It's like the tots in their first judo or taekwondo matches, except now they have swords and armor. Place your bets, please.
Honestly, I was skeptical of Tyrion's choice of a champion, but I see that it's working out better than I feared.
-via Fashionably Geek
Ana Jimenez is a Mexican furniture and product designer in London. Her series entitled "Los Enmascarados" consists of five pieces of household furniture designed to reflect traditional Mexican masks. These masks represent archetypes that appear in folk theater and festivals. For example, pictured above is The Double Face--a mix of good and evil present in one individual.
The Drunk Lady
The Devil
The Buffoon
The Old Man
-via Dornob
Pro tip for graduate students: members of your thesis committee cannot discover the flaws in your methodology or your questionable conclusions if they're running for their lives.*
*Do not actually do this. At this point in your program, it may look like a reasonable idea. That is only because you are not in your right mind. Leave the sword at home.
(Photo: Martin Krolikowski)
The great French scientist Louis Pasteur said, "Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages." That may not be current medical science, but the French have taken it to heart. A hospital in south central France plans to open an in-house bar for wine tasting by patients in palliative care. The Local reports:
Sipping wine may not be a traditional method of treatment for patients who are terminally ill but according to Dr Virginie Guastella, the head of the hospital unit who proposed the idea, it can help them and their loved ones to relax and converse.
“A situation can be palliative for several weeks or even several months and it’s because life is so precious and real until the end that we decided to cultivate all that is fine and good,” Dr Guastella told The Local.
“It’s a way of rethinking the care of others, taking into account their feelings and emotions that make them a human being.”
The wine bar project was launched, she said, "in an attempt to restore longing, taste, desire and even pleasure.”
-via TYWKIWDBI
When sound waves hit an object, they cause that object to move. Those movements are so tiny that we usually can't see them, let alone understand them as information. But researchers at MIT developed a means to translate those vibrations into sound.
As a demonstration, they pointed a camera through a window at a bag of potato chips. Then, perhaps as a reference to the earliest sound recordings, they played Mary Had a Little Lamb. The camera recorded the movement of the bag. A computer program analyzed that footage and reconstructed a clear performance of the song.
In fact, the reconstructions that the team made were so clear that they were understandable by a song recognition app. It's amazing! And also kind of scary.
-via Twisted Sifter
Jordan Lee Nickerson, 6, is a patient at Boston Children's Hospital, where he's receiving chemotherapy for leukemia. Yesterday, pop singer Taylor Swift visited him. She brought along her guitar and offered to sing any song that he'd like to hear. In this simply charming video, they chat about music and Spider-Man before singing Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."
Swift usually doesn't publicize this work, but Jordan's parents are very active on social media. Thanks to their video and photos posted on Facebook, everyone is getting to see the fun that Jordan and Swift shared.
-via Huffington Post
(Image: NBC)
How many friends to you have? And by that I don't mean how many people follow you on Facebook. Rather, how many people are in your monkeysphere? How many people outside of your family do you care about and care about you?
According to a recent study, that number peaks at about 80 people and roughly at the age of 29. That's the result of a survey of 1,505 Britons. Among those surveyed, the average person has 64 friends, meeting most of them at work.
The age of 29 is the sweet spot between old relationships from school and new relationships at work. The Independent reports:
The reason for this is because we apparently share the strains of working in high-pressured environments and spend more hours in the office than ever before.
The data also found that those working in marketing have the most friends at work, just ahead of chefs, servicemen and women, artists and designers, and finally those in HR.
-via Glenn Reynolds
Advance adorably into battle wearing these suits made by Andy Smith. They're boldly crafted in proper colors and precise forms to mirror those of Pikachu and Kitty White. They proclaim, "I'm going to nail this job interview!" Go get 'em, Tiger.
Smith made his plates from plastic garbage bins, so his best strategy is to go on the offense with his sword. If you're attending Animethon in Edmonton, Alberta this weekend, keep an eye out for him.
-via Geekologie
That's Latin for "Who dares, wins." This brave bird stepped forward when others said that the task was too hard, the work impossible, or the mission helpless.
Believe in yourself. Dare to be more than you are now.
This is the neatest, weirdest thing I've seen all week.
4Chan is a huge imageboard posting site. Some time ago, an anonymous poster commented about how loose aesthetic standards have become. S/he argued that modern art is so silly that even that very post could be considered art.
The anonymous poster was correct. In fact, that post could be an enormously expensive piece of art. A framed, printed screenshot of that very post was sold on eBay for $90,900.
Isn't that nuts? No, not yet. This is, after all, the internet.
