Do you believe your eyes? #flyingdog #dog #pilotpete #pilotpeter pic.twitter.com/MtlSUgC6IJ

— Peter Da Poodle (@PeterDaPoodle) March 31, 2020

A woman can be seen to be petting a dog festooned with balloons, who seems to be clueless about its current situation. When the woman lets go of her hand, however, it is revealed that her hand was not just there to pet the dog; it was also there to keep the dog in place. And the dog, still puzzled, went up, up, and away.

(Video Credit: Peter Da Poodle/ Twitter)

Due to what is happening in the world right now, most of us are now working from home, and what were team meetings before are now virtual conference calls. Lots of people, however, are not yet used to this sudden shift. With this in mind, crazy things during a conference call are bound to happen and are inevitable, such as this one:

Melinda de Boer, communications director at a global manufacturer… : "On multiple occasions, my colleagues on Skype have witnessed me giving the 'mum eye' to my two sons, who are mucking about in the same room where I'm trying to work. They say it's scary, it's a shame the kids don't think so!"

Check out other conference call stories from BBC.

(Image Credit: mohamed_hassan/ Pixabay)

It was another day with Eleanor and her family’s WhatsApp group, and her 64-year-old dad just forwarded something that he would not have appreciated before: a meme, which Eleanor guesses came from another dad.

It’s not that the global pandemic has caused my 64-year-old father to discover memes; it’s more that he’s now come to truly appreciate them. He tells me he has “20 coming in a day, from various sources”. Like a meme sommelier, he’s become very selective about which ones he forwards to the family thread. And his taste isn’t bad.

Curious about this sudden development from her father and his generation, Eleanor asks him why their generation is so into memes. “We’ve got time,” her father replies.

My dad isn’t retired, and he’s one of the busiest people I know. So I’m not sure how this applies to him. I wonder if you become more present as you get older – and maybe seem to have more time. Is he living out these “strange times” in a zen state, contemplating each new meme like a teaching of the Dalai Lama?

“By the way,” he says, “I’ve joined Houseparty.”

What a time to be alive.

See more of Eleanor’s story over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: Imgflip)

Dong-hyun is a former Korean Navy SEAL. He served within the Special Missions Battalion and he got out of the Navy two years ago.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was released on October 25, 2019, was marketed as a “highly realistic” game. The developers of the game also consulted with Navy SEALs to make the game realistic.

So what happens when a former Navy SEAL plays the game? Is the game really realistic as what they say?

Find out the answers on this video.

(Video Credit: REDCELL/ YouTube)

In an effort to protect the environment and minimize plastic pollution, McDonald’s UK and Ireland have pledged to remove plastic toys from their Happy Meals starting in 2021.

The announcement of the measure comes following a highly-publicised petition led by two schoolgirls calling on the fast food chain to cut plastic from its Happy Meals, which are geared towards children and contain a small toy.

In a press release, the company stated that from 2021, every Happy Meal in the UK will include either a soft toy, a paper-based toy or a book, as opposed to a toy made from non-sustainable hard plastic.

According to the fast food company, this will remove over 3,000 metric tons of plastic from its business, and this also marks the biggest plastic reduction at McDonald’s UK and Ireland to date.

More details about this over at Independent.

Thanks, McDonald’s!

(Image Credit: McDonald’s/ Wikimedia Commons)

Japanese celebrity Pikataro has turned his famous Pineapple-Apple-Pen (PPAP) song into a catchy hand washing song.

Stay home, stay safe, sing, dance, and wash those hands.

Via - YouTube

Are you sick of this virtual meeting? You can click on an option in the app to close the meeting. Or you could also physically slap this button unit developed by Jules Ehrhardt.

Question: how much force can the button unit withstand? I don't want to hit mine so hard that it breaks.

The button might, though, need an upgrade of the kind seen in Richard Matheson's famous short story "Button, Button."

-via Super Punch

If you're hearing impaired and rely upon reading lips to understand what other people are saying, then face masks are a huge obstacle. That's why Ashley Lawrence, a college student in Kentucky who is studying to work with hearing impaired people, designed a mask with a clear plastic covering. News station Lex18 quotes her:

"For anyone who uses speech reading, lip reading, anybody like that," Lawrence said about the purpose of the masks. "And people who are profoundly deaf who use ASL as their primary mode of communication. ASL is very big on facial expressions and it is part of the grammar. So I don't know if you have seen Virginia Moore on Andy Beshear's things at five o'clock, but she's very emotive, and if half of that is gone because you're wearing a mask then half of what you're saying is being missed, so even if it's not physically talking and just using ASL, then you need to have that kind of access." [...]

