While nursing a hangover, redditor hollyicing made this cake resembling the burned teddy bear that fell into Walter White's swimming pool:
It's a variation of a madeira cake that's lemon and passion fruit flavour with passion fruit butter icing and stacked using home made passion fruit and lemon jam. 3 layers were stacked then sculped into before I did a crumb layer of icing and then piped the butter icing on top. The eye ball was going to be a gob stopper but I couldn't get a plain white one in the right size so lumped for a ball of white marzipan. The whole thing was splashed with black food dye and then burnt a bit to give it that burnt bear look (and also because I like burning things)
Bill Gekas, an internationally award-winning photographer, feels inspired by the visual ambiances of the Old Masters of Western European painting, particular Vemeer and Rembrandt. He duplicated them magificently in a photo series that includes his daughter and himself:
Using various models, including his five-year-old daughter, Gekas has brilliantly re-imagined the masters, replicating the lighting style for which they are famous. The so-called Rembrandt lighting is characterised by strong window light falling on one side of the subject's face and body, producing shadows amid a rich glow. Gekas uses artificial light to simulate the admired window-lighting effect.
Photo: University of Washington, Institute for Learning & Brain Science
Your baby is smarter than you'd think. A new laboratory technique allowed
scientists to peer inside a baby's brain to see what's going on there
while you read or talk to it:
Infants as young as 6 months are capable of making predictions based
on probability, a higher level of reasoning than is commonly believed
possible, researchers have found.
When shown a range of facial expressions, children as young as 7 months
cast the longest gaze on the fearful face, similar to adult behavior,
which scientists say signals an early sign of emotional processing.
And every parent knows that mimicking a baby's behavior, such as clapping
hands, brings the child pleasure. Imaging technology has confirmed that
this kind of play activates the pleasure center in the baby's brain,
whereas engaging in a mismatched activity doesn't.
Sumathi Reddy of the Wall Street Journal has the full report:
Link
The 85-year old leader of the Catholic Church announced that he will resign at the end of the month for health reasons. Here are a couple of my favorite Twitter reactions. This is the first time that a Pope has resigned since 1415. Dan Lewis, the factoid maestro behind Now I Know, points out that this is a long, long time.
OaKoAk, that brilliant French street artist, has a gift for what some people call "urban interventions." He can spot opportunities in ordinary settings and add small changes that give them radically new meanings. This lightsaber is typical of his work.
Several high-profile projects focused a global spotlight on the work of Belgian artist Laurent Durieux in the past year: a series featuring the Japanese manga robot Gigantor, screen prints for the movies The Iron Giant and King Kong, and a re-imagining of the poster for Jaws, which Stephen Spielberg liked so much he bought 25 prints. Read about Durieux's retro-futuristic work and see plenty of examples at Collector's Weekly. Link
The Williamson Aeroplane Camera doesn't have a propeller so that it can fly. Users of this World War I-era camera would attach it to the bottom of a plane. During flight, the movement of the propeller advances the film.
This is only one of twelve unusual antique cameras which you can find at the link. The others include a camera hidden in a cane and another that could be carried by a pigeon.
We've seen wild animals caught on camera traps, and we've seen kittens see their first mirror image. But now we've got a pair of curious young leopards encountering a large mirror on the side of an empty road near Nyonié in Gabon. This sequence was edited down from a 20-minute encounter. French videographer Xavier HUBERT-BRIERRE set up 29 camera traps, but unfortunately is having a hard time getting repair work done on those the animals have damaged. Metafilter has links to his other wildlife videos. Link
There has been a great deal of speculation over the years and substantial evidence that an asteroid is likely what extinguished all dinosaur life. Science could never prove what asteroid may have triggered the extinction. One of the most likely candidates, the 9-mile-wide asteroid that impacted Chicxulub, Mexico, was believed to have occurred 300,000 years prior to the extinction.
Now, however, European and American scientists have re-tested debris from Chicxulub using state-of-the-art equipment and narrowed the asteroid impact down to a period of 11,000 years, between 66.03 and 66.04 million years ago — almost simultaneous with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
The collision, which left behind a 180-kilometer (110-mile) crater, released 420 zettajoules of energy — 100 teratonnes of TNT. The impact created a huge dust cloud that blocked out the Sun, starting the extinction ball rolling by killing off much of the world’s plants, and thus the herbivores soon after. Due to high levels of oxygen in the Cretaceous atmosphere, the impact may also have caused intense, global firestorms that killed off many other species. Because the asteroid landed in the ocean, megatsunamis would’ve swept the world’s coasts, too.
Move over, Gangnam Style. You're being replaced with this dance move that's
coming back in style (after first gaining popularity back in the early
2000s). Here's the Harlem
Shake:
Image: David Applegate, Robert Bixby, Vasek Chvatal and William Cook
In 1930, Harvard mathematician Karl Menger (he of the Menger
Sponge fame) asked a simple question: what is the shortest route a
salesman has to take, in order to visit every city (of a certain size)
in the United States and return to his starting place? That should be
easy enough, right? After all, you only have to check every possible round
trip routes to find the shortest one.
Turned out, brute force doesn't work well in solving the Travelling
Salesman Problem, even with the fastest computer. With 10 cities,
you'd have to check about 300,000 different round trip routes. Add just
5 more cities to that mix, and you'd have to check more than 87 billion.
In 1972, computer scientists Richard Karp of UC Berkeley wrote a seminal
paper, claiming that the Travelling Salesman Problem may not even be solvable.
Undaunted, countless mathematicians and computer scientists spent years
of their lives trying to prove that wrong, but the best algorithm they
could come up with only found approximate solutions. In 1976, Nicos Christofides
developed an algo that found a route guaranteed to be, at worst, 50% longer
than the shortest route. That was a great victory and everyone thought
that it was only a matter of months before someone refined it and found
the correct solution.
Decades later, Christofides algorithm still stood. Until 2011, when a
team of mathematicians from Stanford and McGill universities came up with
an algorithm that is marginally better. 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004%
better, in fact. And what a victory that was because it showed a crack
in the Travelling Salesman Problem that has haunted mathematicians for
decades.
Read more about the hunt for the solution for the Travelling Salesman
Problem in this neat article by Erica Klarreich/Simon Science News over
at Wired: Link
(no math required, promise!)
Not only do the astronauts onboard the International Space Station see
the Earth slip from night into day and into night again, but they see
it 16 times in a day (well, a day being a period of 24 hours on board
the ISS). Watch this mesmerizing
video taken by crew of Expedition 34 on January 3, 2013:
That little speck in the middle of the photograph is pro surfer Garrett
McNamara surfing a humongous wave off the Praia do Norte beach in Nazare,
Portugal. The wave, reported to be around 100 ft tall, is a record breaker
(the previous record, also held by McNamara, was a wave 78 feet tall):
In the small town of Nazaré, on Portugal’s Atlantic coast,
a single red lighthouse stands at the shoreline. The small road leading
to the lighthouse is, on any normal day, completely deserted. But on
Monday, hundreds of people packed the road — photographers and
spectators — as the huge swells battered the rocky shoreline.
But most cameras seemed unable to capture the height of the sea from
such a close vantage point — lauded surf photographer To Mane
took a much wider angle, ultimately capturing a stunning view of McNamara’s
ride atop the unfathomable wave.
How much of a language is silent? What does it look like when you take the silence out?
His project, entitled "silenc", is an attempt to answer those questions. He chose a selection of Hans Christian Andersen stories in Danish, as well as French and English translations. He printed editions in which all of the silent letters were marked in red. These become invisible when viewed through a filter.
