The USPS has released a new postage stamp that appears to be a coded message. Each stamp contains twenty panels that spell out a message. It's not really a code, though, but an artistic font that's easy to decipher if you take the time to see each letter. Appropriately, the dedication ceremony was held at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.

“As you add these stamps to your collection, or use them to send a message to your family and friends — we hope they will appeal to the puzzle-solver in all of us,” said Robert M. Duncan, a member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, who served as dedicating official for the ceremony.

Joining Governor Duncan for the ceremony were Tamara Christian, the Spy Museum’s president and chief operating officer; Rebecca Roberts, curator of programming, Planet Word; and an “international spy” as a special guest.

Read more about the stamp at the Postal Service's website. -via Boing Boing

Last year we shared the Instagram account Subpar Parks, in which Amber Share illustrates one-star reviews of US National Parks. Now Share has turned her collection of reviews into a book called Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors. It contains reviews in both text and illustrations, plus commentary from the author. All 63 US National Parks are included, plus some national monuments, recreation areas, and other areas under the Park Service's umbrella.  

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based designer had some strict criteria when it came to determining which reviews to use in her illustrations. She looked for reviews that predated the project; once it took off, people began to plant fake reviews to get her attention. Then, she tried to weed out any sarcastic ones, and others that criticized park management or administration.

“I really try to focus in on people just criticizing nature because that, to me, is what keeps it funny and light,” she says. “You could go on all day about the ways that Zion manages the shuttle system, and that’s not really what this is about. But somebody who thinks the scenery of Zion is distant and impersonal is really what gets me.”

See a half-dozen such reviews and what Share thinks about them at Smithsonian.

In 1891, 14-year-old Michael Zoettl was recruited to become a Benedictine monk, and was sent from his home in Bavaria to Cullman, Alabama, to live at St. Bernard’s Abbey. Now called Brother Joseph, he studied to be a priest until an accident left him so hunchbacked that his superiors decided he would never have his own parish. Zoettl labored at the abbey, and filled his free time making miniature grottos.

Using simple hand tools and found objects – bits of broken pottery, shells, leftover tiles, marbles, chicken wire – he branched out from tiny grottos into a model of the city of Jerusalem, which he installed in the monastery’s garden in 1912. Originally meant just for the resident monks, Little Jerusalem soon attracted curious tourists. In fact, so many visitors arrived that the abbot told Zoettl he had to quit his little hobby because it was disturbing the monastery’s operations. Zoettl asked permission to move his creation to an old quarry on the grounds but was denied.

Eventually, the monastery embraced the tourism, and Little Jerusalem was moved and expanded. Brother Joseph worked on it until his 80s. Read the story of Little Jerusalem and the man who dedicated his life to it at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: AlabamaSouthern)

You've heard the phrase, "If you love the law and you love sausage, you don't want to see either one being made." Well, sausages begin with the pig, and learning unsavory details about pigs may put you off sausage for a while. And ham and bacon. Ze Frank lays out all the unpleasantness for us, and still manages to make us laugh.

Richard Mosse made use of an unexpected color that made his photographs pop and more eye-catching towards its viewers. The Irish-born photographer used the color hot pink, which is not normally associated with the subject of his photography -- conflict. Mosse employed vibrant pink hues in Infra, a series where he portrayed conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The photos were hypnotic, beautiful, and jarring, even more so with the bright pink hues in the images: 

“Somehow the way he has done it both repels and attracts you – it gets you completely immersed in the subject matter,” Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery and chair of the panel that awarded Mosse the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, told the Guardian at the time. Mosse is one of a generation of artists behind the conceptual turn that a strand of documentary photography has undergone in recent years. These photographers strive to make their viewers conscious of photography’s limitations and its inherently flawed claims to objective truth by bringing in elements of fiction or by using, as Mosse does, a highly stylised visual language that forces us to look at familiar subjects in a different way.

Displaced, the first retrospective exhibition of Mosse’s work, is currently on show at Fondazione MAST in Bologna, Italy, showcasing 77 large-scale images, installations and videos made between 2010 and the present. It chronicles how his approach has developed over time. As well as Infra and its sister project, the multimedia installation The Enclave (2013), the exhibition features his 2017 Prix Pictet-winning stills and film Heat Maps and Incoming (2017). Like the earlier works, these were created using military imaging technology, this time a thermal heat camera that can detect body heat from 30m away and is illegal under international law.

Image credit: Richard Mosse Platon, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, 2012. Collection Jack Shainman

An aerial tram in Claughton, Lancashire, has been delivering rock from a quarry to the brickworks for 100 years now in a system that requires no power. This ingenious delivery course runs on gravity alone. That doesn't mean it's free, because there is some danger and important maintenance concerns, but even a computer couldn't come up with a better system. In this video, Tom Scott obviously had to let the brickworks brag about their products a little to get the interviews. Still neat.

Tomas Gomez of San Antonio, Texas was hitting balls at a Topgolf facility when it began to rain. He decided to hit one last shot before leaving. Lightning struck that final ball during its flight. KSAT quotes him:

“I decided to hit one last shot then leave,” Gomez said in a phone interview with KSAT.

He asked his friend, Arlette Ibarra, to start recording on her phone to get his last shot of the game.

In one full swing, Gomez sent his golf ball flying in mid-air at 88 miles per hour and just seconds later, a massive bolt of lightning trickled down the sky and struck the ball.

I suspect that speed claim is a Back to the Future reference rather than an actual recorded ball speed.

-via Geekologie

It's pretty neat to find examples of fictional mass media plots that eventually came true, even when you realize that movies have attempted to bring us fresh ideas for more than 120 years, and TV programming is a never-ending machine cranking out content on hundreds of channels around the clock. Still, if something happens that was predicted on TV years ago, someone will remember it. However, some of the items on this list are actually real life events that were inspired by the movies, which is still pretty neat.

Read the entire pictofacts list at Cracked. Difficulty level: none of the items are from The Simpsons.    

It's bad enough when two scientists become obsessed with outdoing the other, but it's even worse when they go out of their way to undermine each other. That was fairly easy for O.C. Marsh, as his rival Edward Drinker Cope made plenty of mistakes, but Cope was always willing to fight back. The rivalry between the two made headlines and brought the science of dinosaur fossils into the public consciousness, so it was at least good for something.  

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.