The question is, just how much water is really required to go kayaking? Not much, as a group of adventurous (read: crazy) friends in British Columbia found out. They took their kayaks out after a rain storm in Lion's Bay to slide down a really long drainage ditch into the ocean. Getting their kayaks deployed was a job, but then it's just like a waterslide, right? Not quite. For one thing, there are four of them in boats, so a pileup was inevitable, but not bad enough to stop the fun. For another thing, there are tree branches and other obstructions along a drainage ditch that you wouldn't see anywhere near a waterslide. It's a good thing they were wearing helmets. Notice the blood on one guy's hand when they are through. A good time was had by all. -via Born in Space
In 1978, I was really put out at having to pay $8 to see the Eagles. Everyone knew that concert tickets were $5 and had been for years. Less than 50 years later, you could easily pay 100 times that much to see your favorite musical artist perform. And there's plenty of blame to go around. For one thing, there are lot more people now, wanting to see a limited number of touring artists. Even at the largest venues, an astonishing number of tickets are reserved for fan clubs, sponsors or their clients, and VIPs, which make retail tickets even more scarce than they appear. Then there are fees added. Then there's the infrastructure that allots tickets, which is expensive even when it works. Buying tickets online with a credit card opens up the system to all sorts of abuses that didn't work so well when you had to visit a box office to buy a paper ticket. Scalpers use the latest tech to bypass the safeguards that make ticket buying difficult for fans. The ease of making tons of money for nothing mean that scalpers are extremely hard to thwart. Read how the modern ticket-selling system works to hoover up your money at Vox.
You will be forgiven if you start watching this video and think it to be a comedy skit. Or a movie trailer. I started reading what I considered to be a serious tech article and then the video came up, and I had to read more carefully to make sure it's not a parody -especially when they went into doing a face transplant to go along with the brain transplant. BrainBridge is a medical engineering startup, and the "head transplant system" you see here is just a concept. It has a long way to go before it can actually be used, or even built. The real hurdle is that we do not know how to successfully attach brains to bodies.
One of the most significant challenges in realizing this ambitious concept is the current inability to fully repair nerve and spinal cord damage. BrainBridge acknowledges this hurdle and is actively recruiting top specialists in various fields to collaborate on finding solutions.
It's no surprise that BrainBridge is actively recruiting investors as well. At least they got a talented graphics company to put the concept video together. It would make a decent movie trailer, but that idea has already been done a few times. -via Damn Interesting
Mattel continues to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Barbie doll with a new collection of nine dolls celebrating groundbreaking women in sports around the world. These dolls join a continuing lineup of Barbie Role Models. Just last month, Mattel debuted the Kristi Yamaguchi doll, modeled after the American figure skater. The nine new dolls are modeled after:
US tennis champion Venus Williams
Canadian soccer player Christine Sinclair
Australian soccer player Mary Fowler
French boxer Estelle Mossely
Mexican gymnast Alexa Moreno
Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade
Spanish paratriathlete Susana Rodriguez
Retired Italian swimmer Federica Pellegrini
Polish sprinter Ewa Swoboda
Barbie is also partnering with VOICEINSPORT to provide virtual mentoring for young athletes, and with other retailers to produce Barbie books, snacks, gifts, and clothing with a sports theme. They are also offering a variety of Barbie dolls in uniforms of various sports and sports-themed play sets. We don't yet know when these dolls will be available to order or in a store near you. -via Smithsonian
Continue reading to see each athlete with her Barbie doll.
Tettyo Saito, 30, has spent many years as a hikikomori--a socially reclusive person. He failed college entrance exams and so stayed at home with his parents, rarely leaving. He watched a lot of movies during that time, including one from Romania that fascinated him.
Saito realized that he needed to learn some of the Romanian language to understand the movie better. So, with textbooks and online communities, he taught himself Romanian. Eventually, a 2023 article in The Asahi Shimbum reports, he began writing fiction in that language.
After sharing some of his work with Romanian online communities, a publisher in Romania picked it up. Saito has published a few novels that are actually read and respected in Romania.
He still has, though, yet to visit that nation.
-via Wrath of Gnon | Photo: Yuta Torio
We are at the point in the 17-year long life cycle of the cicada when our little winged friends are roaming the earth in search of mates. They're everywhere, including in our drinks.
