This looks like an ultra-modern playground, but it's actually an astronomical observatory in Jaipur, India. It was built on orders from Maharajah Jai Singh II in the early 1700s. Jantar Mantar, which means calculation instrument, is the largest of five observatories the Maharajah had built to explore and measure the heavens. Read more about it and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user ComradeCosmobot)
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Builders renovating an office at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, England, were surprised to find a fox head jutting through a hole in the floor. The fox had apparently tried to wiggle into the room from below and became stuck.
RSPCA animal welfare officer Kate Wright, who freed the animal, said: "I just had these big eyes staring at me."
She added: "Here was this fox's head poking out of a floor and he was so jammed he couldn't move.
"I actually think he had quite an embarrassed expression on his face."
After the RSPCA arrived, the builders pried up a section of the floor and freed the fox, which was caged, taken away, and released. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: RSPCA)
Austin Chapman is profoundly deaf, but with new hi-tech hearing aids he recently received, he was able to hear music for the first time in his 23-year life.
That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.
Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.
When Mozart's Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn't a dry eye in the car.
Chapman asked redditors to recommend music he should listen to, and got 14,000+ responses. Read his account of the experience at Art of the Story. Link
Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic wanted to find out how Chapman's musical journey is coming along.
I exchanged emails with Chapman to get more of a sense of what music he is enjoying and what he hasn't quite warmed to. The first and clearest thing that comes across: Taste does not take long to develop. Right from the get-go Chapman had a very strong (and, in my personal estimation, very good) sense of what he liked and did not. Top of the like list? Classical music, which he said was "the most beautiful genre to listen to." Country was, so far, his least favorite. "It's very heavy on vocals and since I can't clearly understand the words, the story is lost on me. Instead it just sounds like a man or woman crying for a couple minutes."
Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: Austin Chapman)
deviantARTist Thom-Heap built this gruesomely awesome sculpture of a Dementor, named "LongClaw" from papier-mâché as a prop for Harry Potter convention MISTI-Con in New Hampshire next year. She's quite talented!
Image: Dementor LongClaw - via MISTI-Con
Image: Dementor without shroud - via deviantART
Image: Dementor Sculpture (with shroud) - via deviantART
Image: Thom-Heap as Severus Snape fighting a Dementor in her back yard
- via deviantART
Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada, isn't the northernmost place mapped by Google Street View, but it is one of the most inaccessible. There are no cars there, just a few trucks. The citizens get around on snowmobiles, and traffic in and out of the community of 1,477 people is by plane. Everyone there know how to find their way around. But an Inuit geographical-information-systems coordinator invited Street View to come map the area anyway.
The Inuit man, Chris Kalluk, said he approached Google with the idea of bringing Street View to the Arctic last year as a way to educate the rest of the world about the region. "People that have never been in the North, past trees, in communities you can only get to by airplanes; they just don't know," Kalluk said by telephone from Cambridge Bay, where he has lived most of his life.
"They wonder if we live in igloos and travel by dog team. I spoke with an elder the other day who said that the land belongs to all the people, so everyone should be able to see it."
Fishing and hunting trips, often covering long distances, remain an important part of life for the Inuit in Cambridge Bay, or Ikaluktutiak as it's known in the native Inuinnaqtun language. But because magnetic compasses do not work in the far north, paper maps were rarely used for navigation in the past.
So Street View went to Cambridge Bay, and Google geostrategist Karin Tuxen-Bettman photographed the area with cameras mounted on a human-powered tricycle. Local kids followed on their own bikes. In just a few months, we will all be able to see the village up close. Link -via mental_floss
(Image credit: Google/NYT)
George Takei posted this at his Facebook page, with the line, "I'm sure parents everywhere are on borg with this." Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Her name is Betty, but she really reminds me of Timon from The Lion King, the way she laughs while being tickled! -via Tastefully Offensive
A thoughtful young lady acquired these tattoos to remember her late parents:
I got these a couple months ago for my parents who passed away when I was in high school. Its exact copies of their handwriting from birthday cards. I absolutely love them
Link -Thanks, wifey!
Humans are not the only animal that mourn their dead, but this is quite surprising: when a Western Scrub Jay bird encounters a dead bird, it will call out to others to stop foraging and, well, for lack of better words, attend a bird funeral.
The revelation comes from a study by Teresa Iglesias and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, US. They conducted experiments, placing a series of objects into residential back yards and observing how western scrub jays in the area reacted.
The objects included different coloured pieces of wood, dead jays, as well as mounted, stuffed jays and great horned owls, simulating the presence of live jays and predators. [...] The jays reacted indifferently to the wooden objects.
But when they spied a dead bird, they started making alarm calls, warning others long distances away.
The jays then gathered around the dead body, forming large cacophonous aggregations. The calls they made, known as "zeeps", "scolds" and "zeep-scolds", encouraged new jays to attend to the dead.
Got geeky chickens? This coop, inspired by traditional Hobbit architecture, is the proper home for them:
Collecting eggs is as easy as convincing Hobbits to partake in Second Breakfast, with convenient outdoor access via the external hinged lid of the next box. These latch via hook and eye to provide security against invaders like raccoons--if a group of Oliphaunt war-beasts shows up, however, you may wish to call upon your contacts within the Rohirrim for further assistance.
Link -via Nerd Approved | Photo: My Pet Chicken
P.S. Just curious: what do Hobbits taste like?
Just what it says on the tin. Simply watching two hamsters on an exercise wheel will may your day go a little better. -via b3ta
Jeff Wysaski at Pleated Jeans renames consumer goods to make their purpose more clear. Makes plenty of sense to me! Link
There are lots of things that kids have to figure out as they grow up, like the fact that a little boy will never qualify as a single lady!
Watch this poor kid get his bubble burst by his dad, as he realizes that Beyonce is no longer singing directly to him.
--via Tastefully Offensive
It is impossible, we'd say, not to read the caption in the tune of Carly Rae Jepsen's viral hit Call Me Maybe.
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