From afar, the squirrel sees the hazelnuts that Jeffrey Wang placed strategically inside the soundboard of a teeny-tiny grand piano. As the squirrel approached the tiny musical instrument, Wang, a musician and photographer, knew that his lure worked.
And as it reached its tiny claws inside to retrieve the snack, it was caught ‘playing’ the piano.
The player you control hits the tennis ball back to the other side of the court. Unfortunately, the ball goes out of bounds. And then you see the player blurt out a curse word on your screen.
When Super Tennis was originally released in Japan in 1991, the in-game tennis players would exclaim the world “s***”. The North American and UK versions, however, substituted “rats” instead.
Recently, however, the game was re-released on the Nintendo switch, but the Japanese version remains unchanged. The profanity is still there.
While some people in Japan might be aware that the word is profanity, many are not, and it does pop up in mainstream media. On a recent Japanese TV drama, for example, one character exclaimed the word.
Though, it’s still wild to see the word on kid-friendly Nintendo hardware.
Tony Williams had no one to talk to. Ever since his wife Jo died of pancreatic cancer last year, Tony spent his days just sitting near the phone, hoping that it would ring. It didn’t.
Without any family nearby, Tony put two adverts in his local newspaper looking for a friend to chat to, but didn’t get any replies.
In a bid to find a pal to listen to music with, or just chat in the garden, Tony had business cards made to hand out when he went to the supermarket or out for a walk.
The 75-year-old physicist, however, did not receive any phone calls, despite his efforts. Finally, he decided to put up a poster on his window.
“I have lost Jo, my lovely wife and soul mate. I have no friends and family, no one to talk to. I find the unremitting silence 24 hours a day unbearable torture,” wrote Tony on the poster. “Can no one help me?”
Now, after spending a summer “waiting for the phone to ring,” Tony has been swamped by the responses.
He is enjoying chatting on the phone to strangers—now friends—from around the world,
People from America, Germany, Holland, Australia, Egypt, India, and Japan have been in touch inviting him on road trips to the U.S. or for an afternoon drinking gin and tonics.
[...]
“I’ve just been completely overwhelmed and am so thankful for it all,” he said.
One of the most difficult challenges when it comes to writing is making your readers laugh. If visual comedy is already difficult to achieve, just imagine if you only have words as your medium to make your audience giggle and laugh, not to mention that you also have to persuade your readers to immerse themselves into the world where your story is happening. Sure, there are simple ways to make your audience laugh, such as using funny names for characters or places, but those are not going to last long. So how do you make your readers laugh without resorting to that? In his piece over at QDT, Erik Deckers gives us four tools that could prove useful to us when writing humor. These are: the iceberg theory, surprise, relatability, and exaggeration.
On September 21, at around 6PM, a 37-year-old man from Wythenshawe, named Wesley Hamnett, finished an incredible feat of travelling 230 miles in six days on a bike. But he did not ride on a grown man’s bike, but on the bike of a little kid — his daughter’s pink bike. Why did he do all of that, you ask? For charity, of course!
So far, he's raised an incredible £6,000 - including offline donations - and all the money he has raised will go to a selection of charities, including Macmillan, Christie Hospital, British Heart Foundation and his local hospital in Wythenshawe.
[...]
He explains: "The main reason is that my grandparents all passed away, the last one was last year - my grandad Fred.
"That was a bit of a sad time really, knowing that I'd not got any grandparents left. So I thought, 'I want to do something significant,' you know, to raise money for the people that have helped them all through our lives."
Sharing the details of his plans on Twitter, Wes said that if he could get 1000 retweets on his post, he would do it on his daughter's bike, rather than his own - and so he did, which must have looked unusual to say the least.
Earlier this week, Reese Witherspoon posted a 24-year-old photo of her and Paul Rudd on her Instagram. “Wait a second… did #Paul Rudd and I take the “Selfie” in 1996?” she wondered on the post. But really, who invented the selfie?
It seems that other celebrities like Britney Spears have been taking selfies long before it was cool, and Bill Nye, along with Witherspoon, have been doing that long before the term was even coined. But as to who really invented the selfie, the answer to that is a bit complicated.
Many people have tried to claim the selfie as their own, with some photos even dating back to 1920. So who, in all this madness is actually responsible for the modern-day self portrait? Well, It turns out the old adage of "but first, let me take a selfie," is actually more like "But ere we go, permit thee to capture a self portrait" -- depending on how you define certain terms.
According to The New York Times, one of the oldest "selfies" may span as far back as 1839, when Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia-based chemist with a passion for photography, ran into the frame of a photo. "The first light Picture ever taken. 1839," he wrote on the back of the photograph. 10/10 titling, spot on... or was it...
But does a selfie require a camera to be called a “selfie”? Or does it just have to be a self-portrait?
By that logic, could one argue that painters with likely self-portraits like say, Jan Van Eyck in the 1400s are the art form's true forefathers? What about other drawings? Scribbles on ancient notepads?
The hearing aids available on the market are expensive. In the United States, a pair of hearing aids costs around $4,700 on average. Considering that the lowest salary in the US is around $1,250 a month, a person under that bracket would have to work for four months in order to buy a pair of hearing aids. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Researchers led by M. Saad Bhamla, have developed a proof-of-concept device which could lead to affordable hearing aids in the future.
