In case you missed it, there was a third Men in Black sequel released in 2019 that starred Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson instead Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Men in Black: International was supposed to be a summer blockbuster, but performed below expectations both at the box office and in critical reviews. Screen Junkies gives us this Honest Trailer to explain why.
The first recorded use of lipstick was 5,000 years ago, which is about as far back as records of anything goes, so coloring one's lips may extend much further back in time. But history begins with records, otherwise it is prehistoric. Lipstick, lip gloss, and lip painting varied over the ages, sometimes used by men as well as women, sometimes it denoted one's status, and the ingredients varied wildly from era to era and place to place.
In antiquity, it was the Middle East that certainly had a more liberal attitude towards lipstick, as evidenced by wall paintings that show women with brightly coloured lips. The ancient Greeks had a more complicated relationship with lip paint however, where it became increasingly entangled with societal status. Predominantly worn by sex workers of the period, it became a sort of symbol of the profession, signifying their status, to the point where if ever one of these women would be out in public at the wrong time of day, or without their designated lip paint, they could be chastised and punished for posing as “respectable ladies”. Alongside red dye and wine residue, they improvised with a surprising range ingredients including sheep sweat, human saliva and even crocodile excrement.
Ingredients improved over time, thank goodness. Read the history of lipstick at Messy Nessy Chic.
(Image credit: Stephencdickson)
In this recent clip from the show Italia's Got Talent, Marula Eugster Rigolo uses 13 palm branches and a feather to show us all up. I mean, I can't even walk into the next room without dropping or spilling whatever I am carrying. The actual performance is only six minutes, beginning at about a minute into the video. -via TYWKIWDBI
Artist Simon Weckert performed an experiment that highlights the way our world now works. He piled 99 smartphones into a wagon and pulled it down a street in Berlin. As you can see, it was a light traffic day, so much so that he could walk down the middle of the road. But Google's location tracking saw 99 phones in one place, and flagged Google Maps to alert users to a traffic jam there. Once that happened, there were even fewer cars on that street, as traffic app users went around the area. The stunt highlights how closely your phone and activities are being monitored. -via Laughing Squid
In 2018, Colin O'Brady became the first person to walk across Antarctica by himself with no resupplies. He's now written a book about that trek, The Impossible First. In an excerpt, we learn about one of the times things didn't go as planned. It was that one time O'Brady varied his routine in setting up his tent, skipping the part about anchoring it to his sled. The wind gusted and pulled a stake out of the ice, and he could envision it blowing away completely.
I had no backup tent. No rescue party could ever make it through a storm like this, with zero visibility and rugged, uneven terrain that would prevent a plane from landing. I’d grow sleepy, then increasingly irrational, and finally I’d just lie down, thinking that the ice was a nice place to rest. I’d die alone, in the cold, my body temperature falling.
It wasn’t the fear of death that really got to me—it was the realization that I’d never make it home. I’d never get back to Portland; never walk along the Willamette River holding hands with my wife, Jenna; never laugh around another campfire at the Oregon Coast with my parents and the rest of my family; never again smell the deep, peaceful aroma of a damp, bark-lined forest trail in the Cascade Mountains.
My hands were now everything. They gripped the edge of the tent as my airborne home yanked and jerked over my head. I knew everything depended on what happened in the next few seconds—on how long I could hold on and what I did or didn’t do.
We know he made it back to civilization in one piece, but that moment was still terrifying. Let's assume it was the last time he didn't anchor his tent to his sled. Read the book excerpt at Outside Online. -via Damn Interesting
Read more about O'Brady's adventures in our previous posts.
Are you missing a beautiful ring with Elvish words inscribed into the inside and outside? It's absolutely precious. Once you hold it, you never really want to let it go.
That's why police in North Yorkshire, UK are thoughtfully seeking out the owner, who no doubt dearly misses it. BBC News reports:
North Yorkshire Police seemed unaware of the JRR Tolkien connection when they shared photos of the "distinctive silver ring" on Facebook. [...]
