In July 2016, David Cameron announced his resignation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and stated that Theresa May will be the one to replace him. Before heading into 10 Downing Street, however, Cameron hummed a rather strange tune before completely disappearing from the camera.
The music is still unidentified to this day, but Thomas Hewitt Jones used Cameron’s tune (now known as Cameron's Lament) to create this dramatic track called “Fantasy on David Cameron”.
Sounds like something you would hear from a documentary film.
Powdered or glazed, dog nuts are probably one of the most delicious treats out there, along with ice cream (just ignore the calories). It doesn’t matter if it’s cinnamon or chocolate, jelly or cream-filled; a dog nut would still be good to eat, and even better if served with either coffee or milk.
If you don’t know where to eat good dog nuts, try going to Krispy Kreme, Tim Hortons, or Dunkin’.
Check out these people who tweeted about their love for dog nuts over at Sad and Useless.
The pangolin is the most trafficked animal on Earth. It is said that over a million pangolins were trafficked in the past ten years, and this is only a modest estimate.
Similar in appearance to armadillos, pangolins are the world’s most heavily poached and trafficked mammal—and three out of four Asian pangolin species are critically endangered.
Because their scales are believed to cure everything from asthma to cancer, pangolins are heavily used in Chinese and Vietnamese traditional medicine. While pangolin scales are a perfect defense against predators, when stressed or threatened, pangolins curl up into a ball, making them an easy target for poachers.
Thai Van Nguyen knew of the pangolin situation in his country, and he decided to help these vulnerable animals in any way he could. And so in 2014, Nguyen established Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, and from that year to 2020, the organization has rescued over 1,500 pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade.
Nguyen also established Vietnam’s first anti-poaching unit, which, since 2018, has destroyed 9,701 animal traps, dismantled 775 illegal camps, confiscated 78 guns, and arrested 558 people for poaching—leading to a significant decline in illegal activities in Pu Mat National Park.
This year, Nguyen received the Goldman Environmental Prize award, an award given to environmental activists.
TikTok is a place where new questionable trends appear on a weekly, if not daily basis. This time, TikTok users are putting yellow mustard on their watermelon slices. And thanks to Joel Kahn and Claire Lower from Lifehacker, we don’t need to try this trend on our own because they already did. Surprisingly, Lower stated that the combination is “not revolting, or even unpleasant.” However, it doesn’t taste good either. It’s just… edible.
The question is… Why would someone even think of doing this?
Located at the Burnside Fountain in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a statue known to the locals as “Turtle Boy”. Officially named as “Boy With A Turtle”, the statue is not something that you could say as “child-friendly”, and you would know this just by taking one look at it (see full photo here). But how did this statue come to be? The answer goes back to the early 1900s.
The Burnside Fountain was commissioned in 1904 after the death of Harriet Burnside, who bequeathed upon the city $5,000 from her will to build a fountain that could also serve as a drinking trough for horses and dogs. The design of the basin was left to Henry Bacon, who would later help architect the Lincoln Memorial, and the sculpture itself, our beloved "Turtle Boy," was assigned to Charles Y. Harvey. Burnside made no mention of turtles in her request, so the design's blame most likely lies with Harvey, who perhaps heard "a drinking trough for dogs" and thought that must be coded language…
But only a week after beginning to build the sculpture, Harvey started to hear voices, which he believed came from the unfinished sculpture, which told him to kill himself. Unfortunately, Harvey gave in to these voices.
Sherry Fry finished the statue but had Charles Harvey lived to fully realize his creation, perhaps Turtle Boy would look much different.
Many Singaporeans were prompted to go to the Pasir Ris MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) in the country after a TikTok user @seathebreezee posted a video of him claiming to have hidden S$1000 (about $742) in said place.
Posted on June 19, 2021, the first video shows the TikToker approaching the bushes before hiding US$742.85 (S$1,000), folded in a stack of smaller notes, somewhere on the ground.
The hiding spot wasn’t in frame.
[...]
And before the video ends, the TikToker mentions that he will return to the exact location after three days, curious to see if anyone finds the cash.
Three days later, the TikTok user went back to the place where he hid the money, and was thrilled to see that someone found it, but left S$2.
He then posted another video claiming that he once again hid some money, but this time somewhere near a bus interchange station.
According to a Facebook post by Shin Min Daily News, at least seven people were seen gathering around the bushes, outside of the Tampines bus interchange.
However, after hours of searching, there was no money to be found, leading many to believe that the videos were fake.
Those who have experienced Windows on ARM know the feeling of not being able to find compatible apps on Microsoft Store. It seems that Microsoft has heard the complaints of many, and decided to integrate Android apps on Windows 11, the company’s latest operating system.
They won't just be limited to emulator windows on the software — the integration means the apps will be in the Start menu, show up with individual dedicated icons on the taskbar and launch with desktop shortcuts, too. They'll start to appear in the Microsoft Store, but you can also install them via the Amazon app store.
Panos Panay said during the keynote that Microsoft is using "Intel bridge technology" to bring this integration, making it "seamless and smooth." But that doesn't mean it's limited to Intel machines — Microsoft confirmed on a press call that Android apps will work on AMD systems as well. With the plethora of Android apps currently available, Windows 11 looks like it'll be a much more inviting OS for mobile, touch-centric workflows.
