There’s an Icelandic show about four kittens living in a miniature house. It’s like animal reality television, which is appropriate for its name, Keeping up with Kattarshians. This is what Reddit user u/palmodi discovered, and shared online. The show is about Gudni, Stubbur, Britet, and Ronja, who are all nine weeks old. Now that’s a show added to my to watch list!
image via nutiminn
After months of Star Wars fans picking apart The Rise of Skywalker, the movie is finally available for home viewing. That means Screen Junkies is obligated to give us an Honest Trailer and fit all the complaints into just a few minutes. Well, that's not possible, but they do their best, and managed to shoehorn quite a few jokes in there, too.
Colonel John Boyd was a force to be reckoned with in a dogfight. He was a legendary fighter pilot with the United States Air Force, and he was known as “40-second Boyd” due to his ability to get on an opponent’s tail within 40 seconds.
During the Korean War, he commanded a fighter squadron of F-86 Sabres that dominated the skies over Korea and achieved a kill ratio over 10:1 against the superior MiG-15s flown by the enemy.
Surprised at the amazing success of his squadron, Boyd then, after the war, spent many years studying the data, and found out that it was situational awareness that made his pilots dominate the skies of Korea. Boyd would then create a decision-making process model based on this single observation.
Called the OODA loop, it consists of four parts: Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action, at which point the process repeats with new observations based on the results of the previous action. In practice, fighter pilots observe the presence of an enemy plane, orient themselves to locate the adversary, decide whether to go on the offensive or try to evade the threat, and then act on that decision. Boyd’s main strategic argument was that a faster, more maneuverable plane flown by pilots with quick reactions can overcome more powerful adversaries by “getting inside” their loop, changing the facts of the engagement so quickly the opponent can’t keep up. Boyd’s theories were integral to the development of the highly successful F-16 and F/A-18 aircraft, and the OODA loop model has since spread to other strategic realms like sports, politics, litigation, business, and crisis management.
And this mindset might also help us in combating the novel coronavirus. How? Find out over at Nautilus.
(Image Credit: Airwolfhound/ Wikimedia Commons)
It takes a long 5-14 days for the COVID-19 symptoms to appear, and this is why this type of coronavirus is so dangerous. In this span of time where the person becomes mildly ill because of the virus, that person would already have transmitted the virus to other people via respiratory droplets that are produced when a person either coughs or sneezes.
One person in South Korea, known only as patient 31, transmitted the virus to over 1,100 people as she went about her life.
But how does the novel coronavirus perform its sneak attack on the human body?
Scientists are beginning to understand those stealthy transmission dynamics at a biological level.
All viruses are intracellular parasites. Their only mission in life, if you can call it that, is to use the mechanisms of human cells to make copies of themselves. The tricky task is finding a way into the cells where they can replicate. The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, isn’t particularly good at that. Research so far suggests that it sneaks in through a single cellular door: a membrane protein called ACE2.
[...]
The virus that causes Covid-19 can latch onto the ACE2 receptor undetected—likely because of its animal origins. The adaptive immune system—the part that creates antibodies that help identify pathogens quickly—hasn’t had a chance to learn what SARS-CoV-2 looks like yet. This means the virus can use a molecular phishing scam to sneak into the cell.
More details about this over at Quartz.
(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)
Ever missed the classic video games but don't have an Atari on hand? The Internet Archive has got you covered! They have a Historical Software Collection that lets you play classic games online for free.
One of the games they have is Pac-Man (1982).
"While the Atari 400/800 version of Pac-Man wasn't as pretty as the arcade version, it was surprisingly solid. When you play this one online, keep in mind that F1 is the "start" key and the number pad on the keyboard is used for movement."
Want to know more about their collections? Head out to Mental Floss for a list!
