It is only reasonable to think that past and present employees of Sony Interactive Entertainment could be prioritized when they order the video game consoles that they develop, but it seems that that isn’t the case. They are treated just the same as those who aren't part of the company.

Taking to Twitter to share his sadness was Adam Boyes, PlayStation’s former VP, who found himself unable to pre-order the console.

Former PlayStation head of global second-party games Gio Corsi replied to the tweet saying he hadn’t managed to get his hands on one either adding that the two could ‘sad together’.

Someone else responded to the tweet saying that they were ‘p*ssed off’ Boyes didn’t get a free console after all he did for Sony. Boyes replied to the guy, ‘They don’t owe me anything, my dude. I loved my time there, and my time there is over.’

Love how he’s just cool about it.

(Image Credit: Adam Boyes/ Twitter)

This painting of a Pekingese dog was produced by artrist Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl in 1861. While we don't know for sure whether the dog was male of female, we know its name was Looty. At the time, Pekingese dogs were found in China, where they were bred for their small size and their resemblance to lions.

When Anglo-French invaders stormed, looted, and burned the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860, they found five of these Pekingese dogs guarding the corpse of a lady who had committed suicide upon hearing the pillaging taking place outside. The dogs were brought back to England, the tiniest of them—historians note she weighed around three pounds—was gifted to Queen Victoria, who renamed her “Looty” in reference to the spoils of war.

The renaming sealed her fate as a stolen object of intense fascination.

To modern ears, the name sounds like a confession of a crime, but the British Empire was downright proud of taking treasures from conquered lands. Read about Looty and what she came to symbolize at Artsy. -via Nag on the Lake  

Why would anyone want to climb a tall pole, such as a flag pole, and stay there for any length of time? Fame and fortune, of course! It wasn't so easy to go viral 100 years ago, so to grab attention, one had to do something that was worthwhile to watch in order to draw a crowd. Once one guy succeeded at that, many others looked, thought "I can do that!", and tried it out.  

We can’t talk about pole-sitting without talking about Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, the original “influencer” for the roaring twenties craze. The aerial stuntman dubiously claimed to have been a survivor of the Titanic and called himself “the luckiest fool in the world.” He was first dared by a friend in 1924 to sit on a flagpole and succeeded in staying up there for 13 hours and 13 minutes. In an era without television, the odd stunt attracted considerable attention, prompting Kelly to travel around America charging admission for the spectacle, as well as earning endorsements for publicity stunts. He helped inaugurate new hotels and shops; attracted crowds for movie premieres and amusement parks, and once sat on a pole for 22 days at Madison Square Gardens during a dance marathon (another endurance fad) until the last dancers dropped.

It didn’t take long before pole-sitting fever had spread across the country, prompting amateur copycats and professional pole-sitters alike to seek out similar fame and fortune….

As the poles got higher and the record time got lengthier, fewer people wanted to compete, and the fad died out. But it wasn't the first time such a fad took hold. Read about pole-sitting in the 1920s and its origin in ancient times at Messy Nessy Chic.

Chick E Poo is a parrot who lives in Woodinville, Washington. She sings her operatic solos constantly. She must have been exposed to lots of arias, but she sings her own version, often incorporating her own lyrics, like her name and "meow." She appears to be quite proud of her vibrato and soaring high notes! -via Laughing Squid

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in the US on September 26, 1975, about six weeks after its British premiere, which means the movie is now 45 years old. It wasn't an immediate hit, but found new life as an audience participation experience, which became almost a rite of passage for a generation of college students. The film was a reworking of the stage version, and there were some differences.   

6. “Science Fiction/Double Feature” had a different singer for the film.

As previously mentioned, Patricia Quinn took the Magenta role just so she could sing “Science Fiction/Double Feature” on the stage, but when it came time to film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it was decided that O’Brien should sing the song instead. Quinn wasn’t happy, but she did get a small consolation: The iconic lips that sing the song in the opening credits are hers.

7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s director agreed to a smaller budget in order to keep the original cast.

