The Slinky is an amazing toy. It's just a metal spring, but you can do so many things with it! The guy from Action Lab shows us how weird slinkys are when you drop them vertically, thanks to slow-motion video. Someone in the comments compared the slinky's behavior to a Loony Tunes character, recreated in the real world where physics is a thing. -via Digg
Lady with an Ermine is a commissioned portrait that is a classic example of High Renaissance portraiture. The artwork is mostly unheard of or forgotten as it preceded the better-known Mona Lisa. However, Lady with an Ermine is an excellent display of Da Vinci’s fixation with anatomical realism. In addition, Da Vinci uses the ermine as a symbol with meanings related to the subject of the portrait. Check out My Modern Met’s full analysis on the oil painting here!
Image via wikimedia commons
Australian photographer Danny Huynh has an amazing hobby. He builds remote control animatronics based on pop culture characters. They are works of art, but the real magic takes off when they move!
Sadly, Huynh's creations are not for sale. Continue reading to see more.
It's a mistake to think that if you have enough money, you can travel anywhere. Quite a few places are forbidden, some to outsiders, others to any human beings at all. The reasons are varied. Some locations don't want visitors because they hold precious treasures, fragile artifacts, or delicate ecosystems. Others are dangerous due to volcanoes, radiation, or animals. The rest are top secret for one reason or another. The Island of Surtsey is both volcanic and a delicate ecosystem.
In the 1960s, an undersea volcanic eruption created a brand-new island off the coast of Iceland. It’s not every day that scientists get to study an island from the moment it emerges, so they decided to make the most of the opportunity. The island, named Surtsey, has become a case study for how ecosystems develop without any interference from humans. (Other than the ideally noninterventionist scientists who study the island, that is.) Some of the lifeforms that have found their way to Surtsey include molds, fungi, at least 89 bird species, and, supposedly, one plucky tomato plant.
In 1969, an Icelandic scientist named Ágúst Bjarnason was asked to make a trip to Surtsey to identify a mysterious plant, which he identified as a tomato. Bjarnason looked into the situation a bit further; as he later recalled, “Someone had done their business … and this beautiful tomato plant … had grown out of the feces.”
Read about seventeen other places you can cross off your vacation list at Mental Floss. The list is also available as a video. Strangely, North Sentinal Island is not among them.
(Image credit: Bruce McAdam)
How weird and wonderful can a Thai commercial be? Producers in Thailand are always pushing the creative envelope and this 2019 chocolate bar ad is no exception. It's called "The Secret" because the young lady in the ad is hiding something from her boyfriend. But thanks to a Voiz Waffle Chocolate Bar, it won't be an obstacle in their relationship.
-via Dave Barry
As we've said before, people will take any activity at all and make a competition out of it. Joey Chesnut won the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest (again) this past weekend by downing 76 dogs- a new record. Competitive eating has been in the news for about three decades now, but it was also a thing around the turn of the previous century, which grew out of Fat Men's Clubs (FMCs), fraternal organizations in which men could be proud of their girth and socialize with each other. And, of course, eat.
FMCs did not invent eating contests — like most modern social phenomena, the history of competitive eating reaches into mythology — but they certainly popularized them in American culture. When the Manhattan FMC held an all-you-can-eat contest at their East Third Street clubhouse in 1909, several reporters were present to watch Frank Dotzler, a 380-pound alderman, devour 275 oysters, 8 pounds of steak, 12 rolls, 11 cups of coffee and 3 pies. He won $50 and eternal glory.
The considerable media attention enjoyed by these clubs says a lot about the era in which they prospered. “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Laura Doan wrote in an engrossing article about Texas FMCs, “attitudes about fat bodies were remarkably different than they are now … As fat men’s clubs were at their peak, people positively associated men of a larger size with wealth and affability.”
Read about the rise of Fat Men's Clubs and their gastronomic achievements at Inside Hook. -via Digg
Here’s a good reason to pick up Skyrim again! Thanks to modder Cooleoj’s efforts, Skyrim’s dungeons are being enhanced and resized to provide more ways to have fun in the game. The mod, called ‘Dungeons Revisited,’ adds a “lot of new paths, rooms, and enemies”, and new “confusing” elements to the game’s dungeons. While not revealing a lot about the mod, Cooleoj assures that both veteran and new players will get lost playing through the new modded dungeons:
All of the changes are in harmony with the themes of the base game’s dungeons, as Cooleoj says they want the enhancements to be both lore-friendly and indistinguishable from the experiences Bethesda crafted.
The dungeons enhanced so far include some fan favourites, like Bleak Falls Barrow, which looms over Riverwood and plays host to one of the game’s early main quests, and others. The list “thus far” is Ustengrav, Embershard Mine, Steepfall Burrow, Halted Stream Camp, White River Watch, and Hillgrund’s Tomb – though it sounds like the modder’s planning to revisit more.
If you’re keen to grab the mod for yourself, you can find it at Nexus Mods here. As ever, mod with caution, and be sure to check out our rundown of the best RPG games and best Skyrim mods on our home platform.
