Redditor gippy44 is a master of his craft. It takes a special genius to so perfectly remake an object so terrible as the spice rack that Homer made in The Simpsons episode "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge." He insists that he was just lucky that the knot in the back board was in the right place.
This neighborhood decided to co-op homeschooling, and their PE teacher is a retired marine. How did it go? Well, the kids loved it!
“He’s got elementary school kids lined up in his backyard doing burpees and air squats while chanting I don’t know but I believe, Santa comes on Christmas Eve,” said Haz in his tweet.
This alone was enough for people on Twitter to start salivating with a desire to either send their kids over or to join this boot camp of an educational process themselves.
Images from Bored Panda
My HAUNTED MANSION in Animal Crossing New Horizons is finally finished!!!
— Weary Bones 🦴🎃🦇 (@capuchinokappu) May 2, 2020
I made this spooky video of it to celebrate, I hope you guys like it :’)#acnh #hauntedmansion 👻🦇🕸 pic.twitter.com/hx3qvhPdyv
It's a treat when someone uses a world-building video game to re-create another familiar fictional world, and so @capuchinokappu is to be applauded for meticulously recreating Disney's theme park attraction the Haunted Mansion in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. He shared a small portion with us in a video. Fans of the Haunted Mansion (I'm looking at you, Jill Harness) will get a kick out of the mashup between cutesy and creepy.
Capuchinokappu’s dedication to cutesy horror aesthetics seems to extend to the rest of his island, too. Another tweet shows the mummified dog-villager Lucky hanging around the outskirts of the attraction where he apparently “loves to wander around the graveyard ... and water the black roses.”
You can see that one at the A.V. Club. -Thanks, hearsetrax!
I've always thought that common sense is common. That is, I thought what's normal and even reflex thing to do for me is also what other people automatically do. I found out how wrong I was when I had a boyfriend, and we were very different.
What's common sense for me is not common for him, and vice versa.
This is further explained by Michelle vanDellen in her article at Psychology Today,
Common sense has the same two problems as moderation. First, common sense is ambiguous. Without clear guidelines about how to behave, common sense leaves too much open to interpretation and will be difficult to enforce.
Second, common sense is not really common at all. No one is likely to agree about what common sense is. Sometimes these differences will be reasonable—what’s common sense in a city is not the same as what’s common sense in a small town. But other times these differences could be problematic, especially because people are likely to be biased by what they want to do. The more people want to do something, the more they are going to think it fits into the category of common sense, just the way our participants who liked gummy snacks were more generous in their beliefs about how many fruit-shaped treats could count as moderation. We aren’t going to agree about what’s right when it’s influenced by our beliefs.
(Photo by Andreas Fickl on Unsplash)
Apple, Butterfly, Cat -- as you read these words, did a picture come to mind? The clarity of the picture that appeared in your head depends on how excitable your neurons are, according to a research.
The strength of a person’s mental imagery is associated with excitability in the prefrontal cortex and visual cortex. Highly excitable neurons in the visual cortex may reduce a person’s ability to imagine mental images. The findings shed light on how aphantasia, a condition where a person can not imaging mental images, may occur.
(Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash)
"How the Covid-dragon Disappears" follows a brave knight battling the Covid-dragon, aided by a young boy who realizes no one is alone in this fight. Watch the short, one and a half minute film.
The film was written and directed by Joey Jones at a.cg studio/Ayzenberg Group. Wanting to contribute in some way to the fight against Covid-19, Joey and the Ayzenberg creators did what they do best - they channeled their creativity to produce "How the Covid-dragon Disappears" to honor the frontline workers battling the pandemic. Inspired by their efforts, the team has offered the piece to Direct Relief to help raise awareness and lend support to their work.
For a deeper look into the motion graphics animation used to create the film, please visit their website.
To achieve this fun and unusual looking Watermelon Pudding Cake they use 3 layers of Agar (a jelly-like substance). The red layer is watermelon flavored. The second layer is coconut water flavored. The third layer is pandan flavored. Pandan, in case you didn't know, is a tropical plant that grows in Southeast Asia and has a tropical flavor. The flavor is often described as grassy with hints of rose and vanilla.
Via -Instagram
It's hard enough to find out how old representational writing really is, much less to figure out its original purpose. For some time now, the theory has been that writing was invented for accounting purposes: listing possessions of, taxes by, and tributes to authorities. These records were important because of the power that came with them. But it may be that wealthy rulers appropriated an existing system of records for their own purposes. However, the question may be better understood if we know how writing was invented. It actually developed over a long period of time in several stages.
The evidence suggests that writing is actually more like gunpowder than like nuclear weapons. For one thing, in the four wellsprings of writing, it never (as far as we know) sprang forth as fully phonographic but evolved to become that – there’s usually some kind of proto-writing, and some kind of proto-proto-writing. I like to think of writing as a layered invention. First there’s the graphic invention: the notion of making a durable mark on a surface. Humans have been doing this for at least 100,000 years – the bureaucracy didn’t give humans that power. Then the symbolic invention: let’s make this mark different from all other marks and assign it a meaning that we can all agree on. Humans have been doing this for a long time, too. Then there’s the linguistic one: let’s realise that a sound, a syllable and a word are all things in the world that can be assigned a graphic symbol. This invention depends on the previous ones, and itself is made of innovations, realisations, solutions and hacks. Then comes the functional invention: let’s use this set of symbols to write a list of captives’ names, or a contract about feeding workers, or a letter to a distant garrison commander. All these moves belong to an alchemy of life that makes things go boom.
