Missy Doods is a math teacher who survived the 2005 Red Lake shooting. She is also a school safety advocate trying her best to help prevent continuous violent actions in schools. The Red Lake shooting left 10 people dead, including the shooter. Doods teamed up with Jillian Peterson and James Densley, researchers in Minneapolis-St. Paul, who compiled the most comprehensive database of mass shooters to date to prevent school violence. Vice has the details:
Peterson and Densley found that 95% of mass shooters in schools are suicidal. They believe this finding should reorient the way we approach violence prevention in schools. “If a student says, ‘I’m going to kill everyone tomorrow,’ it’s an automatic police response: expel, suspend... a big, punitive response,” said Densley. “If that same student said, ‘I’m going to kill myself tomorrow,’ we would respond totally differently.”
This is a reminder to please lock and remove valuables from your vehicle. Never, ever leave precious toilet paper (toilet tissue, bath tissue, lavatory paper, or whatever else you call it) in plain sight. To reduce the possibility of theft please hide all stockpiled toilet paper appropriately.
The Eugene Police Department reports it received an online report where the rear window of an SUV was completely shattered and the thief took all valuables including two cases of 30-roll toilet paper and some valuable business and personal items.
A rear window can be easily replaced, but replacing 60 rolls of prime toilet paper is another matter.
Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, who are scientists at Dartmouth College, married to each other, and Monty Python fans, have written a paper that does a gait analysis of the various silly walks performed in the classic sketch known as the Ministry of Silly Walks. John Cleese plays Mr. Teabag, who works at the Ministry of Silly Walks. Mt. Putey (Michael Palin) comes to his office hoping for a grant to develop a silly walk. Butler and Dominy did the study to celebrate the sketch's 50th anniversary, and to draw attention to the need to reform the peer review process for health studies.
For their own gait analysis, Butler and Dominy studied both Mr. Putey's and the Minister's gait cycles in the video of the original 1970 televised sketch, as well as the Minister's gaits from a 1980 live stage performance in Los Angeles. "If silly walking can be defined as deviations from typical walking, then silliness can be quantified using two-dimensional video-based motion analysis," they wrote. So that's what they did. Butler and Dominy found that the Minister's silly walk is much more variable than a normal human walk—6.7 times as much—while Mr. Putey's walk-in-progress is only 3.3 times more variable.
So what does all this silly walking have to do with academic peer review? The sketch might be satirizing bureaucratic inefficiency, but Cleese's Minister is essentially engaging in a hyper-streamlined version of the peer review process in his meeting with Mr. Putey that (the authors concluded) resulted in a fair assessment. In reality, "Peer review is a very time-intensive process, both for the application and the reviews," said Butler.
"If the process were streamlined and grants were awarded more quickly, researchers could start their work earlier, accelerating the timeline for research," said Dominy. This would also save grant administrators time and money.
Since it's not safe to pack a large number of people into an arena or auditorium right now, many entertainment productions have canceled, or have continued in a weird manner without the usual studio audience. If you've watched the late night shows or the town hall meetings, you are probably impressed by how much the energy from the audience added to the usual show. Now imagine that in pro wrestling. While other sporting events were canceled, the WWE went ahead with Monday Night Raw in an empty arena. But they had fun with it. Paul “Triple H” Levesque joined the commentary team with plenty of jokes about the situation.
The wrestlers followed suit. Bayley, the dastardly women’s champion, and her buddy Sasha Banks worked the nonexistent crowd as they walked to the ring. Nikki Cross tried to get a crowd chant going. The Miz and John Morrison used the absence of an audience to talk themselves up without the risk of getting booed. (Triple H’s deadpan response: “It’s amazing how comfortable Miz and Morrison are without crowd noise. It’s like it happens all the time.”)
The episode culminated in the already-legendary faceoff between semiretired babyface turned bonafide Hollywood star John Cena and his current rival, demented children’s show host (yes, you read that correctly) Bray Wyatt. Without the roar of the crowd yay-ing and booing behind it, the clash between Cena’s steely hip-hop Superman persona and Wyatt’s Joker-fied madness felt uncomfortably intimate, which to be honest is exactly the way it should feel.
Nicole McLaughlin offers you so many options that you may not have thought feasible. Honestly, I don't brush my teeth after lunch at work because it's not practical to carry around a toothbrush and toothpaste. But it would be practical if I could keep those necessary implements conveniently mounted on a shoe.
Disney's plan to remake every animated feature film into a live-action remake continues with Mulan, which is due out on March 27. Before you see that one, let's revisit the original 1998 movie with an Honest Trailer. Mulan seemed progressive at the time, but not so much now. The new version, a war film with no songs or magical sidekicks, will be very different.
Are you looking for a fun way to remind someone you love that they are special? Be kind and gift them the Mister Rogers Bath Bar Mini Soap from the NeatoShop. This practical little gift is sure to put a smile on their face. It is a wonderful way to remind someone that they are special and to please wash their hands.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Bath and Body. New items arriving all the time.
Don't forget to stop by the shop to see our large selection of customizable apparel. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and wonderful people come in every size.
Lately, I've been planning a small professional conference for librarians and searching for a fun activity that everyone could enjoy. After all, there are only so many presentations on andragogical assessment scaffolding that people will want to attend. I need something spicier--like axe fighting!