Video by Atari Vintage Players
Almost no one is going outside due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As Japan fights off the virus, Nara’s various tourist attractions and amenities are devoid of people. The deer are now taking this chance to roam around Nara, Japan. Some wander off to gift shops and restaurants. Head over to AP News to see photographs of the deer roaming around!
image via AP News
Hotel thievery is more than taking hotel towels and toiletries. From ceramic bowls to throw pillows to oil paintings and to wireless speakers, hotel thieves take more than what we would expect. It can be anything, as long as it can fit in a suitcase. One guest at the Beverly Wilshire hotel stole a marble fireplace by cutting it out of the wall with a chisel, Peter Greenberg told The Guardian:
“There’s a sense of entitlement,” explains Greenberg. “The guest thinks: ‘I overpaid for this room, and what’s in it is mine.’ Anything that can be squeezed into a suitcase seems to be fair game.”
Some things that don’t fit in the overhead bin are up for grabs, too. That’s the takeaway from the latest Theft in Hotels survey published last year by Wellness Heaven, a German website that reviews luxury hotels and spas. The data, collected from 1,157 four- and five-star hotels, helps explain why rack rates keep rising. The first sentence of the report jumps off the page like the price of beluga on a room service menu: “Stealing soaps or pens seems harmless for many hotel guests, however, some are so bold that they carry TVs, pianos, mattresses or even [taxidermied] animals out of the hotel.”
The other shocker from this biennial survey is that the people who stay in the best places are the biggest thieves. Four-star hotel guests tend to pilfer common household staples like pens, towels, hangers and cutlery. It’s at the posh five-star places, though, where the good stuff goes missing.
A television set is nine times more likely to be stolen from a five-star than a four-star hotel. The same goes for art heists, which happen five times more often in the very best establishments. Duvets and pillows are another five-star obsession. There’s a fourfold increase in the theft of those coveted goose down accessories. The scam: bring some old bedding from home, and switch it out just before checkout.
image via wikimedia commons
In his lifetime, he was able to travel across four continents, write over 36 books, and write 25,000 letters to his correspondents around the world. He can be described as “charismatic, annoying, exuberant, caustic, but undeniably irrelevant”. He was one of the most widely admired public figures in the whole world. He is Alexander von Humboldt.
He claimed to sleep only four hours a night and called coffee “concentrated sunbeams.” Among his many scientific achievements, Humboldt theorized the spreading of the continental landmasses through plate tectonics, mapped the distribution of plants on three continents and charted the way air and water move to create bands of climate at different latitudes and altitudes. He tracked what became known as the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean and created what he called isotherms to chart mean temperatures around the globe. He observed the relationship between deforestation and changes in local climate, located the magnetic equator and found in the geological strata fossil remains of both plants and animals that he understood to be precursors to modern life forms, acknowledging extinction before many others.
Humboldt's expansive thinking was embraced by the prominent scientific thinkers of his time, such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. A friend of his also stated that he learned much more just by being around with Humboldt for an hour compared to reading books for eight days.
Read more about his life over at Smithsonian.com.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Equipped with his knowledge of electronics, with just a little isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, UV light, a screwdriver, and a toothbrush, watch this man restore this extremely yellow GameBoy Advance, which he bought on Ebay for $5. He was able to fix its power button, volume, as well as restore it to its original color.
Watch the whole video to find out how he did all of this.
(Video Credit: Odd Tinkering/ YouTube)
At the beginning of the 1700s, European colonists were scattering about the New World while others were busy trying to figure out how to cash in on the new lands. Communication across the Atlantic was slow and not all that reliable, so it was easy to convince investors that the riches of the Americas could someday be theirs. In France, that led to the founding of the Mississippi Company, where investors could claim their share of the coming riches. There was a problem, though, in that France had very few colonists, and they were not extracting those riches. And even with the investments, few signed up for the journey.
The pressure is on to deliver. In order to recruit more people to the colonies to extract what John Law needs from the isolated territory, he begins falsely advertising the “Eldorado” allure of Louisiana. Despite his best efforts, few volunteer to leave the comforts of home and so he turns to society’s “black sheep”. He recruits in hospitals for paupers, prostitutes, drunks and disorderly soldiers. Then he goes to prisons and makes its occupants an offer they can’t refuse: marry a prostitute and set sail into the sunset … to Louisiana.
