Filmmakers always have more projects in their heads than will ever make it to theaters. They can be dismissed at any point in the process, meaning some will always be just ideas, while other projects begin production, or otherwise get plenty of publicity before they are eventually scrapped. Afterward, they never have to face the critics, but those projects become part of Hollywood legend. For example, Peter Jackson's movie project based on the game Halo.

After dazzling the world with his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Peter Jackson next sought to oversee the film adaptation of the wildly popular video game series “Halo.” Jackson was executive producing a movie from a script by Alex Garland, who would later find great success in the science-fiction genre with directorial efforts “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation.” Directors came and went from the “Halo” movie, including Guillermo del Toro and Neill Blomkamp, who could have made his feature directorial debut with “Halo.” When the project died, Blomkamp moved on to his breakthrough “District 9.” “Halo” is now in development as a television series for the new streaming service Paramount+.

Or that biopic about Edgar Allen Poe.

Sylvester Stallone has been trying to get a movie about Edgar Allan Poe off the ground for nearly 25 years. As the writer-director-actor once said, “What fascinates me about Poe is that he was such an iconoclast. It’s a story for every young man or woman who sees themselves as a bit outside the box, or has been ostracized during their life as an oddball or too eccentric. It didn’t work for him either…His work was too hip for the room…but he developed the modern mystery story. He was also one of the great cryptologists; there were very few codes he couldn’t crack. He was just an extraordinary guy.”

While Stallone originally wanted to play Poe himself, he later recruited Robert Downey Jr. to star in the title role. “It has [to] be like Downey, I designed it for Downey,” Stallone explained. “Perhaps I could re-work the script. [Maybe] Johnny Depp. It needs a very special actor like that.”

Read about 30 such projects that might've been great or might have been awful, we'll probably never know, at Indiewire. -via Digg

You can also believe that the quaint nest is something you can see in Studio Ghibli movies. I sure would! Photographs of a tiny hummingbird’s cozy (and honestly adorable) home were taken by conservationist and wildlife educator Bianca Soares in Paraguay. The hummingbird can be seen sitting in a small nest that fits it quite nicely, and has a leaf for a roof over its head.  Check the full video here to see more photos of the bird on its nest. 

(via Flipboard)

Image via Flipboard

How do we define "life"? It's been tried many times, but there's always an edge case that makes a simple definition fall apart. Viruses can replicate, but not by themselves. Blood cells split and carry out life's functions, but have no DNA. Seeds can be completely dried for hundreds, even thousands of years, and still come back to life when conditions are rights. So can bacteria. Scientists have come up with definitions for life, but those definitions are often for use within their area of expertise, and do not cover all the uses of the word. There have been some who reject the very idea of a definition of life. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden carried out a survey not to define life, but to categorize it into something people can recognize when they see it.  

The Lund researchers found that they could sort things pretty well into the living and the nonliving without getting tied up in an argument over the perfect definition of life. They propose that we can call something alive if it has a number of properties that are associated with being alive. It doesn’t have to have all those properties, nor does it even need exactly the same set found in any other living thing. Family resemblances are enough.

One philosopher has taken a far more radical stand. Carol Cleland argues that there’s no point in searching for a definition of life or even just a convenient stand‐in for one. It’s actually bad for science, she maintains, because it keeps us from reaching a deeper understanding about what it means to be alive. Cleland’s contempt for definitions is so profound that some of her fellow philosophers have taken issue with her. Kelly Smith has called Cleland’s ideas “dangerous.”

So not only is defining life difficult, the very nature of the quest to define it is a matter of contention. Read more about the topic in an excerpt from Carl Zimmer's new book Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, at Quanta magazine.  -via Damn Interesting

Spain-based street artist David Villaécija has chosen the perfect spot for a camera mural. In an interview last year, Villaécija explained the magical experience of an evolving piece of art, such as this one:

Another factor, would be the illusion and magic, as well as the adrenaline sparks that accompany you during the beginning, development and liberation of the idea … until a point arrives in that that magic fades and that is where you know that the final.

-via Street Art Utopia

Lucky, a Siberian Husky, has a job: to guard this jewelry store in Chang Ma, Thailand. To test her protective abilities, owner Worawut Lomwanawong arranged for a disguised police officer to simulate an armed robbery of the store.

