Any time you hear the word "buttload" as an amount, you know it mean a lot. But it turns out that it really does mean a specific amount, and that amount is... a lot.

After immediately falling down a Google hole about it, I discovered that this is, indeed, true! A butt, also known as a pipe, is a unit of measure for English Brewery Cask Units and English Wine Cask Units. It's the second-largest barrel size, equal to half a tun, which was typically 252 Imperial Gallons (although that exact quantity has changed throughout history; current standards place an English Tun at 259 US gallons or 216 Imperial Gallons).

You have to admit that 129 gallons is a substantial amount of beer or wine. That's enough for the kind of party the police would want to speak to you about. Read more about beer and wine measurements with plenty of links to follow at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: Grolltech)

The living room is a room with a lot of functions. It’s a place where people can host visitors, or lounge and relax after a long day of work. When someone assembles or designs a living room, it always has the same format: couches for sitting, a center table, and some appliances for entertainment. It didn’t always look that way. Apartment Therapy explains the design evolution of arguably the true heart of any home: 

“The living room is the central entertaining space of the home,” explains Alessandra Wood, Modsy’s vice president of style and author of “Designed to Sell,” which traces the history of design retail back to the 1930s. “It’s often the most public space of the home as well, so it’s the area where dwellers usually add the most personality and design attention.”

For those above reasons, Wood thinks the living room has often become a backdrop for showcasing new trends. Interestingly enough, as is often the cyclical nature of fads, certain living room decor items and decorating ideas have come in and out—and back into—vogue over the years. With that in mind, I examined just how living rooms have changed since the ’60s.

Perhaps Kate Butler, head of design for Habitat, a British furniture retailer, says it best: “It’s important to see where we have previously been by looking at elements of design and the ever changing interior industry landscape, whilst also still looking to the future of design.”

Ready to take a walk down memory lane? Looking back on living rooms of the past just might give you some insight into what to expect for the rest of 2020—and beyond.

Image via Apartment Therapy 

The Fyre Festival made news in 2017 for being so horrible that the founder got a six-year prison sentence for fraud, and several lawsuits are pending. But there have been many festivals that were overhyped and underproduced, or just ended up being terrible for one reason or another. Take the third TomorrowWorld electronic music festival, hosted on a rural farm in Georgia in 2015. Things were going well until it started to rain.

We're not kidding about the "post-apocalyptic hellscape" part either -- you can actually put "and then the crows came" after every sentence for the rest of this entry and it won't seem out of place at all. The rain turned the site into a muddy bog, which would have been manageable, but then the organizers suddenly announced that they would no longer be able to provide the shuttle service that was supposed to take non-campers back into Atlanta on Saturday, stranding everyone in the middle of nowhere as night arrived. Thousands of drunk EDM fans ended up stumbling for miles through dark and muddy woods, desperately seeking a way out. Some people collapsed and had to be carried, while others gave up and slept in the forest without shelter.

Witnesses described seeing "Walking Dead hordes" of increasingly hungover and dehydrated David Guetta fans moving listlessly through the trees. Others described it as "like the Hunger Games," which is hopefully an exaggeration, unless surviving staff from the face-painting tent disguised themselves as rocks to hide from bands of spear-wielding feral teens. Once the march hit a road, people banged on bus windows and lay down in the road to stop vehicles from driving away without them. Desperate marchers pooled cash and formed competing alliances trying to bribe drivers to take them out. Ubers and cabs flocked to the area, charging a small fortune to ferry the wealthier revelers to safety. Which might actually be a fun glimpse of the real Tomorrow World, if the worst predictions about climate change are on the money.

There's more to that story, and those of other massively-oversold festivals centered around food, Christmas, and music, which you can read about at Cracked.

During the lockdown, the sidewalks in my neighborhood turned into a colorful gallery of encouraging slogans and artwork by kids organized online by the local library. Sidewalk chalk is great for trying your hand at public art, political slogans, graffiti, or hopscotch, since it will wash off as soon as the rain comes, or even sooner with a garden hose if you mess up. But your tools may also tend to get lost or crushed. You'll have no such problems when your sidewalk chalk is as big as a Pringle's can! And you can make these chalk sticks yourself with some plaster, tempera paint, water, and Pringle's cans (yeah, I said they were that big). Find the recipe for homemade giant chalk at Instructables.  -via Nag on the Lake

Instructables member XYZ Create has a brilliant way to hide your valuables. First, hollow out the core with a bandsaw. Then attach neodymium magnets to hold the pieces together. Put inside your valuables, such as cash, bearer bonds, or essential papers, then leave the safe on a pile of firewood. Your most important pieces of property are then hiding in plain sight! It's a foolproof plan.

-via Dave Barry

Asbestos is now known to be a dangerous substance which can cause various diseases such as asbestosis and pleural disease. People exposed to this substance could have higher risks in developing certain cancers. But before asbestos was known to be a material dangerous for one’s health, it had different uses for different kinds of people. Kings and nobles have used asbestos to display grandeur, while scammers used it to create false relics.

According to legend, Charlemagne liked to lay out his lavish banquets on a sparkling-white tablecloth spun from pure asbestos. After his guests had eaten their fill, the king would pluck the tablecloth off the table and fling it into the hearth. In the blaze, the cloth turned fiery red, but did not burn. When it was plucked out, it was cleaner than ever, with the debris of the meal roasted away.

[...]

The wondrous properties of the material made it a prime tool for the creation of false relics: its incombustibility served as proof of authenticity. Scammers passed off chunks of asbestos as fragments of the True Cross, and the monks of Monte Cassino bought an asbestos towel under the impression that it was the cloth Jesus had used to wash his disciples’ feet.

Asbestos has always been a strange substance in history. Where you find it, however, is even stranger.

