In a regular traffic video, you might feel a little guilty gawking at drivers slipping and sliding on ice. These drivers live for this sort of thing. And the photographers recording their antics might have a death wish, too, or maybe just a need for adrenaline. At least they don't encounter drivers coming from the opposite direction. This video was recorded at the 2020 Monte Carlo Rally held in France over the weekend. The course is deliberately designed to cover wet and dry roads, snow, ice, and twisting mountain routes. This video is from just one curve; there are plenty more from the rally at YouTube. -via Digg
Kendall Diwish, a resident of Alberta, found a trio of abandoned kittens who were stuck to the ice. He used some warm coffee to free them. Happily, they have all found a new home.
Just now at Delancey and Norfolk in the Lower East Side an accident ran over a pedestrian trapping them under an SUV. Onlookers just lifted the SUV, dragging the victim out. pic.twitter.com/uq1IHcSJ9k
— help how do i change this (@colbydroscher) January 26, 2020
New York City residents are known for ignoring each other, but that's just a method of maintaining a sense of privacy in crowded living conditions. When the situation calls for it, strangers will band together to do what needs to be done. Sunday afternoon, a traffic accident pinned a 25-year-old woman underneath a car.
The woman was crossing Delancey in the crosswalk, police said, when a 65-year-old woman made a right turn from Norfolk St. and hit her, then struck a car stopped at a traffic light, causing a chain reaction of minor fender-benders.
The younger woman was pinned under the SUV. Video posted on Twitter shows one bystander run up to the rear wheel, as two more rush to help. More and more people crowd the heavy vehicle, surrounding it as they lift up the driver’s side to pull the woman to safety.
The woman suffered some pain and bruising, and was taken to a hospital to be checked out. -via reddit
A machine that automatically washes clothes. A car that can drive itself. The quest for making our lives easier still goes on up to this day, which is why I’m not surprised if pilotless commercial jet flights are talked about for years. Unfortunately, there’s been little decisive evidence that suggests that autonomous flying is possible, until now.
Airbus has confirmed one of its test aircraft took off automatically at Toulouse-Blagnac airport in France last December.
The European aerospace company conducted a series of successful tests on autopilot last month, with two pilots on standby.
According to Airbus, the A350-1000 achieved eight automatic takeoffs over a period of four and a half hours.
More details about this over at CNN.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Airbus/ CNN)
Who would have thought that colored pencils can turn into an intricate human skull? By gluing together 646 pencils, British artist Skot Biscuit was able to carve out this masterpiece, which Skot named Wilson after making it.
Check out Skot Biscuit’s Instagram to see more of his skull-themed works.
Via Laughing Squid
(Image Credit: skotbiscuit/ Instagram)
Brazil produces more coffee than any other country in the world. Who comes in second? Not Colombia, as you might think. Nor any other nation in South America. The second biggest coffee producer is Vietnam.
For visitors and locals alike, it’s clear that coffee is an incredibly important and integral part of modern Vietnamese culture. The plant was introduced by the French in 1857, and, when it was discovered that the central highlands of Vietnam provided excellent growing conditions, production ramped up exponentially. Small-scale production shifted to plantations at the beginning of the 20th century, but the industry stalled after a century of growth just prior to and during the Vietnam War.
In the two decades following the war, the coffee industry experienced an incredible rebound, becoming Vietnam’s chief export as well as the second biggest coffee exporter in the world (Brazil is No. 1). It’s also the main global supplier of Robusta coffee, the bean used widely in instant coffee and espressos. Economically, the coffee sector accounts for around 3 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP) and provides jobs for almost 3 million people.
While most of Vietnam's coffee is exported, the drink has become part of Vietnamese culture, and it's served very differently than what Americans are used to. Read about coffee in Vietnam at Coffe or Die.
-via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: (WT-shared) Shoestring)
We think of plane crashes as long drops from high altitudes that leave no survivors. But plane crashes, as rare as they are, happen in all kinds of ways, and many are survivable. In fact, 95% of those involved in plane accidents survive. So you may as well learn what to do in that situation instead of assuming you're a goner. -via Digg
London-born artist Chris Kenny crafts dancing figures and abstract portraits by gathering and piecing together small twigs. Viewing his collection, one might see patterns or objects in the simple and minimalistic works. From his twig recreations of different saints to a small baby, check out his works on Instagram.
(via Colossal)
image via Colossal
It is said that around 7,000 people get cited yearly for violating the rules for driving in the HOV lane. This 62-year-old man just had to be one of them, after he tried to disguise a fake skeleton as a passenger so that he could use the aforementioned lane.
The Arizona Department of Public Safety says a trooper pulled over the man on Thursday after noticing he had placed a fake skeleton in the passenger’s front seat.
At the very least, I could praise the man for his cleverness by making the skeleton sit upright, tying it to the front seat, and have it wear a hat.
He could have had the skeleton wear the seatbelt, though, and have it wear gloves. But hey, that’s just me!
Last April, a man was pulled over after driving in the HOV lane with a mannequin wearing a sweatshirt, baseball cap and sunglasses.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Arizona Department of Public Safety via AP)
Rebecca Mehra is a middle-distance runner with Little Wing, an elite running club in Bend, Oregon.
One day, Mehra had an “electrocution incident” in her home, which she recorded in her training log. Apparently, Mehra had an oven with a broken control panel, which caused it to beep continuously. So, she started unplugging the appliance when it wasn’t in use. That day, as she reached her hand behind the oven to pull the plug, something unexpected happened. ZAP!