The Warlord Combat Academy in Irving, Texas offers the realism of full-contact sparring with heavy, steel weapons. You get armor, too, which is helpful. Classes include the use of the longsword, the Hungarian saber, and the lightsaber.
Well, it looks like stained glass. It's actually an adhesive sticker that fits smoothly into the dimensions of an airplane window.
This is an invention by Danielle Baskin, the merry prankster who recently left signs for magical items up at her local Costco. She advises using these stickers to aid praying while airborne.
So, how would you feel about being kept in the dark about the coronavirus pandemic? Apparently the producers of Germany's Big Brother have been keeping the contestants in the dark. Most have them have been in the house since February 6th. They have no idea that there is a pandemic going on in the real world. After some backlash, however, it appears the plan is to update the contestants on live television.
Is Germany having a run on toilet paper like the US and Australia? I really hope the show plans on at least gifting them some toilet paper and hand sanitizer when they are finally let out of the house.
At the North Pole, 24 time zones converge to a point, and time as we measure it has no meaning. Sunrise, sunset, and noon come only once a year. The same has true at the South Pole, but Antarctica is a continent with people. They've worked out a system where each research station coordinates their clocks with their sponsoring nation. At the North Pole, the clocks are set wherever you want them. Most of the time, this is unimportant, as the Pole sits in the Arctic Ocean, and anyone who happens to be there is just passing through, with no reasons to change their clocks at all. But the research ship the RV Polarstern is deliberately locked in the ice for a year to study Arctic conditions, and it has a crew of 100 people from 20 countries. What time is it for them?
At the North Pole, it’s all ocean, visited only rarely by an occasional research vessel or a lonely supply ship that strayed from the Northwest Passage. Sea captains choose their own time in the central Arctic. They may maintain the time zones of bordering countries—or they may switch based on ship activities. Sitting here in my grounded office, it is baffling to think about a place where a single human can decide to create an entire time zone at any instant.
Last fall the Polarstern captain pushed the time zone back one hour every week, for six weeks, to sync up with incoming Russian ships that follow Moscow time. With each shift, the captain adjusted automatic clocks scattered around the ship. Researchers paused to watch the hands of analog clocks spin eerily backward. And every time the time changed, it jostled the delicate balance of clock-based communication—between instruments deployed on the ice, between researchers onboard, and between them and their families and colleagues on faraway land.
Archaeologists have found a 40-foot diameter building in Kostenki, Russia, that was apparently constructed from the bones of at least 60 mammoths. The bones, no doubt, made an excellent building material, after the mammoths had been eaten. Dwellings built of mammoth bones have been found before, but this one is much bigger and 3,000 years older. It doesn't appear to be an everyday living space, so researchers are speculating on its cultural significance.
"What a site!” says Penn State University anthropologist Pat Shipman, who wasn’t involved in the research. “I am completely intrigued as these remarkable finds differ meaningfully from previously discovered ones and can be more carefully and fully studied with modern techniques.”
The site stands out most obviously for its scale. “The size of the structure makes it exceptional among its kind, and building it would have been time-consuming,” says Marjolein Bosch, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Cambridge. “This implies that it was meant to last, perhaps as a landmark, a meeting place, a place of ceremonial importance, or a place to return to when the conditions grew so harsh that shelter was needed,” Bosch was not involved with the new research on this “ truly exceptional find” but has personally visited the site. Indeed, the structure’s sheer size makes it an unlikely everyday home. “I cannot possibly imagine how they would have roofed over this structure,” Pryor said.
The smaller mammoth houses feature more definite cooking hearths, and they contain the remains of reindeer, horse and fox, which suggests the people in them were living on whatever they could find in the area. The new mammoth bone structure lacks evidence of other animal remains. “It’s almost exclusively woolly mammoth remains and that is one of the interesting things about it,” Pryor said.
“With no other animal bones, this doesn’t look much like a dwelling where people lived for a while,” Shipman added.
Austria built a nuclear reactor as a power plant before they asked the citizens whether they wanted one. Oops. But that was in the 1970s. Maybe they should ask them again. However, the facility has its uses, although not for nuclear power generation. Tom Scott tells the story.
The legend of a race of women warriors known as the Amazons has been around since ancient Greek scribes wrote them down. That's where we got our greatest comic book superhero, and indeed, the Amazon River and rain forest were named after them. But are they a myth in the same vein as Zeus and Poseidon, or were they a story meant to be taken as fiction even in its time? Or could there be some basis for the tale in reality?
Until fairly recently, it was believed that the Amazons were created from scratch by the patriarchal Greeks as a device to highlight things like the supposed inherent superiority of males. For example, in the myths, while the Amazons were frequently praised for their skill as warriors, they usually lost to the Greeks in the end. (After all, Theseus made Antiope his concubine, and when her Amazon friends came to Athens to free her, they were defeated as well.)
However, in the early 1990s, archaeologists Renate Rolle and Jeannine Davis-Kimball independently discovered evidence that began to challenge the traditional beliefs about the Amazons. Later research by Stanford historian Adrienne Mayor would go on to use this and other evidence to rather convincingly argue that there really was a group of warrior women that inspired the legends.
Don't you just love it when someone combines two of our favorite subjects? Most people would think trying to set up a domino fall with cats around is a fool's errand, but it works here. These are the well-behaved cats who ring a bell to get a treat. The domino sequence is not only fascinating for the cats to watch, but there are several places where its progress depends on cats acting like cats. Which they do very well.
