Say goodbye to the old triangular design! Actually, you can still buy classic triangle tents at your local camping shop, but there are now new and modern designs that are still comfy, cozy, and good for outdoor camping. Yanko Design curates a list of modern tents that fit both your Instagram feed and your outdoor camping needs! One of the examples are Belgium’s tree tents. Designed by Dutch artist Dre Wapenaar, these ‘Tranendreef’ tree tents are suspended above the ground and basically hang on the tree like fruit: 

The tent is suspended above the ground and basically hangs on the tree like fruit. The guests use a ladder to get inside/outside. It can host two adults and two small children. Originally installed as part of a public art project called ‘Pit’ (hence the avocado shape we assume) organized by Z33, it brought art into the public space of Borgloon. The designer also created ‘field furniture’ – seating, washing, toilet, and BBQ units to complete the camping site with the tents.

Check more designs here! 

Image credit: via Yanko Design

The Ford F-150 Lightning is a game-changer for the automobile industry. The company's signature pickup truck can now be powered by electricity, but not only that, you can power your home during emergencies with the truck battery, and you can plug your power tools into it. Ford's chief engineer for this project is Lunda Zhang, who immigrated to the US from China as an eight-year-old who spoke no English.

Outside of the terminal, her father had borrowed a car to drive the three hours from O'Hare to Indiana. The back door opened and Zhang plopped herself down into the seat of an automobile for the very first time.

"That was the first time I was ever in a car and it was just beautiful," Zhang says during an interview with The Drive. "I remember it was dark outside but there were lots of lights from the streets. Everything looked so new and so fascinating. And just to be in a car—it wasn’t even our car, it was a car my dad borrowed to come get us—it was just awesome. I felt like I was riding in a carriage, like the princess story almost."

She quickly became fluent in English, bolstered by popular TV shows like Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street, according to the Detroit Free Press. Soon, Zhang became indoctrinated in American culture. She learned about Coca-Cola and chocolate milk, as well as how the culture iconized automobiles. Specifically, she remembered being drawn to the Batmobile and the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo.

Read how Zhang became an automotive engineer and rose through the ranks to head Ford's electric truck project at The Drive. -via Metafilter

Last week, America commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, in which hundreds of people were killed and the entire Greenwood District of Tulsa was burned to the ground. What is often left out of the story is what happened to Greenwood in the years afterward. The popular notion is that Greenwood never recovered from the riot, which it did, and that the riot occurred on "Black Wall Street," which is a name that was only used after the 1921 massacre.

“They just were not going to be kept down. They were determined not to give up,” recalled Eunice Jackson, a survivor of the massacre, in an interview for Eddie Faye Gates’ 1997 book, They Came Searching. “So they rebuilt Greenwood and it was just wonderful. It became known as The Black Wall Street of America.”

Another survivor, Juanita Alexander Lewis Hopkins, told Gates, “The North Tulsa after the [massacre] was even more impressive than before...That is when Greenwood became known as ‘The Black Wall Street of America.’”

Film footage shot by Reverend Solomon Sir Jones from 1925-1928 shows a bustling, thriving Greenwood, confirming recent data collected by the Tulsa Historical Society showing that a few short years after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood’s homes and businesses came back. It’s difficult to understate the scale of Greenwood’s recovery; unlike other disasters like the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania or San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Greenwood was left to rebuild entirely on its own.

However, the Greenwood neighborhood no longer exists in Tulsa. Read what eventually happened to it at Smithsonian.

＼混雑状況／
お問い合わせを沢山いただくので、番台に表示を用意しました。
アヒルの数が、その時の客数です。

人力でやってますので実際とは多少ずれがありますし、刻一刻と変化もしますので、目安としてください🙏

時々ツイートでもお知らせします🐥 pic.twitter.com/O2xeQGJitO

— にんじん湯@豊橋 (@ninjinyu2021) May 31, 2021

Before you step naked into a Japanese sento, or public bathhouse, you'd probably like to know how many other naked people you'll be sharing the water with. You often won't know until you step into the bath itself, after passing through the lobby and changing room, although people have developed ways to estimate the crowd. Now, a bathhouse called Ninjinyu in Toyohashi City has unveiled a cute way to know before you undress, even if you don't read Japanese. The picture above shows a display at the front desk, where you can see that there are two ducks in the ladies pool, and six in the men's pool. This means two women and six men currently using the baths. Sora News explains how this helps everyone coming in the door. -via Fark

Part of telling a story on the radio is describing a scene, but that can't be the punch line. It just won't come off right. Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) channels a 1940s radio announcer, Edmund Hillary-Swank, sharing modern internet memes, which doesn't quite have the same impact as seeing them. Bonus: commenters at YouTube have some more examples.

