The modern concept of Satan is recognizable to all of us, but his few mentions in the Bible aren't where they come from. Much of the devil's iconic characteristics come from later writers and artists. -via Boing Boing
For several weeks, journalists have been trying to convince us to eat bugs. Like those scientists who want us to drink dog urine, news outlets these days abound with articles advocating the consumption of cicadas.
This trend has, apparently, caught on enough that a pizzeria in Dayton, Ohio is offering a pizza topped with cicadas.
Yes, that's what you're looking at. The restaurant Pizza Bandit calls it the Spicy Thai Cicada Pie. CNN reports:
The restaurant did livestream a tasting panel trying out the pizza, which also featured miso hoisin sriracha sauce, mozzarella, provolone, mushrooms, cabbage, green onion, mango, cilantro and a spicy Thai sauce.
"Opinions of the pizza range from absolutely delicious to...well...uh...yeah...," the Facebook post said.
-via Dave Barry | Photos: Pizza Bandit
Oh, that’s just the kid’s name for short, don’t worry. Meet Hypertext Markup Language R. Pascual, a newborn baby from Bulacan, Philippines. According to the baby’s parents, the name was inspired by the father’s web developer job. However, this naming convention is not new for the family, as other members also have unique names such as Sincerely, Macaroni, Spaghetti, and Cheese Pimiento.
(via Rappler)
Photo courtesy of Sincerely Pascual
Well, this could be handy! It usually takes me a long time to paint my nails. Clockwork has created their self-proclaimed first ever nail painting robot, which can paint nails in just ten minutes. For $8, you can now commission the robot, which is doing manicures in San Francisco to do your nails:
Right now, the robot doesn’t cut or shape nails, but the website hints those features could be coming soon.
TikTok user Elissa Maercklein posted a video of the robot with the caption “living in the future.”
The company behind the bot says they design robots that “liberate people from everyday mundane tasks.”
Image credit: Clockwork
A thousand is a lot. How about fifty thousand? That’s a lot of photos right there! Göran Strand captured 50,000 still images of last week’s solar eclipse from his backyard in Sweden. Strand used over 250 gigabytes of images to condense the two-and-a-half hour solar eclipse into just ten seconds! PetaPixel has the details:
To add to the remarkable achievement of capturing the movement of the eclipse itself, Strand also captured all of the solar prominences. A solar prominence is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface. Strand also shows a close-up of the largest prominence with a scaled earth graphic beside it. With this remarkable graphic, it’s easy to see how roughly one million Earths could fit inside the massive star.
With so many frames captured, Strand told PetaPixel about how he went about editing the solar eclipse timelapse.
“To capture the timelapse, I took a series of 200 frames every 30 seconds for 2.5 hours,” he explains. “From each 200-frame clip, I stacked, aligned, and calibrated the best 50 frames. In total, I ended up with 250 calibrated still images that I then did further processing with. First, I aligned all of the 250 images, sharpened the details, and then extracted the data that showed all the prominences. Then I had my finished images for the timelapse.”
As eclipses and other notable astro events occur rarely, less than ideal weather is always a challenge for those photographers hoping to catch the action.
Image credit : Göran Strand
The divisive flavor is a frozen blend of raw herring, onion, sugar, and cream. https://t.co/cBtjP5UFma
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) June 14, 2021
Are you travelling to the Netherlands? If so, you may wish to try this Dutch specialty: ice cream flavored with raw herring. Inventor Robin Alting admits that some of his countrymen are hesitant to eat it. That may be a result of the ingredients, which Atlas Obscura lists:
The divisive flavor is a frozen blend of raw herring, onion, sugar, and cream. It’s been described as having the texture of traditional ice cream but the strong taste and smell of herring.
The myth of Atlantis may have arisen from the many real-life cases of cities that sunk into the water. There are quite a few reasons for this happening- earthquakes, tsunamis, changing ocean levels, and even deliberate acts such as dam building and dyke busting. Archaeological evidence shows us underwater places around the world where people once thrived, such as Atlit Yam in Israel, which sank around 6300 BC.