Lucky slept through the entire incident. Newsweek reports on the owner's disappointment:

[...] Worawut tried to rationalize why Lucky might not have reacted to the "robber." He said it could've been because the dog recognized the policeman who was posing as the crook. "I found it very funny to see that she didn't even try doing anything and continued to sleep," he said, adding that he was delighted to see the video go viral.

Worawut also mentioned that the local authorities wanted to do security tests for jewelry stores, and his was chosen for the study. He added that it was the "first serious security test" for his storefront.

-via Super Punch

Back in the early days of oil drilling, a blowout was considered as a risky, but natural consequence of the process. This event occurs when oil shoots up from the ground uncontrollably, which results in what we call a “gusher”. The gusher, back then, was the image of the progress of oil exploration, and the “symbol of new-found wealth.” In reality, however, it was a symbol of death and destruction.

[Gushers] have killed workmen, destroyed equipment, and coated the landscape with millions of barrels of oil. The destruction to wildlife and to the environment is catastrophic.

One of the largest, and the worst, gushers to happen in history was the Lakeview Gusher in 1910. The oil spill lasted for 18 months, spilling 9 million barrels of oil in the process.

The Lakeview gusher remains the largest accidental oil spill in history, bigger than the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and only eclipsed by the oil spills during the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi forces deliberately dumped massive amounts of oil into the Persian Gulf to thwart the US Marines from landing on Kuwait's coast...

Learn more about this historic disaster over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The Malpasset Dam in France was built in the 1950s to regulate the Reyran River, which was dry most of the year, but carried torrents of water in the winter and spring. Experienced dam builder André Coyne was in charge of the project, which was completed in 1954. It took five years for the reservoir behind the dam to fill, but on December 2, 1959, the last few meters filled quickly. Officials decided not to open the spillways because that would interfere with a nearby road-building project.

Later that night, the thin walls of the dam collapsed under the massive weight of the water and a huge wave swept through the valley, destroying all structures including houses, roads, railway lines, telephone and electricity network all the way to Fréjus. Large chunks of concrete, from the breached dam, some weighing up to 600 tons, were found more than a mile away. Over 400 people perished and 7,000 were left homeless. André Coyne, the dam’s chief engineer, was deeply affected by the tragedy. He died less than a year later.

The major takeaway from the disaster was that it was important to adequately understand the geology of the rocks over which a dam was to be constructed. But the most immediate consequence of the dam failure was the laying down of a law that legalized marriage with a dead partner.

Why that happened is a story you’ll need to read at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Eolefr)

Well, whatever’s in that part of the ceiling should be investigated. This is not normal.

Just kidding. This is a normal photo of two cats named Koda (the one with the seemingly severed head), and Lilly (the one with the seemingly headless body).

Just as magicians use two people to show an illusion of a body seemingly cut in half, the same technique was used in this photo. In this case, it just so happened that the Lilly's head cannot be seen from the angle at which the photo was taken, and the photographer, Reddit user i_spin_bubbles, took the photo at the right time.

The Reddit user said that he didn’t realize that he’d captured an Illusion until he saw the photo: “I just took pictures of both of them playing. When I saw the captured picture, I saw the illusion. I didn’t expect for the picture to become a meme and thus so widely known. I was just hoping for people on /r/aww to like it.”

There were lots of memes created from this picture. The owner said that he really enjoys them: “I really liked the beheading history meme. Fun fact: The cats were born near the French border.”

Along with Koda and Lilly, i_spin_bubbles also lives with another cat named Miez. Learn more about them over at Bored Panda.

Now this is cool.

(Image Credit: i_spin_bubbles/ Bored Panda)

It’s only reasonable to think that all the components of NASA’s Perseverance rover are new. After all, it is the successor to the Curiosity rover, and it was only launched last year. And so it would be a surprise to find out that the Perseverance’s brain is a piece of technology from the late 90s. That’s right. A processor released by IBM and Motorola over two decades ago, in 1997, serves as the brain of the Perseverance rover. The question is, why?

The craft's developers were more interested in reliability than sheer power, and their solution was a G3 processor, or CPU, used in Apple's Power G3 Macintosh starting in 1998.

Apple veterans remember the G3 fondly. It was a futuristic, tower-style computer of translucent white and blue. Its side conveniently flipped open to facilitate expansion. It smoked older Macs with a processor operating speed that topped out at a screaming 266 megahertz (MHz).

Or so we thought at the time. Today's processors leave the G3 in the dust. The processor in an Apple iPhone 12 runs at 3 GigaHertz (GHz), while a Samsung Galaxy S21 runs at 2.9 GHz in the U.S. model.

