A speed camera in Italy awarded a driver with a $960 prize for taking her Ford Focus up to 437 miles per hour, or approximately 10 times the maximum speed of that vehicle. Alas, she was to be disappointed, as it was a computer glitch which caused the reading. Fox News reports:
The Autoappassionati report said local police failed to double-check the camera’s findings before mailing the woman a ticket – which placed 10 points on her license and carried a fine of 850 euros, or just under $1,000.
Giovanni Strologo, a transportation spokesman for the community of Offagna, in Ancona province, where the incident happened, advised the driver to appeal to the local government for compensation, according to the report.
In a Facebook post, he noted that police should have checked the details before sending the driver a ticket and joked that “even with a missile” the car could not possibly reach speeds that high.
If one wants to go to Mars, there is a launch window that comes around every two years or so when the planets align in a manner that makes the trip to the red planet a lot easier. NASA takes advantage of that launch window every time it comes around, as in this moth. China and the United Arab Emirates are scheduled to also send missions to Mars in July. The planned European-Russian Exomars mission was scrapped, but three missions are still a go as of now. NASA is out in front with an audacious plan to send a lander to Mars and then bring it back with samples of the planet!
In 2011, when U.S. planetary scientists were asked what big-ticket projects should receive federal funding over the next decade, a Mars sample-return mission came out as their top choice. Actually, they needed two missions. The first would collect rocks and soil and cache them on Mars, and the second would retrieve the samples at some later date and return them to Earth where they could be studied in far more detail than they could be on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover constitutes Part One of that plan. Now scheduled for a July 17 launch from Cape Canaveral [Update: Launch is now planned for no earlier than July 30], it’s the most advanced Mars mission yet.
Having established from past investigations that Mars was once a habitable place, scientists now want to know if the planet was, in fact, ever inhabited. That’s a more difficult question, as there currently are no definitive “biosignatures” for identifying life, short of spotting a kangaroo bounding across the Martian surface. More likely, a tentative answer will come from multiple lines of evidence showing that a particular rock’s chemistry and physical characteristics probably resulted from biology. Perseverance’s job is to find the rocks that look most promising for containing that fossil evidence.
YouTuber walter santi (previously at Neatorama) surprised his two cats with a ball pits and 500 plastic balls! Santi and Indy had a ball, so to speak, playing in it. However, Indy kept losing his favorite ball amongst all the new ones. -via Metafilter
You know how you have to be somewhere at a certain time, and you leave early, but then use up all your spare time and more looking for a parking space? Somehow, people in movies manage to always have a parking space waiting for them right in front of their destination, even in cities, even in Manhattan. It's movie logic. While some shortcuts are forgivable (no one wants to watch someone looking for a parking space), other just bend reality for a good visual, like walking or running away from an explosion.
Waking up from a long coma and being able to walk...
ViralHog introduces us to one gentlemen's beautiful quarantine crafting project: a completely functional and smooth-sipping fountain made of whiskey bottles. He writes:
In the video, I am videoing a Jack Daniels waterfall feature that I made from scratch with everything recycled apart from the pump inside! It's amazing what you can do when stuck in lockdown.
It's beautiful and, when fully filled, helpful at parties.
Journalist Juliette Bretan is not musically-inclined, but as she was researching her roots, particularly the lives of her Eastern European grandparents, she was captured by the sounds of an obscure musical genre. Interwar Polish tango combined Argentine tango, Jewish klezmer, and Polish folk music to produce sad, sentimental, and strangely patriotic songs. The heyday of Polish tango was 1918 to 1939, so it was both birthed and killed by war. You can hear some examples here, here, and here.
Bretan fell hard for Polish tango, which, in an article for culture.pl, she described as “merging pinches of the age-old Polish romantic and sentimental melodies with Jewish inflections and a more modern, brassy sound, dripping in glissandos and vibrato.”
The Jewishness of Polish tango is essential to understanding the source of these sounds, which means it’s important for those of us in 2020 to understand what it must have been like to be Jewish in Poland during the interwar years. Briefly put, it was no picnic, in particular because of the overt antisemitism of the popular National Democratic Party, which organized successful boycotts against Jewish-owned businesses. For the fascists and racists who waved the banner of the NDP, antisemitism was nothing less than a prerequisite to Polish patriotism.
Even so, being a Jewish composer, musician, or performer in Warsaw, whose population between the wars was roughly one-third Jewish, offered Jews a rare measure of personal and professional freedom. That’s because many interwar Poles, whose country’s borders had been erased from maps by Russia, Germany, and Austria in the late 18th century, were ready to celebrate their nation’s newfound independence. Thus, for large swaths of the Polish population, especially those in Warsaw, Jewish composers, musicians, and performers were tolerated, and even welcomed, to the extent, that is, that they were entertaining.
To protect their soldiers from getting wounded by the weapons used in their time, the Ancient Greeks during the time of Alexander the Great developed this suit of armor made out of layers of linen glued together by animal fat. The said armor is capable of deflecting arrows. It can also reduce the impact of sword blows on the wearer’s body. But how does this ancient technology fare against modern weapons, such as new arrows and guns? You might be surprised at how comparable this armor is to a light kevlar, when it (the armor) is 5 times thicker.
It doesn’t fare well against fire, however, as it is flammable because of the animal fat.
Twitter user Romina asked people to give a short description of a movie and make it sound boring. Movie buffs jumped on the assignment. The best of them are 1. boring, and 2. make it obvious what movie they are referring to, at least to people who watch movies. The reply above didn't really need a picture.
Visitors do not respect the guest list at a Christmas party in an LA office building, and one executive's husband is not happy about it.
