The Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, Sweden offers a new travel experience that builds anticipation and helps passengers acclimate to their destination cities. The Climate Portal consists of 3 rooms that simulate the temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure of Hong Kong, Dubai, and Kiruna, which is Sweden's northernmost town. Participants are also surrounded with photos of these cities, giving them a very realistic impression of where they're going.
-via Core77
Can you believe this place? The customer service at this Subway is so pathetic that they won't even look at a robber standing right in front of the staff, demanding money.
The inadequate customer service training came in handy a few days ago. A man walked into a Subway sandwich shop in Coventry, Rhode Island. He was wearing a plastic shopping bag over his face as a mask. He walked up to the counter and told the lackadaisical teenagers "working" there to hand over their money.
They just ignored the robber. NBC News reports:
When he demanded money at the counter Tuesday, "the two teenage employees did not respond to the suspect," they said.
The man — who looks exasperated in security camera video of the incident — "became agitated and mumbled something under his breath as he walked out of the business," police said.
He should come back later and complain to a manager.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Coventry Police Department
(Photo: TVMOST HK)
It's not enough to just pick up a can. It could be contaminated. That's why smart grocers wrap each can in a plastic container with shrink wrap over the top. Rocket News 24 reports that this image was snapped in a grocery store in Hong Kong.
Instructables member Berto Aussems designed the WeDangle, a hanging, swinging seat built into a set of clothes. The pants and jacket contain soft supports that wrap around the body. Cords attach to these supports with carabiners. A fabric strap and aluminum tube wrapped around a tree branch hold the cords, permitting the user to recline and gently rock. The tube breaks down into four sections, which are easily pocketed in the jacket.
It doesn't look pretty, but Aussems envisions this as a proof of concept, rather than a final design. He hopes to refine the WeDangle so that it can be a piece of everyday clothing that lets people relax outdoors without bringing any extra equipment.
(Image: CBS)
Actress Nichelle Nichols played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek television series. Now, at the age of 82, she's leaving Starfleet for service with NASA. The tabloid The Mirror reports that Nichols will fly on NASA's SOFIA space telescope. This modified 747 flies at an elevation of 50,000 feet to observe strange new worlds. Nichols told fans about this mission during a reddit AMA. She writes:
SOFIA does not, sadly, fly into space. It's an airborne observatory, a massive telescope mounted inside a 747 flying as high as is possible. I was on a similar flight, the first airborn observatory, back in 1977. It's an amazing experience, you get a totally different perspective than from earth.
I do hope someone gets some great pictures.
-via The Geek Twins
(Unrelated photo by Cara Fealy Choate)
The emergency services dispatcher for the West Yorkshire Police answered the call. The man on the other line explained that a cat in his home had performed a nefarious crime:
Me girlfriend has let the cat eat my bacon . . . I want to press charges.
The dispatcher asked for clarification: did the man want police to arrest his girlfriend or the cat? Both. She responded:
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
She should be! The dispatcher refused to do anything about this brutal act of thievery. The tabloid The Mirror reports:
He starts to protest and insists it's the girlfriend's fault for allowing the cat to do it.
But when he is finally told it's not a 999 emergency, he finally concedes and ends the call.
You can listen to a recording of the call in this video. It's a disgraceful act of negligence by an alleged "civil servant."
-via Dave Barry
I'm laying down a marker here: the Face Mask Hotness Hoodie is the future of menswear. This design by Andew Christian Laurel Cross has everything that a man needs to be comfortable and cool at the same time. And if it gets a bit chilly, all the wearer must do is pull on his hoodie and face mask.
This one is a mixture of cotton and polyester, which will be standard evening wear. For business settings, men will wear velour versions to look professional.
Potty training story books are an entire genre of young children's literature. But, sadly, most of those books are directed at human children and feature only human characters. That's why Gary Whitta is writing Pooping Is Logical: Potty Training Your Child the Vulcan Way.
Whitta is a screenwriter, most famous for writing The Book of Eli and Star Wars: Rogue One. His book, which is ilustrated by Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik, tells the story of a little Vulcan boy who is learning to shed his diapers. Geek Dad reports:
Fortunately his parents, who are wise and loving, are on hand to help him through this transition and assure him that pooping on the potty is a perfectly natural, safe, and grown-up thing to do. In a society based on logic, what could be more logical than pooping?
At the moment, Whitta is facing difficulty getting copyright permission from the owners of Star Trek. Hopefully that will be resolved before the next generation of Trekkies is ready to learn how to use the potty.
