On April 29, 2010, Felix Arvid Urf Kjellberg joined YouTube. Back then, he did not know that he was about to be the most subscribed individual user on the said platform.
Ever since the day he joined, he constantly uploaded videos on YouTube. Now, with over 104 million subscribers, Felix, also known as PewDiePie, clearly has earned his special place at the platform.
Celebrating his decade in YouTube, Felix decides to take a peek at how much his channel progressed over the years, reflecting how much has changed since the beginning.
Obvious Plant (Jeff Wysaski) has made a documentary! The Exciting of Trains goes off the rails, so to speak, early on and then gets weirder as it goes. After all, trying to make random old clips of train travel into a coherent story just invites nonsense. -via Metafilter
Holy cow- surely this isn't how this guy's head is shaped! No, it's just a well-done optical illusion tattoo. Click the right arrow on the image; Ryan's tattoo looks just as good in color. And it's not even finished! This tat is the work of Matt Pehrson of the Zion Tattoo Company. You can see more of his intricate geometric tattoos at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
Residents of one street in Chester, UK, made this video to support each other while social distancing. You have to wonder if this is sort of an artist's colony, since the residents have such a fashion sense and no hesitance about performing. They did a wonderful job! -via Nag on the Lake
Yehuda Devir (left) and his wife Maya (center) are the happy parents of Ariel (right) a growing baby. Yehuda and Maya are both artists and, appropriately, illustrate their adventures together in an ongoing comic series titled One of These Days. In it, the parents address the joys, anxieties, and tribulations of raising a baby.
You can follow their labors on Instagram or view a roundup of their babycare-related cartoons at My Modern Met.
If you need something to argue with your family about, here's a touchy topic and a list made to be taken apart. While some die-hard Star Wars fans will say nothing good has come of Disney purchasing Lucafilm, it at least ensured that Star Wars would continue. Since that happened in 2012, the House of Mouse has been busy producing movies, TV series, novels, animations, video games, and comic books. If you've been keeping up with all that, you'll be interested in how io9 ranked the best moments from all that Star Wars media. If not, you may find something in the Star Wars universe you'll want to seek out and experience for yourself.
You might be, like me, very overdue for a hair cut. Unless you wear a pageboy style, it's not so simple to cut it yourself. Too bad you don't still have a Flowbee to make it easy! In case you weren't around in the late 1980s, the Flowbee was a hair trimmer that attached to your vacuum cleaner. It sucked in your hair and made sure every strand was cut to the same precise yet adjustable length. At least that was the idea. It was invented by carpenter Rick Hunts.
Hunts, who raised more than $100,000 from investors and even sold his cabinet shop to obtain additional funds to mass market his creation, clearly felt the Flowbee would be a slam-dunk. He approached major personal grooming companies like Conair, Norelco, and Remington to see if they’d be interested in the Flowbee. He also approached beauty salons to see if they’d consider selling them to customers. He later recalled that all of them said the idea was nuts. In the case of the salons, they were afraid the Flowbee might actually work as advertised and see a reduction in foot traffic from people content to cut their own hair.
Facial recognition systems have indeed advanced over the years, improving in both accuracy and efficiency. Facial recognition systems, like the ones made by Los Angeles startup TrueFace, are used to speed security checks over at the base entrances at the US Air Force. But because of the world changing drastically in only a few months’ time, not only are we heavily affected by this sudden change, but our systems as well.
… CEO Shaun Moore says he’s facing a new question: How good is TrueFace’s technology when people are wearing face masks?
“It’s something we don’t know yet because it’s not been deployed in that environment,” Moore says. His engineers are testing their technology on masked faces and are hurriedly gathering images of masked faces to tune their machine-learning algorithms for pandemic times.
In other words, some facial recognition systems are struggling to cope with the current times. Others, however, like those in Russia and China (because of their lighter privacy rules), as well as Japan (because they have a flu season, a time when people wear face masks), cope a bit better.
So how well are our facial recognition systems in scanning faces with face masks? Good, but far from perfect.
Check out Ars Technica for more details about this subject.
With the Pentagon releasing some videos which contain “unidentified aerial phenomena”, the Japanese government is now preparing to deal with unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, in case they encounter one.
The Japanese Defense Ministry says its pilots have never encountered an unidentified flying object, The Japan Times reports, but authorities want to be prepared should it happen in the future. And while the new protocols are geared toward identifying military drones, they could also serve as guidance for first contact with hypothetical aliens.
From 1995 to 2003, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent its time exploring Jupiter’s system. In these years, the aforementioned spacecraft was able to make 11 flybys over one of Jupiter’s icy moons: Europa.
On the 26th of September 1998, the spacecraft was able to take highly-detailed photos of Europa’s surface — photos that scientists now revisit as they prepare for future missions, such as the Europa Clipper, which is targeted to launch in 2023 or 2025.
"We've only seen a very small part of Europa's surface at this resolution," Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and Europa project staff scientist working on future missions, said in a statement. "Europa Clipper will increase that immensely."
You’ve probably heard of lots of people who got laid off from their jobs because there’s a new machine in town that could do more things than they could. This has been a sad trend throughout the years, as old as the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps older. And because robots are now slowly becoming an essential element in some services, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear more stories about people getting fired.
In many parts of the U.S., robots have been replacing workers over the last few decades. But to what extent, really? Some technologists have forecast that automation will lead to a future without work, while other observers have been more skeptical about such scenarios.
Now a study co-authored by an MIT professor puts firm numbers on the trend, finding a very real impact—although one that falls well short of a robot takeover. The study also finds that in the U.S., the impact of robots varies widely by industry and region, and may play a notable role in exacerbating income inequality.
Quantum computing has been a subject of interest for physicists and science enthusiasts alike, because of its massive potential to revolutionize basically all things that require computing like medicine and data transmission. Many companies now invest billions in this field in science, in hopes that one day they will be able to understand and harness the power of quantum computing. Now, it seems that even kids will have an opportunity to learn more about quantum computing.
With an eye toward the future, a group of researchers at Fermilab,a particle physics laboratory in Batavia, Ill., has worked with high-school teachers to develop a program to train their students in this emerging field.
This program, called "Quantum Computing as a High School Module," was developed in collaboration with young students in mind. But it's also a perfect diversion for science enthusiasts of any age who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands.
The bad news is that students at The Julliard School didn't get to stage their spring performances live. The good news is that what they did instead is available to us all. Student musicians, actors, and dancers, along with some distinguished faculty and alumni, collaborated from their homes to produce Ravel's Bolero. Read how the performance came together here. -via Kottke
While the weather is warming up and dog grooming businesses are closed, some folks took a chance on removing their doggo's winter growth themselves. While they get points for self-reliance, the results are not quite as planned. Okay, these dog owners get more points for seeing the humor in their situation and sharing the pictures online.
The good news is that it's hair, and it will grow out eventually. And the dogs probably don't care nearly as much as their pictures might imply. Get a laugh at 52 dogs who had to endure home grooming at Bored Panda.
We may never know how people in the distant past regarded the concept of time, at least before they left evidence in the form of symbols and language. But once they developed those things, we can chart how the world not only saw time, but tried to measure it and understand it. Quanta magazine has a timeline of some of the highlights in that journey, as they pertain to culture, physics, timekeeping, and biology. While all timelines end with "now," we are sure to learn more about time and its nature in the "future." -via Damn Interesting
