For those who are planning to homeschool their kids, CNN has listed 9 educational documentaries for different subject areas. However, these are also good considerations for adults!
Their list includes Spellbound, He Named Me Malala, Jane, Apollo 11, Underwater Dreams, Chasing Coral, Elephant, Babies, and Elián.
What are your favorite educational movies and documentaries?
Image Credit: Evert F. Baumgardner via Wikimedia Commons
We've read about a cat that has a sad face as an illusion. Now, here's a dog with RCF (Resting Concerned Face)... and it's not an illusion!
Part Pekingese, Dachshund, and Chihuahua, Old Man Bacon (complete with a white beard) has an Instagram account that is chock-full of him looking concerned and confused—like he’s just come to the realization that something has gone horribly awry. (Or, like the Jean Ralphio meme, he’s just realized that he’s taken on too much responsibility.) If you’re a chronic over-thinker or a worry wart, Bacon is bound to be your spirit animal.
Don't worry, though! He's a happy dog despite looking worried all the time. Here's a proof:
Image Credit: thebaconator via Instagram
February 20, 1826. People were inside a small theatre in the big city of London, waiting with their eyes open in the pitch black darkness of the room. Suddenly, there was light shining across the room — it was a replica of our Sun. When the viewers’ eyes finally adjusted from the sudden change in lighting, they realized that they are no longer in the theatre, but inside the Rosslyn Chapel in rural Scotland. It was magical, indeed.
The viewers were inside the work of a French inventor, Louis Daguerre. The diorama was one of his many inventions, a multimedia spectacle that took the mid-nineteenth century by storm. The first diorama was constructed in 1822, behind the Place du Château d’Eau (now the Place de la République). Daguerre’s studio was located in the 10th arrondissement, in Paris, rue Faubourg du Temple; the area was shabby and underdeveloped, consisting of old army barracks and a smattering of theaters. Once customers entered the theater, however, they soon forgot their dilapidated surroundings. They were transported, as it were virtually, to places and moments in history: the Black Forest; the Inauguration of the Temple of Solomon; the Great Fire of Edinburgh.
The modern cinema, as well as technological advancements like virtual reality, can trace their roots back to this amazing invention.
Learn more about Daguerre’s diorama over at JSTOR Daily.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
It was 1943, and the city of Harvard in Clay County, Nebraska, decided to dispose of unused plots of land by selling them at $1.50 apiece. Upon seeing this great offer, a 16-year-old man named Robert Pinckney, who was the son of a local physician, decided that he wanted some for himself so that he can build victory gardens in summer. But upon seeing the list of plots on sale, Robert saw that the plot of land in which the jailhouse stands was also one of the properties on sale.
As any good and responsible citizen would have done, Robert informed the city council about their mistake. But they only laughed at him.
Robert decided that the best revenge would be to buy the plot, which he did.
And so the sale was made and the deed papers signed, and still the city refused to admit their mistake. They pretended as if nothing happened, and continued to house criminals in the jail. Once Robert put a lock on the jail, but the city officials smashed it and threw him off the premises.
So Robert hired a lawyer and sued the city for owned rent…
The jailhouse would then get a wide media coverage, making the city of Harvard famous. The jailhouse would also contribute much to the war effort, but how?
Find out the rest of the story over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Jimmy Emerson/ Flickr/ Amusing Planet)
The Mayan city of Tikal was a thriving city that has prospered and expanded for hundreds of years. But in the ninth century A.D, something happened in the city that made its citizens abandon the place, but what was it? It turns out that mercury and toxic algae are what drove the people out of the city, as these poisoned their drinking water, and since they were already struggling to survive the dry season, this made their situation worse.
Per the study, published last month in the journal Scientific Reports, the Maya sought to collect as much water as possible during the region’s rainy season, developing huge, paved plazas that were sloped to send water sluicing into the reservoirs for storage. As the researchers argue, this system inadvertently contributed to the city’s undoing.
