Hasan Kaval is a madman. But he knows how to relax, in a well-worn leather love seat, watching TV with chips and soda. Only he's doing in high in the sky! He's speaking Turkish, and the wind is so loud that auto-translate cannot hear it, so you might want to skip through the first minute and a half. Then- holy moly! The lack of a seat belt will make you nervous, but he survived to post the video. Do not try this at home. -via reddit

A cat can be seen standing in the room. Two cherubs, one on its left, and another on its right, can be seen helping it to put on the royal robes. Another cherub flies on top of the cat’s head, with a crown on its tiny hands. The cat, however, seems to be thinking of something entirely different than his current coronation, with its eyes fixed on somewhere else in the room.

The oil painting, titled “Fantasy of a pet cat” was created in 2006 by the Japanese artist Tokuhiro Kawai.

Traditionally, the classical approach to painting has always been intended for narrative: heroes, saints and the divine were painted in their glorious feats of battle or miraculous miracles. But the task of storytelling has since been ceded literature and film. Kawai attempts to rekindle this fragile bond, but in a contemporary context in which religion and epic battles are less a part of our lives. “Human beings live their life carrying this kind of contradiction or unanswerable problems. By creating an original hero, I want to pursue the amusing trait of a mankind who exists with the desire to battle, and yet have contradictory behaviors,” says Kawai.

This isn’t Kawai’s only cat-centered painting; he has a lot more, along with his other Renaissance style paintings, which can be seen over at Spoon & Tamago.

Cute!

(Image Credit: Tokuhiro Kawai/ Spoon & Tamago)

The ancient past has always been full of mysterious structures and strange sites that continue to baffle archaeologists and historians to this day. Belonging in this category is the iconic Stonehenge, which is said to have been used as a burial ground in the past, according to many scholars. But while the place might have been used in the past as a burial ground, people are still baffled at how the ancient people managed to build such a big structure. But it seems that there is now a much larger mystery to solve, and this mystery can be found just a few miles away from Stonehenge.

Now, another monumental site has been discovered in the area, and though it’s much, much bigger than Stonehenge, it’s easy to see why it’s been missed for so long. The newly found site, contemporaneous with Stonehenge, is a vast arc of pits, which archaeologists believe represents a significant development in their understanding of the inhabitants of early Britain.

“When we started the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, we started to look in between the monuments [we knew about],” says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford and lead author of a recent study describing the newly-discovered site, published in the journal Internet Archaeology. “The Neolithic period was a time of monumentalization of ritual sites. It was happening all over the country. This dwarfs the lot of them.”

More details about this site over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: garethwiscombe/ Wikimedia Commons)

How will you celebrate the Fourth of July this year? To stay safe and commemorate the United States declaring itself independent from the British Empire, you might want to watch the American Revolution unfold on your television. The big event is the debut of the Broadway hit Hamilton on Disney+ of course, but to keep you entertained all weekend, Den of Geek has compiled a list of the best movies about the birth of our country. They range from 1959 to today, and include musicals, miniseries, and animation, as well as the movies you are already familiar with. Some are about the Founding Fathers while others look at how the war affected everyday people, plus subjects that were untouched in your history classes. There's even one British production!  

Europe has neighborhoods where the US has zoning laws. Buildings in many US cities and mid-size towns are highly divided by use, with apartments downtown, stores in shopping centers, industries in the industrial park, and single-family houses in vast neighborhoods and suburbs, where you must have a car in order to buy groceries, eat out, or socialize.  -via Digg

With their ordinary-looking glasses that have “technology that’s there when you need it, gone when you don’t, hidden by design”, Focals by North just might be the smartest glasses in the market, perhaps even better than Google Glass. Still, it wasn’t perfect. The Focals had a lot of issues when it was released, and this resulted in the product not selling well in the market. 

Unlike the tech giant Google, which could probably withstand a failure or two, North isn’t that big of a company. Because their product was a flop in the market, the company’s future was bleak. It was rapidly losing money, and just a month after it released the glasses, it had to lay off 150 employees just to keep itself running.

The Focals were anywhere from $600 to $1,000, depending on your color and prescription needs, and launched in 2019. By all accounts, the company was not doing well before Google bought it. After the January 2019 launch, Focals laid off 150 employees in February 2019, a substantial portion of the "over 400 people" it employed. Josh O'Kane, the reporter who broke the acquisition story for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, said on Twitter, "We've learned the company likely sold very, very few Focals and was running out of money." The company has planned a Focals 2.0 with a better display and lighter body, but with the Google acquisition, those products are canceled.

Thankfully, the company is in better hands now. But it has been anticlimactic for the company’s CEO.

Google's smart glasses contribution was, of course, the infamous Google Glass, which launched in 2012 and basically shut down as a consumer product about two years later. (North CEO Stephen Lake actually called Google Glass "a massive failure" in a 2019 tech talk. Awkward!)

More details about this over at Ars Technica.

(Image Credit: North/ Ars Technica)

There has been a growing interest in neural networks recently. Just a few weeks ago, I posted about a neural network which created realistic faces based on the blurry photos it was fed with.

