A restaurant owner in Portland, Oregon is making news for being inventive with the use of plastic menu holders.
Min Trahn, owner of Butterfly Belly Asian Cuisine, saw that face shields are in short supply and realized he had just the thing to make some on his own.
He took a look at his laminated restaurant menu folders and saw they could be transformed into face shields.
This may not look like a cutting-edge design, but you have to admit it is original. We applaud everyone who is out there actively trying to make a difference and help people. Now is the time to get creative and resourceful.
This riddle starts off with a rollicking story of monsters and magic, and then gets into math. There's some logic, too, but it's really about math. While the answer is pretty darn cool, it wouldn't work if the numbers were the least bit different. Sure, sea monsters and floating cities are fantastical, but what really defies logic in this story is that they could keep chests full of pearls around for a thousand years without someone stealing any. That part is truly preposterous.
If you want to eat like a survivalist, you might want to brush up on the food taken on Antarctic expeditions a hundred years ago. There were no freeze-dried processed MREs, unless you count staples like the hardtack stocked on long voyages (consisting of flour and salt) and the Native American pemmican (dried meat, rendered fat, and sometimes fruit). While that may not sound appetizing, hunger is the best sauce.
“Pemmican was the only food source which could make [expeditions] happen, and was thus a prime mover of polar travel,” [author Jason C.] Anthony said. “The calorie requirement for the hardest polar sledging could be up to 10,000 [calories per day], though usually the hard days required about 6,500 — still more than the Tour de France, I think.”
Sounds great! Well, not so much “great” as “necessary.” Still fun. And, per Anthony, these aren’t necessarily hard and fast numbers.
“Generally the British expeditions provided each man 4,000 to 4,500 [calories per day]. Even modern adventurers have had trouble calculating the caloric needs,” he said. “I think it was Fiennes and Stroud ... who determined that the caloric deficit between what [explorers] burned and what they ate was the equivalent of what a normal person eats at home each day. In other words, they were starving.”
As many of us our navigate the new normal of homeschooling our children, I am grateful to the village of moms who send me hilarious videos and memes to help me get through the day. I normally don't share them with everyone, but this one was too good to keep to myself.
I big shout out and thank you to this comedian who created the Desperate Mother's Prayer. Thank you Desperate Mom (also known as Brandalyn Shropshire)! Thank you!
Michael Reid, an art dealer in Sydney, Australia, expresses the existential angst that many of us are starting to feel while in quarantine. Like Edvard Munch's inner voice, he screams. Let us all make food art from our stash. But beware: once the cookies are used up, they're gone for food.
In what can only be described as a really terrible public service announcement, the Malaysian government recently advised women to wear makeup, dress nicely, and avoid nagging. A short time later they were forced to retract that advice and apologize for their sexist comments.
The Malaysian government was forced to apologize after its Women's Development Department published a series of sexist "tips" to help deal with home quarantine, like advising women to continue to wear makeup and to "avoid nagging."
The campaign was met with fierce backlash, and the posts have since been deleted from the department's social media account.
One of the biggest criticisms was that the government body charged with supporting women appeared to be ignoring concerns about a rise in domestic violence that may accompany stay-at-home orders to focus on things like how women should dress.
The Women's Development Department director-general claims they were just trying to send out positive messages to woman during this time of crisis.
Rena Nicole and her partner were out for a walk through their neighborhood in Ohio, when a Great Dane noticed them. There was just one problem, though. The dog couldn’t see them because the fence was too tall. But, with its quick thinking, the Great Dane found a way to solve its problem: through the trampoline. And so bounce the canine did.
"Ever seen a Great Dane on a trampoline? No? Now you have," Nicole wrote. "You’re welcome."
The eight planets of our solar system range from hot, rocky Mercury to the huge gas giants further out, but Earth is unique in that it is the densest of all the planets. The reasons behind that have to do with the way the planets formed in the first place. They coalesced from material spinning around the sun as it formed, all at different distances from the star that affected what they are made of.
If everything were based purely on the elements making them up, Mercury would be the densest planet. Mercury has a higher proportion of elements that are higher on the periodic table compared to any other known world in the Solar System. Even the asteroids that have had their volatile ices boiled off aren't as dense as Mercury is based on elements alone. Venus is #2, Earth is #3, followed by Mars, some asteroids, and then Jupiter's innermost moon: Io.
But it isn't just the raw material composition of a world that determines its density. There's also the issue of gravitational compression, which has a greater effect for worlds the larger their masses are. This is something we've learned a lot about by studying planets beyond our own Solar System, as they've taught us what the different categories of exoplanet are. That's allowed us to infer what physical processes are at play that lead to the worlds we observe.
Finally, we learn what the fox says! Finnegan lives at Save a Fox Rescue in Faribault, Minnesota. He looks in the window, because he wants attention from his caretaker, and he gets it. So what does the fox say? He giggles! -via Digg
One of the problems with archiving things digitally is that formats change so often that data may become inaccessible, if not irretrievable. That can spell disaster for early internet classics, such as the website YTMND (You're The Man Now, Dog). Launched in 2004, it was a repository for early memes in repeating loops that became classic memories for the internet generation. But it was based on Flash, which fewer and fewer browsers now support. Therefore, viewership lagged over time. Then last year, a catastrophic server failure convinced founder Max Goldberg to go offline completely. But it has now been resurrected.