According to Sharman, 20th Century Fox offered him “a reasonable budget” if he would cast “currently fashionable rock stars” in the lead roles for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sharman lobbied instead to keep the original stage cast (with some exceptions, like the addition of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon), and instead got a “modest budget” and a very tight shooting schedule. Sharman now calls the decision “crucial” to the film’s cult success.

Read the rest of the fun facts about The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Mental Floss.

An important piece of rock art discovered on the Wessel Islands depicted ancient hunters harpooning a large whale. Sure, it’s an ancient rock artwork of ancient people fishing, but what is its significance? Anthropologist Dr. Ian McIntosh tells ABC news that this discovery is an astonishing one, and is of significant historical importance: 

"The Yolngu have understood these whale hunter enterprises so much they could finely detail the boats on these rock carvings."

These hunters were known as the wurramala, and it's believed they came from Indonesia and regularly visited the Arnhem Land coast in the wet season long before Europeans or even Macassan traders arrived in Australia several centuries ago.

Dr McIntosh is part of the PastMasters history research group and also the author of The Whale And The Cross, a biography of Yolngu philosopher David Burrumarra MBE.

Mr Burrumarra was of the Warramiri of Elcho Island, and one of the clan's primary totems is the whale.

Image via ABC news

Georgia Langton attempted to recreate the chicken katsu curry served in Wagamama (a British restaurant chain) and it seemed like a success.The dish looked tasty when it was served at the dinner table, but when the family tucked in, they found out the secret of the chicken katsu curry that hides beneath the sauce and the chicken breading: it was undercooked. Severely undercooked that her brother, Aidan, called her out and jokingly accused her of “attempted murder.”

Posting side-by-side images of the dinner she had posted on Snapchat and what he found when he cut into the food, @Aidan_langton wrote on Twitter : "Nothing close to her story. This is actually attempted murder.

"I've decided to put my sister down so this doesn't happen again."

The tweet gained more than 45,000 likes as @georgialangton_ came forward to own up to the blunder, saying: "Safe to say I’m never deep fat frying again nearly killed my family", before insisting it was a rare blunder, stating: "Btw I'm actually a good cook just had a moment of weakness."

I wonder what they ate that night.

(Image Credit: Aidan Langton/ Twitter)

In the past 40 years, marine heat waves have become longer and more noticeable. According to scientists, the probability of these events has increased greatly due to global warming. And the one factor that contributes most to this is, unsurprisingly, human influence.

According to the findings of the attribution studies, major marine heatwaves have become more than 20 times more frequent due to human influence. While they occurred every hundred or thousand years in the pre-industrial age, depending on the progress of global warming, in the future they are set to become the norm. If we are able to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, heatwaves will occur once every decade or century. If temperatures rise by 3 degrees, however, extreme situations can be expected to occur in the world's oceans once per year or decade.

Learn more about the study over at PHYS.org.

This is saddening.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

It was previously believed that tarantulas are color-blind. However, scientists were still puzzled over the fact that these spiders come in vivid green and blue colors. What’s the reason for this? Researchers from Yale-NUS College and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have investigated, and they found out that the tarantulas might be using these colors to communicate with other tarantulas that could be potential mates. If this is the case, then it also suggests that these spiders are not color-blind.

The research was jointly led by Dr Saoirse Foley from CMU, and Dr Vinod Kumar Saranathan, in collaboration with Dr William Piel, both from the Division of Science at Yale-NUS College. To understand the evolutionary basis of tarantula colouration, they surveyed the bodily expression of various opsins (light-sensitive proteins usually found in animal eyes) in tarantulas. They found, contrary to current assumptions, that most tarantulas have nearly an entire complement of opsins that are normally expressed in day-active spiders with good colour vision, such as the Peacock Spider.

These findings suggest that tarantulas, long thought to be colour-blind, can perceive the bright blue colours of other tarantulas. Using comparative phylogenetic analyses, the team reconstructed the colours of 110 million-year-old tarantula ancestors and found that they were most likely blue. They further found that blue colouration does not correlate with the ability to urticate or stridulate - both common defence mechanisms -- suggesting that it did not evolve as a means of deterring predators, but might instead be a means of attracting potential mates.

