Twitter user @kikai_RGB sends out this image of what appears to be a shiitake mushroom claw machine game in the prefecture of Shizuoka. That's just the appetizer. Elsewhere you can find an onion claw machine and a live crab claw machine.
-via Super Punch
Would you throw $10,000 on a bet? I wouldn’t! Well, at least Alpharad is aware of the fact that people won’t like where that huge amount of sponsored money will go- but hey, it’s content, right? Watch as he pulls other YouTubers into betting on Mario Party NPCs like it’s a horse race. Maybe the future of gambling will be betting on NPCs!
We’re going full Vocaloid this time? Just in case you have no idea what Vocaloids are, they are AI singers that are fed songs to sing- actual songs created by humans. Back to the topic at hand, Spotify submitted a patent application to the European Patent Register. The patent, which offers near real-time plagiarism analysis for artists, also has another side to it. The patent, as Input Magazine points out, seems to be a building block for the streaming company to create its own AI-generated music:
Earlier this year, Spotify filed a patent application for a process that required a plagiarism interface. This process is focused on creating content using an AI model. Instead of training the model directly on existing content, however, it would clone the existing content and train its model on this cloned content — if it passes the plagiarism interface unscathed.
This process creates lawsuit-proof samples that could be used by Spotify to create its own music or be sold by the Swedish company to record labels, producers, etc. Considering all the data Spotify has on its users and how they respond to its music library, the potential for AI-generated bangers is limitless.
Image via Input Magazine
It takes special cameras to film in high speed, night vision, and x-ray photography. Here you will see all three! In slow-motion, you can see how they appear to be swimming through the air, appearing a bit awkward compared to bird flight, but still much better than any other mammals would be at the task. -via Laughing Squid
Pantone has announced their color of the year, or shall we say, colors of the year, because there are two. For the upcoming year, pick the vibrant, uplifting, and optimistic PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating (which most of us would call yellow), or the very neutral and cautious PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray. Or use them together, which seems a bit strange, but it's almost 2021, which seems strange in itself.
A message of happiness supported by fortitude, the combination of PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray + PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating is aspirational and gives us hope. We need to feel that everything is going to get brighter – this is essential to the human spirit.
As people look for ways to fortify themselves with energy, clarity, and hope to overcome the continuing uncertainty, spirited and emboldening shades satisfy our quest for vitality. PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating is a bright and cheerful yellow sparkling with vivacity, a warming yellow shade imbued with solar power. PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray is emblematic of solid and dependable elements which are everlasting and provide a firm foundation. The colors of pebbles on the beach and natural elements whose weathered appearance highlights an ability to stand the test of time, Ultimate Gray quietly assures, encouraging feelings of composure, steadiness and resilience.
Okay, if you say so. One commenter called these colors "caution tape" and "sweatpants." -via Boing Boing
In 1886, Teddy Roosevelt, still in his twenties, boated down the Little Missouri River and stopped to hunt cougars. How like him. When he returned from his side trip (without a cougar), someone had stolen his boat. While this story so far seems like one of those movies where everything goes wrong, you have to remember this is Theodore Roosevelt, and so he took matters into his own hands.
Roosevelt and the two cowboys with him built themselves a new boat, and they piled into it and headed after the scoundrels. They sailed for three days. The makeshift vessel didn't offer a ton of shelter, and temperatures dropped to around zero. But they did have blankets, as well as enough bacon and coffee to sustain themselves, and really, that's all a man needs.
Build another boat, just like that. Roosevelt and his companions caught up with the boat thieves, and that's where the tale gets exciting. The future president actually took photographs! Read the rest of Roosevelt's adventure, and other stories like the time Abraham Lincoln was distracted from the Civil War by three motherless kittens, and how Peter the Great started his reign sharing the throne with his brother, in 5 Ridiculous Side Stories Starring Famous Historical Figures at Cracked.
Viewed a flat today and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop thinking about the back door... pic.twitter.com/uscUF7pLH9
— Jamie Wilkes (@jamwilkes) December 8, 2020
Jamie Wilkes, an actor on the TV series His Dark Materials, is shopping for an apartment. He viewed one with a hidden and ingenious back door. Entering the home from it may be hard, but exiting is quite straightforward.
Simone Williams of New York City has clenched the Guinness World Record for the largest afro on a woman. It has a circumference of 4 feet and 10 inches, beating out the previous record by 6 inches. The New York Post describes her nearly decade-long project:
It took Williams nine years to grow her now unmatched afro, after years of getting perms and straightening her hair from middle school up through college. “I chose to transition [to natural hair] around the age of 23. It began because I wanted to save the money spent at the hair salon to help with the costs of moving into my first apartment,” she said.
