International marketing can be spectacularly profitable if done right. However, language and cultural differences must be smoothed out before a product is rolled out in a different country. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes there's a magnificently embarrassing screwup that people will talk about for years. Auto companies have been particularly egregious about this. But it's not always a matter of translating English to other languages. Sometimes it goes the other way.
To be fair, a lot of these mistranslation events are fairly old, but they continue to happen in the 21st century. How hard would it be to vet these things with a few native speakers before releasing an entire marketing campaign? See all 15 stories in a pictofacts post at Cracked.
Territorial animals are terrifying creatures. They don’t care how small or big you are. If you dare enter their territory, they will torment you until you go away. This red-wing blackbird, aptly nicknamed “Dive Bomber Dave” does just that when he sees people walk by the tree which he claims as his own.
He also has a TikTok account dedicated to him, apparently, and the account has over 120,000 followers.
Talk about being famous.
Via Laughing Squid
(Video Credit: Liberty Village/ Instagram)
The PS5 design is pretty fowl pic.twitter.com/VeoWeCnNBN
— Anthony (@kindekuma) June 11, 2020
Sony released the official console design of the PlayStation 5 a few days ago, and people are making fun of the upcoming video game console due to its rather unusual design. Shortly after the PS5’s reveal trailer, memes about it have surfaced in the Internet, with people comparing its design to that of routers and even to Seto Kaiba’s upturned collar. The design is just not appealing to the human eye.
Aaron Souppouris, however, argues that people will get over the PS5’s design after a time, just like how the people got over at the lunchbox look of the Gamecube and the George Foreman grill look of the PS3.
In a matter of months, the PlayStation 5 will be normal. We’ll all get used to the asymmetry, the ‘00s blue accents and the overflowing edges. And what we’ll be left with is a memorable piece of hardware. It’s a design that says something; it’s a statement. And even if that statement is (to my mind), “we don’t know what we’re doing,” statements endure far longer than precision.
In other words, the design won’t matter if it works and if it gives you great video game experiences. But it will surely leave an impression.
Given the huge number of PS4 users, the sure-to-be-cheaper discless version and the strong selection of titles on show yesterday, Sony can live with a few days of memes.
Check out Souppouris’s article over at Engadget.
(Image Credit: @kindekuma/Twitter)
— Unfinished Sentenc (@UnbeatenObj) June 11, 2020
(Image Credit: @UnbeatenOBbj/Twitter)
yes that’s me, i look way different and i’m way stupid during work https://t.co/7I7wr46Ta7
— sxtanxc🐍 (@sxdbxar) June 8, 2020
We all have embarrassing and painful moments in our lives. Some of us just get caught on camera, like this poor GrabFood rider in Singapore who got stuck in an elevator in a very weird position with his bicycle.
Despite his predicament, the rider still had managed to laugh, while another man, possibly the customer, came in to help him.
Twitter user @sxdbxar later on identified himself as the rider.
“Yes, that’s me, I look way different and I’m way different during work,” said the rider on his retweet.
This is both funny and wholesome at the same time, as the rider was a good sport.
(Video Credit: @yanmoneyy/ Twitter)
Researchers from Duke University have developed an AI tool that can create realistic images from blurry images, which is kinda cool but creepy at the same time.
Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, 'imagining' features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren't there in the first place.
While this may not be used to identify people, the researchers say that this method, called PULSE, could be used to create realistic faces that don’t exist in real life.
The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.
We’ve really come far in artificial intelligence.
More details about this one over at TechXplore.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Duke University/ TechXplore)
Animator William J. Crook tries to imitate how a match stick burns, using a twig and some colorful leaves. The result is a fun and surreal stop-motion video. Unfortunately, the fun is short-lived, as the video only lasts 23 seconds.
See the short animated clip over at The Awesomer.
(Image Credit: William Crook/ The Awesomer)
The "internet bench" at Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, UK, was installed in 2001 as a place you can get connected. There was no wifi at the time, so the bench's phone connections could be useful for that, but there were very few laptops, either. You can imagine that it wasn't a big success. But that wasn't really the point. Tom Scott explains.
Stewart Adams spent a large chunk of his life searching for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis. He failed in that endeavor, a regret he never really got over. But he did invent an effective treatment for arthritis, called ibuprofen, which is known in the US by the brand names Motrin and Advil. That ibuprofen is used for a wide variety of pain relief is Adams' greatest achievement.
Adams began his research by studying how aspirin worked, which no one else was doing at the time. He was interested in the drug’s anti-inflammatory properties and hoped to find something that mimicked those qualities but didn’t cause an allergic reaction, bleeding or stomach irritation like aspirin could.
Adams recruited Nicholson, a chemist, to help him test more than 600 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could reduce inflammation and that most people could tolerate. They narrowed down the field to five drugs. The first four went into clinical trials and all failed. The fifth, though, proved to be successful. They received a U.S. patent for ibuprofen in 1966. Three years later, it was approved as a prescription drug in England and soon became available around the world as an over-the-counter pain reliever.
