed copy of Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 sold for a whopping  $1,560,000 at Heritage Auctions. This record-breaking sale beat the recently-established record held by the purchase of The Legend of Zelda for the NES, which sold for an eye-popping $870,000 at auction. The Verge has more details: 

Over the past 12 months, the record for the most expensive video game ever has risen dramatically. Here’s the timeline of the record, as far as I am aware:

July 10th, 2020: copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for $114,000

November 23rd, 2020: copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 sells for $156,000

April 2nd, 2021: copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for $660,000

July 9th, 2021: copy of The Legend of Zelda sells for $870,000

July 11th, 2021: copy of Super Mario 64 sells for $1,560,000

It’s not just video games that have skyrocketed. The value of Pokémon cards has been on a tear, too, and eBay even announced a feature for its app to make it easier to scan trading cards to sell on the auction site. The prices of NFTs, a form of digital collectibles, seems to be dropping, though.

Image credit: Heritage Auctions

Thanks to an OpenAI model, a new art scene has exploded. Hackers have been modifying an OpenAi model to make image generation tools. To get an ‘artwork’ from these tools, all you have to do is prompt them with a description of the image you want to see, as Vice details: 

While the new CLIP-based systems are reminiscent of GPT-3 in their “promptability,” their inner workings are much different. CLIP was designed to be a narrow-scoped tool, albeit an extremely powerful one. It is a general purpose image classifier that can decide how well an image corresponds with a prompt, for example, matching an image of an apple with the word ‘apple.’ But that is all. “It wasn't obvious that it could be used for generating art,” University of California, Berkeley computer science student Charlie Snell, who has been following the new scene, said in an interview. 

But shortly after its release, hackers like Ryan Murdock, a machine learning artist and engineer, figured out how to connect other AIs up to CLIP, creating an image generator. “A couple of days after I started messing around with it, I realized that I could generate images,” Murdock said in an interview.

Image: Mordechai Rorvig

Dutch photographer Jeroen Nieuwhuis teamed up with the real life ‘ice man’, Wim Hof. Hof is a multiple Guinness world record holder for his cold weather endurance feats. Jeroen and his team spent time with the record holder during his daily endurance routines to capture his skills on camera. The Phoblographer gets in touch with the photographer to learn about his experience with the ‘ice man’: 

Jeroen’s work takes him all around the world, photographing commercial clients and personal projects in varying conditions. However, when Covid-19 regulations prevented him from traveling abroad, he decided to take a road trip with his team to photograph Wim Hof doing one of his endurance routines. Proper preparation and one-to-one discussions with Wim ensured that Jeroen captured the real essence of the endurance of the Ice Man and his superhuman abilities.

Despite shooting professionally for over 10 years, I still find myself getting nervous at times when I arrive at a site. There’s always the fear at the back of my head that something could go wrong, and in many cases it does. Preparation is key to any photoshoot. This doesn’t just involve prepping gear and sketching out a storyboard. A lot of times you also need to prepare your mindset to seamlessly execute a shoot on location. Sometimes you need to instantly come up with a plan B when plan A doesn’t work out. I can’t remember who it was, but a legendary photographer once said that even the most experienced photographers run into unexpected hurdles when they’re on shoots; the best among them know how to adapt and move on with the shoot as if nothing happened.

Image credit: Jeroen Nieuwhuis 

The Endoceras was an oversized predator that preyed on early fish species and trilobites. Thanks to fossil remains of the creature, experts have determined that the sea creature’s home turf, so to speak, was in Australia. Senior curator of Earth Sciences for the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Dr. Adam Yates, believes that the Endoceras existed in a time before any dinosaurs or any animal with a backbone lived on land: 

"It is probably not widely recognised amongst our ordinary everyday people that Central Australia was home to these marine animals and their fossils can still be found in places like the MacDonnell Ranges."

Several years ago Dr Yates came across a section the Endoceras when the museum shifted premises.

"This particular fossil was found lurking in the basement of the old space where the collection was temporarily stored for many years before we finally moved into the new museum at Megafauna Central in the centre of Alice Springs.

At closer inspection Dr Yates realised that significance of the specimen.

"It came from an exceptionally large nautiloid," he said.

"It would have been about two-and-a-half metres long, which makes it one of the largest animals alive at the time.

"The segment of fossil that you see is only a part of the whole creature," he said.