The ultra-low-cost proof-of-concept device known as LoCHAid is designed to be easily manufactured and repaired in locations where conventional hearing aids are priced beyond the reach of most citizens. The minimalist device is expected to meet most of the World Health Organization's targets for hearing aids aimed at mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss. The prototypes built so far look like wearable music players instead of a traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids.
"The challenge we set for ourselves was to build a minimalist hearing aid, determine how good it would be and ask how useful it would be to the millions of people who could use it," said M. Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "The need is obvious because conventional hearing aids cost a lot and only a fraction of those who need them have access."
[...]
"We have shown that it is possible to build a hearing aid for less than the price of a cup of coffee," he said. "This is a first step, a platform technology, and we've shown that low cost doesn't have to mean low quality."
Of course, this affordable device offers fewer features than the expensive ones available, but Bhamla compares this issue to buying a basic and a luxury car.
Learn more details about this over at MedicalXpress.
There is a lot of wind available here on land, and, as we all know, wind is a good source of renewable energy. This wind, however, is too weak to make wind turbine blades move. It appears that we could use this breeze to generate power, not through a wind turbine, but through this nanogenerator.
The method, presented September 23 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, is a low-cost and efficient way of collecting light breezes as a micro-energy source.
[...]
"You can collect all the breeze in your everyday life," says senior author Ya Yang of Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "We once placed our nanogenerator on a person's arm, and a swinging arm's airflow was enough to generate power."
A breeze as gentle as 1.6 m/s (3.6 mph) was enough to power the triboelectric nanogenerator designed by Yang and his colleagues. The nanogenerator performs at its best when wind velocity is between 4 to 8 m/s (8.9 to 17.9 mph), a speed that allows the two plastic strips to flutter in sync. The device also has a high wind-to-energy conversion efficiency of 3.23%, a value that exceeds previously reported performances on wind energy scavenging. Currently, the research team's device can power up 100 LED lights and temperature sensors.
Learn more about this nanogenerator over at TechXplore.
This is phenomenal!
(Image Credit: Xin Chen, Xiaojing Mu, and Ya Yang/ TechXplore)
This might just be the weirdest thing that I have seen in my life — a $1,400 denim overall with grass stains. I mean, why? You could just buy a new denim overall and roll on the grass in your backyard.
“This denim overall is crafted from organic cotton and specifically treated for a stained-like, distressed effect,” reads the description of the dirty dungarees, which debuted on the runway as part of a grunge-inspired collection back in January and are now available in stores and online.
[...]
“It is produced through cultivation and manufacturing processes that don’t involve harmful chemicals, pesticides or artificial fertilizers,” a description on Gucci.com reads.
But real farmers think these fancy pants should be put out to pasture.
“For [that much money], I’m thinking, ‘What’s the equivalent of that in second-cut hay bales?’ That’s the currency I’m most interested in,” farmer Lauren Gitlin, 40, told The Post.
The greatest enemy that you can have in life is not your best friend. It’s not your partner. Nor is it another family member. The greatest enemy that you can have is yourself.
But how do you battle against yourself? How do you confront yourself? This goat decided that the best way that he can confront himself is through hand-to-hand combat, or in this case, head-to-head combat, in the mirror.
If you ask me, world records are getting weirder and weirder. But hey, aiming for world records is no joke. It takes time, effort, and money, and so I can say that even weird world records deserve recognition.
A Texas city's annual Rotary Duck Derby, delayed for months..., went forward without some of the usual fanfare, but with a Guinness World Record for lining up rubber ducks.
The City of Graham's 3rd Annual Rotary Duck Derby, which was originally scheduled for April, took place at the city's Downtown Square.
Residents could sponsor a duck in the race for $5 or 24 ducks for $100, with the proceeds being donated by the Graham Rotary Club to a variety of community projects.
[...]
Organizers said they expected the number of ducks to come out to 20,000, enough to break the Guinness record of 17,782 ducks.
You fell in love with him when you saw him on The Mandalorian. You bought the miniatures and the toys. But you know that your soul won’t find rest until you’ve collected all of the Baby Yodas out there in the whole world. And now comes another Baby Yoda collectible, but this time in LEGO form.
Fans of The Mandalorian can soon get their hands on this adorable LEGO version of The Child aka Baby Yoda. The 1073-piece kit builds a 7.8″ tall version of the littlest could-be Jedi, and features a posable head, movable ears, and an adjustable mouth. Drops 10.30.2020. Pre-orders start at 1pm PST on 9.21.2020 on LEGO.com.
The Force and the cuteness are strong with this one.
A man in blue can be seen on the cargo space of the truck. Suddenly, he trips, but he has a quick reaction time, and manages to hang on the truck, albeit in a weird position. Thankfully, a car happens to pass by in the area, and the car’s driver helps him to climb back again on the truck.
One of the easiest ways to put more fun and action in a photo is by adding in animals in the picture. Just look at these pictures from Sad and Useless. Chaotic and hilarious.