To assess the factors at play in Tikal’s demise, the team took samples of sediments at the bottom of four of Tikal’s reservoirs. Chemical and biological analyses of layers dated to the mid-800s revealed the grim history of the lakes’ contents: As Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz, two of the largest reservoirs were not only dangerously polluted with the heavy metal mercury, but also carried traces of enormous toxic algal blooms.
[...]
“The water would have looked nasty,” says co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati, in the statement. “It would have tasted nasty. Nobody would have wanted to drink that water.”
More details about this sad story over at Smithsonian Magazine.
(Image Credit: Raymond Ostertag/ Wikimedia Commons)
How far is our Sun from our planet? How far is the Moon? How far are the stars that we see in the night sky? While some of these questions are already answered by today’s science, hundreds of years ago people did not know how to answer these questions, but they created ways to attempt to answer them.
Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today, with high-powered telescopes and computers, still ponder the universe and attempt to tease out answers to millennia-old questions.
Two hundred years ago, a man named Joseph von Fraunhofer made one of the most important discoveries that would help astrophysicists today in calculating the distances of celestial objects. He had found “the hidden code in starlight.”
Learn more about Fraunhofer’s life, as well as his discovery over at Nautilus.
(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)
Simpson Xin shared pictures of a stray cat in China who looks so distressed you have to wonder what it's worried about. Won't someone comfort the poor thing? But that's just an illusion, caused by the cat's unique facial markings. Here's a closer look.
Still, you'd think someone would want to take the cat in just for the internet points. We wouldn't be surprised if it became an Instagram star ...or whatever the Chinese equivalent of Instagram is. See more pictures of the cat with the perpetually furrowed brow at Bored Panda.
Japanese pastry chef Koki Kato layered cream, fruit, and mille-feuille cake inside hollowed-out melons, pineapples, and oranges. They're supposed to tantalize all five senses as you slice one open. These culinary marvels will overpower you with delight as you contemplate wondrously how Kato grew melons with cakes inside. You can see more photos at Sora News 24.
Photo: Cake.jp
In 1588, Italian engineer Agustino Ramelli published a book that included an illustration for an invention that he had in mind. He wanted to be able to easily consult multiple books at a time, so Ramelli thought it would be possible to build a geared wheel that would let him easily flip between eight books.
Ramelli never built his bookwheel, but Matt Nygren and Maher Abdelkawi, students at the Rochester Institute of Technology did. Atlas Obscura describes their project:
Today, one wheel resides at the Melbert B. Cary Jr. Graphic Arts Collection at RIT’s Wallace Library, and the other at the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library. Each weighs about 600 pounds and has room for eight books; users can take a seat and spin the wooden cases, which are carefully weighted to avoid unintended movements. It’s also worth getting close to observe the core mechanism: a complex, epicyclic gearing system that consists of outer gears rotating around a central gear, much like planets moving around the sun.
-via Bookshelf | Photo: Mireya Salinas
You've probably never heard of the disease called chlorosis, because we don't deal with it anymore. But in the 1890s, it was quite common. Chlorosis gave the sufferer a host of symptoms, but the most baffling -and the one responsible for the name- was a green tint to the skin.
For centuries, chlorosis was a constant — though the diagnoses behind it shifted with the societal and medical norms of the time. First described in 1554, it was known until the mid-1700s as the “disease of virgins,” and the best cure was thought to be intercourse (bloodletting was also a popular treatment).
“Chlorosis was absolutely seen as a women’s disease, which meant, as it still often means today, that it got little attention and was easily dismissed with absurd cures,” says Anna Scanlon, director of the writing center at Illinois Wesleyan University and an avid researcher of chlorosis. Other treatments included telling women to conceive, exercise or abandon education. While there were physicians who believed that men could also contract chlorosis, such cases were thought to be extremely rare, and those men diagnosed with it were usually described as effeminate. The disease was predominately associated with the upper classes until the mid-19th century, when the medical establishment realized that poor women could also lack adequate nutrition and exposure to sunlight.
Luckily, since then medical science has figured out what caused chlorosis and how to treat it. But the reason for the green tint is still somewhat of a mystery. Read about chlorosis at Ozy. -via Digg
If you've been cooking and baking the past months and you ran out of ideas, here's something you can try: a 4000 years old Mesopotamian meal consisting of 4 intricate dishes and a loaf of bread.