"I'm not charging anything for them because I think that if you need them, then you need them and I don't think that you should have to pay for them," Lawrence said. "So we are sending them out for free whenever we have people asking for them and if they're foreign, then maybe we'll charge shipping, but other than that they're completely free."

-via My Modern Met

Then & Now Movie Locations is one of the great, hidden treasures of the internet. The resident blogger, Paul S., travels around the US, photographing locations of iconic scenes from famous movies, most commonly horror movies.

Most recently, Paul traveled to Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, San Francisco, and Washington, DC to track down shots from the 1994 film Forrest Gump.

Where does Forrest wait for the bus at the beginning of the film? He's at Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia. You can see more at Then & Now Movie Locations.

With distance learning being the new normal, some teachers are going above and beyond to connect with their students. Karie Snodgrass teaches 2nd grade in Oregon. Instead of giving up on a big project she had planned for her students she spent hours upon hours preparing and dropping off care packages to the kids in her class.

"We were getting ready to do this huge project with plants and measurement and math and everything," Snodgrass said. "I knew they wouldn’t have access to seeds but I had the seeds already. So I put all the seeds in baggies wearing gloves and then I thought then they need journals and then they need crayons and so I put together care packages."

She called this act her version of the ding, dong, ditch. We call it another wonderful example of kindness in action. Thank you to her and all the amazing teachers out there.

Via - KATU

Inspired by the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis, artist Bob Vershueren built a huge birdhouse in Annecy, France. Implantations, as he calls it, was exhibited at the Jardin de l’Europe in 2017.

It's not the most efficient of designs. But it looks more organic this way--as though families of birds have gradually built houses on top of each other as time passed on. You can see more photos at Colossal.

Photo: Annecy Paysages

You may have seen some memes going around that draw attention to an anomaly in the Namibian border. The country has an odd "arm" reaching out from its northeast corner over to Zimbabwe, effectively cutting Botswana off from Angola (and not really from Zambia, as the above picture implies).

This border is a leftover from colonial rule, when Namibia was called German Southwest Africa. The Germans negotiated with English colonists for this strip of land so that they could have access to the Zambezi River, and therefore to the east coast of Africa, where they held another colony. Whatever else the British gained in the exchange, they also got the last laugh. Find out why at Amusing Planet.

I changed the title to the latest video by Tom Scott, because the title itself changes every time you load it. The number went up by 100,000 views between the time I first encountered it and when I posted it here. That's one of those "whoa" things that he takes only a few seconds to explain, but it's a neat introduction to what he's actually telling us about, which is how computer code makes software communicate with other, totally unrelated software. However, this capability can be used for evil. Still, this kind of code is ephemeral, and won't last forever. He used, as an example, Star Wars weather, which we posted eleven years ago, but I didn't realize Tom Scott was behind it. -via Metafilter

Artificial intelligence has advanced through the years. What started as a thought-provoking idea has now become one of the fastest growing fields in the sciences. But AI is more than just engineering and the sciences, as it…

… prompts fundamental questions about how we want to organize our economy and society. The pursuit of AI brings us face to face with basic, intimate questions about consciousness, intelligence, creativity: in short, what it means to be human.

Anyone hoping to get her arms around what artificial intelligence will mean for the world in the twenty-first century must engage with questions and perspectives from across engineering, psychology, economics, sociology, and philosophy.

And with that, Forbes gives to us thought-provoking quotes about artificial intelligence. See them all over at the site. But for now, here’s one from Marvin Minsky:

“The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.”

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

This six-week old kitten was found alone stuck on a roof in Georgia. With no one there to notice, it would seem that she was going to succumb to the cold. Thankfully, these firefighters came to rescue her, and she was immediately nursed back to health Wednesday after her rescue.

The female kitten quickly recovered after she was given milk, cat food, and was warmed in towels, a fire official told the Marietta Daily Journal.

(Image Credit: Cobb County Fire & Emergency Services/ Facebook)