[...]

The chip in Perseverance, the PowerPC 750, isn't even the fastest G3 chip — the single-core chip runs at 200 MHz, which is still 10 times the speed of the chips powering the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, according to NASA.

(Image Credit: NASA/ Big Think)

This is the Storm, an armored multi-purpose vehicle designed by the Ukranian company Highland Systems. This vehicle, capable of being fully amphibious, was revealed at the IREX defense expo in Abu Dhabi. But what makes it so different from other amphibious military vehicles, such as Russia’s BT-3F and the USA’s AAV-7? Loz Blain from New Atlas, has this to say:

… the Storm is the first to take advantage of a hybrid-electric powertrain, giving it an impressive 18-36 hour range in hybrid mode with its diesel range extender running, or the ability to operate purely on battery power for 1.5-3.5 hours depending on your speed.

Weighing in at around 8,000 kg (17,600 lb), this versatile six-seater's 2,500-horsepower electric powertrain makes it a seriously quick performer for its category. Top speed on land is 140 km/h (87 mph), and it's capable of an impressive 30 km/h (18.6 mph) in the water, two to three times as fast as larger competitors. It'll currently handle waves up to 1.5 metres (60 inches).

These feats are already impressive, but the Storm still has more to offer, such as its ability to climb vertical step-ups, as well as its thick armor that can protect against ballistics and mines. Despite all these, Highland Systems still plans on going to the next level. The company plans on making a submersible version and a wheeled version of the vehicle.

Exciting!

(Image Credit: Highland Systems/ New Atlas)

Italian furniture designer Fabio Novembre calls his design "Adaptation." It urges users to adapt to the uncertainties of life. He explains:

Often we take the comfort acquired for granted, laying down as if it belonged to us forever. But this is a world where there is no revenue of a position, where is important to always find a new balance.

Adaptation is a seating system confronted with the uncertainties of our time, with the precariousness of the structures, suggesting that just a little adaptative [sic] capacity is needed to continue to live and to smile. History teaches us that those who cannot adapt are doomed to extinction.

I'd adapt by propping up one side with bricks.

-via The Awesomer

Rain Noe of Core77 says, "It's really sad that this exists, but this is the world we live in."

Well, I think that it's pretty awesome! The Smash My Trash trucks have crane arms mounted on the back and spinning, toothed barrels that reach into dumpsters and compact the trash inside.

Here's a cautionary tale about traveling alone to a country where you don't speak the language. What could possibly go wrong? But it's not a horror story, because instead of laughing at Erwin Kreuz, Americans were so charmed by his good-natured naivety that they made him famous.  

In 1977, 49-year-old German brewery worker Erwin Kreuz blew his life savings on his first flight — a once-in-a-lifetime birthday trip to San Francisco. He’d seen it on TV, and he wanted to visit the Wild West. As the World Airways flight from Frankfurt stopped to refuel in a small airport in Bangor, Maine, before continuing on to California, an air stewardess who had finished her shift told Kreuz to “have a nice time in San Francisco.” Her choice of words would change Kreuz’s life.

Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day, was a little groggy, and on hearing this, grabbed his suitcase, got off the plane, went through customs, jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to the city. He wandered Bangor for three days enjoying the sights and sounds that Maine had to offer. Unfortunately, Kreuz thought he was in San Francisco.

When the mixup was eventually uncovered, that's when Kreuz's adventures really began. Read his story at SFgate.  -via Digg

The Arby's Meat Mountain Sandwich is a stunt offering that contains chicken, turkey, ham, corned beef, brisket, steak, roast beef, pepper bacon, and two kinds of cheese. It is a challenge for those who want to prove how carnivorous they are. This sandwich has an estimated 1,275 calories and 3,536 milligrams of sodium. So what other ingredients are in a Meat Mountain? Mel magazine looked them up and decided to lay them out for you. There are 120 entries, with explanations of their nature and effect on the human body, but that doesn't mean 120 different ingredients. The components are listed separately, starting with the bun, and they all list salt, sodium chloride, or both. Still, it's an obscene amount of food, so the article might put you in the mood for a small salad and some unsweetened tea.

Filipe de Castro, an architect in Brazil, can find creative energy from objects lying around his home and office. Would you like to live in a house shaped like a baby rattle? Would you like to work in a building that resembles a chocolate sundae? de Castro has options for you.