We are supposed to wash our hands for at least twenty seconds, but singing "Happy Birthday" to ourselves twice each wash can get tedious. How much of your favorite song would work? UK teenager William Gibson has launched a generator that will put the lyrics of any tune to the National Health Service hand-washing poster illustrations. It's called Wash Your Lyrics. Just enter a song title and the artist, and it will generate a poster you can print out and display in your bathroom or workplace to remind you of how much you need to sing to reach the required 20 seconds for proper hand washing. The first song I thought of was "Yoda" by Weird Al Yankovic, because I'm just weird. Others had better ideas.
-via Mashable
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Seventy years ago, on March 8, 1950, Volkswagen started producing the Type 2, which came to be the first van. We called it the microbus. Like the Type 1 (the Beetle), it slowly made its way across the Atlantic and began to compete with both the family station wagon and work trucks. But it really caught on with younger people.
As the Microbus became more accepted in America, it began to take on a cult status with fringe groups. Its boxy appearance—so unlike anything the major auto manufacturers in Detroit were producing—became a symbol for counterculture types, who wanted to stand out from the rest of crowd. Some owners painted peace signs on the Microbus, earning it the nickname “hippie bus.”
“It became popular with people who were rejecting mainstream American culture,” White says. “It was their way of saying, ‘We don’t need your big V8 cars.’”
The VW Microbus was also a favorite of marginalized members of society, who could use the versatile vehicle to transport people to rallies, polling stations, protests and more during the political and cultural upheaval that laced the 1960s.
The microbus also became a symbol for the road trip. While the underpowered engine could fail, the multiple people inside knew they were in this together. Read about the Volkswagen microbus and its effect on America at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Bernard Spragg)
Classical music has been around for centuries now, and even up to this day many people listen to it. It is indeed a timeless genre of music.
Did you know that some of the pop songs that we listen to today were inspired by classical pieces? Classic FM lists twenty-seven of those songs.
Check it out over at the site.
(Image Credit: stux/ Pixabay)
Did you know that when Benjamin Franklin suggested daylight saving time, he was partly joking? And did you know that it is a health hazard?
These are just some of the fascinating facts about daylight saving time.
See the others over at Mental Floss.
Which of these are you already familiar with?
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
Many academic institutions are not big fans of writing in the first person. For some, writing in that manner makes writing subjective.
This is reflected in how students, particularly in secondary schools, are trained to write. Teachers I work with are often surprised that I advocate, at times, invoking the first person in essays or other assessment in their subject areas.
The role of the author in academic writing is to show his or her argument in a dispassionate and objective way. The personal opinion of the author has no place in this type of writing.
As noted in Strunk and White’s highly influential Elements of Style – (first published in 1959) the writer is encouraged to place themselves in the background.
While this is very reasonable and scholarly, it seems that the times are now changing, as writing in the first person perspective is “becoming more acceptable in academia” today.
More details about this over at The Conversation.
(Image Credit: janeb13/ Pixabay)
We love playing outdoors and get ourselves muddied (or at least, that’s what our generation used to do when we were kids, unlike today’s generation). Dogs are similar to us in that aspect: they love playing outside and getting themselves muddied, too, and that means that we’ll have a hard time cleaning them after playtime. And then, while cleaning them, we resolve to never let them play in the mud again.
Bored Panda shares 30 pictures that justify why we should never let our dogs play in the mud.
(Image Credit: Bored Panda)
Over the years, we’ve come to realize the many negative effects of excessive plastic production and consumption. We now have our sewers, seas, and oceans filled with plastic. Meanwhile, an alternative to plastic has been garnering attention to the general public, and that alternative is bioplastic.
The name itself evokes nature, the packaging is often colored green, the labels highlight how it was made from corn or compostable. There’s something sweetly seductive looking at a bioplastic cup and imagining it ending up in a huge compost pile where it will natural[ly] degrade over a few weeks or months into fertilizer that can be used to grow more corn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And it yet it’s mostly a dream, sold by the companies who make the plastic and perpetuated by our broken recycling system.
When done right, bioplastic could be the key towards reducing carbon emissions by up to 3.8 gigatons by 2050. However, it seems that the world does not know what that “do right” means.