Appropriately, this stylish woman works as a fashion designer.
-via Oddity Central | Photo: Simone Imaani
History has done these women a disservice. However, an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts aims to give them the recognition they deserve for their contribution to the fashion industry. The exhibition, called Made It: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion, highlights female designers, artisans, and innovators who made their mark in fashion, as Fast Company details:
“While we’re interested in how women have contributed to fashion design, there are lots of other stories that emerge,” says Petra Slinkard, the museum’s curator of fashion and textiles who put together this exhibit.
She points out that for much of history, making clothes was one of the few socially acceptable professions for women. But female workers were often doing the most dangerous, back-breaking work. Two centuries after the French seamstresses formed a guild, 145 workers—most of them women—lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City.
Today, women make up 85% of the 40 million garment workers, which are some of the lowest-paid laborers in the world. “Since women’s job options are limited, women have been treated as expendable,” Slinkard says. “Employers also thought they could pay women less because they had husbands who could support them, which was not always true. We feature many single mothers in the exhibit.”
Image via Fast Company
Hoops Désolé is an acrobatics troop tha consists of six men who jump through hoops in a manner more literal than you and I do. Each choreographed show demonstrates astonishing strength, agility, precision, and teamwork. You can watch some of their training sessions on their Instagram page.
Not My Job is a subreddit for posting evidence of people doing a job badly. Maybe it really is their job, but they don't know what they're doing, or are just phoning it in that day. Or maybe they were assigned a task that is beyond their knowledge or experience.
See 50 examples of a job done badly in a ranked list of images taken from the subreddit at Bored Panda.
Never mind the Skittles. This is how you taste the rainbow. Sora News 24 reports that the Dosanko ramen restaurant chain is offering ramen with rainbow-colored sauce. Here's what it's made of (besides happiness):
If the broth looks incredibly thick, that’s because the Happy Rainbow Ramen’s list of ingredients is almost as long as its list of colors. Dosanko starts with a miso broth base, since miso is the preferred ramen style in Hokkaido, the chain’s home prefecture. After combining Hokkaido and Nagano miso varieties, the chefs add curry to the mixture, and the Happy Rainbow Ramen broth gets a fourth contributor from cheese fondue sauce, which is what holds the special colors.
Photo: PR Times
This is easily THE most bizarre advertisement I have seen in quite some time :) I made a mental list of products/services that it could be advertising, but it beat every single expectation or idea into smithereens and my jaw hit the floor as the product reveal happened! 1/2 pic.twitter.com/51X8tEGPFs
— Karthik (@beastoftraal) December 2, 2020
As you watch this ad from the Philippines, try to guess what you're being sold. It will become clear eventually, but by then you'll be way more concerned with the bizarre story that unfolds. What is not clear is who thought this would sell the product. That would be the ad agency Gigil.
“The film is actually about belonging and acceptance—but we just showed it in a different way.”
See, it's not really about the product, it's about virality. And the ad went plenty viral, which cements brand consciousness. The upside is that all of us can watch something truly bizarre, whether we buy the product or not. -via Everlasting Blort
It's been said that Moose Milk was developed to use up leftover liquor, but it also seems to be rather nutritious for a cocktail. Traditional recipes call for amounts that would keep an entire regiment warm, and it has kept the Canadian military going through long dark winters.
Though there are many iterations, historic recipes for Moose Milk typically revolved around the core ingredients of liquor, cream, and egg yolks beaten with sugar. While the Canadian military lays claim to the invention of the cocktail, which division made it first is uncertain. The navy, army, and air force each make their own versions, all hearty concoctions using a diverse array of liquor options (soldiers often used whatever was on hand, but it’s best to stay in the realm of whiskey, rum, and vodka). In an interview with Imbibe magazine, Michael Boire, a retired Canadian army major who first tried Moose Milk while serving in the Royal Highland Regiment, called the stuff “high-propulsion eggnog,” noting that, “everybody in uniform has tasted it at one time or another.”
Moose Milk appears to be rather close to egg nog, with the optional additions of coffee, chocolate, and/or ice cream, which all seem delicious. Find out more about Moose Milk and read a recipe that makes a mere two servings at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Rachel Rummel for Gastro Obscura)
Well, it’s just a possible solution, but if it does work, then we can expect to sustain life on the red planet just like what was written on those sci-fi novels! Scientists have racked their brains in order to find a way to provide oxygen for NASA astronauts that would land on the planet in the 2030s:
The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.
On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have now said they may have come up with another technique that could complement MOXIE.
The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2.
The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface.
Image via CNN
