Stuntman Tim Howell climbed to the peak of Lord Berkeley’s Seat, which was 4,000 feet from the ground. The 31-year-old stuntman from Somerset made the climb to the Ann Teallach mountain range and jumped from its peak. Howell was accompanied by photographer Hamish Frost, who was able to take photos before and after his jump. Some of the images were captured with a helmet- mounted camera that uses software to automatically remove the camera from the image.
Image via Scotsman
Wikipedia is a crowdsourced font of information about everything, usually with sources cited. But Wikipedia exists in many languages, and since the editors and admins are all volunteers, who is safeguarding all those various versions? Redditor Ultach tells us that one user has been posting Wikipedia articles on the Scots language version since 2013 -around 20,000 of them, or a third of the entire inventory. This one person began at age 12 and is now an administrator of the Scots language Wikipedia. But they are no true Scotsman.
The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences.
When doing research for an article on Scots I did think the Scots Wikipedia felt more like parody or humour than a real project, & ended up deciding not to cite anything from it. Still staggered by this.
— Reply Guy #BPD #anxiety #fml (@no_frankly) August 25, 2020
Some consider the unnamed teenager to be well intended but misguided, akin to Cecilia Gimenez' restoration of the artwork called Ecce Homo. Others consider them a troll or vandal. At the minimum, it's language appropriation. Metafilter has quite an informative discussion about it. Another Scots Wikipedia admin has an AMA discussing what should be done. And a Facebook group has sprung up, inviting native Scots speakers to help clean up Scots Wikipedia.
(Image credit: Wikipedia)
Before the rise of selfies, there were small photographic prints on cards. These were called carte de visites, and they were popular during the Victorian era. The carte de visites (CdV) were initially expensive and difficult to produce, but that didn’t stop people from offering theirs to other people during their social visits. Homes often had a tray for collecting these calling card-esque photographs. Besides the owner’s photograph, the CdV contains the owner’s name and an emblem, as DIYPhotography details:
In 1854, Paris photographer Andre Adolphe Disderi patented the 2 1/2″ x 4″ carte de visite format. They were created by using a sliding plate holder and a camera with four lenses. The technique spread to the photographic studios in the great cities of the world. Carte de visites were extensively used in the American Civil War era as families sought mementos before loved ones left for war. Queen Victoria had numerous albums filled with images of her extensive family.
Small and inexpensive to produce, cartes de visites became the international standard. They were collected, exchanged and placed in family albums. Most carte de visites were taken in studios but some adventurous photographers took them outdoors in early examples of photojournalism.
For many people, posing for a carte de visite was the first time they had been photographed. Smiles are almost completely absent. Some people look ill at ease. Most photographers posed their subjects as if they were being painted for a grand oil painting. Look past the stern expressions and you will see Victorian fashion, various accessories and props, uniforms, and hair styles and epic facial hair.
From 1860 until the end of the century, carte de visites were immensely popular. But people didn’t just want pictures of themselves or loved ones, carte de visites of celebrities were also in demand. Images of politicians, authors, explorers, sports stars and other people of note were widely circulated. Eventually the larger cabinet cards replaced CdVs as the technology behind photography continued to advance.
Image via DIYPhotography
Not every child looks the same. For kids with physical disabilities, it can be hard to relate closely to a doll that is very physically different. That's why former social worker Amy Jandrisevits makes dolls that have bodies like their child caretakers. My Modern Met reports:
The meticulous work is seen by Jandrisevits as a direct reflection of the recipients themselves. “We need to see each child as a work of art—a masterpiece. While doll-making is an art form, the real canvas is the child him/herself. If we want to become a society that values differences and inclusivity, this is where we start. We start with something as simple as a doll—a human likeness.”
Jandrisevits has made about three hundred dolls so far. You can see examples of her work on Instagram.
Paying online bills. Using GPS. Sending emails. These are just some of the things that we could do today, and it’s all thanks to our satellites, man-made machines that orbit around our planet. Sooner or later, however, these machines cease functioning, and this created a new problem for us to solve. That problem is space junk.
Technically referred to as orbital debris, space junk is any defunct human-made object remaining in space or reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Experts estimate that there are already millions of pieces of space junk in orbit, ranging from chips of paint and scraps of metal to used-up rocket stages and defunct satellites. The debris multiplies each time objects collide or a fuel leak causes a satellite or rocket to explode.