More details about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: Aram Dulyan/ Wikimedia Commons)

Smartphones indeed have evolved through time. Before, these devices only had limited functions, but now, they have proven to be indispensable, because of their versatility. With only a smartphone, you could already do lots of things, like make music, edit videos, and take amazing photos. But those are not the only things that we could do with our smartphones

Scientists have experimented with the smartphone, and they found out that we could use smartphones to help us monitor our health, such as gauging fertility (if you’re female), and even detecting serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Learn more about this over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: deeptuts/ Pixabay)

You might have heard of Laika as the first dog to be launched in space, but did you know that she was not the first animal to be launched there? In fact, there were already lots of animals who have been into space over a decade before her, from fruit flies, to mice, to numerous monkeys.

Know more about the animals launched before Laika, as well as the animals launched after her, over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center)

We all know that giant pandas are already endangered, and so it is always nice to hear news of them giving birth to their cubs, which would increase their numbers. On August 21, at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C, a 22-year-old giant panda named Mei Xiang gave birth to a giant panda cub. Currently, the newborn panda was about the size of a stick of butter.

The cub's sex will be determined after neonatal exams are completed at a later date.

The cub will also be named after 100 days.

Mei Xiang "picked up the cub immediately and began cradling and caring for it," according to a Zoo release. "The panda team heard the cub vocalize and glimpsed the cub for the first time briefly immediately after the birth."

Awesome!

(Image Credit: smithsonianzoo/ Instagram)

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#7 Sports Bra (34-❤️). Tennis Balls, Metal Eyelets, Clamp Rings, Wire, Shoelaces. #sportsbra #brasculpture

A post shared by Katrina Herrndorf (@bra.artist) on Mar 19, 2020 at 11:45am PDT

Artist Katrina Herrndorf explains that "what started out as a simple study in ceramic sculpture class of the form of my bra drying on a doorknob has evolved...." For her exploration of the bra, she made examples from unusual materials, such as baseball gloves, and inspired by usually non-mammary themes, such as Canada Day.

Well this is a different approach to trimming your hair. If your local salons or barber shops are closed due to the pandemic, you’re probably considering cutting your overgrown locks at home. Micarah Tewers suggests a new method for cutting your hair, and it’s by using nail trimmers. Not exactly the tool I’d use, but seeing her do it makes it a viable option. Will you cut your hair with nail trimmers? 

An AI designed by Heron Systems defeated a human F-16 fighter pilot in a VR trial system. This situation seems a bit too close to The Terminator. At  DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trial, the AI was able to defeat the pilot with significant handicaps in place, like not being allowed to improve using information learned from its previous competition rounds, disabling its collision detection systems, and restricting weapons to only the aircraft's nose cannon, as Input magazine details: 

Heron System’s AI system used what’s known as deep reinforcement learning, which allows algorithms to quickly try out problem-solving options in a virtual environment to approach something akin to understanding. We’re using the term “akin to understanding,” because really we’re too terrified to type out what it really is — that robots can pilot F-16’s now, and are more than capable at it than any of us.

“I think what we’re seeing today is the beginning of something I’m going to call human-machine symbiosis,” DARPA’s director of its Strategic Technology Office told Defense One. “Let’s think about the human sitting in the cockpit, being flown by one of these AI algorithms as truly being one weapon system, where the human is focusing on what the human does best [like higher-order strategic thinking] and the AI is doing what the AI does best.”

Image via Input magazine 

You can now check the progress of NASA’s new Mars Rover, Perseverance as it travels to Mars. NASA has launched a free online tool that lets anyone monitor Perseverance’s journey in real time. You can also see the nearest celestial body to the spacecraft at any given moment! The Mars 2020 rover will arrive in February 2021, so people can monitor its journey for a few more months, as Slash Gear details: 

Using this new NASA tool, anyone can see the rover on its journey, nearby objects like the 81p Wild 2 comet, and the paths these various space bodies are taking. Clicking through an object will enable viewers to get additional information on each satellite, comet, planet, and moon.

In addition to the direct view of the rover, users can also zoom out to view the wider region around the rover, including the orbit of each nearby planet and comet. Of course, this is all a visualization — you can’t actually see the rover itself in real-time, only its journey and its digital representation from NASA’s team.

Image via Slash Gear

Mario’s 35th anniversary is coming soon, and with no announcements on the rumored 35th-anniversary remasters, why not celebrate by getting some limited-edition goods? If the PowerA and HORI’s new Nintendo Switch controllers or Mario's new LEGO line are out of your budget, how about some stationery? Nintendo teamed up with German manufacturer UHU to release Mario-themed adhesive products. Handy items like glue sticks, white tack, and correction tapes will have special designs to commemorate the anniversary.

Image via NintendoLife 

Be careful! A Google Drive security flaw in its “manage versions” feature could let attackers swap a legitimate file with malware. The app’s cloud storage reportedly doesn’t check to see if a file is of the same type. For example, a cat photo may be a program in disguise. Users might not know that there’s a problematic file until they’ve installed it, as Engadget detailed: 

Chrome seems to “implicitly trust” the Drive downloads even when other antivirus programs detect something amiss.

The approach could be used for spear phishing attacks that trick users into compromising their systems. You might get a notification of a document update and grab the file without realizing the threat.

Nikoci said he notified Google about the issue, but that it was still unpatched as of August 22nd. We’ve asked Google for comment.

This would mainly be useful for attacking companies that rely on Google Drive for sharing documents, but that’s increasingly common. The description also suggests that this would require a significant change to Drive’s version control. For now, the best solutions may be to use antivirus software and be wary of Google Drive file update alerts, especially if you weren’t expecting them.

Image via Endgadget