Image via PCGames
Have you ever written a full paper for a subject without much effort at all? Alternatively, have you defended your position (whether in a personal conversation or in a more academic setting) through purposefully convoluted arguments that really aren’t that good? Well, it seems that our ability to bullshit through real life events is a sign of intelligence. The proof lies in a study published in Evolutionary Psychology:
The researchers measured respondents’ intelligence through a cognitive ability test, and tested their ability to bullshit through a verbal exercise that required them to explain 10 concepts (like general relativity), only the catch was that some concepts didn’t even exist. The researchers found the skilled bullshitters who satisfyingly and persuasively tried to explain completely made up theories and concepts.
Unsurprisingly, those who tested high on the bullshit scale also tested well on the cognitive ability test, thereby proving that sometimes, you can actually fake it till you make it.
Maybe bullshitting is just another way of finding connections, or maybe it’s a sign of a charismatic persona. Either way, we now have further proof that bullshitting can make you smarter—or at least make you look smart.
Image credit: Paramount Pictures
Now this application is very convenient! Brickit is an app that uses an AI camera to scan your LEGO bricks and suggest projects you can build with your current inventory. The application uses machine learning to scan your entire spread of bricks to recognize as many bricks as it can. In addition to taking inventory of your collection and suggesting potential projects for it, Brickit can also show you exactly where the necessary bricks are in your messy pile. Isn’t that amazing?
Image via PetaPixel
Four years after the release of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch, players are still finding new ways to exploit the game or find hidden items buried in the game’s files. MrOrdun has achieved something that no player has done before. The player shared a video on Twitter of them opening an ‘impossible chest,’ a chest that the game recognizes but the player can’t reach in the overworld:
As spotted by Kotaku, the video shows how they were able to uncover the “impossible” chest found 80 meters below the ground at Aris Beach in the game. According to the player, “it has never been opened prior to this moment”.
As the player mentioned in the tweet, the chest despawns after seven seconds of sinking from loading into the game, so they had to intercept the chest along the way.
The player takes multiple steps in order to collect the chest, including using a game bug that lets you fall through the ground as well as utilising Breath Of The Wild‘s multiple Sheikah Slate abilities to reach it.
The full YouTube video, which goes through the entire process, reveals that the prize within the impossible chest was, after all this time, just a piece of amber.
Image credit: Nintendo
People shooting off fireworks in Toledo, OH turned their neighborhood into a war zone when their performative patriotism (or just stupidity), turned their neighborhood into a war zone after the U-Haul truck they rented exploded with the fireworks inside. pic.twitter.com/EQguCzpZWY
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2021
A block party in Toledo, Ohio, was the scene of a major fireworks mishap Sunday night. A group of teens were seen throwing some kind of incendiary devices into a U-Haul truck filled with fireworks. The truck exploded, and ignited a stack of fireworks that had already been unloaded. Four people were injured. A longer video shows that the explosions went on for several more minutes (linked video contains NSFW language). -via Fark
Steve Lindsay has created a device that can hug any object placed between them, regardless of shape! The fractal vise has passed through different iterations, and now, its latest version, has finally met the Nebraska-based artist’s approval. Lindsay actually spent six years working on the vise’s design! The device was based on a 1900s milling machine, with its components creating a tight grip on irregular shapes like wrenches and scissors.
Image credit: Steve Lindsay via Colossal
Let's take a tour of Ocado's automated grocery warehouse in London. The point of this video from Tom Scott is to make us think about how networks of robots may be many individual robots, or one robot made up of a colony of parts, like a Portuguese man o' war. Yeah, but what we are really seeing is the future of humanity, where the robots have taken over the grocery business and eliminated not only shopping, but grocery workers. Still, considering how many cars are in the parking lot, it appears that robots still need a lot of supervision.
We had martial arts films before The Karate Kid came out in 1984, but they were mostly considered to be B-movies. The saga of Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi changed all that. Karate schools sprung up everywhere, martial arts actors Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan became mainstream stars, and there were several Karate Kid sequels, remakes, and even a streaming series that follows the young characters as adults. But how real is the karate of The Karate Kid?
Den of Geek consulted Dr. Hermann Bayer, an expert authority on Okinawan Karate and the author of the upcoming book Analysis of Genuine Karate―Misconceptions, Origin, Development, and True Purpose. Dr. Bayer remembers firsthand how The Karate Kid stimulated the Karate boom in the mid-eighties because he was a practicing Karateka then. But as a martial scholar, he’s pragmatic about his opinions.
“First and foremost, we have to bear in mind that we are talking about a movie, not about a documentation or a piece of research,” says Bayer. “This means that we need to concede that fascinating viewers by something pretty, amazing, or spectacular to look at is more important than authenticity.”
Read and find out how authentic "wax on, wax off" is, and more importantly, how the karate styles give meaning to the characters in the original The Karate Kid.
Will the koala hold still? Perhaps, if you put him in a comfortable environment. The caretakers at Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park in Duncan, South Australia, show a tool that they use with a scale to accurately weigh the little fellow.
-via Nag on the Lake
