People look at me like I'm nuts because I turn off my engine while waiting in line at a drive-through. I've been told that if you are going to be still more than 20 seconds, you're better off turning your car off. Yes, we have to wait longer than that at stoplights, but in most places, it is illegal to turn off your engine at an intersection. So I'm saving fuel waiting for Taco Bell to fill the orders in front of me, probably incorrectly, while the SUVs around me are roaring the whole time. This guy explains how the formula is determined, which involves some math, but stick with it. Turns out that 20 seconds was a generous guess.
Of any material I could think of to fashion an accurate human skull out of, this Gibeon meteorite best embodies the "mystery" most acutely. I call him The Traveler... a true time traveler. Coming in from the asteroid belt, 4 billion years old and counting...crossing over and crystallizing in the pure vacuum of space...then crashing onto the face of earth...collected by tribesmen in Africa, making its way to America, continuing on to Asia...to be meticulously cared for, worked over, lavishly transformed by human hands....into a thing of exquisitely rare beauty.... the architecturally "perfect" form of the brain vessel.
A symbol of death, of eternity, of immortality, of demise and rebirth. This guy has made an amazing journey and it's composed of pure natural symmetry. Nothing neutral about this artifact, it carries huge gravity and spending time with it is oddly humbling."
This is a most interesting, humane, culinary solution if you have a mouse in the house (or seven). Bonus if you happen to dine on peanut butter and vermin sandwiches!
You know them, but how weird is it to see brand logos out of context? The digital agency Hello Velocity made a new font, Brand New Roman, using 76 different corporate logos to spoof late-stage capitalism. Lukas Bentel explains the effect of the font.
"At this point, brands are inescapably ubiquitous and attention-hungry," says Bentel. "What's interesting about Brand New Roman is that when you smash so many of these brands together, they start to lose their powerful brand connotations in interesting ways. The sheer density overrides all the extra brand identity connotations each symbol usually carries."
The font becomes more readable when rendered in a single color, but the brand identity of the individual letters starts to get a little fuzzy and harder to identify. So which is more important to your finished product, the brands represented, or what you are saying in your text? Try Brand New Roman yourself- you can type anything into this generator to see what it looks like. The applications are endless, and can be quite funny. Check out some examples at Muse.
Once upon a time, going to a concert was all about the music. Then Alice Cooper came along and turned the concert stage into a circus, playing a character in terrifying makeup, singing terrifying songs in a powerful show that no one could forget. And all while using a woman's name for reasons no one could fathom. Those concerts propelled his songs to the top of the charts.
“[When] that curtain goes up all of a sudden I am not that same guy,” Cooper told me recently about his onstage transformation from Vincent Furnier into the man we all love and fear as Alice. “I become that character and the game is on. And that character is a villain and he goes out there with absolutely no attitude of ‘Gee, I hope you like us tonight.’ He goes out there with the attitude of grabbing ’em by the throat and shaking them for an hour and a half.”
He's been doing that for 50 years now. Alice Cooper shares stories from his long career in an interview at Uproxx.
If you're thinking of relocating, maybe you should check out the average commute times for people for who in or around the city you're considering. Just zoom in on the interactive map at Educated Driver and click on the city's dot for more details. People near where I live commute around 40-45 minutes a day, which seems like a big waste of time over a lifetime. However, the average commute time in L.A. or San Francisco is an hour, and 75 minutes in New York City! Now think of this map as a whole, and consider all the lost hours, the gasoline, the pollution, the traffic jams, and the stress that could be avoided if we could just live closer to our workplaces. -via Digg
Being atop a skyscraper when it sways is disconcerting, but not as terrifying as that sway would be if it weren't for mass dampers. This simple but thorough explanation of how they work from Minute Physics uses a LEGO Saturn 5 rocket, or two of them, to show how it works. The video is really only 3:40 long; after that, it's an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Unless a band is named after the most prominent member (Bon Jovi) or an obvious fact about them (The Philadelphia Orchestra), there's probably a great story behind how the name was selected. Some of them may even be true.
Hobos have been around since the railroad system made traveling across America possible. Itinerant workers rode the rails to where jobs were available, as best they could. Their numbers grew when unemployment did, and they developed a system leave messages for each other. Or did they? Historians know that the "hobo code" we've all read about is not what we've been told before. -via Kottke
Take a stroll down memory lane with a compilation of snippets from the biggest song of each year from 1940 to last year. That's 78 songs! No problem, it's easy to skip around and find the years you want to hear. But how do you define the biggest song of the year? In this case, it's the song that stayed at the top of Billboard's pop music chart the longest. In some cases, it wasn't the biggest-selling song, but if you were around, you no doubt remember it. Some of those #1 hits may surprise you (see 1974). If you want to see the UK version of the same idea, you'll find that video at Laughing Squid.
This 5-year-old is feeling good after her first hair cut, and she tries her best to explain it to us. She's very good at describing the ultimate happiness, as she relates it to her experiences so far in life. No one has felt such joy since Navin Johnson saw his name in the new phone book. -via Digg
The Stanley Hotel in in Estes Park, Colorado, is famous for inspiring Stephen King to write his novel The Shining. But the evil spirits from King's imagination are not the only intruders bringing notoriety to the hotel. A black bear wandered into the hotel lobby Wednesday night, possibly looking for a room, while 300 guests slept through the invasion. The bear climbed on the furniture while a desk clerk stayed very still and recorded part of the encounter. After a while, finding the service unacceptably slow, the bear left on its own. -via Boing Boing
Last year, we posted about a plan to train crows to pick up litter, specifically, cigarette butts. Here's a way that can happen. The Crowbox is a vending machine for crows. It's set up in stages, to train birds how to use it, and crows are pretty smart and learn quickly. This demonstration video uses quarters, but there's no reason you can't use cigarette butts or something else that crows can easily find. If you'd like to make your own Crowbox, the plans and instructions are here. -via Metafilter
Modern DNA sequencing is adding to our knowledge of human migration and evolution at an astonishing rate. Back 100,000 years or so, there were several hominin species wandering the earth: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans -and possibly others. We know that these humans interbred and left traces of DNA, but now we have an example of a human whose two parents were different species. A bone fragment of a girl found in a Russian cave in 2012 was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
The fragment was identified from among 2,000 bone fragments excavated from the Denisova Cave. With a technique called collagen peptide mass fingerprinting, Slon and her colleagues determined that the bone had a hominin origin, though they didn’t know the species. From the bone’s cortical thickness, they inferred that Denisova 11 was at least 13 years old at the time of her death; six DNA extractions and subsequent genome sequencing revealed her sex. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating determined the bone was at least 50,000 years old, an estimate that was refined as more data were recovered. Slon says that “from genetic data, we can make a rough estimate of the individual’s age, and we think she lived around 90,000 years ago.”
Comparing her DNA to known gene alleles belonging to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and present-day humans in Africa revealed her unique parentage.