-via The Mary Sue
(Photo: Rafael Gamo)
It won't be enough to absentmindedly stroll up and down the stairs. You'll have to think about where you're placing your feet or you'll tumble down. JSa Architecture, a firm in Mexico City and Lima, designed these stairs, although it's not clear why.
-via Contemporist
(Photo: Devon Knight/The Guardian)
The Spaghetti Incident, a new restaurant in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has devised an ingenious way to get people to buy its spaghetti. Besides offering several tasty varieties, the restaurant offers its spaghetti for takeout in cones. The result is that people wandering the neighborhood for amusement can grab a cone and a fork and eat it as they stroll. Spaghetti, a food that is normally messy to eat, becomes completely portable by this method. Dave Bry of The Guardian explains:
Eating spaghetti out of a cone is, oddly, easier than eating it from a plate. This is because of the well-known “twirl method” that sophisticated humans have learned to use to eat pasta. The cone shape facilitates the trick by giving natural purchase to the tines of the fork as they twist. The curved sides of the cone help guide the strands of spaghetti into a ball around the fork. (Emily Post recommended using a spoon to achieve the effect). The twirl negates the need for spearing any bit of food with the fork.
-via Carmen Jade
(Photo: University of Bath)
Yoda is an owl with a job. A handler brings him to the library of the University of Bath to drive off seagulls that settle on the building and cause mischief for students and staff. Yoda has diligently kept these troublemakers from nesting there, so the library administration recognized his work by granting him an honorary library card. The Guardian reports:
The library management team decided to issue a library card to Yoda in recognition of his “valuable service” to the university. The card, which is valid until 2020, features a photograph of the bird, described as Prof Yoda The Owl.
A spokesman said: “The university has invited Yoda and his handler Marcus to visit the campus twice a week as an environmentally friendly method to control the seagull numbers on campus and thereby limit the potential adverse effects a large gull population can have.
-via Jessamyn West
It has become a familiar, even expected experience in a neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. Every day, Don Brittain, 78, checks to see when sunset will occur. When it does, he stands on his back porch and plays "Taps" slowly on his trumpet.
His neighbors now walk out to their own porches and silently stand at attention while the 24 notes flow out across Puget Sound. It is a shared experience of reverence:
"[I want to] support our guys who are over there fighting" said Don. "I had polio as a kid so I couldn't serve."
For him, that was one of the worst things about getting polio.
"I would have served in a heartbeat," he said.
Yet, Don's daily ritual is not just for the soldiers, it's also for his neighbors. They now take it as seriously as Don does. As soon as Don begins to play, his neighbors come outside and stand at attention.
"It seems to move people," said Don. "It has an effect on them."
In our everyday, hectic lives there is almost nothing that gets people to stop like this and reflect, but in Tacoma, under Don's leadership, people spend twenty-four notes nightly doing exactly that.
You can read more at CBS News (warning: auto-play video).
-via American Digest
When your robot companion feels the call of the wild, you must set him free. He's not really yours unless he chooses to be with you. Randall Munroe of xkcd reminds us of this great if painful responsibility.
(Photo: L. Shyamal)
But I can offer this little bug close competition. Only my appreciation for half-and-half prevents me from claiming the title as well.
The coffee berry borer beetle eats coffee beans. It doesn't have a lot of competition because most animals, including other insects, find the caffeine in coffee beans too toxic to consume directly. And now scientists know why. Ed Yong writes for National Geographic that researchers found that the coffee berry borer beetle's unique digestive tract can detoxify caffeine:
Javier Ceja-Navarro from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has discovered its secret: it has bacteria in its guts that can detoxify caffeine.
When he fed the beetles with coffee beans and analysed their faeces for traces of caffeine, he couldn’t find any. None. Something in their gut had completely destroyed the would-be poison. Bacteria seemed like the obvious candidates, so Ceja-Navarro fed the beetles with antibiotics. This time, when they ate coffee beans, their poo was laden with caffeine. And when they got a chance to breed, they utterly failed. Most of their eggs and larvae died outright, and none of the survivors made it to adulthood. Without their microbes, they couldn’t handle their caffeine.
-via Marilyn Terrell
(Photo: Global Reactions)
In 1953, the general store and post office of Ochopee, Florida burned down. So local residents converted an irrigation pipe shed on a tomato farm into a temporary post office. It stayed there and remains in business to this day.
(Image: Kris555000)
It serves residents of 3 counties and was once a bus stop. A single Postal Service employee works there, sorting mail into slots on the back wall. In addition to being a functional service point, the Ochopee Post Office is also a popular tourist attraction as it is the smallest Post Office in the United States.
This is 1 of 7 of America's smallest civic institutions rounded up by Atlas Obscura, including the smallest national forest (33 trees) and a police station the size of a phone booth.