This meal was tried by Bill Sutherland, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Cambridge. Bill shared his journey on Twitter.
Bored Panda reached out to Professor Bill Sutherland to find out more about his Mesopotamian cooking experience.
Bill heard about the recipes from Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid, who’s “a real expert on Mesopotamian culture.” He bought the book about the Yale Collection and thought “it would be fun to try and cook them.“
This was about an hour of planning and a couple of hours cooking,” said Bill. But in no way did he expect so many to take interest in his peculiar Twitter thread. “Currently, 3.7 million people have seen this,” the professor said in disbelief.
Image Credits to Bored Panda and Professor Bill Sutherland
This was the very first TV ad for Pizza Hut, produced in Wichita, Kansas. It was posted to YouTube years ago by the son of the producer. They didn't really need to give you a reason to select Pizza Hut over all the other pizza joints in town, because there weren't any others in most places. But they did make the ad funny, and introduced an earworm. -via Boing Boing
Rich McCor, also known as Paperboyo, is a paper artist. While he normally travels the world to find inspiration, lately he's been stuck at home like the rest of us, watching a lot of movies to fill the time. Those movies inspired him to start a new project- making paper scenes using paper silhouettes combined with the things he has around the house. A little imagination and some real talent goes a long way!
“I usually work with architecture and forced perspective, so translating my ideas to a much smaller scale was a challenge but a fun challenge,” McCor tells My Modern Met. “I realized that there were plenty of opportunities to create images around the house with the same sense of humor and surprise as my exterior photos, so I used the theme of movies as a starting point and then let myself get carried away with it.” From Indiana Jones using a phone charger as his bullwhip to a herd of paper-cut Jurassic World dinosaurs charging across a cheese board, McCor’s indoor series showcases his boundless imagination.
See a gallery of the movie scenes at My Modern Met. Follow McCor's art at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
In December of 1944, a unit of Germany's First SS Panzer Division overwhelmed a group of US troops near the Belgian city of Malmedy. The GIs surrendered, and were rounded up as POWs. The Germans then killed 84 of them, which is a war crime. After the war, the American military tried 75 Germans for murder for the Malmedy massacre and related war crimes, convicted all but one, and sentenced 43 to death. But that didn't happen. In 1949, the Army convened a senate investigation to determine whether US military investigators and prosecutors had tortured, coerced, or otherwise mistreated the German defendants in the name of retribution. The senate investigatory subcommittee officially had three members, but the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was allowed to sit in and observe.
At the time, McCarthy was less than halfway through his first term in the Senate, and he hadn’t yet launched the reckless crusade against alleged Communists that would turn his name into an “ism.” Relegated to the status of a backbencher after Democrats took control of the Senate in 1949, McCarthy was thirsting for a cause that would let him claim the spotlight. The cause that this ex-Marine and uber-patriot picked—as an apologist for the Nazi perpetrators of the bloodiest slaughter of American soldiers during World War II—would, more than anything he had done previously, define him for his fellow senators and anybody else paying close attention. But so few were paying him heed that no alarms were sounded, and in short order his Malmedy trickery was overshadowed by his campaign against those he branded as un-American, an irony that lends special meaning to this forgotten chapter in the making of Joe McCarthy.
McCarthy did not sit in and observe. He questioned, accused, and bullied those involved, as if he were trying out an early version of the tactics he later used to smear opponents and galvanize the public against perceived communists. In short, McCarthy dominated the proceedings. Read the story of Joseph McCarthy and the investigation into the Malmedy trials at Smithsonian.
(Image source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
I'm a stained glass artist from Montreal and I just wanted to share my latest piece. I had been wanting to make this window for over a year but other bigger projects kept coming up (which is great!). It's 25" x 16" and made with the Tiffany style copper foil technique. Almost every piece here was carefully painted and went through multiple kiln firings, took about two weeks to complete. Follow me on Instagram to see other stuff I've made!