The green coloration, on the other hand, could serve as camouflage in tree-dwelling spiders.

Head over to EurekAlert to know more about the study.

(Image Credit: Bastian Rast/ EurekAlert)

It has been assumed by scientists that the photosynthetic algae in the Arctic remain largely dormant during the winter season. That assumption is being challenged by this new study, which found out that phytoplanktons,under the thick sea ice and snow, already start growing and multiplying as early as February, a time where light is already barely detectable just about 1.5 meters underwater.

The study suggests that springtime blooms are the culmination of an extended period of growth that starts in winter, not a singular burst of activity as was thought.

“Arctic phytoplankton are superefficient at using every little photon they can find,” Randelhoff says, but he was surprised that they could grow with such little light. As the months progressed and the sun rose higher, the team found that algal growth accelerated, reaching its peak growth rate for the year in April and May, despite the microorganisms still being covered by ice.

Think about that for a second. Phytoplanktons grow and even multiply despite being covered by ice. If that isn’t impressive, then I don’t know what is.

(Image Credit: U.S. Air Force/ Wikimedia Commons)

In 1974, Ernő Rubik built the first Rubik's cube not as a toy, but as a tool to model three-dimensional movement. The colors were to designate that movement, and only afterward did he discover it was also a puzzle.

After creating the cube, he explained, he was faced with a second challenge: how to solve it. At the time, he had no idea if his cube could even be put back into place, let alone how fast — and it took him a full month to solve his own puzzle. It was fiendishly difficult “to find your way back, or to find your target — just to solve it as a combinatorical problem,” he said. “And I was without any background for that, because I was the first who tried.”

The popularity of the puzzle surprised Rubik, and so did its longevity. He assumed it would only be interesting to those with science or engineering backgrounds. Yet here we are 46 years later, and Rubik's cubes still sell like hotcakes. Rubik's new book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All, is not so much about the cube itself, but about how people all over the world took it to heart. Read what the book holds and see a video interview with Rubik at Undark. -via Digg

(Image credit: Steren Giannini)

What happens when two spaceships have the same registration number? Awkward! Karl Poyzer, Joseph Roberts, and friends worked on this animated sci-fi comedy short during lockdown. Contains NSFW language at the very end. -via Geeks Are Sexy

With the upcoming release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X for this year’s holiday season, video gamers will surely be breaking their piggy banks in order to buy one of the two consoles. The question is, is there enough space in their homes for the game consoles that they are buying? A Japanese illustrator helps us to put things into perspective.

Now that we have official dimensions for both consoles, Keisawada, an illustrator in Japan, decided to create computer-generated models to put their sizes in perspective. The image above shows the relative sizes of a PS5 in vertical mode, an Xbox Series X, and a Nintendo Switch for comparison. When placed alongside each other, you can see that the PS5 towers over the others, while the Xbox Series X takes the prize for girth.

Check out the comparisons that Keisawada illustrated over at Technabob.

Which console do you plan on buying this holiday season?

(Image Credit: keisawada/ Twitter)

With the many things that it can do, such as create poems, songs, and even articles that look like a human wrote it, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has certainly caught the eyes of the people. It could be considered as advanced AI already, but scientists are still looking towards making an AI more advanced than this one.

GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?

Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish—nothing like the hyperrealistic deepfakes generated by GANs—but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.

[...]

The final images generated by the model aren’t exactly realistic. But that isn’t the point. They contain the right high-level visual concepts—the AI equivalent of a child drawing a stick figure to represent a human. (You can try out the model for yourself here.)

Learn more details about this AI over at Technology Review.

I feel excited and at the same time fearful about the future. What about you?

(Image Credit: Technology Review)

“Why is she crying?” you might ask upon seeing the photo on the left. But when you see the photo on the right, you probably would go “Oh, I see” after realizing the reason why the girl was crying on the first photo.

Still can’t figure it out? Head over at Awkward Family Photos to find out why this girl cried.

(Image Credit: Brit/ Awkward Family Photos)