At a glance from afar, two buoys can be seen floating next to each other. However, as they go near the shore, one would notice a strange detail from the pair of buoys: both of them have a pair of hands. Clearly, those aren't buoys at all! As the two men emerge from the sea and go to the shore, suddenly, a whistle can be heard from the background, and both panic.
Find out what happened next over at DailyMail.
“Boys will be buoys” indeed.
(Image Credit: DailyMail)
Many of us now probably just spend most of our time sitting down in front of our computers at home to work or to communicate with friends. Too much sitting down, however, is bad to our body and our overall health.
In addition to being a risk factor for many life-threatening cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, excessive sitting can lead to depression, chronic pain and increased risk of physical injury, according to research. That's why it's important for us to become aware of our sitting habits and do what we can to counteract them.
A way to counteract the effects of excessive sitting is exercise, and CNN gives us five exercises that address the poor posture problem and others. See the exercises over at the site.
(Image Credit: Dana Santas/ CNN)
Facebook will pay $52 million in a settlement for failing to protect its moderators. A court case alleged the company failed to protect its moderators from the mental health impacts of their job. Moderators will get a minimum of $1,000 each from Facebook, as The Guardian details:
As part of the settlement, which was announced Tuesday, moderators will get a minimum of $1,000 each from Facebook with the potential for additional compensation if they have been diagnosed with mental health disorders, including PTSD.
Moderators, who are generally contracted by third-party firms, are constantly exposed to graphic content including child sexual abuse, beheadings, terrorism, animal cruelty, and “every other horror that the depraved mind of man can imagine”, Steve Williams, a lawyer for the plantiffs, told the Guardian.
Workers may be eligible for additional damage awards of up to $50,000, lawyers for the plaintiffs said, and Facebook will change a number of policies to better address mental health.
More than 11,000 people who have worked as moderators for Facebook in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida from 2015 until now will qualify for compensation under the settlement.
image via The Guardian
Fugetsu-Do Confectionery is home to LA’s legendary mochi. The shop opened in 1903, making it the oldest shop in LA’s Little Tokyo. The Fugetsu-Do Confectionery is also the oldest Japanese-American business in the country. In this episode of Legendary Eats, Food Insider shares the history of the shop and how the current owner took ten years to master the art of making mochi.
The pandemic has caused a lot of establishments to close. Gatherings, events, concerts, and graduations have been postponed as well. The current situation did not stop this Texas principal as he drove over 800 miles to visit all the graduating students of his high school. Check the full story on CBS News.
image screenshot via CBS News
Marcus Hutchins single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Hutchins saved the internet from a piece of malware called WannaCry, which destroyed data on hundreds of thousands of computers. Hutchins was able to find and trigger the kill switch in its code, stopping WannaCry from wreaking havoc on the world. To learn more about Hutchins life, including how despite saving the world from the cyber threat, he was still arrested by the FBI, head on to Wired.
image via Wired
In the African savanna, a cheetah can be seen upside down in midair, with its paws near the hind legs of its prey. Its prey, the impala, is caught. The photograph, however, does not say if the impala escaped, or if it was devoured by its predator.
Meanwhile, in the snowy mountains of Scotland, a female mountain hare can be seen tucking herself into a ball in order to conserve heat and to minimize its exposure to the shards of ice and other elements that the ferocious wind carries.
These are just some of the amazing photographs that won in the 2020 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition. Check out the other photos over at The Atlantic.
(Image Credit: Yi Liu / BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition)
(Image Credit: Andy Parkinson / BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition)
Quick- which animals kill the most humans? What we are scared of has little to do with what is really dangerous. But then again, tapeworms don't make a great movie villain the way a shark does. -via Digg
Excited to be able to control my air-conditioner with a GameBoy Color, using my own ROM!
— JinGen Lim (@jg_lim) April 27, 2020
(How I built it: https://t.co/K1Rzhx0qbn ) pic.twitter.com/wQGq3iMHQC
Just when we thought that the GameBoy Color was already obsolete, we then find something rather amazing in this late 90’s gadget. Apparently, it can be used to control your air conditioner because of its feature that’s often forgotten — its infrared transmitter/ receiver. This feature…
allowed users to wirelessly share data and play co-op for supporting games, but so few titles used the feature (they didn’t call the system the Game Boy Infrared, after all) that it was often overlooked and is now largely forgotten. But forgotten or not, the infrared communication port is still there along the top edge of the system, and as Singaporean technophile JinGen Lim (@jg_lim on Twitter) looked at it, he got an idea. What if, instead of waiting for the extremely rare opportunity to use the infrared function to play some obscure decades-old game, he used it to help keep his home comfortably cool?
