With all the negative stuff happening in the world and in our individual lives, it is understandable if a person falls into despair and sorrow. But amidst all of these things, this shirt reminds us to always have a positive outlook in life and not “give up hop”.
And so, let's stay hopful.
(Image via Engrish.com)
How did Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, manage to get millions of subscribers? Public speaker and presentation coach David JP Phillips dives deeply into how PewDiePie captures the attention of his audience, as well as how he projects himself in front of the camera. What David finds is a natural public speaker — an expressive, persuasive, and creative man.
(Image Credit: David JP Phillips/ YouTube)
Serial record-breaker David Rush has been practicing his poker chip stacking skills for about a year and a half. After that long time of training, Rush is now able to stack the poker chips at an amazing speed. Just a few days ago, he attempted to break the world record of the most number of poker chips stacked with one hand in a minute, which was 42.
The serial record-breaker said he managed to stack 49 chips, but the last was placed just after the time ran out, making his new record 48. The stack was able to remain standing on its own for at least 5 seconds, qualifying for the record.
David Rush currently has broken over 150 Guinness world records.
A truly amazing man.
(Image Credit: David Rush/ YouTube)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee is already a very difficult piece to play on normal instruments such as the piano, violin, and wind instruments such as the trombone. But this trombonist, named Martyn Stroud, decided to take things to an entirely new level by playing the piece on a watering can.
Blowing into a trombone mouthpiece attached to the end of a watering can’s neck, [he] manages to emulate the frantic sound of the buzzing musical bumblebee.
We’re very impressed.
Watch the video on Facebook.
(Image Credit: Martyn Stroud/ Facebook)
When someone dies in their 90s, or even older, people aren't all that curious about what caused their death. After all, there is a limit to how long a human body can last, and death in a person who has achieved an extremely advanced age is not a surprise. But what does it really mean to die of old age? Gizmodo spoke to four experts about that. University of California, San Francisco, professor of medicine Elizabeth Dzeng says, in part,
It’s common, in our society, to say that someone “died of old age.” But nobody ever actually dies of “old age.” There are always other pre-existing diseases—or new diseases—that cause the deaths in question. “Old age” isn’t something you’d put on a death certificate—most likely, it would be something like cardiac arrest, which occurs due to some underlying issue such as an infection, heart attack, or cancer. For example, a clot could go into the lungs which prevents somebody from oxygenating their brain or their body, and which then causes the heart to stop. When somebody dies, whether or not they’re young or old, some disease or disease-process has caused their body to stop working.
There's more, and they also address aging, filling out a death certificate, and the idea of dying peacefully in your sleep at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo)
Sandra and Lloyd Simpson adopted more than two dozen children in the 1970s and '80s, to add to several that Sandra gave birth to. That was something that Toronto had never seen, and won't likely see again. But Sandra saw the need in Canda's foster care system, then in Vietnamese refugee children, and in international adoptions that didn't work for other people.
With their sprawling numbers and the haphazard way they came together, the Simpsons pressed up against the boundaries of what it meant to be a family. They arrived in Forest Hill in 1978 like an asteroid, crashing into a wealthy white neighbourhood that had never seen so many Brown faces before, let alone enough Brown faces to field both sides of a baseball game, and all under one roof. They embodied a particular strain of mid-century Canadian liberalism—a belief that the complications and inconveniences of race could simply be discarded and replaced with a new collective identity.
Talk to the Simpsons today and they’ll say they were just like any other family. Over the course of 20 years in the big house on Russell Hill Road, they played on soccer teams and got into fistfights, snuck around with boyfriends and delivered newspapers. They experienced joy as well as tragedy—troubles with the law, illness and disability.
Now, 40 years later, the Simpson kids have grown into chefs, business owners, athletes, hospitality workers and parents with kids of their own. And they’ve had time to reflect on the singularity of their childhood and of their mother’s vision, and on the peculiar moment in time that allowed their family to flourish. Sandra pushed the limits of adoption so far that her motivations still seem alien, even to her own children. “To tell you the truth, she’s not normal,” her daughter Kathryn told me. “I don’t think anyone could really explain her.” She had a unique brand of stubborn, no-nonsense altruism that persevered in the face of bigoted NIMBYism. What happened on Russell Hill Road is not just the story of an extraordinary woman, but of a radical experiment in child rearing. Sandra Simpson didn’t keep the suffering of the world at a distance. She invited it into her home and made it family.
Read the story of Sandra Simpson and the children she raised at Toronto Life. -via Digg
Mississippi is getting a new flag. The Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag will select a new design from submitted entries by September, and the state's citizens will have a referendum to accept or reject the new flag during the November election. The deadline for submissions was August first, and now those hundreds of submission are in a gallery for public view. The only rules are that the design must contain the words "In God We Trust," and that no Confederate flags are used. You can "♥" flags, but that probably won't have any sway over the commission. Most of the submissions are straightforward, many with magnolia blossoms, but the few posted here show that there is a wide range of inspirations. -via Metafilter
Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology dug up 75 million-year-old dinosaur bones in Alberta in 1989. They've been studied on and off ever since, and one bone from a horned dinosaur called Centrosaurus showed some abnormalities. Thirty years later, scientists took a closer look.
A multidisciplinary team led by a paleontologist and a pathologist studied the bone inside and out, examining everything from the outside shape to the inner microscopic structure. In the end, the experts arrived at a diagnosis of osteosarcoma–a malignant bone cancer that afflicts about 3.4 out of every million people worldwide. The team’s new study, published today in The Lancet, provides the most detailed evidence yet for cancer in a dinosaur.
Discovering osteosarcoma in a dinosaur has implications for the evolutionary origins and history of cancer. “If humans and dinosaurs get the same kinds of bone cancers,” says George Washington University paleontologist Catherine Forster, “then bone cancers developed deep in evolutionary history, before the mammal and reptile lineages split 300 million years ago.”