My goodness, there is what appears to be a house fire, in which a dog sits. He proclaims the situation to be fine, despite the calamity. It will not remain fine for much longer, I wager!

Here we have a meme of popular songwriter and entrepreneur Aubrey Drake Graham. In the first image he appears to be uninterested, if not actually offended, by a picture of Rowan Atkinson, but in the second image he is pointing approvingly at an unidentified, bearded ginger.

It’s quite the zoetrope, it appears to be a frog, green in colour, pedalling a unicycle, with the caption, ‘oh gosh, what do we have here?’
 
I beg your pardon, dear listeners, I've just been informed our program is being visited by the Duke of York. My my, I wonder to what we owe such a pleasure. Let me just open the door for him and -- what?? You're not the Duke! I've been bamboozled by Lord Astley yet again!

Blimey! It appears this strapping young fellow has produced a stick, only to insert it into the spokes of the very velocipede upon which he is riding. No mean feat! It is no surprise that he makes a most spectacular fall. Yes, a very peculiar man indeed; he now seems to lay blame on all his surroundings, even though his predicament is no doubt of his own volition.

Internet parodies can be fun, but sometimes they speak truths that are useful in the real world. This poster in the style of a comedy meme is from the National Park Service, which is dead serious about the dangers of getting too close to wildlife. In introducing the chart, PetaPixel has links and videos to numerous stories of tourists who disregarded this advice and found out. -via Nag on the Lake

If you remember the yucky-tasting water at Disney World, you might be tempted to think that the drinking fountains are engineered to make you buy an expensive drink instead. But my experience with central Florida is in visiting relatives in more than one location, so I thought that all of Florida had sulfurous water. Midway to Main Street explains just what happened to Florida water. Yeah, it might spur you pay through the nose for a soda, but that's not the original intent. -via Digg

Polygon went out and made a list of 25 dumb internet videos. I would have made a much longer list, but that would take quite a bit of time. There are definitely some classics here that will spark nostalgic joy, and some that you may have not yet seen (I was only familiar with videos older than 2018) but are worth checking out, along with commentary on each. What dumb internet videos would you add? -via Boing Boing

Holy Toledo! This is what you call an impactful security video. On the one hand, this is really scary because there could have been children using the pool or the trampoline. On the plus side, the pool actually saved the car, the driver, and the house as it slowed the vehicle. And the lawn was thoroughly watered. Notice the water flew so high that it took a while to run off the roof and overflow the gutters. As no one was injured in the collision, this ended up on the subreddit IdiotsInCars. -via Digg

Anyone who develops a new technology is sure that it will be a hit and change the world in some way or another. The public isn't so sure, and it often takes time to win us over. There are plenty of products that turned out to be not so cool or useful (or even dangerous) in the long run, and they fell by the wayside. Then there are the products that eventually became ubiquitous, and looking at the backlash in hindsight can be a hoot.

Yeah, early predictions can be hilariously wrong, even when they come from those who have something to lose if the product succeeds. See a list of 15 such products that faced initial backlash at Cracked.

Sheep can be pretty nervous, and it's not unusual for that nervousness to spread among a flock. But in 1888, it was more than just a flock, as a panic exploded across a huge sheep-raising area in England.  

The first widely recorded sheep panic occurred on the night of November 3, 1888, in Oxfordshire. Around eight o’clock, tens of thousands of sheep across an area of about 200 square miles, around the town of Reading, impulsively and simultaneously went berserk. They broke through their pens and dwellings and bolted out into the open fields, destroying property and overrunning fences as they did so. The next morning they were found widely scattered, some miles from their fields. Some of them still panting with terror under hedges, and many crowded into corners of fields.

Another such panic occurred in 1889 and again in 1893. There was no evidence of an earthquake, meteor, or human intervention. What caused the sheep panic? We still don't know for sure, but you can read about the experts' best guess at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: بدارين)

Here’s a new suggestion on how to support our birds: instead of just installing simple bird feeders, why not go big and build a habitat in your backyard? Not only does it serve as a new aesthetic addition to your home, it could also serve as a shelter for wild birds that need to survive. The San Diego Union Tribune has more details: 

The Audubon Society has made it really easy to discover the most bird-friendly plants for your neighborhood with its Native Plant Database created by Rowden, using data compiled by John Kartesz, director of the Biota of North America Program. All you do is enter your ZIP code (and your email address) to get a list of the best native plants for your area, along with nearby nurseries where they can be purchased and a list of the birds the plants are likely to attract.