This Neolithic village lies 26 to 39 feet (8 to 12 m) beneath the Mediterranean Sea, hidden for over 8,000 years until marine archaeologist Ehud Galili discovered it while surveying the sand for shipwrecks in 1984, New Scientist reported. It is now considered one of the oldest submerged settlements ever discovered. Careful excavations have revealed rectangular houses with hearths and the remains of a dry-stone well. One of the most interesting finds was a megalith structure — similar to Stonehenge — built around a spring, made of seven huge stones weighing around 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms) each; burial sites and human remains have also been unearthed. One study suggests that a tsunami is likely to blame for the abandonment of the settlement, Live Science previously reported.
Read about eight sunken cities and what caused their demise at LiveScience. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Hanay)
Benjamin Franklin once said that wine is "a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy." We can surely say the same about crocs, all the more so now that they are elevated on stiletto heels.
Or, perhaps, we should instead thank the Parisian fashion house Balenciaga, which has brought these shoes into existence. Complex reports that these wonders, as well as knee-high crocs, will be available in Balenciaga's 2022 Spring line of fashions. Personally, though, I'm holding out for thigh-high crocs.
-via The Mary Sue | Photo: Balenciaga
Now that you've been vaccinated, you might be looking forward to traveling. If you want to start small and avoid crowds, how about a day trip to your nearest ghost town? These are towns that once thrived, but where abandoned for any of a dozen reasons. However, if the towns were built well enough to last a while, preservationists eventually discovered and protected them. Now they are windows into the past, full of life and history if you are willing to go there and learn about them. Atlas Obscura has links to 22 of these ghost towns and what you need to know before visiting them. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Drown Soda)
If you have a copy of the 1997 game Goldeneye 007 for the N64, rejoice now because you could sell that game for almost $15,000! If you’re interested in selling it, of course. A copy of the game was sold in 2020 for a whopping $14,999, as Fatherly details:
According to the data collected, a copy of Goldeneye 007 for N64, first released in 1997, sold in 2020 for $14,999. “If you somehow resisted unpackaging the cartridge it took you half a year to save for in 1993, now could be the time to act,” the site reports. “The biggest sale on Mavin was for Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64. It sold in the fall of 2020 for a dollar under $15k.”
Goldeneye 007 was the only toy in the top 10 priciest ’90s toys that wasn’t a Beanie Baby and by far the video game that is worth the most. The second priciest N64 game was the 1999 N64 version of Super Smash Bros, which sold for $ 9,976, and Yoshi’s Story, released in 1998, sold for $5,500.
Overall, the Beanie Babies line is where most of the money can be found in old toys we used to play with. Some people spend money on the old-school Furbies and American Girl dolls, too.
Image credit: Alexander Jawfox
This past week, investigators announced they had cracked what is believed to be the oldest case solved with DNA and forensic genealogy -- dating to 1956. https://t.co/sIvOczsSjl
— NPR (@NPR) June 13, 2021
In 1956, the bodies of 18-year-old Lloyd Duane Bogle and his girlfriend, 16-year-old Patricia Kalitzke, were found in the mountains near Great Falls, Montana. They had both been shot in the back of the head, and Kalitzke had been raped. Investigators did their best, but no perpetrator was found, and the case remained open for more than 60 years. Forensic science has come a long way since 1956, and such a murder today would rely heavily on DNA evidence. Kalitzke's vaginal swab stayed in the evidence file, but virtually no one had a DNA profile at the time, and all these years later anyone evolved in the case was liable to be dead. Could they solve this crime using DNA?
With the help of partnering labs, forensic genealogists are able to use preserved samples to create a DNA profile of the culprit and then use that profile to search public databases for any potential matches. In most cases, those profiles can end up linking to distant relatives of the culprit — say, a second or third cousin. By searching public records (such as death certificates and newspaper clippings), forensic genealogists are then able to construct a family tree that can point them right to the suspect, even if that suspect has never provided their DNA to any public database.
In this case, "Our genealogists, what they're going to do is independently build a family tree from this cousin's profile," Andrew Singer, an executive with Bode Technology, told NPR. He called it "a reverse family tree. ... We're essentially going backwards. We're starting with a distant relative and trying to work back toward our unknown sample."