Goldberg has been working to restore the site since it went offline last May. The site’s database was being stored on eight-year-old hardware and was somehow deleted. After going down, Goldberg said he received an “outpouring of support from people all over.” He launched a Patreon, and “people clearly wanted to support the site sticking around,” so he started work on fixing it up.
The new YTMND looks mostly like the old YTMND that went down last year. But it’s had some major under-the-hood upgrades: the whole site is served over HTTPS, encrypting your connection, and audio is now played in HTML5 instead of Flash, so the site works properly on modern browsers (which no longer support Flash) and on mobile. Goldberg has also removed ads from the site since Patreon supporters are covering his server costs.
Bikes are always a pain in the butt when bringing them on subways. Not with this bike, though. Why? Because it’s foldable. But what makes this bike so unique? You can fold it down to the size of a weekend bag. Introducing the Tuck Bike.
Without compromising on style or performance, the full-size bike weighs just 14kg and folds down to 61 x 83 x 37cm – roughly the size of a weekend bag. When folded, you can roll it down the subway platform thanks to its spinner wheels. The bike also stands on its own in a crowded train, making it ideal for city living and urban dwellers to commute to work by train. The Tuck Bike can also be easily stored, fitting easily under a desk or in the trunk of a small car.
The Tuck Bike will launch in September 2020 on Kickstarter.
Popular notions tell us that left-brain thinkers are analytical and logical, while right-brain thinkers are creative and artistic. But it would seem that this popular belief is wrong, as, according to new study, creativity is mostly driven by the left brain.
In a new study in the journal NeuroImage, researchers at Drexel University conducted EEG scans while 32 guitarists to improvise jazz to six leads (songs). They found the guitarists’ brain activity to be almost entirely left-brain.
A caveat: Inexperienced improvisers displayed right-brain activity and, not surprisingly, lower-quality music. (Professional jazz musicians judged the music.) This is a key insight, because it indicates that right-brain creativity is more about how the brain handles novel artistic situations—i.e., I’m totally winging this creative thing.
In other words, the shift of creative activity from the right brain to the left happens with experience. To put it simply, those who have much experience can be creative while being unconscious about it, and this phenomenon is handled mostly by the left brain.
Novices are more able to respond to instructions from a coach, because their right-brain creativity is under more conscious control from the frontal lobe. Left-brain creativity, meanwhile, produces higher-quality music in a somewhat unconscious, autopilot process that musicians have difficulty altering. The researchers hope to trace this shift in the learning process, to help creatives avoid locking in bad habits.
“Kids are born scientists,” said cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson in a speech. Is this true? For one, I could say yes. Kids, after all, are always curious about the world around them, which, I think, makes them scientists in their own way. But it’s an entirely different story when a kid as young as six becomes recognized in the scientific world. Such is the case of Grace Fulton, who co-authored a scientific paper with her father at the young age of six. Yes, her name was included in the paper, and her father states that her name being there isn’t just for show.
Graham Fulton is an ornithologist at the University of Queensland. His research includes how well owls adapt to urban environments. “Grace absolutely adores owls,” Graham said in a statement. “She was only four when she started spending nights with me in the rainforest searching for them, and now she knows all of their calls."
For his most recent research, Graham compared the presence of owls at a Brisbane park with the nearby Mount Glorious rainforest. He told IFLScience that “[Grace] attended fieldwork on all occasions and always [attended] school the next day. She was in Prep at that stage. She could read the data and tell which owl was most common both on the data (excel sheet) and from being at the fieldwork. She could recall the moments I forgot.”
“She asks questions that inspire research, looks at the data, never stops learning, corrects me when I mark down the wrong bird,” Graham added, so when the work was published in Pacific Conservation Biology, both Fultons were listed as authors.
[...]
Grace is also the lead author of a paper currently undergoing review, in which she recorded a bird nesting in a previously unrecorded type of environment. Grace has expressed an intention to eventually become a butterfly researcher, despite her father telling her, “They're just bird food.”
You’ve probably seen people post really beautiful quotes with a picture of the person allegedly responsible for the quote. But is it accurate? Is it true? Did they really say it? If they did really say it, is it taken in the right context? Unfortunately, many of these quotes are quoted incorrectly and are taken out of context.
Cracked gives seven examples of quotes that are quoted inaccurately. See them over at the site.
When you are looking for recommendations of new movies (or movies new to you, that is) to watch, an esoteric list is more useful than a ranking of blockbusters. You already know about the blockbusters. Independent films are those made outside the Hollywood studio system, often on a shoestring budget.
In our attempt to assemble a list of the most important American indies, we have included works by mavericks, film school grads, and true outsiders; productions with multimillion-dollar budgets and labors of love financed through part-time jobs; movies that played the arthouse, the grindhouse, or barely anywhere at all.
Some were massive box office hits, while others languished in obscurity for decades. Not all of our selections would rank among the best American independent movies ever made. Instead, the films on this list are the ones that broke new ground, created genres, or first introduced important artistic voices and subjects into American film.
So while this list from the A.V. Club contains famous indie films you'd expect, like Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead, and Clerks, it also has big films you might not have known were independents, like Dirty Dancing, Easy Rider, and Pulp Fiction. It also includes quite a few films that you have never heard of, but would be worth looking up and watching today.