A honeymoon voyage, it isn’t. Those who accept the bargain for their freedom are shackled together until they board ships on a less-than-first-class voyage to America.
You might guess that this led to disaster, and you'd be right. Read the story of the "Mississippi bubble" that led to the coinage of the term "millionaire," at Messy Nessy Chic.
Adrienne Raphel wrote a book about crossword puzzles and was shocked to learn that they are barely over 100 years old. But crosswords are far from the only word games, which have been around probably as long as words have been written down. Or maybe even earlier, but how would we know? We do know that word squares go back to the Roman Empire, because they carved them in stone.
The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”).
The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature—the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work.
Note how you can read the square horizontally or vertically, beginning in any corner. Raphel also gives us an overview of the rise of palindromes, acrostics, riddles, and various other puns at The Paris Review. -Thanks, WTM!
(Image credit: M Disdero)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world are being encouraged (in some cases ordered) to stay home, and if they must get out to maintain a distance of six feet (183 cm) between each other. To emphasize the importance of taking measures to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, artists have recreated iconic album covers that show the artists practicing social distancing.
Quarantines are no fun, but Bini the bunny and his owner are forced to stay inside, and leave it to them to find some ways to stay entertained. They play a popular card game called War, watch to see who wins the grand prize - a delicious bowl of fruit!
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDc0r8YA80&feature=youtu.be
Bacteria was discovered in 1676, fungal spores even earlier, but viruses are too small to be seen under an ordinary microscope. They also don't act like other life forms, and for a long time, scientists argued over whether they existed at all, and then over whether viruses are living things. The discovery of viruses came about when botanists studied a plant disease.
In 1857, farmers in the Netherlands reported a disease threatening another economically vital crop: tobacco. The leaves began turning a mottled dark green, yellow, and grey, causing farmers to lose up to 80 percent of crops in affected fields. Massive fields of tobacco that had been planted with the same crop repeatedly were especially susceptible. Once the disease reached a farmer’s field, it spread rapidly.
“It's very easy for it to move around,” says plant virologist Karen-Beth Scholthof of Texas A&M University. “If you're in a greenhouse or your garden and you're watering with a hose and the hose touches an affected plant, you can end up damaging a plant next to it.”
In the Netherlands, plant pathologist Adolf Mayer began researching the disease in 1879 and named it the “mosaic disease of tobacco.” He tried to use Koch’s guidelines, which call for a series of germ isolations and re-infections, to find its cause. But Mayer ran into trouble. Although he showed that the sap from a sick tobacco leaf could pass the disease to a healthy leaf, he couldn’t produce a pure culture of the pathogen and couldn’t spot the culprit under a microscope.
“The tools did not exist to see a virus,” says biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts, curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Outbreak exhibit. “It was just this invisible contagion.”
A series of botanists worked on the problem over several decades to unwind what caused tobacco mosaic disease. It was a virus, a tiny packet of DNA that needs to invade a living cell in order to reproduce. Read how they figured that out at Smithsonian.
Hello, my name is Tim and I am the head of security for The Cowboy. I have been asked to take on the additional duty of social media management while the museum is closed. I’m new to this but excited. My team will also continue to protect and monitor the museum. Thanks, Tim Send pic.twitter.com/bPiXD9DoAd
— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 17, 2020
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has closed to the public, but they have an exponentially-growing presence at Twitter. See, they gave their social media responsibilities over to Tim, their security guard, and he's having a heck of a time figuring out how to use Twitter.
Thanks for all the tips, Friends. Realize I have been doing the hashtags wrong. I need to use that pound sign from the phone. I’m learning! Here’s his costume from True Grit from 1969 courtesy of John Wayne Enterprises. #HashtagJohnWayne Thanks, Tim pic.twitter.com/AZu7EidGu2
— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 19, 2020
Luckily he has his grandson Lucas to advise him.
Lucas, can you read this?
— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 18, 2020
This is some truly genius performance art, but that doesn't make it any less funny. Really, #HashtagJohnWayne is returning results. You can follow Tim's Twitter adventures at the museum's feed, or check out the highlights at Boing Boing.