Read what we know so far and the various theories of why writing became was it is at Aeon. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen)
The purpose of a fan is to move air around. But what if there was no air? The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) put a small fan in a vacuum chamber to find out. Since we can't see air moving around, he added styrofoam pellets, which started acting weird due to static electricity. The fan would act on the pellets, but only when they came in contact with the fan (or bounced off each other), because there was no wind pushing them around like in the real world. Cool. -via Digg
People joke that one day the story of 2020 will be made into a movie, and it will be a horror film. Maybe not. YouTuber Probably Tomfoolery tells the story of what happened in 2020 from the perspective of what we learned, a saga we will tell our children one day. In rhyme, no less! -via TYWKIWDBI
A "school lunch classic" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but here it (mostly) refers to favorite recipes at colleges, which are known to have food that is vastly superior to grade school lunches. Some recipes have become famous, at least regionally, because students love them. And each of these standout recipes has a story behind it, like Jersey Dirt at the University of Richmond. As a prank, Tina Lesher entered it in a recipe contest at the school, claiming it was her daughter's favorite dessert. It was a winner.
One day, Melissa Lesher walked into the dining hall and saw Jersey Dirt (which she had never tried) on display, along with signs stating that it was her favorite. “I was mortified. I lost it. I turned the cards over so no one would see my name associated with it. I was livid,” she told the alumni magazine years later. But the dessert lives on at UR. Writes alumnus Catherine Amos Cribbs, “That glorious mix of cheesecakey pudding and crushed Oreos could calm an overstressed brain or soothe a broken heart.” For our overstressed brains and broken hearts, you can use this recipe from the university itself.
Find out how other school recipes became standouts, like Wellesley Peppermint Stick Pie and Cornell Barbecue Chicken, at Atlas Obscura. You might be pleased to find that two of these treats are from the lower grades, and one is actually served for lunch.
For years, Anna Jarvis fought for the recognition of Mother's Day as a holiday. She even endured the mockery of some senators,
Senator Henry Moore Teller (D-CO) scorned the resolution as "puerile," "absolutely absurd," and "trifling." He announced, "Every day with me is a mother's day." Senator Jacob Gallinger (R-NH) judged the very idea of Mother's Day to be an insult, as though his memory of his late mother "could only be kept green by some outward demonstration on Sunday, May 10.
However, despite the success, Anna later on loathed how people celebrated the holiday. She eventually tried to stop the promotion of the holiday and had a special hatred for florists who used Mother's Day to promote their businesses.
What do you think about Anna's reaction on how the world celebrated the holiday she founded?
Read more at Mental Floss.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force in World War II are better known now as the Tuskegee Airmen. As bombers flew over Nazi Germany, they wanted the best escorts to protect them, and that meant the Tuskegee Airmen. The group flew 1,500 combat mission and 200 escort mission during the war, with more than 15,000 individual sorties, garnering 850 awards. Their motivation was to win the war, but it was also to prove their worth because so much was riding on their success for the folks back home.
In the late 1930s, the German army was spreading through Europe. Although the U.S. hadn’t yet declared war, thousands of Americans were signing up to fight overseas as pilots. But at the time, racist stereotypes were widespread in the U.S. military. The Armed Forces were segregated, with black servicemen often restricted to working menial labor jobs. Nowhere was this inequality more apparent than in the Army Air Corps, which didn’t just segregate black servicemen from their white counterparts, but outright excluded them.
To justify, military leaders pointed to a racist Army War College report released after the First World War. The report claimed black people were an inferior “sub-species” of human who lacked the intelligence and courage to serve in combat, especially in challenging roles like pilots.
For decades, civil rights leaders had been fighting against such prejudice, lobbying for equal treatment in the military. The pressure mounted when the U.S. started preparing for war. In 1938, anticipating the need for more pilots, the Army Air Corps began establishing flight schools at colleges all across the country, excluding black schools. However, advocates’ efforts were about to pay off. In 1940, while campaigning for his third presidential term, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to start the first training program for black military pilots.
The 332nd Fighter Group was an experiment with long-lasting consequences. Read how the Tuskegee Airmen approached the tough training and rough treatment at Popular Mechanics. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: USAAF)
What is your floor made of? Lava? That's what most say, but in Holly Gramazio's childhood, the floor was quicksand. Others say water, sharks, poison, electricity, piranhas, swamp, or just a void of nothingness. People didn't say wood or linoleum because they know we are talking about the game. It could be a game with rules, a group activity, or a solitary obsession.
The unifying characteristic is: acting as though the floor is forbidden. Inverting the standard behavioural rules of the gym or yard or living room, where the floor is for walking on and the furniture is very much not.
That doesn’t always mean avoiding the floor. Sometimes succumbing to the danger is the pleasure: a tiny quick step onto the carpet and a squeal at the sting of the lava; reaching down with a courageous hand to tease the sharks. I remember sitting on the beige carpet of my bedroom and imagining the quicksand as it crept up slowly over my legs, and then up my body, around my waist and higher and higher while I grabbed on hard to the leg of my bed so I could haul myself out at the last minute.
As long as there’s some rules or pretence about what happens when you touch the floor, the game is something I’m interested in.
Gramazio took a survey to see how universal the game is, and how it is viewed by people around the world. Read her insights from the responses about that game we all know. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Kheng Cheng TOH)