Computer scientists have shown in two recently published papers how mouse movements can be used to gain knowledge about your behavior. It is said that the information that could be acquired from said mouse movements could reveal sensitive details such as age and gender. Talk about scary.
Prof. Luis Leiva, the corresponding author of the two papers, provides further details on the study.
"We have demonstrated how straightforward it is to capture behavioral data about the users at scale, by unobtrusively tracking their mouse cursor movements, and predict user's demographics information with reasonable accuracy using five lines of code. For years, recording mouse movements on websites has been easy, however to analyze them one would need advanced expertise in computer science and machine learning. Today, there are many libraries and frameworks that allows anyone with a minimum of programming knowledge to create rather sophisticated classifiers. This raises new privacy issues and users do not have an easy opt -out mechanism."
To combat this potential risk, they developed a method to distort mouse coordinates which thereby prevent mouse tracking.
"It is inspired by recent research in adversarial machine learning, and has been implemented as a web browser extension, so that anyone can benefit from this work in practice," explains Leiva. The web browser extension called MouseFaker is available on Github.
Have you ever seen smoothies being served this way? I sure haven’t, and I’m looking forward to seeing something like this in person. It looks amazing. Every move just shouts experience and a long time of training.
When news outlets try to distill a complex story into a short blurb or a 30-second news bite, the details often get distorted. It doesn't help that so many people only read the headlines. The 1994 lawsuit against McDonald's over hot coffee became the ultimate example of a frivolous lawsuit, but when you dig into the details, it is revealed to have been anything but frivolous. LegalEagle explains what really happened. The McDonald's case takes only the first six minutes; afterward there are other cases of "frivolous" lawsuits that were more substantial than they appeared at first glance. -via Digg
I've just discovered the comics of Zach Cranor. They have a common theme: something innocent turns into hell and something familiar becomes freakishly alien. They're wonderful, as Cinderella is discovering as she prepares for the ball and/or prison.
The French have a reputation for romance. While it is a stereotype, it is one that the people of France rarely deny. So it might surprise you to learn that French lovers don't often say "I love you" ("je t'aime"). Oh yeah, they communicate the sentiment in a lot of other ways, but those words don't come easy.
The French don't say, "I love you" because they don't have a verb to express heartfelt sentiments for the people they care about. There is only the verb "aimer", which means both "to like" and "to love". As a result, a French person is not exaggerating when they conjugate "aimer" to explain their relationship to rugby, a warm baguette or the smell of lilacs. Naturally, then, it feels trite and rather mundane to use the same word when describing intense feelings of love for one's newborn baby, a childhood friend or a life partner.
The upshot is that the language is insufficient to express the true depths of love. That sounds sweet, but why don't they come up with words that are sufficient? Maybe because the French know that actions speak louder than words. And there are still plenty of other words that hint at true love, too. Read more at BBC Travel.
Shmorby attempts to introduce newbies (meaning children) to the internet. While he wants to paint the web as a fun, useful place, alas, the real internet keeps butting in. Oh yeah, and don't beat yourself up over missing "the internet mascot everyone knows and loves," because the only people who knew Schmorby before last fall were his creators. -via Metafilter
Victory in warfare often goes to the entity that develops the most horrendous weapons, as we all learned in 1945. But mysterious but horrifying weapons that you wouldn't expect abound in history. In the 7th century, Byzantine warfare included the use of what appears to be a flamethrower! This weapon was called Greek fire.
The chief method of deploying Greek fire was by projection through a tube called a siphōn, which was placed aboard ships or on siege engines called cheirosiphōnes. A handheld portable siphōn was also invented that is the earliest analogue to a modern flamethrower. Byzantine military manuals also give mention of Greek fire filled jars, caltrops wrapped with tow soaked in the substance, and cranes called gerania that would pour Greek fire onto enemy ships.
The Byzantines ascribed the discovery of Greek fire to “divine intervention”, for which the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos (AD 945–959) would later account in his book De Administrando Imperio to never reveal the secrets of its composition, as it was “shown and revealed by an angel to the great and holy first Christian emperor Constantine” and that the angel bound him “not to prepare this fire but for Christians, and only in the imperial city.”
Some time in the distant past, African straight-tusked elephants (which were larger than existing elephants) traveled to Sicily when the Mediterranean sea level was low, and then got stranded there. They somehow evolved into dwarf elephants. The first dwarf species on the island was around the size of a Shetland pony! But it went extinct, and then came a slighter larger species which, at 1000 kilograms, was still quite small for an elephant. Fossils from Puntali cave in Sicily give a somewhat confusing timeline for Sicil's elephants, but now mitochondrial DNA has been extracted from a fossil, and its sequencing may yield answers.
It shows that the Puntali elephants were isolated on Sicily at least 175,500 years ago, but potentially as recently as 50,000 years ago.
This then allowed the team to estimate that the elephants shrank in size by up to 200kg per generation, shedding 8,000kg to reach just 15% the size of the straight-tusked elephant within 40 generations.
'We have produced a range of realistic evolutionary scenarios,' explains Victoria. 'I would not be surprised if evolutionary rates were even higher than our highest estimate, but only new data on Sicilian and other southern European material will refine this further.'