This particular specimen did not die of cancer, though, which itself carries implications about how dinosaurs lived. Read about this new research at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Fred Wierum)
Are you durable enough to endure the full trauma of a journey through a frog's digestive tract? The Regimbartia attenuata beetle species can, thus teaching us an important life lesson. Scientists at Kobe University in Japan found that fully of the 93% of beetles who made the trip finished it alive and well.
Because the beetles are so large, they tend to plug up the frogs' butts, so they probably stimulate the frogs' digestive systems to loosen up. Again, another life lesson provided to us by Mother Nature. Let us do likewise.
-via Dave Barry
In the late 1950s, two musicians, John Mansfield and Philip Hayward, bought up a string of small clubs in and around London and named them all Ricky-Tick. These clubs were intimate and welcoming, and became a favorite among young musicians trying to hone their craft and try out material in front of an audience. These included bands that made it big, like The Rolling Stones, and bands that didn't, like Hogsnort Rupert and the Good Good Band. Bob McGrath, Hogsnort Rupert's alter ego, played the Ricky-Ticks, designed the posters, and witnessed the early days of many musicians' careers.
As a participant, McGrath had an insider’s view of the birth of the British R&B scene. Of the Rolling Stones, McGrath is matter of fact. “They were good,” he allows. “Jagger couldn’t sing to save his soul, but Charlie Watts was one of the few English drummers who had any sense of rhythm. It was quite a shock to see their audiences clapping on the right beat, the 2 and the 4 instead of the 1 and the 3. Jagger and Richards had very little interest in anything other than themselves,” he concludes. “Apart from Brian Jones, they all seemed like immature assholes.”
McGrath also sheds light on why the Ricky-Tick clubs outside of London seemed so much more fun than the ones in the city proper. “London and Soho were mean streets,” he says, “even then. It was pretty seedy—drug people, gangsters—not a friendly place to be. I never felt at ease there, and I was there an awful lot.”
In contrast, the Ricky-Tick clubs that popped up in the cities and towns of the Thames Valley were welcoming places, notwithstanding the occasional punch-up between rival groups of mods and rockers. Beyond the more relaxed attitude that came with being outside of London, the U.K. in general warmly embraced music performed and/or composed by Black artists. Unlike in the United States during the early 1960s, when rhythm and blues records by Black performers were mostly listened to by Black audiences, white kids in England were fully on board. Thus, when Black performers from the United States such as Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe played Ricky-Tick, they were greeted by packed clubs filled with adorning fans, from the predominantly white locals to the Black American servicemen stationed at nearby U.S. Air Force bases in South Ruislip, West Ruislip, and High Wycombe.
Read about the clubs that gave birth to rock 'n' roll as we know it at Collectors Weekly.
Fancy an elegant and beautiful bag to carry watermelon-sized fruits? Worry not, as Japanese designer Tsuchiya Kaban designed a leather bag that can hold your fruit. The tote, part of The Fun of Carrying project, can carry exactly one round watermelon. Now you can carry your melons in style and comfort!
image via The Colossal
The tangled algae we see along the beach are more than additions to our dining table! Did you know that seaweed can improve gut health, and act as an anti-inflammatory agent? Not only is seaweed a good ingredient for skin care, it can also serve as a substitute material for plastic bags! Wallpaper has more details:
The most common second home for seaweed outside of the ocean is no doubt the dining room table. Nicknamed the ‘vegetable of the sea’, seaweed contains a wealth of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids that are key to a healthy diet. Slipping some onto your plate can help you get some much-needed A, C, E, and B vitamins, as well as iodine and calcium.
Beyond the dinner table, seaweed has long been used for cosmetic and medical purposes. It is a key element of ‘thalassotherapy,’ or ‘healing through the sea,’ a form of therapy that became popular in 19th century coastal France and which uses seawater and sea products for improved physical and emotional health.
In Ireland too, seaweed baths have long been used to relieve aching joints and calm anxious minds. Since 1912, Kilcullen’s Seaweed Baths in Sligo has offered soaks in porcelain bathtubs filled with seawater and seaweed. The iodine-rich bath is meant to combat symptoms of rheumatism and arthritis, as well as improve general health.
image via Wallpaper
Now that’s a venture I did not see coming. Tesla’s senior industrial designer Remy Labesque has redesigned the chocolate chip. Labesque believed that the classic chocolate chip’s teardrop shape is not suited to its function, as Dallas News detailed:
The chip isn’t a designed shape,” Labesque said. “It’s a product of an industrial manufacturing process.”
The baking standby is optimized for mass production, not for baking in cookies, whose broad surface area is better suited to maximize taste and melt-in-your-mouth
texture. Labesque’s redesign for artisanal Dandelion Chocolate is a square, faceted pyramid, kind of like a flattened diamond. Two edges are thick, and two exceedingly thin, for even more textural pleasure.
image via Dallas News
This video can enlighten you about some of the people behind the magic that happens in film. Filmmaking is no easy feat, and is a combined effort of many. Insider details eight different jobs that are part of every film set, from styling food for a shot to creating realistic-looking food props.
A glazed ceramic vessel set an auction record for a work by the Arts and Crafts-era design firm. The small vase sold for a whopping $431,250 after a forty-minute bidding war. It was initially estimated to sell for between $7,000 and $9,000 at a Sotheby’s auction, as artnet news detailed:
“The work exhibits a highly unusual and rare glaze coloration for Grueby pottery, with terrific proportions and crisp modeling, which helped drive the intense competition between at least two collectors,” a representative for the auction house said in a statement to Artnet News. “It is unlikely that another work with this particular glaze coloration will be discovered.”
image via artnet news