Facebook users responded telling police they needed to follow in the footsteps of Frodo Baggins and destroy the ring.
"The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom, only there can it be unmade," one Facebook user said.
"The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. One of you must do this."
Nonsense! The ring is the property of Lord Sauron, who will no doubt handsomely reward anyone who ensures its return to him.
-via Geekologie
When a member of the US Senate dies in office, the state's governor usually appoints someone to fill the position. Quite a few times in our nation's history, that person has been the late senator's widow. The House of Representatives fills the slot by special election, in which a widow can run and often has their party's support. Not only is it a way to show respect for the late congressman, it is usually assumed that the widow has the same political positions. Beginning in 1922, widow succession has been an important method of getting women into congress. At least in the early days, becoming a political widow was the easiest way for a housewife, or any woman, to enter congress. But are these widows really qualified?
Many widows who went to Congress were already familiar with its working, having been party to their husbands’ world. “They had worked on their husbands’ campaigns and as a result, knew their district well,” explain Palmer and Simon. Many wives were deeply entwined with their husbands’ policy setting and political strategy. Before the powerful congressman Hale Boggs died, his wife, Lindy, “was his chief political adviser,” explains the House of Representatives archives. “She set up her husband’s district office in New Orleans, orchestrated his re–election campaigns, canvassed voters, arranged for her husband’s many social gatherings, and often acted as his political surrogate as demands on his time became greater the further he climbed in the House leadership.”
Some widows’ tenures in D.C. came to overshadow their husbands’ legacies. Perhaps most notable was Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a famous and formidable politician who spoke out against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s redbaiting. She originally went to Congress in 1940 to fill her husband Clyde’s seat and, after her election to the Senate in 1964, she made history as the first woman to serve in both chambers. She lost her last election in 1972, when she was in her mid-70s.
The tradition continues. While more women are entering congress on their own records, name recognition and legacy still helps. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is in the running for the seat vacated by her late husband Elijah Cummings. Read the history of widow succession at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Library of Congress)
Janelle Shane studies artificial intelligence and posts the funniest results, as we've seen before. After several attempts at training algorithms to generate recipes, and even baking brownies full of horseradish (shown above), she has completely given up all hope.
I’ve seen neural net recipes that call for crushed sherry or 21 pounds of cabbage. One of my personal favorites is a recipe called “Small Sandwiches” that called for dozens of fussily chopped, minced, and diced ingredients - before chucking them in the food processor for 3 hours. Part of the problem has been neural nets with memory so terrible that halfway through the recipe they forget they’re making cake.
More recent neural nets like GPT-2, given better long-term memory and extensive training on a huge portion of the internet, can make recipes that are more likely to pass for the real thing. Use talktotransformer.com to prompt GPT-2 with “Black Forest Cake. Ingredients:” and the quantities and ingredients will be reasonable, even if the whole thing doesn’t quite work (generating a few examples in a row, I saw some Black Forest recipes that called for kneading the batter, and one that suggested pouring the batter into a toaster).
In her latest post, Shane passes along AI recipes for Crock Pot Cold Water, Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake (which contains chicken but no chocolate), and Completely Meat Circle. How could you possibly make these recipes worse? Shane proposes to next have a neural network study vintage American recipes, as in those abominations that rely heavily on Jell-O and condensed soup. You can submit your suggestions for that experiment. -via Metafilter
DoodleChaos (previously at Neatorama) designed a roller coaster around Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Not only does it work perfectly with the music, but it's a thrill just watching it.
This was a challenging project because the rides in Planet Coaster do not always run at the same speed. I found that the timing changed based on changes to my CPU load or graphics settings. In total, I spent over 90 hours making this video.
