Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) is known for making super elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions that perform everyday tasks. This one is quite elaborate, but there's no "everyday" about it. He got one of the larger LEGO Super Mario Kart sets (no doubt because of a sponsorship deal) and not only built the karts, but designed a track that replicates the odd effects of the game! Watch the racetrack move to thwart the drivers. Watch cars get smashed flat. Watch a turtle zig zag across the course. Watch a kart on a bridge leap-frog across another kart. First you have to watch to see what he came up with, then you have to watch again to figure out how he did it. The video is short, but it's packed full of delightful moments. And to think, Joseph's mother told him he'd never make a living from building ridiculous chain reaction devices. -via Boing Boing
The British Antarctic Survey has been conducting studies of the ice covering Antarctica for decades, and have now released the most accurate map yet showing what the bedrock is like underneath the ice. With 27 million cubic kilometers of ice removed, the continent is a lacy archipelago of islands with tall mountains, deep gorges, a massive continental shelf, and underwater channels. This new map is called Bedmap 3, since it is the third iteration of an iceless Antarctic map. It is the most accurate such map yet, made with twice as many data points as the previous map. The data points were acquired by "planes, satellites, ships and even dog-drawn sleds."
Scientists and surveyors have also determined the current thickness of the ice in different places, and in fact found the place where the Antarctic ice is the thickest. The image of the bedrock underneath will be useful in knowing where and how the ice will travel as it melts under warmer temperatures. Read more about Bedmap 3, how it was made, and how it may be used at the British Antarctic Survey. -via Real Clear Science
Any opportunity to own a home in California for less than a half a million dollars is quite rare indeed, but this one is special. Sure, it's away from the cities, but that means less light pollution for your astronomical observatory. You heard right, this two bedroom, two bath home on a half-acre is an observatory that comes with a 16-inch Meade telescope in a 10-foot rotating dome. There's also a workshop with a lathe and a milling machine, and plenty of extra parts. The yard has an antenna farm, and the sale could include a range of ham radio equipment. Oh yeah, it also is equipped for off-grid living, with solar panels and battery, but can use the grid for backup. Are you interested yet?
The listing includes a shed, a tractor, and a bunch of communication equipment. However, none of the pictures include a look at the living areas. I guess it takes a special kind of astronomy and/or ham radio enthusiast to appreciate this kind of home. The real estate listing refers to it as a "man-cave," while a commenter noted that this is a supervillain starter lair. Check out the listing for a few pictures and more details. -via Fark
It's hard to say whether the website Learn the World Map is a game, quiz, or just a learning opportunity, but it's fun, and will suck up quite a bit of your time. It made me feel good to know I can locate so many countries on a world map, and I did learn a few new things. Who knew that Northern Cyprus is its own country? But since I knew where the island of Cyprus is, I still found it. However, play on the main part of the website doesn't keep a running score, and it never ends as far as I know. Still, I will never forget where Liberia is now.
On the right side of the screen, you can go to "challenge" mode, and that's a different story altogether: find ten countries as fast as you can, and get a score at the end. But you can only do the challenge once a day. Try your hand at the map, and you'll either pat yourself on the back or else you'll learn where a few countries are. -via Nag on the Lake
You've heard the advice about taking care of your household stuff: If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40. That's why every home has both. We've covered the history of duct tape; now it's time to learn how WD-40 came about. Do you know what's in that familiar blue spray can? No, you don't, because the exact formula is a well-guarded secret. Do you know what WD stands for? You might, or you mioght be able to figure it out with some thought, but if not, you'll learn it in this video. I was particularly surprised to learn that WD-40 only goes back as far as the 1950s. I guess I had assumed it was ancient. I already had plenty of respect for the product, but I also learned a few new uses that never occurred to me before, way beyond making things move that should. -via The Awesomer
An awful lot of our science fiction stories depend on the ability to use deadly weapons in space, but we never let things like physics and reality spoil a good story. Meanwhile, space scientists and engineers are always considering the effects of space on human activities. Would a gun, the kind with regular bullets, work in outer space? The answer is ...sort of, but there would be differences and consequences.
The Soviets used to take guns into space as a matter of course, but they weren't for space battles. They were armed because their capsules came back over land, and there was the possibility they could touch down in a wilderness area with dangerous wild animals. Targeting is better these days. Cosmonauts once shot a cannon in space, but it was in an unmanned space station that was de-orbiting. We don't really know whether that "experiment" yielded any important data. Read about the feasibility of discharging guns in space at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: brunurb)
In the 2000 movie American Psycho, Patrick Bateman and a few colleagues pull out their business cards and compare them. The scene sets up the characters as a collection of empty suits who are bent on one-upmanship regarding the most mundane details. The cards aren't particularly attractive to the audience, but it was a memorable scene. It hits different for typographers, printers, and designers.
Hoban Cards, "a tiny letterpress printing shop located in Chehalis, Washington," goes in deep to explain the four cards in that scene, plus another card featured in the film. The lines from the original novel use fictional fonts, and the descriptions don't match what we see onscreen. Plus each card has a list of flaws and design problems that belie the pride with which they are presented. If that scene has been bothering you for those reasons, you'll be glad to know you aren't the only one.
Hoban Cards has an extensive catalog, with examples printed for all kinds of fictional characters, and even more at Instagram. -via Metafilter
Yes, the sharktopus is a ridiculous fantasy creature from the movies, but strange things can happen between two very different species in real life, too. Do you recall the picture of a weasel riding on the back of a flying woodpecker? That was ten years ago, before we blamed everything on artificial intelligence. Well, now we have a video of an octopus riding on the back of a shark!