Which brings us to that day in 1971, when Adams had to deliver an important speech at a pharmacological convention in Moscow. The problem was, he had spent the night before toasting ibuprofen's success with vodka. Read the story of Stewart Adams and the development of ibuprofen at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)
The outrageous characters of the Old West are often found to be the product of dime novels and less-than-rigorously researched newspaper articles written to thrill those back east. One such character is "Cattle Kate," born Ellen Watson. Her life was interesting enough without the extras heaped upon her, but those extras found a willing audience.
“Cattle Kate” Watson was one of early Wyoming’s most scandalous outlaws. She was a prostitute, a cattle thief, and a mean, aggressive Amazon who would beat you up as soon as look at you. She was, in short, a public menace. In 1889, her harassed neighbors finally had had enough, and resorted to classic rough frontier justice. Watson, along with her equally disreputable husband/pimp, were captured and strung up. No one mourned them.
It is a colorful story, one which made Watson one of the Old West’s most famous villains. There is just one problem: not one of the “historical facts” listed above is even close to being true.
Aside, unfortunately, for the lynching part.
What really happened was more of what we now call "shocking but not surprising." We touched on Cattle Kate's life in a previous article, but you can get the full story of the persecution of Ellen Watson at Strange Company.
Ze Frank gives us true facts about cats in a way that makes it clear that cats are weird. You knew that already, but this video goes into detail about cats' carnivorous tastes, amazing eyes, sensitive whiskers, and scratchy tongues. Of course, there are plenty of jokes along the way, as you'd expect from Ze Frank.
Someone took a train in Switzerland last October and deboarded quite a bit lighter. They left behind a package filled with gold bars worth more than $190,000! You'd have to be pretty oblivious to leave that much behind by accident -and then not go back for it it.
Despite "extensive investigations," the owner of the high-value package had not been tracked down, officials said in a statement published in the local government Lucerne Canton gazette.
After authorities failed to track down the owner of the precious cargo, the gold bars, worth 182,000 Swiss francs ($191,000), were confiscated by the public prosecutors office.
Now, authorities have decided to publicize their quest to find the bounty's mysterious owner.
While Switzerland is a banking mecca, it's not like this sort of thing happens every day. The owner of the gold bars must be either so rich that the loss was incidental to them, or more likely did not want the bars traced to some nefarious activity. Read more details of this curious lost-and-found at CNN. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Kotivalo)
I’ve seen a caution sign in a mall before telling me that I might get hurt because the floor is wet. I’ve also seen a caution sign on our induction stove, telling me that the ceramic plate is hot after cooking, and so I shouldn’t touch it. But never before have I seen a sign which just tells me to not move. I wonder what would happen if I did, though. Will I get shot with a laser beam?
Only God knows, I think, or someone who understands Chinese characters.
Image via Engrish.com
Insomnia could be considered as one of the toughest disorders a person can have. While it may be considered by some as just a sleep disorder caused by stress and anxiety, it is much more than that. A person suffering insomnia is not only affected physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
If you’re someone who had this, you know how difficult it is to deal with insomnia. But if you are currently struggling with it, then James Parker has a message for you: you’re not alone in this one.
We are all out there, keeping an eye on things: a sodality, a siblinghood, an immense and floating guild of piercingly conscious minds. What might happen, if not for our vigilance? Into what idiocies of optimism and vainglory might humanity collapse? We’re like the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones, except there’s millions of us. Above the city rooftops it shimmers and flexes; it tingles over the leafy suburbs: the neural lattice of our wakefulness.
Parker’s An Ode To Insomnia can be read over at The Atlantic. It’s a good read.
(Image Credit: Cdd20/ Pixabay)
Because this is a family-friendly blog, I'm choosing images for this post very carefully. But once the kids are out of the room, check out Marie-Claude Marquis's entire portfolio of altered decorative plates.
Who would want to be a web-slinging superhero or an armed man in a village killing zombies and other monsters when he can be a cat trying to escape in a cybercity? That’s right. This game, titled Stray, will offer you a chance to see the world in the eyes of a cat. Now if that’s not an interesting premise, then I don’t know what is.
[The game] is set to hit PS5 and PC sometime in 2021, equipped with jaw-dropping graphics and a fascinating story to unravel.
The official synopsis for the game reads:
Lost, alone, and separated from family, a stray cat must untangle an ancient mystery to escape a long-forgotten city… see the world through the eyes of a stray and interact with the environment in playful ways. Be stealthy, nimble, silly, and sometimes as annoying as possible with the strange inhabitants of this foreign world.
If there was an upcoming game that I’ll have high expectations with, it would be this one.
See the teaser trailer here.
Well, what do you think?
(Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive/ PlayStation/ YouTube)