Noon Whistle Brewery, a brewpub in Chicago, offers unique drinks that have a bit of extra protein in the form of a single cicada which, the company assures us, has been locally harvested. So you know that you're supporting local growers.
The cicada is served in a measure of Jeppson's Malört, a liqueur closely identified with Chicago and described by comedian John Hodgman as flavored like "pencil shavings and heartbreak."
In the pantheon of tricks that advertisers use, the confusion between the terms "orange" and "oranges" is subtle and maliciously genius. What better way to confuse the viewer? Orange, as in the fruit, comes in discrete units and therefore takes a plural form with an "s." Orange, as in the color, is a continuous quality and has no plural form. This poor spokesperson, er, orange, doesn't see the distinction until she is corrected on it. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The manufacturers of the "orange" drink are counting on no one else catching the difference, either. That's why it's important to have an educated public. Despite schools' best efforts, most kids aren't listening during this lesson because they don't realize that it may be important to their lives later, and they end up believing they are really drinking orange juice. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The best neighbors are the ones who have something interesting going on that makes you smile, or at least doesn't adversely affect anyone around them. You know, the kind who make sure there's no HOA in the neighborhood before buying a home. I say this as the only homeowner in my neighborhood with a brightly-colored house. But even without the expensive but interesting constructions or decorations, they draw your attention for just being their own quirky selves. The fellow above told the guy who snapped the picture that he was taking his mother-in-law for a ride.
Someone in Lakewood dons a unicorn costume while snow blowing and this is the kind of community I want. pic.twitter.com/yYlfH42jAG
— SuzyLeeInCLE (@WeThePeopleCLE) January 23, 2022
What would you think if you saw a Dalek in someone's window? Or a Batmobile in the driveway? Or when someone does something as nice as staging a drive-in theater for the neighborhood kids? You'd get out your phone and snap a picture of course, because those things are worth sharing. See a ranked gallery of 50 pictures taken of wonderful scenes from the neighborhood at Bored Panda.
(Top image credit: rustede30)
We always loved the fascinating look under the hood that Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy gave us over the years, but we haven't heard from him in a long time. Bill is back! Once again, he takes a mundane subject and makes it way too interesting. Duct tape (or Duck™ tape) is something everyone has, and everyone uses, but what makes it work so well? Hammack dissolved the tape into its component parts: The plastic backing, the cloth reinforcement, and the adhesive. The adhesive is key, because it has so many qualities that make it useful. It sticks things together effectively, but it's not permanent. Most of the time, it can be removed without leaving residue. We get an explanation of exactly how the adhesive behaves to give us the tape we want, and how adhesives in other kinds of tape differ. But the silver backing and the fabric reinforcement have important roles, too. Yes, there are many kinds of tape that vary in their components, making them useful for various applications, but duct tape is useful for almost everything in the world -except ducts. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Twitter user Michael (@bovineflu) spotted this odd vending machine at a train station in the city of Freiburg in southwestern Germany.
This machine sells unclaimed delivery packages. The look like they've been resealed after opening, which is probably a good precaution lest some dangerous--or worse, valuable--items be accidentally sold. Michael describes it as "100% my kind of slot machine." Everyone is a winner!
-via Massimo
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, opens this weekend. While we were all astonished by the magnificent full length chase scene that was Fury Road in 2015, Furiosa is said to be even better. In honor of the occasion, Screen Junkies is paying tribute to the man behind all the Mad Max films, George Miller, by looking at the first three of these movies.
First, there was Mad Max in 1979, in which a cop named Max Rockatansky tries to keep order as society is collapsing in Australia. He was played by a 21-year-old American-born newcomer named Mel Gibson. The 1981 sequel was titled Mad Max 2 in Australia, and The Road Warrior in the US because so few Americans had seen the original that they did not want it to appear to be a sequel. The world had gone full dystopian by then, but fashion and car chases were paramount. The third movie in 1985 was Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which was supremely silly but starred Tina Turner, so we all went to see it. It is considered the weakest of all the franchise's movies. This Honest Trailer looks back at all three movies of the Mad Max Mel Gibson era. And now we look forward to the Max-less Furiosa.