Eventually, this debris will fall back to Earth as atmospheric drag causes it to spiral into lower and lower orbits, a process that can take anywhere from weeks to millennia. (Atmospheric drag is similar to the force you feel when you put your hand out a car window as it’s moving, only much weaker because the density of air in space is so low.) Most debris will burn up as it reenters the atmosphere, but there are some exceptions. In 1978, a Soviet Union spy satellite powered by uranium failed in orbit, just months after it had launched, and fell back toward Earth. Instead of burning up on reentry, fragments—some of which were radioactive—scattered across the Canadian North. Just this past May, an almost twenty-tonne chunk of space junk from a recent rocket launch passed over Los Angeles and New York before crash landing in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Mauritania. It was moving so fast that scientists couldn’t predict with certainty where it would land.
While they may not be raining down on Earth, space junk also poses another problem — it could collide with our active satellites (including the International Space Station), which could wipe out satellite communications and cost us millions of dollars.
One way in which we could solve this problem is by retrieving these space junk. But, like any other space project, this one would be very expensive as well.
More details about this over at The Walrus.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)
Thammapa Supamas lives in Thailand and has a white cat named Ka-Pwong. Or, to be more precise, she used to be white. The poor cat suffered from ringworm.
Supamas was worried about her cat’s infection so she asked her mother for advice. She suggested applying turmeric—an Indian spice and medicinal herb used to treat infections. “My cat Ka-Pwong had ringworm, we did everything to cure it, but nothing worked. That was when my mother had the idea of using turmeric. At first, she painted it on the ringworm but as there was a lot left, she decided to paint the whole body to prevent future mycoses,” said Supamas to Bored Panda.
As anyone who cooks with turmeric knows, it can stain your skin yellow. The spice turned the entire cat bright yellow, which did not wash out. The good news is that the ringworm has cleared up! And Ka-Pwong now has her own Facebook page, in case you want to follow along and find out how quickly the cat replaces her dyed yellow hair with new white fur. Read the whole story with lots of pictures, including some with Photoshopped Pickachu features, at Bored Panda.
(Image credit: ตุ้มเม้งแมวแพนด้า&คาพ้วงแมวเชื้อรา)
Tina Fey read the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabees, about the toxic culture of teen girls, and wrote a fictional treatment which became a big hit in 2004. Mean Girls was a fetch comedy that struck close to home for a generation and then some. This Honest Trailer is pretty straightforward, because Mean Girls was everything it aimed to be.
Only a few animals can survive the subzero temperatures of Antarctica. One of those animals is penguins, who have an ingenious way of keeping themselves warm while ensuring that no one dies as they travel across the frozen terrain and bombarded with gusty winds. What do they do? They huddle. This phenomenon is already amazing enough on its own, but once we look deeper into this, it becomes even more amazing.
“A penguin huddle looks like organized chaos,” said François Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced. “Every penguin acts individually, but the end result is an equitable heat distribution for the whole community.”
It turns out that penguins execute their huddles with a high degree of mathematical efficiency, as Blanchette and his team discovered. More recently, Daniel Zitterbart, a physicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, helped develop and install high-resolution cameras to observe undisturbed huddling behavior. Zitterbart’s team recently discovered which conditions cause penguins to huddle, and they are investigating the possibility that the penguins’ mathematical behavior may reveal secrets about colony health over time.
Learn more about this interesting mathematical phenomenon over at Quanta Magazine.
(Image Credit: Nature on PBS/ YouTube)
Growing up, I have encountered people who are okay with artificial developments such as vaccines and GMOs. I also have encountered people who are not okay with “unnatural” methods, as they believe that 100% natural should be the way to go. But natural is not always good all the time.
… Given a choice, most people gravitate toward the natural over the artificial. After all, natural environments are preferable to garbage dumps, natural foods are nearly always healthier than stuff concocted in a chemistry lab. Yet it needs to be said loud and clear: Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. “Smallpox is natural,” Ogden Nash noted. “Vaccine ain’t.” …
Reading 19th-century critic and essayist John Ruskin, who wrote “There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” one cannot help conclude that Mr. Ruskin didn’t get out much. By the same token, “doing what comes naturally” can be very bad advice indeed.
Read more of David Barash’s article about this over at Nautilus.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)
The temperature hit 130°F (54.4C) in Death Valley last week. Just knowing that can make you sweat, but there are people actually living and working in Death Valley. How do they cope with such heat not only this year, but year after year as the desert warms up? Park ranger Brandi Stewart of the Death Valley National Park taels us about her life in the heat.
