Neatorama

Slap a few more kebabs down on the griddle. French multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender (NSFW) is making me hungry. In 2012, he converted a clothes iron into a functional cook plate and used it to prepare food for visitors at the Centre d'Art La Cuisine in the town of Negrepelisse in southern France.

Mailaender calls the piece "L’Union Fait la Farce", which I can translate literally as "the union is the farce," but not idiomatically. All I know is that I want beef right now.

-via Toxel

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Pull yourself together! Existence can be difficult at times, but with a little motivation, you can give it the honest effort it requires. This surreal animation is from AJ Jefferies. -via Boing Boing

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If you go the website for the car parts retailer O'Reilly Auto Parts and search for part 121g (that stands for 1.21 gigawatts), you'll find a listing for the flux capacitor from the Back to the Future movie franchise.

Mind the safety warnings.

Doc Brown would have liked this option in 1955.

-via Dave Barry

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Lucy Smalls is going stir-crazy after two weeks of isolation in Florida. This is when the notion of building a picnic table for local squirrels made perfect sense.

I'm three weeks in and completely agree. I should line my fences with these tables.

-via The Mary Sue

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It's well into the afternoon and I'm still in my pajamas. Of course, I'm a blogger, so that's a day that ends with the letter Y. I'll probably maybe shower later after I finish watching Tiger King.

Are you working from home? Are you attending meetings or classes through Zoom or WebEx? Penn and Kim of the Holderness Family sympathize with your struggles, like getting dressed or muting the mic when going to the bathroom. In this musical parody video, they sing along as we try to join the meeting and share our screens.

-Thanks, Katherine!

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A truck, carrying a load of toilet paper, sadly caught fire in Texas. The good news, the driver of the truck appears to be okay. The bad news, the toilet paper did not survive.

The toilet paper, which appeared to be large rolls typical of commercial use, was scattered across the roadway. TxDOT officials said the tractor-trailer and the load of toilet paper "burned extensively," estimating it would take authorities "some time" to clean up.

My heart aches for the loss of so much toilet paper.

VIA - WFAA

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Skylar Bird, a photographer from the Pacific Northwest, is busy social distancing all while continuing to capture beautiful family moments. This time, however, those moments are through glass. She is calling it the Social Distancing Project.

South Sound photographer Skylar Bird is in the midst of a special project: family photo sessions - but with precautions, of course. Bird photographed moms, dads, and kids through their front windows...no contact at all. Despite the separation, Bird captured precious moments and documented history as the country commits to social distancing and staying at home.

Thank you to the photographers who remind us that, during even the darkest days, there is still beauty and laughter to be found in the world.

Via - KATU

Photo: Skylar Bird

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Peter Dearman didn't come up with the idea of running a vehicle on liquid air; the concept goes back more than 100 years. But in 2001, he actually built one that worked. Dearman took that old idea and set to work fixing the problems that kept it off the market all that time.

Still, the underlying principle was sound. Most engines rely on heat differentials. In the case of, say, a gasoline-powered car, the fuel is mixed with air, crammed into a piston chamber, and set alight, causing it to jump more than 1,000 degrees in temperature. The gas rapidly expands, propelling the piston and, in turn, the wheels. Take the same process, slide it way down the Fahrenheit scale, and you've got a liquid air engine. The nitrogen fuel starts out at 320 degrees below zero. When it enters the (much warmer) piston chamber, it boils off into gas. The change in temperature is smaller than with gasoline, so the pistons move with a little less oomph—but it's enough to get the wheels going. The real problem comes later: All that frigid fuel coursing through the engine quickly freezes it, effectively wiping out the heat differential. The air stops expanding, and the car runs out of puff.

The roadblock was clear, Dearman told me recently. He'd been pondering how to get around it since he was a teen. In a car that runs on heat, you need something to keep it cool—a radiator. In a car that runs on cold, you need the opposite. “I had an idea in my head for how to make it work, but I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere until I had some research to go on,” he said.

Dearman not only came up with a way to dissipate the cold, but also harness it in a way that would make the vehicle efficient enough to justify its development, all while being eco-friendly. Read the story of Peter Dearman's liquid air engine at Wired.

(Image credit: Jan Siemen)

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Redditor and Trekkie Naelavok gathered blooper reels from Star Trek: The Next Generation and spliced the failed elements into the final scenes. For example, this scene from the episode "Future Imperfect" now features LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn high-fiving each other.