Suddenly 240 volts were coursing through her left hand, up the arm, and down through her feet to the floor. “For what felt like three or four seconds I wasn’t able to let go of the plug,” she recalls, “as if my hand was glued to it.”
For a few moments, after successfully unplugging the oven, Mehra lay on the floor confused and worried. She felt fine at the moment, however, other than the fact that her hand was trembling, so “she carried on as usual.”
A few days later, the effects of that incident started to show: she couldn’t hit the splits, and, according to her coach, “It was like she was sticking to the ground on each step.”
What happened to her?
Find out more about Rebecca Mehra’s story over at Outside Online.
(Image Credit: Rebecca Mehra/ Instagram)
In 1835, Captain Charles C. Stannard was surprised to find a shallow reef way out in the middle of Lake Superior. Something had to be done to warn lake traffic away from the mountain underneath the surface, but it took years and patient engineering to build a lighthouse. The Stannard Rock Light stands 40 kilometers from the nearest island, and even further from the mainland, making it the most distant lighthouse in the world. It also earned the title “the loneliest place in the world.”
Life in this remote outpost was lonely and harsh. The keepers were not allowed to have wives, girlfriends and families, which increased homesickness. The men spent time playing cribbage and ate whatever came out of the can. Often, they went days without speaking to each other. To combat the terrible isolation, the men were rotated off the Rock, typically after three weeks. Louis Wilks, who was the lighthouse keeper for twenty long years from 1936 to 1956, spent a record 99 consecutive days on the Rock—a feat no other keeper were able to even approach. The solitude was so crushing that many keepers had no idea what they signed up for until they arrived at the Rock. One keeper threatened to swim ashore if a boat did not come immediately to get him. Another one—as the legend goes—became deranged and had to carried off the Rock in a straitjacket.
You might not think that three weeks on a rock is all that bad, but there was no scenery to look at, much less internet access. The work was hard and dangerous, and sometimes the scheduled boats did not show up. The lighthouse was manned from 1882 to 1962. Read about the hard life on Stannard Rock Light at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Lt. Kristopher Thornburg, U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Alder)
Milk has a peculiar history. It's baby food for mammals, but humans continue to drink it way past infancy. We've learned to make cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream with it. And we drink milk from species other than our own, which is all kinds of weird. Is there any harm in that? The answer, of course, is "it depends." Which is the answer to pretty much all dietary controversies. Kurzgesagt gives us the state of the research about drinking milk. -via reddit
Santiago Terrasas, a Shoshoni martial artist and kinesiologist who lives outside of Reno, Nevada, will happily take you down with a meat cleaver. For 40 minutes, he'll whack at you with the sharp edge, livening up the blood flowing in your body. Eugene S. Robinson describes the experience in Ozy:
“Well, ultimately, our body wants to breathe,” says the 41-year-old Terrases. “So I want to improve the flow of blood, spread those blood vessels, open up the muscles and push the pain out.” A statement that could easily have been attributed to at least a half-dozen serial killers. [...]
“There are more things under heaven on Earth than in our books of science,” says surgeon Dr. Steve Ballinger quoting Hamlet. “But I’ve had four massages with razor-sharp instruments and it seems like it works 50 percent of the time. Usually if the cleaver is cold, it’s like an ice massage. Or maybe it scares you into a neuro reset.”
Terrasas charges $3 a minute, but will soon raise that price due to increased demand for his services. So make an appointment while you can still afford it.
-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Kasia Robinson
In the summer of 2011, brothers Morgan and Mason McGrew (previously at Neatorama) had an idea to shoot their own stop-motion version of Toy Story 3. They were just kids then, but they jumped in and never gave up on the project. Joe magazine tells their story.
And yes, these were toys that Morgan and Mason had played with when they were young. “We had some of the toys from when we were kids,” Morgan tells me over email. “Others we found elsewhere - school, day-cares, parks, etc.” It gives the film a whole extra level – when the Woody and Buzz memorably face the existential crisis of their owners growing up and no longer being played with, some of these are real discarded toys that have actually had that happen to them.
Their film is a combination of various techniques, and has all been shot on iPhones. Woody, Buzz and the rest mostly move in stop-motion, with the brothers having customised and modified the off-the-shelf toys to be poseable for their animation needs.
The human characters are played by their friends, family and school teachers. Morgan plays Andy, and Mason is grown-up garbage man Sid. Kids from a local day-care fill in as extras.
The result of that work is a shot-for-shot recreation of the Pixar film. The eight-year production was completed about a month ago. McGrew and McGrew sought permission from Disney before posting the finished movie on YouTube Saturday. If you want to watch it, continue reading.
We’ve all been there. We’ve had a friend or relative who passed away, and it’s a sad thing to know that they can no longer be here with us in this world. We only have a handful of photographs and memories with which to remember them. And one way of seeing these photos and reliving these memories is by opening Google Street View.
One Twitter user recently posted that her family never got to say goodbye to her grandpa when he died a few years ago, but when she visited her grandpa’s farm through Street View, there he was, sitting at the end of the road. Thousands of people responded, many with their own stories of finding old Street View shots of their dearly departed grandmas reclining in their front yards or their grandpas getting into their trucks.
Check out some stories of people who found their loved ones on Google Street View over at Slate.
(Image Credit: Tumisu/ Pixabay)