Image credit: ABC Alice Springs: Emma Haskin

(Chris Hallbeck/Maximumble)

Those five channels were NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and the local UHF channel. The last of these was usually my favorite as a child, especially when it ran a 3-day Star Trek marathon when I was 8 years old. I never felt deprived, even when I had to tweak the aluminum foil around the TV antenna to improve the reception.

Why is this ship built so oddly? It's not sleek, like it's supposed to slice through the water. That's because it has one specialized purpose: to tow up to 24 sensor arrays that search for oil and gas hidden beneath the ocean floor. It's called the Ramform Titan. The operator, Petroleum Geo-Services, describes its capabilities:

Ramform Titan has 24 streamer reels, 16 abreast with a further 8 in a second row. The back deck layout is augmented by six independent source array handling booms. Together these enable faster deployment and recovery, with increased flexibility and safety, which make it possible to fully utilize the operational weather window. Steerable sources and streamers, combined with automated gear-handling systems increase flexibility and efficiency. This is an ideal platform for ultra high-density 3D acquisition, and reliable, compatible 4D projects.

-via Super Punch | Photo: PGS

Wombats are Australian marsupials, which you know come in all sorts of strange shapes and lifestyles. You might be surprised at how large a wombat can be, or how fast they run. Wombat poop is oddly cube-shaped, and research has figured out how that happens. Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal explains a lot of weird things about wombats in a rather comprehensive comic, with facts that get weirder and weirder as it goes along. The real focus is on the wombat butt, which is quite unique in the animal kingdom. If you don't already know about wombat butts and how they are used, you should go and read the while thing. Or even if you already know, go see it because it's entertaining. -via Metafilter

At My Modern Met, Madeline Muzdakis describes clocks, with and without alarms, from millennia ago. A common one, first described in China in about 520 AD, uses candles that burn evenly. By marking the drop in the wick, users could note the passage of time.

To make this candle clock into an alarm clock, place nails into the candle. When the wax around a nail melts, the nail falls into a metal tray, clattering noisily, and hopefully getting the attention of the user.

Read about other ingenious early clocks, most notably those that could keep track of time on seagoing vessels, at My Modern Met.

Photo: Benutzer:Flyout

The Soviet Union launched the first leg of the space race in October of 1957, when the satellite Sputnik 1 became the first manmade object to orbit the earth. It was soon followed by Sputnik 2. The United States made a big deal about its first satellite launch, which was on December 6, 1957. The rocket that was to deploy the satellite Vanguard 1 rose four feet and then fell back and exploded, which you can see here. In February of 1958, the US launched Explorer 1, its first successful satellite in orbit. But Vanguard got a second chance, and went into space a month later.  

Although tiny, compared to its predecessors, Vanguard 1 had quite a few mission objectives. It carried on board instruments that could measure the densities of the upper atmosphere and the electron content of the ionosphere, which was then used to determine the effect of the space environment on a satellite. It also obtained geodetic measurements through orbit analysis, and these proved that the Earth was indeed pear-shaped with the stem at the North Pole. The launch itself was a test to determine the launch capabilities of a three-stage launch vehicle as a part of Project Vanguard.

The Sputnik satellites lasted a few months each, and Explorer 1 remained in orbit for 12 years. But the Vanguard 1 satellite is still orbiting the earth 63 years later! Read the story of Vanguard, the little satellite that could, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Bruce Irving)

You already know the answer to this question: 1. It's dangerous, and 2. it doesn't work. But you want to see someone demonstrate it, right? And who better than Lauri Vuohensilta (previously), the Finnish madman who will try anything?

"...and definitely don't do this. You are going to see soon why."

Oh yeah, we need another quote here.

"Mushroom cloud is always good thing to have on nice summer day."

They end the video by burning their sauna, as one does. -via Digg

One of the biggest and most challenging restoration projects of the Tate Modern was fixing a damaged painting. Russian artist Vladimir Umanets vandalized a corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 work titled Black on Maroon in 2012. Restoring the painting to its original state took almost 18 months, and the museum labels the project as one of its most successful attempts at restoration: 

Due to Rothko’s layered technique, the painting’s “surface is really delicate and it turned out that most of the solvent systems that could dissolve and remove the ink could potentially damage the painting as well.” Patricia Smithen, the Tate’s head of conservation, told The Guardian. The video above from the museum shows the art and science that went into restoring the famous work, an eighteen-month-long process that involved some reverse engineering from a canvas donated by the Rothko family.