And here is Worf revealing a little too much about his childhood during "Booby Trap."

Now I want to see all of the Star Trek canon re-edited this way.

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drive on ice they said! this got me pic.twitter.com/VHxwSEhIAY
— Dan Mace (@Dannmace) March 27, 2020

Driving on ice is pretty scary, but some folks won't let that stop them. Watch this SUV take on a frozen lake that seems to be on the verge of melting, considering the sheen of water on top of the ice. This video has been all over the internet, but this version is the full story, including footage from inside the vehicle. If you're expecting a failure, you've come to the right place. But stay to the end. -via Geekologie

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Heidi Oley, a hairstylist at the Chroma Station Salon in Atlanta, can't work on her clients due to the coronavirus shutdown. But she has a boyfriend, Geoff Clark, to work on while they hole up in a cabin in the woods in northern Georgia.

Heidi keeps creative and Geoff keeps beautiful as she gives him daily makeovers. You can find his many transformations on Instagram.

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When did women start wearing their hair cut short? You might think the style dates back about a hundred years to the rise of the flapper, but it is actually quite a bit older, before the days of motion pictures or even photographic evidence. Specifically, back to the French Revolution. And even then, fashion trends followed pop culture entertainment.

During the later years of the French Revolution, many fashionable young men and women of the upper and middle classes began to cut their hair short. It was called the Titus haircut, or coiffure à la Titus. The name is a reference to Titus Junius Brutus, the elder son of Lucius Junius Brutus, who founded the Roman Republic in 509 BC by famously overthrowing the Roman monarchy.

The unlikely connection between an ancient Roman nobleman and a late-18th-century French haircut begins in 1729, with the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, who had just finished composing a five-act play called Brutus. The play draws material from the legendary story of Lucius Junius Brutus, who condemned his son Titus to death for taking part in a conspiracy to reinstate the monarchy and put the overthrown king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus back on the throne. Titus was blindly in love with the Etruscan king’s daughter Tullie, and it was through this relationship that the conspirators dragged Titus into betraying Rome. When the Senate handed Titus over to his father, Brutus forgave his son but insisted on his execution to ensure the safety of the Republic.

What does any of this have to do with short hair? The actor who portrayed Titus during a 1791 revival of the play had his hair cropped short. Read how that became a viral fashion and what it meant to the French at Amusing Planet.

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According to Merriam-Webster, concatenation is "a group of things linked together or occurring together in a way that produces a particular result or effect," or else the process of linking those things. The experimental film CONCATENATION by Donato Sansone strings together all kinds of film clips that have only one thing in common: motion. Placed just right in sequence, they remind one of a chain-reaction domino fall, marble run, or Rube Goldberg machine. It's a lot of clips, but they move so fast the video still comes in at less than a minute. Genius! -via Colossal

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How does the center of the Milky Way galaxy, our galaxy, glow? As you can see from this photo, this region of our Galaxy, which is found 26,000 light years toward the constellation Sagittarius, glows “in every type of light that we can see.”

In the featured image, high-energy X-ray emission captured by NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory appears in green and blue, while low-energy radio emission captured by SARAO's ground-based MeerKAT telescope array is colored red. Just on the right of the colorful central region lies Sagittarius A (Sag A), a strong radio source that coincides with Sag A* [Sagittarius A-Star], our Galaxy's central supermassive black hole.

The image also captures hot gas that surround Sag A, as well as the Galactic Center Radio Arc (the thick red line found near the center of the image), numerous stars, and black holes.

(Image Credit: X-Ray: NASA, CXC, UMass, D. Wang et al.; Radio: NRF, SARAO, MeerKAT)

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TikTok is a place where you could find all sorts of people, from bored college students to celebrities, create short clips (which are usually based on a song or an iconic line from a film), which range from funny, weird, dangerous, and cringeworthy. The app has gained popularity far and wide, and it has successfully hit 1.5 billion downloads last year. But not everyone seems to be impressed by the app.

U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) this week introduced legislation banning all federal employees from using TikTok on government devices.

Due, they said, to cybersecurity concerns and possible spying by the Chinese government.

“TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that includes Chinese Community Party members on its board, and it is required by law to share user data with Beijing,” according to Hawley.

If passed, the bill would prohibit certain individuals from downloading or using TikTok on any device issued by the United States or a government corporation.