Since the Game Boy Color’s IR transmitter sends out invisible-to-the-naked eye flashes of light, just like a remote control, Lim’s theory was solid.
Lim was apparently inspired by this video that’s been around for quite some time.
Wow!
(Video Credit: JinGen Lim/ Twitter)
Director George Miller began working on an idea for a fourth Mad Max movie in 1998. It didn't hit theaters until 2015, for various reasons. By the time production started, Mel Gibson was too old to play Max, so Tom Hardy got the role. But the real star was Charlize Theron, who played Furiosa. Five years after the movie burned up theaters all over the world, Miller, Hardy, Theron, and more of the cast and crew share their memories of making Mad Max: Fury Road. It was an intense nine months spent in the Namibian desert, performing non-stop stunts, which you can get a glimpse of in this video.
“Like anything that has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings,” Theron said. “I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach. There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”
“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.
Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is how a nearly impossible project managed to become an Oscar-winning action masterpiece.
Read the crooked path Mad Max: Fury Road took from concept to silver screen, the difficulty of the actual shooting, and its lasting legacy in this oral history. -via Metafilter
This genius student almost got away with his trick. Oh, if only he spelled "reconnecting" right!
Image Credit: imgur / u/reddericks
Mitch Hedberg famously said, "This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty." Certainly a relatable joke, with the expense and time involved in taking clothing to a dry cleaner. But sometimes you can clean garments labeled "dry clean only" at home, if you are careful.
Sure, the label on your blouse might say “dry-clean only,” but is there any wiggle room? According to Gwen Whiting, cofounder of The Laundress, there is. “The instructions found on care tags aren’t necessarily the best way to clean an item but are instead a way for manufacturers to avoid getting blamed for irreparable damage when instructions aren’t followed,” she told Glamour. “When manufacturers default to dry-cleaning care instructions, it’s to push the responsibility to the dry cleaners rather than themselves.”
There comes a point when the risk is worth it, when the garment is too dirty to wear and too old to justify the expense of a professional cleaning. I once threw two leather jackets in the washing machine since otherwise I would have to pay more than their original prices to be cleaned, and they came out fine. Your mileage may vary. But you might be able to squeeze some more wear out of your dry-clean-only clothing with some laundering tips from Lifehacker.
(Image credit: Carrielwilson)
In a new episode of The Watcher’s Top 5 Beatdown, Hoai-Tran Bui joins the boys to rank her top five Pixar films. Bui is a writer at Film and host of the Millennial Falcon podcast. Do you agree with her or the boys’ top five? Do you have a ranking of your own?
Touchwood Design Inc. were inspired by World War II government public service announcements to create posters to address the current situation. The series of posters, called Repurpose With A Purpose, reminds people to wash their hands, observe a 14-day quarantine after travel, stop hoarding food, and to practice social distancing. Plain Magazine has more details:
The multidisciplinary design studio adapted the simple, visual and straightforward style of these recognised posters to our address our current situation. It’s a visual campaign that effectively gets the message across, taking the firm stance of its past purpose into the present. “We recycled them and gave new meaning to help educate, inform and remind us that we’ve faced terrible things before, and we’ll get through this together,” the studio says.
image via Plain Magazine
Recycling in ancient times? Pompeii had it! New discoveries revealed that the ancient city sorted rubbish into different piles. Large piles of ancient garbage were found outside Pompeii’s fortification wall, and in and around the tombs of the city. Professor Allison Emmerson of Tulane University interpreted these piles as sorting systems, as Hyperallergic detailed:
“Since the earliest excavations of the eighteenth century, large piles of ancient refuse had turned out outside Pompeii’s fortification wall, in and around the tombs that Roman law relegated to the same area. Past interpretations had viewed these waste mounds as akin to modern landfills, signifying the separation between the zone outside the wall and the city within it, even going so far as to see nearby tombs as abandoned and no longer visited by friends and family of the deceased.”
Garbage turned up in association with monuments that were still in active use, where the living continued to bury their dead and return for regular commemoration. Discarded materials like mortar and plaster, and crumbled tiles and amphorae, were utilized to build walls; the piles of abandoned material were intended to be resold within the city.
“I began to realize that ancient attitudes towards garbage must have been quite different from our own,” said Emmerson. “That point became even clearer as I continued excavations in the city center (with the University of Cincinnati’s Pompeii excavation, directed by Steven Ellis).”
image via Hyperallergic