More details about this over at Gizmodo.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Scott Bauer/ Wikimedia Commons)
In early Arthurian legend, Merlin was the product of a conception between a demon and a virtuous sleeping woman. This idea was apparently popular, as it made its way into a lot of medieval art. The devil could be blamed for all kinds of things, like an unexpected pregnancy, a child's death, a child who who did not resemble his father, or one who grew to be evil or strangely gifted. See a roundup of art illustrating such stories at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort
The spread of Coronavirus has caused a spread of misinformation as to how people can avoid catching the contagious disease. Health officials have maintained that the best way to avoid the virus is by washing your hands. CDC says that you should lather soap on your hands for at least 20 seconds. You can try singing “Happy Birthday” twice, but CNN has listed a few recommended songs that you can sing along, from Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” to Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts”.
image via wikimedia commons
Carl Chun led a deep-sea expedition in 1898 that led to findings that contradicted the belief that life could not exist below 300 fathoms. The German marine biologist along with his team emerged from the expedition with writings and proof of creatures that were strange and otherworldly during his time. After his expedition, he showcased his findings through the 1910 treasure Cephalopod Atlas. The atlas showed vivid illustrations by Friedrich Wilhelm Winter, as Brain Pickings detailed:
Among Winter’s stunning, sensual illustrations — which I have restored and made available as prints, benefiting Greenpeace and their inspired endeavor to protect the increasingly human-savaged habitats of these living wonders — is one of a creature Chun was the first to describe: a small, black cephalopod with branchial hearts and a light gonad that appears to shine just above its stomach. He named it Vampyroteuthis infernalis, “vampire squid from hell.”
image via Brain Pickings
The best way to wake up in the morning is with a cup of coffee. That means that we have to muster our strength to part ways with the comfort of our beds, and make coffee. Josh Renouf created an alarm clock that won’t force you to stand up and make coffee, it will force you to wake up and drink the morning coffee made by your alarm. The Barisieur is a retro-looking alarm clock that simultaneously brews a fresh cup of steaming coffee while waking you up!
image via Awesome Inventions
Another day, another hectic morning for Melina Marama Waite and her family. Unbeknownst to her, this seemingly ordinary day would turn out to be a crazy one. As she loaded all of her kids inside the car, she did not notice a stray cat sneak into her car. As nobody was aware of the cat being in their car, Melina went drove on.
She left the house around 7:30, dropped two of her kids off at day care, and was on her way to drop her 9-year-old daughter off at school — when she suddenly realized they’d had a stowaway in the car the entire time.
As she and her daughter “stopped behind some cars at an intersection,” the cat suddenly announced its presence by climbing into the dashboard.
“It was a complete shock, I didn't know what to do.”
Waite was incredibly bewildered to suddenly have a cat sitting right in front of her on the dashboard, and needless to say, the cat was just as confused.
“When the traffic moved I started moving and the cat slipped and panicked and tried to grab the rearview mirror and my daughter freaked out,” Waite said. “I tried to grab the cat then it fell and ran to the back of the car somewhere.”
What happened next? Find out over at The Dodo.
(Image Credit: The Dodo)
Many times we've heard about personal injury lawsuits as examples of overreaction and entitlement, with the most famous example being the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Often the facts behind these "frivolous lawsuit" cases are very different from what the public story becomes. Way back in 1928, May Donoghue found a decomposing snail in her ginger beer at a cafe in Scotland. Her complaint brought a shrug from the cafe owner. Donoghue got sick. Then she went after the manufacturer of the soda.
By the time the case arrived in court, people in Glasgow had already started to talk about it. Many questioned Donoghue’s motives and attacked her character: Some said that she was doing it for the money, while others claimed she merely wanted attention. Donoghue’s separation from her husband, whom she had recently left after he’d had several affairs, was also wielded against her and used as evidence of her untrustworthiness.
“Mrs. Donoghue was a married woman, but in the case, she is portrayed as going out with a ‘friend’ for ice cream and ginger beer,” says Erika Chamberlain, the dean of the law faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Chamberlain wrote her doctoral dissertation on the case, which went down in legal history as Donoghue v. Stevenson. “There was a lot of speculation as to whether the ‘friend’ was in fact a lover.”
Details about Donoghue’s personal life — her working-class childhood, her unhappy marriage to Henry Donoghue — were dissected in the press. She was often portrayed as crazy or a liar. According to Chamberlain, one defense lawyer tried to claim that the snail never even existed.
Nonetheless, Donoghue pressed on.
The lawsuit was long and complicated, but eventually established that manufacturers have some responsibility for the quality of their products. Read what happened at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Min Heo)
Here is a glorious example from 1941 of how to name a club. You can imagine what their meetings are like, but experience shows that a meeting of like-minded people does not necessarily have to stick to the subject. You'll find an even earlier clip along the same lines at Weird Universe.