Now, a programmer named Aldo Cortesi has created an even stranger algorithm — one that draws silhouettes for nonexistent animals, some of which look plausible and others which look like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

In a post about the project, Cortesi wrote that he was indeed inspired by algorithms that generate human likenesses.

Check out the photos over at Futurism.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, one of these days, I come across something weirder than these fictional animal silhouettes.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Futurism)

If Tim Burton's Batman were made in 1945, it would be The Bat-Man. YouTuber Journey's End edited together the movie from 1989 with vintage footage and gave it the necessary filters to look somewhat like the 1943 Batman serial, now starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Palance. I'd go see it! -via reddit

The toy that eventually became known as the Slip 'N Slide was patented in 1961 by Robert Carrier. The first prototype was made of Naugahyd, because Carrier worked at an upholstery shop. Once it was made, he spent time improving the design.  

According to Carrier’s 1961 patent , the “aquatic play equipment” was a portable surface for the “sport” of body planing. From his original strip of Naugahyde, Carrier took a ream of the plastic material and sewed a tube into the side, forming an “irrigating duct” to which a hose could attach. The duct had punctures along the length of it, from which water could be released via pressure from the hose. Seams stitched across the length of the fabric at regular intervals also carried water laterally, wetting the repellant surface but not making it soggy.

“It’s very easy to dismiss,” says Walsh. “The best inventions are so simple that people are like, ‘Wow, why didn't I think of that?’ But if you look at the patent, I mean it is really genius. You attach the hose to one end and then sew the other end shut so that there's pressure, and then you put spaces in between the stitches so that water literally shoots out every inch and lubricates the entire surface of the slide.”

But the inspiration for the Slip ‘N Slide was to make things safer for his son. Read the "accidental" origin and the history of the Slip ‘N Slide at Smithsonian.

The city of Florence, Oregon, has opened a new municipal park named Exploding Whale Memorial Park. The name was selected by a poll of citizens, and commemorates the infamous 1970 incident in which Oregon authorities decided to get rid of the rotting carcass of a huge beached whale by blowing it up with a half-ton of dynamite. The ensuing disaster became a tale to be told for generations. And now the event will live on forever in the Florence park. They even have a mascot named Flo, seen above. Read more about the park, and the exploding whale, at Oregon Live. -via Boing Boing

Nice sweaters, but what are they sitting on? It's a hand! Those are some small sweaters, but they didn't shrink in the wash; they are made that way. Althea Crome is a micro knitter. She knits sweaters so tiny that they are in danger of getting lost in your hands, but just look at how detailed they are!



Crome explains how she does it.

Crome uses a fine silk thread and fashions her own knitting needless from surgical wire. According to her website, they’re sometime as small as 0.01 inches and can “accommodate more than 80 stitches per inch.”

Read more about Crone's micro knitting at Messy Nessy Chic.

See more of Crome's work at Instagram and at her shop.

Why settle for the cheesy book dedications when you can just state the facts that your wife and children are the reason why you finished your book two years later than you expected? Or why dedicate the book to someone else (and waste your time thinking of a good dedication message) when you could just dedicate it to yourself?

Check out these and other funny and creative book dedications over at Sad and Useless.

Which do you think is the best book dedication?

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

It seems that sleeping together on one bed is not just romantic; it also is healthy, according to science. This recent study suggests that couples who share a bed together get better sleep compared to those who sleep on separate beds.

Researchers conducted the study among 12 young, healthy, heterosexual couples who spent four nights in the sleep laboratory. They measured sleep parameters both in the presence and absence of the partner using dual simultaneous polysomnography, which is a “very exact, detailed and comprehensive method to capture sleep on many levels — from brain waves to movements, respiration, muscle tension, movements, heart activity” says Dr. Drews. Additionally, the participants completed questionnaires designed to measure relationship characteristics (e.g., relationship duration, degree of passionate love, relationship depth, etc.)

The results showed that rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep is both increased and less disrupted in couples sleeping together compared to when they slept individually. This finding is particularly relevant because REM sleep, which is associated with vivid dreams, has been linked to emotion regulation, memory consolidation, social interactions and creative problem solving.

The researchers also observed that the couples that shared a bed together could synchronize their sleep patterns, which they believe is associated with relationship depth.

In order words, the higher participants rated the significance of their relationship to their life, the stronger the synchronization with their partner.

More details about this one over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Most timelapse videos that we see display the Earth as the steady object, with the celestial objects, such as our Sun, the stars, and the planets, moving in the sky. But when you take the focus away from the steady Earth, and instead focus on the cosmos, something amazing happens: it turns the world upside down… literally!

The movie, with each hour is compressed to a second, dramatically demonstrates the daily rotation of the Earth, called diurnal motion. The video begins by showing an open field in Namibia, Africa, on a clear day, last year. Shadows shift as the Earth turns, the shadow of the Earth rises into the sky, the Belt of Venus momentarily appears, and then day turns into night.

Amazing.

(Image Credit: Bartosz Wojczyński/ APOD Videos/ YouTube)

新しいコントローラー拾った pic.twitter.com/POwx1eyCK6

— ミッシ@ER34 (@cbr6w) June 27, 2020

Twitter user @cbr6w found the perfect controller for when you're so frustrated with a game that you want to just throw something at the screen. Although it won't vibrate, it is wireless.

-via Super Punch