Black on Maroon seemed like an odd choice for a protest, as a blogger at Art History Abroad wrote the following day: “‘Why Rothko?’. His paintings [are] often criticised by those who don’t favour their abstraction, but rarely deemed politically or socially motivated to a point that they might provoke vandalism.” The presence of Black on Maroon and other Seagram Murals at the Tate, in fact, mark an act of protest by Rothko himself (who committed suicide the day the paintings arrived at the London museum).

Meet Lightograph, photographer Jeremy Cowart’s patent-pending creation. Cowart believes that his creation is the next level of photography. While images captured under the Lightograph concept seem to be moving at first glance, Cowart points out that they are not motion pictures, as the subjects involved are not moving. The only aspect of these images that are moving are the lights in the photos: 

To Cowart's knowledge, his process is unique and has never been done before, at least not with portrait photography. There's no use of CGI or 3D graphics in the process. 'This is truly a new method of art-making and analog photography,' Cowart says, 'Light can now tell multiple stories in a single image. It can show the hero and villain side of a person in the same portrait with a simple shift of light. Humans are multi-faceted. We're constantly changing and evolving.'

There's an inherent dynamism to a Lightograph. In a single Lightograph, the entire mood and emotion in a scene can dramatically shift with changing light. Light changes temperature, direction, and much more. Cowart also says that the process can be used for more than portraiture, with possible applications in commercial, lifestyle, fine art, fashion, beauty, editorial, travel, headshots, automotive, stock, architecture and more.

While the Lightographs are fascinating to look at with portraiture, the process could also have implications for advertising and marketing. Cowart says 'I see it as the future of digital media. So, magazine covers for example. Future issues of any magazine could have Lightographs as their covers […] Imagine driving past a digital billboard and the light changes completely in those three seconds that you drive past it […] Netflix movie posters could be Lightographs that evolve as you sit on your couch and scroll through movie titles.'

Image credit: Jeremy Cowart 

Would you purchase a sculpted block of goat cheese? I would! Daniel Elkayam teamed up with a shepherd and cheesemaker in Jerusalem to create a special collection of goat cheese. The collaboration, called Tatriz El-Habib, was created as part of the matchmaker project, where designers are paired with craftspeople. Designboom has more details: 

The focus of this year’s matchmaker project is food, and the brief for the designers was to tell the story of food makers through design. after being matched with shepherd and cheesemaker efrat giat, elkayam spent time in the yemenite valley in ein karem, where the giat family’s goat farm is located. during this time, they took the goats out to pasture, milked them, made cheese, and, most importantly, absorbed the shared experience.

From this shared experience, the designer learned about the giat family, whose origins are in yemen. there, the family business was based on small handmade factory for jewish traditional embroidery. after immigrating to israel, they settled in ein karem and raised goats for a living. today, efrat raises a herd of 11 goats, produces cheese, and makes jam from the surrounding mountain fruits. in addition, she conducts workshops revealing her unique way of life.

image by Oded Antman

I can’t understand the Internet sometimes. Thanks to big online stars, canned fish is now up in the ranks of being the summer snack of 2021. Once seen as a mediocre pizza topping, canned fish is now hyped online. Nylon’s Sophia June raises a point regarding the food’s rise in popularity. According to June, the popularity of tinned fish is fueled by the demand for shelf-stable foods during the pandemic: 

Caroline Goldfarb and Becca Millstein started Fishwife, a tinned fish company that sells high-quality, sustainably-sourced seafood in shamrock, bubblegum, and cerulean tins with loopy cursive, in what is an aesthetic that falls somewhere between a Glossier store and a Starbucks cup, last year. Goldfarb and Millstein quarantined together and found themselves eating tons of tinned fish during that time: throwing it in salads for protein, eating it straight out of the can, or putting it out for happy hour with natural wine. They got the idea to start the company when they couldn’t find tinned fish at the grocery store that was based in the United States and that marketed itself as being sustainably sourced — something that was important to Goldfarb and Millstein. Other newer tinned fish brands like Scout, Vital Choice, and even Patagonia are also marketed as sustainable. Now, Fishwife sells smoked rainbow trout and wild-caught smoked albacore tuna, with more types of fish planned.

“Tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food,” says Goldfarb. “There is no food that will make you hotter than tinned fish. Straight up. Do you know a hot girl who doesn’t exist on protein? I don’t.” She adds that in addition to protein, tinned fish also has omega-3s, vitamin B, and calcium, of which a tin of sardines contains more than a glass of milk.

Image credit: Anna Auza