At four minutes, it's longer than a real-world roller coaster, and less nauseating, too! -via Digg
Tracking single viruses is not a new concept in the scientific field. The concept is, you attach some sort of molecule that will glow to the virus. This will serve as a tracking device for the virus, and you’ll be able to track the virus with very high precision using optical microscopes.
There’s a problem in doing this, however. Since the glowing molecule is usually attached on the outer shell of the virus, this can interfere with the normal activity of the virus. This is why putting the glowing molecule inside the virus is more preferable, and that’s just what this group of researchers from China did.
The researchers replaced the glowing molecule with a quantum dot. A quantum dot is a tiny blob of material that, by virtue of its tiny size, will glow when excited by light. Even better, the color of the glow is tuned by changing the size of the blob, so we can make nearly any color of quantum dot we want.
More details of how they did it, and what they found out, over at Ars Technica.
(Image Credit: National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research/ Ars Technica)
It’s not a surprise that I see people wearing face masks when I go outside.
With the spread of the new coronavirus, many people have rushed to stores to buy face masks. Some even put canine face masks on their dogs. But does a regular face mask really protect its wearer from the virus? Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
If it's a regular surgical face mask, the answer is "no," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Live Science.
A more specialized mask, known as an N95 respirator, can protect against the new coronavirus, also called 2019-nCoV. The respirator is thicker than a surgical mask, but Schaffner doesn't recommend it for public use, at least not at this point.
More details about this over at Live Science.
(Image Credit: Alex Chirkin/ Wikimedia Commons)
They eat up various crops. They are largely resistant to insecticides. They cause losses of up to $5 billion annually. These are diamondback moths, one of the major insect pests in the world.
To try to suppress their population in a sustainable way, an international team of researchers has created a strain of genetically engineered diamondback moths and released them into the wild for the first time.
For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers engineered the moths so that when the males of the strain mated with wild females, the female offspring would die during the caterpillar life stage.
The male offspring, however, would survive and mate with the remaining female moths, repeating the cycle with their offspring until the overall population is reduced.
This action, however, raises some concerns.
More details over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: Olaf Leillinger/ Wikimedia Commons)
コーギーのおしり 焼き上がりました♪( *´ω`* )/
— うちは、ぱんや。 (@utiwapanya) June 2, 2019
中味はリンゴジャムとカスタードです♪ pic.twitter.com/hBNMPK6ECS
Corgi butts are really… something fun to look at, and, to some, really appetizing.
A bakery in Sapporo, Japan named Utiwapanya seemed to have been inspired by these cutely-shaped buns and decided to make these buns called “Corgi-butt Bread.”
I guess you could just call them Corgi buns.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: @utiwapanya/ Twitter)
Approximately 200 heart transplants take place in the UK every year, while 20 patients die while waiting for a suitable organ. Fortunately, a team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands may soon develop a robotic heart that can pump blood but is soft and pliable.
Researcher Jolanda Kluin was inspired upon seeing a picture of the soft and flexible but tough arms of a robotic starfish. Called a hybrid heart, the device has a layer of synthetic muscle that is strong and flexible enough to contract and expand like real heart muscle, a lining to capture cells that will gradually build a tissue cover, and an outer net-like scaffolding covered by the patient’s own tissue to reduce the chances of rejection.
The first working model is expected to be ready for human implantation by 2028.
The Masons and other secret societies saw a great rise in membership after World War I. That meant a rise in the number of hazing rituals for candidates, at least until the Masons banned hazing some time in the 1930s. DeMoulin Bros. & Co. was ready to supply amazing props and contraptions to aid in those rituals, including the punch bowl shown above, which had a second hidden tank to direct something drinkable to the spigot. The company supplied organizations with electric cages, guillotines, fake women, and mechanical goats. Many of the items were recommended to be used in conjunction with their electric carpet that supplied a shock. And then there is the intriguing human centipede for sale. See a collection of pages from the DeMoulin Bros. & Co. 1930 catalog at Dangerous Minds. Warning: one page contains a racist slur.