The California Native Plant Society’s CalScape database and Garden Planner are additional resources for finding native plants best suited to your region.

And please note, this is much more than a landscaping tip. We’re talking about the future of our bird communities here, because the threat to their survival is high.

Birds have evolved to eat the seeds and insects native to the areas where they live, but farms, herbicides and urban development have destroyed many of those native plants, along with the insects that feed off them, causing ripples up the food chain. Think about how few insects you find on your windshield and grill these days. Then ask your parents what it was like a few decades ago, when a drive through the country left cars bristling with dead bugs. Our cars may be cleaner, but it means our birds have dwindling access to food.

image via wikimedia commons

Tomorrow we’ll have a six year old, and like so many girls her age she insisted on a cake depicting the future Queen Elizabeth I witnessing the execution of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII pic.twitter.com/4HC5khHjur

— Edmund Kingsley (@KingsleyEdmund) May 29, 2021

Anne Boleyn, a Queen of England under her husband, King Henry VII, lost her head when the king decided to move on to a new marital relationship. Some breakups are harder than others and Queen Anne definitely had a rough one.

The daughter of Edmund Kingsley, a stage actor and producer, appreciated the drama of that moment in history. It was the theme of her sixth birthday party. BuzzFeed reports:

“She said, ‘Well, my friend is getting unicorns, but I think what I'd really like is Henry VIII executing Anne Boleyn with Elizabeth I watching,” Kingsley told BuzzFeed News. [...]

Morrissey, a theater and movement director with a history background, was able to share with their daughter the details of the royal family who once occupied the Hampton Court Palace.

“I think that's where the seed was sown, seeing that castle and having a really fun day there. She just got really into the story of his big, fat, horrible king who had six wives," Kingsley said.

-via Nag on the Lake

Blackmouth Design, a custom fabrication firm in Seattle, made this home entertainment console and table for a dedicated Trekkie. It's built to imitate the navigation and helm console from the Enterprise on Star Trek. One of the engineers describes the build on reddit:

The table is approx. 56" x 36" and 21" tall. It features 16 vintage rocker switches that activate custom programmed light patterns (Screen accurate LED backlit replica resin "gumdrops" controlled by an Arduino Mega) and plays sound effect audio files from The Original Series as well as a few hidden Easter Eggs (like playing the theme song or the Amok Time fight music) when the correct combination of switches are thrown.

In addition to the 16 rocker switches there are 8 red momentary push buttons that control the customers home media system (Turn on/off lights, lower projector screen, etc.). The table top and trim are 3/16" Powder coated Aluminum over red, grey and black laminated plywood. LED backlit graphics (recreated from scratch) sit under 1/4" plexiglass panels. The table also has 2 drawers for game controllers and remotes as well as 2 hidden shelves to support beverages.

-via Hack A Day

In June of 1858, a ship named the Mary Russell landed at Cork Harbor in Ireland. It had returned from delivering a shipment of mules to Barbados under the command of Captain William Stewart, who had just bludgeoned seven men to death- six crew members and a sailor who had hitched a ride on the ship. Stewart didn't make any attempt to hide the murders, as he was thoroughly convinced they were planning a mutiny. There were no such plans, but the six-week journey was a descent into extreme paranoia for Stewart.   

As Stewart revealed to Scoresby later, he hadn’t originally planned to harm anyone. He had asked the men to furl the sails so he could sail on without their help, in search of a ship to rescue him from their treachery. But one had already passed them by during the battle with Howes, and a second turned away—possibly thinking the Mary Russell was a pirate ship—despite Stewart’s attempts to flag it down.

And then a new thought struck him: Surely if the crew were innocent, God would have directed the second ship to rescue them. And since death was, in Stewart’s understanding, a punishment befitting the crime of mutiny, that must be what God intended for them. That notion, together with the terror that Howes, still at large, could murder him at any moment, gave way to a sudden, sobering realization.

Stewart must kill his crew.

Read the story of the Mary Russell's journey and the trial that ensued at Mental Floss.