🎓✨ At 98, WWII veteran and Poolesville resident Richard Remp received the high school diploma he forfeited to serve our country. Hand-delivered to his hospice bedside, this diploma marks a heartfelt tribute to his lifetime of bravery and service.
— Montgomery County MD (@MontgomeryCoMD) May 20, 2024
📰 https://t.co/lPqfoBEbM4 pic.twitter.com/TG3bb8EuMV
This story could be framed as a joke: "How long does it take a Marine to graduate from high school?" But it's actually a bittersweet story. Richard Remp of Poolesville, Maryland, is known as Gunny to his friends because he was a decorated gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. Remp did not graduate from high school because he dropped out at age 17 in order to serve in World War II. He stayed in the Marines and also served in Korea, and then in Vietnam. Now 98, Remp is in hospice care due to stage four cancer.
Remp's family, American Legion Post 247, and a caring school superintendent joined forces to issue Remp a diploma from Sharon High School in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Remp did not attend Sharon High School, but the nearby high school he attended could not pull off issuing a diploma in time. Sharon school Superintendent Justi Glaros rallied her school board to approve the diploma, and then drove 4.5 hours to hand-deliver it (along with a Sharon tigers t-shirt) to Remp on Friday. A video of Remp's acceptance speech will bring a tear to your eye. -via Fark
Modern surgeons can do amazing things to repair a body, but they still have a couple of drawbacks. First, there aren't enough of them, and the skilled surgeons we have aren't distributed equally around the world. Second, they still have human-sized hands and fingers. Very tiny, precise surgical repairs are the province of highly-trained microsurgeons -and robots.
Sony introduced their new Microsurgery Assistance Robot at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation. It can be controlled by a trained microsurgeon from a distance, but since it has a microscope for viewing and scaled-up controls, it can be used by surgeons who are not specialists in microsurgery. Imagine being able to fix tiny holes in delicate blood vessels, inside a body where the problem is not exposed by a large incision. In this demonstration video, the robot uses various instruments to cut and then stitch up that cut on a single kernel of corn. We hope the ear is recovering nicely. -via Laughing Squid
In February of 1947, a story about a runaway child in San Francisco was picked up and made the news nationwide. The boy was already home again, so there was no panic, and the story provoked mostly laughter. Richard Allen loved movies, and with $20 in his pocket, spent an entire week watching movies all day, buying comic books, and eating candy and hot dogs. He slept outside at night, and eventually was hauled back home by his father. The story was a sensation again when it went viral on the internet in 2021. But behind the headlines, there were questions. How did a 10-year-old boy in 1947 get his hands on $20? Why was he afraid to go home? And why weren't the police involved?
Allen died in 2020, so Joshua Bote of the San Francisco Gazetteer talked to his daughter Denise about her father's unique life, both before and after the theater incident. His mother dressed him up as Shirley Temple when he was a baby, he had a crush on Annette Funicello, he was a wrestling promoter in the 1980s, and he was once awarded Citizen of the Year. But he never told his daughter about the week he spent watching movies away from his parents. Yet Denise was able to fill in some of the blanks in the story, which you can read at the Gazetteer. -via Nag on the Lake
On May 21, 1924, 18-year-old Richard Loeb lured a 14-year-old acquaintance, Bobby Franks, into his vehicle. They then picked up Loeb's friend, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold. The two men bashed in Franks' head with a chisel, stuffed a rag down his throat, removed his clothing, poured acid on him, and stashed his body ten miles from home in a culvert. Then they set about making a ransom demand from the boy's family. The ransom was never paid, as Franks' body was found the next day.
Leopold and Loeb held no animus toward Franks; he was just a convenient victim for their experiment in committing the perfect crime. It was far from perfect, though, and the two were soon arrested. The ghastly crime made national news, mostly because Leopold and Loeb were from wealthy and prominent Chicago families, and were considered to have bright futures. They also showed no remorse for the murder, and had only the thinnest of motives. There would not be a "trial of the century," because both pled guilty to the crime. Instead, there was a hearing before a judge on whether they should receive the death penalty or life imprisonment. And the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow was arguing for leniency. Interestingly, Bobby Franks himself had argued against the death penalty in a debate competition shortly before his murder. Read about the sensational case of Leopold and Loeb at Smithsonian.