Life is not easy for solitary cats, no matter what era they live in. Any illness or injury, as well as malnutrition, can mean death. So it was a surprise for a team of archaeologists to find an almost-complete skeleton of a cat at a 8th-century settlement in southern Kazakhstan. The intact skeleton means it had been buried, as if someone had cared for it, which was an exceedingly rare find. Dr. Ashleigh Haruda explains more.
Haruda worked with an international team of archeologists and ancient DNA specialists. An examination of the tomcat's skeleton revealed astonishing details about its life. First, the team took 3-D images and X-rays of its bones. "This cat suffered a number of fractures, but survived," says Haruda. Isotope analyses of bone samples also provided the team with information about the cat's diet. Compared to the dogs found during the excavation and to other cats from that time period, this tomcat's diet was very high in protein. "It must have been fed by humans, since the animal had lost almost all its teeth toward the end of its life."
In the 1850s, political forces were splitting the US in the lead to the Civil War. Abolitionists were campaigning against slavery, people were reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and women were organizing for the right to vote. Meanwhile, the federal government was trying to deal with the vast expanses of land that the US owned, but had yet to control.
It was in this divided atmosphere that the May 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to settlement and eventual statehood. The assumption was that Nebraska Territory would become a free state, while Kansas, under the sway of its pro-slavery neighbor Missouri, would become a slave state. The Act infuriated Northerners because it undid the Missouri Compromise of 1830 and allowed for the expansion of slavery.
But the assumptions of the Act were disrupted by the social movements and civil rights discussions occurring in New England. An organization called the New England Emigrant Aid Company hatched a bold plan to transport New England settlers to the open hills and plains of Kansas Territory in 1854 and 1855, for the purpose of voting for Kansas to become an anti-slavery “free state.” In line with the ideals of the American Renaissance in New England, the principal founder of the Company, Eli Thayer, wrote that its goal was “to go and put an end to slavery.”
Thayer wanted to establish as many New Englanders as possible in Kansas before the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed a year after its passage. It wasn't easy, as travel was arduous, and passing through pro-slavery Missouri was downright dangerous. Read about the Yankee emigrants who settled Kansas at Zocalo Public Square. -via Damn Interesting
When it comes to eating sushi, a fatty tuna is what makes the experience great. Because of this, fish buyers dedicate at least a decade of their life trying to learn how to determine which tuna cut is fatty and which isn’t. But if you don’t have the time to train yourself in tuna examining, then this app called Tuna Scope, developed by Dentsu Inc., might help.
The firm trained the machine learning algorithm that powers the software using thousands of images of tuna tail cross-sections. The cut can tell human buyers a lot about the quality of fish they're about to purchase. In testing against human experts, Dentsu claims it found the app gave the same grade more than four out of five times.
The app is currently in use by one company, conveyor belt sushi chain Kura Sushi. The restaurant buys the majority of its tuna outside of Japan. Part of the reason the company started using the app is that it allows its employees to grade tuna without traveling. That's a significant perk during the current pandemic. Moreover, conveyor belt restaurants in Japan tend to offer the least expensive sushi, so there's a cost-saving aspect at play as well.
The bride can be seen to be talking with someone on her phone, while her laptop sits on her lap. A few seconds later, the groom appears on camera and sits besides her. It appears that he is also interested in what makes his bride occupied during the wedding. The video, however, does not reveal what she is doing, and this prompted many Twitter users to theorize what’s really happening.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Dinesh Joshi/ Twitter)
That's a good idea to ignore the relatives fake hugs and smile 🤣🤣
Creating a good resumé might no longer be enough when applying for jobs, as companies no longer just look at a person’s resumé — they also look at a person’s social media activity, a process known as cybervetting.
These were readily available information in the form of raw data and metadata, meaning what they had posted, when and how; analytics information that would require processing, for example, results of sentiment analysis or topic modeling of an applicants' posts; and information related to users' online social network that is often used for social network analysis, for example who follows whom on social media.
The question is, are people okay with this method? It turns out, the responses are mixed. Some are worried, while some are not.
What do you know about the Falkland Islands? The British territory off the coast of Argentina was difficult to cultivate, and was only good for raising sheep. It was so far away from Britain that only people with little other choice went there, and they lived an almost-medieval existence. Then in 1982, the world learned of the Falkland Islands when Argentina invaded, ostensibly to "liberate" the islands. The war made the islands' declining economy worse, but it made the British pay attention to them.
After the war, the wretched condition of the Falklands attracted international attention, and Britain allotted the islands more aid money than it ever had before. It passed a nationality bill that granted Falkland Islanders full British citizenship, and it gave the islands independence in all matters except foreign policy and defense. The islands would be run not by the governor but by their legislative council; this would consist of eight elected members, though there would be no political parties—there was no need, since most people had known one another all their lives. There was already a local court, and since it was difficult to assemble a jury in which no one was related to the defendant, the bailiff was empowered to step outside and collar more potential jurors literally off the street.
But the turning point that changed everything was Britain’s decision, in 1986, to permit the Falklands to claim fishing rights to the waters for a hundred and fifty miles offshore, which it had not allowed before for fear of antagonizing Argentina.
Losing parents at such a young age just might be the most devastating and the most emotionally painful experience one can have in this life. It would be really difficult to live life knowing that those who cared the most for you are already gone. Thankfully, there are those who would try to comfort you and make your life less painful.
A miniature golden retriever named Poppie, who lives in Colorado with her cat fostering humans, gently comforted an orphaned litter of kittens who needed reassurance after their mother died. Poppie lovingly rubbed her nose against the little ones who came up to her and even gave one kitten a cleaning much in the way a mother cat would do.
Neither the kittens nor Poppie like being separated from one another for too long.