“Overall, we spend a lot of time indoors,” she says. “On our days off, many rangers go hiking or camping in the mountains to spend some time outdoors without the heat. For those who have a water heater with a tank, many rangers will turn off the water heater, so that water becomes the ‘cold’ water, and the water running through the pipes becomes the ‘hot’ water. Unfortunately, my house has a tankless water heater, so while it saves energy, my home only has hot and hotter water in the summer.”
Lastly, Stewart mentions that she and many other park rangers have misters lining their porches to help them stay cool. “But really, anything above 120 is too hot, even with the misters,” she says.
Good advice for humans, but other species survive and even thrive at higher temperatures. Learn how they do it at Mel magazine.
The Great Emu War happened in 1932, but there's a new one raging on the internet over how you pronounce the bird's name. Americans tend to pronounce it ee-moo, and National Public Radio declared it an acceptable pronunciation. However, Australians did not take kindly to the action, as they pronounce it ee-mew. It's the difference in the pronunciation of the words moot and mute. The Guardian stepped into the middle to declare both wrong.
The Portuguese word “ema” was originally used to refer to a cassowary, and may be based on an Arabic word meaning “big bird”. The word was likely brought to Australasia by early colonial explorers.
“This is pretty typical of English which is just absolutely chock-full of words that are borrowed from languages from all over the world,” Enfield said.
“We mangle it to a more comfortable pronunciation for our own language and, you know, then just takes off.”
So it seems both the Aussies and Yanks are guilty of brutalising the bird’s name to suit their lazy anglo accents.
Well, I guess that settles it. Or maybe not. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Calistemon)
August 24, 1995. Midnight. People were already lining up at CompUSA and BestBuy, as they were looking forward to getting a copy of the most anticipated software at that time. That software was Windows 95. Twenty-five years later, 95’s legacy, through its features, still lives on to this day, from the Start button, to other ambitious features of the said software.
… PC geeks were choosing between Pentium or 486 processors, IDE or SCSI hard drives, double-speed CD-ROMs, and Sound Blaster audio cards to experience the best of Windows 95. Microsoft added a lot of features to Windows 95, but the biggest was a new Start button, menu, and task bar that made it a lot easier to discover applications and navigate the operating system. Multitasking improvements and the graphical interface were a big leap from Windows 3.1 and the days of MS-DOS, but the interface was rather similar for Macintosh and OS/2 users at the time.
More about this story over at The Verge.
(Image Credit: Microsoft/ Wikimedia Commons)
He was asking for it! He thought he was tough until he was taken down by the fearless and remorseless police dog.
Click Here for the short video.
These filters aren’t there for aesthetics. Meet the Breeze, a mask that would work in any scenario, be it an area with bad air quality, a smoke-filled war zone, or the daily travels during the pandemic. The mask has a naturally cooling outer fabric, and an inner layer made from silver and 24-karat gold. The inner layer instantly destroys any germs that come in contact with it, as Yanko Design details:
Designed by a videographer who often had to wear masks for hours while working, the Breeze was first and foremost crafted to fit comfortably around your face, letting you wear it for a long time. Its wraparound style allows you to wear it around your head (instead of around your ears), and a velcro fastening system gives you the freedom of wearing it around caps, ponytails, hair-buns, and even turbans. The comfortable fit allows the Breeze to sit on your face almost like a second skin, giving you hours of use without any “mask fatigue”. The mask uses an 80-20 blend of polyester and polyamide to help it regulate temperature. A simple spritz of water on the outside of the mask helps bring its temperature down as you breathe, giving it a cooling effect. The mask comes in variants with and without air-valves. The air-valves direct the flow of air as you breathe, filtering in the air from one side, and out the other, thanks to replaceable N99 filter inserts. This double filtration system makes the mask safe for you as well as the people around you. Both valve and valve-less versions of the mask come with the unique silver+gold mesh layer along with a standard N95 filter lining to trap microparticles and kill microorganisms.
Image via Yanko Design
All squirrels are created cute. Some squirrels are just cuter than others. Such is the case for these Japanese dwarf flying squirrels, which can only be found in Honshu and Kyushu, both remote Japanese islands.
These incredible creatures can only be found on Honshu and Kyushu islands, remote locations in Japan. While there are around 50 different species of flying squirrels all around the world, these ones – known officially as Pteromys momonga – are one of only two ‘Old World’ species.
They’re rather small, measuring out at between 14 and 20 centimetres and weighing between 150-220g. Also, while other many other flying squirrels have one mating cycle per year, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel has two.
Learn more about these cute animals over at UNILAD.
(Image Credit: @kristinecake/ Twitter)