Read where that search went and how the case became the oldest ever solved by DNA at NPR. -via Damn Interesting
No, seriously, that's the name of this Québécois pastry. In the original French, the name of one is "pet de soeur", which is "fart of the sister." Atlas Obscura suggests origins for this aromatic delights filled with butter and brown sugar:
Regarding its name, explanations abound. Some say it stems from the sound the dough makes as it’s being fried in oil. Others tell tales of one nun’s fart causing such hysterical laughter that another sister accidentally dropped some dough in oil.
Photo: Twin1995
It wasn’t even staged on a game that provides a feature that could let its players film short clips or movies like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, no! Remember the roguelike game with the sexy, well drawn characters from Supergiant Games? Sure, Hades is obviously set in Greek mythology, so there’s no surprise that fans wanted to pay homage to its source material:
Six months in the works, the Iliad Project is a community reading of Homer’s timeless epic, initially streaming live on Twitch later this month. Leading the charge is Wriste13, a Hades speedrunner who’s played the game since well before its official 1.0 release last September. (If you’ve kept tabs on the game’s speedrunning community, you’ll recognize him as the champ of the Hermes Cup.) More than two dozen members of the community—from other speedrunners to actual Hades voice actors to some folks who just love the game—will participate. The Iliad Project even tapped Greg Kasavin, Supergiant’s creative director, to draft and read an introduction.
“The main goal is that the Hades community produces something like this...and that we get a nice wide swath of readers in terms of variety,” Wriste told me over a Discord voice call last week. “We have familiar names, like Jawless Paul, who is a YouTuber, and we have Courtney Vineys, who did the voices [in Hades] for Dusa and Aphrodite. But we also have a lot of smaller streamers and some people who aren’t even streamers, or who barely have a social media presence. They just love the game.”
Image credit: Supergiant / Kotaku
Hey, space nerds- here’s your chance! A Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7, hailed as one of the rarest photo lenses in the world, will be up for auction in Vienna, Australia. The lens was designed for NASA, who needed a device that could capture photos of the moon during its Apollo missions. Out of the ten lenses to be ever made, NASA had six of them:
"This is one of these ten lenses that Zeiss made at that time," said Andreas Schweiger, of Leitz Photographica Auction, which is running the auction. "Most probably, this is one of the lenses delivered to NASA."
Schweiger spoke to Insider last week via Zoom from his office in Vienna, where his team's readying for a live auction at the city's Hotel Bristol, scheduled for June 12.
For the last few weeks, boxes containing historic and rare camera equipment have been arriving at the auction company's doorstep. Most came from private collectors.
"They get their camera as a gift from their grandparents, for example, or they find maybe a camera in the attic," Schweiger said. "When they don't know what to do, they look up on the internet and hopefully they find us."
Image credit: Leitz Photographica Auction
That is way too cheap for a vehicle. It turns out that Alibaba has an electric vehicle catalog, with low-cost vehicles that are relatively usable. But is it worth the purchase? Electrek shares the experience of one of its readers regarding their purchase of a $1,700 electric mini-Jeep:
This isn’t some electric Powerwheels toy – it can fit a couple of adults shoulder to shoulder. It’s more closely comparable to a golf cart in size and power, yet reaches a decent speed of 25 mph (40 km/h).
It’s also much cheaper than golf carts, which cost around $7,000 in the US.
Amazingly, this mini-Jeep is quite affordably priced at a mere $1,280.
But based on my conversations earlier this year with the Chinese factory, the final price shipped to a US port seemed to put it closer to $1,700.
That’s actually pretty close to what Electrek reader Kyle Day found when he set out to order his own electric Jeep.
He originally told me several months ago that he planned to buy one and have it sent to the US. I offered him my customs broker’s contact info (I have a problem and it’s called “buying too much weird stuff from overseas”) and I asked him to keep me updated about how the process went.
Check the full interview with Kyle Day here to learn more!
Image credit: Alibaba via Electrek