This footage was captured in 2023 in the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, New Zealand. The scientists from the University of Auckland saw something unusual on a mako shark and launched a GoPro in the water and a drone overhead to investigate. They tracked the two animals for ten minutes. The sighting was quite a surprise, as octopuses rarely come close to the water's surface. And that's about as close to a sharktopus as we're going to get in real life. -via Damn Interesting
Every war gives us horrific casualties and medical advances. In World War I, doctors were able to save many soldiers whose faces were permanently disfigured, which led to breakthroughs in plastic surgery pioneered by Dr. Harold Gillies. But plastic surgery was in its infancy, and most veterans with facial disfigurements and missing features couldn't get such reconstruction. Into the void stepped Anna Coleman Ladd. The renowned sculptor leveraged her physician husband's connections in the Red Cross in order to go to France to help soldiers who had lost noses, jaws, ears, and other facial features to the war.
Ladd opened her "Studio for Portrait-Masks" in Paris in 1917, where she custom-made meticulously fitted and painted masks for veterans to wear that gave them a more normal appearance. Many of these men were able to set foot out of their homes for the first time with their masks, and went on to re-integrate with their communities. Read Ladd's story and see some of her work at Danny Dutch. -via Strange Company
Perception is the way we experience the world. Our perception is made up of the signals that come into our bodies through our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs, but is also made up of our brain's interpretation of those signals. We know that the way light comes into our eyes should be upside-down, but our brains unscramble those signals to match the world around us. That's just the beginning of the ways our brains change the incoming signals to be useful instead of confusing and overwhelming. The brain uses present signals to predict the future, so quickly that we never notice what we are doing. Kurzgesagt explains some of the chores your brain does at the microsecond scale, which is a lot, and it makes us wonder how we ever have time and brain power left over to just think (as we normally think of it) and make conscious decisions. This video is about 9:40- the rest is promotional. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Henry Rosenthal counts his cattle by the head, so when he says he has 50 head of cattle, he actually means 25 stuffed calves with two heads each. Those are the ones that have undergone taxidermy treatment. He also has preserved fetuses, skeletal remains, and a ton of ephemera and art devoted to two-headed calves and a few other animals. You can find them at the Two-Headed Calf MOOseum in San Francisco. Rosenthal became fascinated with polycephaly -a condition in which an embryo begins to split into twins, but doesn't fully separate- in his 20s when he saw a two-headed calf, and soon after he got a chance to purchase a stuffed specimen. His collection became a museum, or moo-seum, as the 2020 pandemic was taking off. The stuffed calves were joined by photographs, newspaper accounts, paintings, drawings, and figurines, all portraying calves born with two heads.
Want to visit the Two-Headed Calf MOOseum? It's only open by appointment, but that's easily arranged if you are going to San Francisco. Or you can see what they have and learn the story behind the collection at Atlas Obscura.
Iguanas are common on Marco Island off the southwestern coast of Florida. John Johnson, the owner of Down Goes Iguana, specializes in eliminating hundreds of these pests every year. Gulf Coast News in Fort Myers reports that Johnson advocates eating this invasive species--especially the eggs.
Although the eggs are small, enough of them put together make for a fine omelet. With 49 eggs harvested from his prey, diced ham, peppers, and onions, Johnson creates a unique dish. Johnson says that his iguana omelet "this touches the edge of the Florida man" meme. One local reporter says that despite their exotic origin, the iguana eggs taste like regular chicken eggs.
-via Dave Barry
Jareth was found wandering, abandoned, and came into the care of Life With Pigs Farm Animal Sanctuary. He proved to be, shall we say, hormonally blessed. Ryan and Mallory took him in, but he quickly decided that Mallory should be his mate. Not gonna happen, so the couple introduced Jareth to their hen. Jareth was all for that, but the hen didn't want to have anything to do with Jareth. You have to wonder whether the rooster's over-eager behavior was the reason he was abandoned in the first place. Twice shot down, Jareth then made friends with another rooster named Billy, and they were very happy together until Billy died. Poor lonely Jareth was then brought in the house, where he could sleep with the three pigs. Over time, though, Jareth built a new relationship with a rooster named Sebastian, and we hope that he's happy. You can keep up with Jareth and the other sanctuary animals at the Life With Pigs Instagram page.
X user @Msamlam shares this map owned by the National Library of Australia. It dates back to 1932, when Japan felt quite confident of its ability to be a major power in the world and the dominant power in eastern Asia. The illustrators depict in detail stereotypes of the peoples of the world.
The image of the United States includes a reference to the 1932 Summer Olympics, where Japan did quite well in swimming events.
Wild pigs moved out of Asia and into the Middle East and Europe long, long ago. THe number of pig bones found at archaeological sites indicate that they were eaten by all kinds of people thousands of years ago, although that varied who was domesticating and raising them. Pigs were limited to those who could afford sturdier pens than those required for sheep or goats. On the other hand, pigs presented advantages in cities, since pigs will eat anything, including garbage, and don't need grassy fields. But then, during a period when pork consumption was pretty low already compared to other livestock, the Hebrews enacted a ban on eating pork. Hundreds of years later, Islam also prohibited pork because pigs are considered unclean. Hinduism has no specific restriction on pork, but many Hindus avoid it because of the pig's unclean reputation.
However, these restrictions were never universally observed. And scholars still argue over why the ban on pork was instituted in the first place. Read what archaeologists have discovered about the history of pigs and pork consumption at Archaeology magazine. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Alexandr frolov)