The original framed, printed screenshot of that 4Chan post is gone. But you can buy a framed, printed screenshot of its eBay listing. That auction lasts another day. The current bidding is $50,200.
-via Nerdcore
(Photo: Daniel Oines)
The kids were not so dumb as to try to rob a clearly-marked patrol car. Like the carjackers who tried to take a car away from armed US Marshals two years ago, these thieves thought that the unmarked car was privately owned.
A detective in an unmarked car parked in the area in response to previous reports of car break-ins. The detective sat quietly in his car and watched. Three suspects, aged 13, 14, and 15, arrived at about 6 PM and began testing car doors, seeing if any were unlocked. They eventually worked their way down the street to the occupied police car. When they tried to open it, the officer arrested them.
-via Weird News
This is Risa Yoshiki, a professional model. She's the star of a new Japanese show called I Want Risa Yoshiki to be Angry at Me. The target demographic is 30-something men. Each 5-minute episode is filled with Yoshiki yelling at the camera. She says affirmations like these:
You’re way too damned old to be getting excited over manga!
Hey, hey, hey! Hello? Is there something wrong with you?
Just knock it the hell off already, ass!
Where the hell are you staring?
You’re in your late 30s! Shouldn’t you start acting like an adult?
Dumbass, listen when people are talking about pancakes!
So basically it's like being married.
Noah Veltman is a journalist who applies statistics to popular interests. Two months ago, we saw his charts illustrating the average costs of goods sold in fashion magazines. More recently, he created a cool interactive chart showing how NFL football players have gotten taller and heavier from 1920 to 2014.
Does this change reflect just how Americans have gotten bigger over the past century? Veltman says that further study would be necessary to find out:
You'd also need to look at the growth of athletes in other sports over time. If all athletes have gotten taller and heavier at similar rates, then it would reflect a general trend, but if, say, tennis players have stayed roughly the same size while football players have grown a great deal, that would indicate that football is still an aberration.
You'll notice that around 1990, the mass of data points began to separate into groups. Veltman speculates that this is due to specialization in football:
That likely reflects increased specialization of body type by position, with the heaviest group containing offensive linemen and defensive tackles, the smallest group containing defensive backs, kickers, and some running backs, and the middle group containing other position groups. Nowadays if you're 6' 3" and 280 pounds, you're too big for most skill positions and too small to play line.
-via Marginal Revolution
Louie the poodle is a canine of refined tastes. No ordinary slop thrown into the bowl is good enough for him. The local humans cannot be trusted to cater to his tastes, so Louie himself mixes the dry and wet dog food into the proper combination.
Give this pooch a cooking show on the Food Network!
(Painting by Julian O. Davidson)
For Americans, September 11 will always be a morbid date. It is a time for mourning. But this was not always so. Once, September 11 represented a glorious triumph for America. Today, Americans should also reflect on a September 11 that occurred before our living memory. For 200 years ago on this date, the United States fought and won the Battle of Plattsburgh--the most decisive battle of the War of 1812.
September 11, 1814 was immediately recognized as a great day to Americans as they were enduring the final months of the War of 1812. Later generations also grasped its significance. In his naval history of that war, Theodore Roosevelt referred to the Battle of Plattsburgh as the “greatest naval battle of the war.” Winston Churchill, in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples, called it the “most decisive engagement of the war.”
The victory secured by America’s fighting men at Plattsburgh was precisely that. More than any other single battle of the war, the outcome of Plattsburgh ensured that the War of 1812 ended in a draw instead of an American defeat.
(Map by P.S. Burton)
As I mentioned in a previous post about the burning of Washington, the British grand strategy designed by the Duke of Wellington was to tie down American forces on the eastern seaboard and at New Orleans while driving the death blow down the Lake Champlain-Hudson River corridor. Wellington realized that the war in North America could not be fought like the war in Europe. Because America lacked an established road network in its interior, the rivers and lakes between Canada and the United States would have to serve as the highways that would carry British armies into the heartland of America.
(Map by Kmusser)
Lake Champlain stretches 125 miles from Quebec into New York State and Vermont. At Ticonderoga, a narrow stream connects Lake Champlain to Lake George. That lake extends south 32 miles to within just a few miles of the Hudson River. And, finally, the Hudson River reaches all the way to New York City, the largest city in the United States. It is down this freshwater road that Britain planned to cut the United States in two.
(Painting of the surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga by John Trumbull)
The British effort in 1814 was not the first attempt to divide America along this path. In 1776, a British fleet defeated an American fleet in Lake Champlain off Valcour Island. The following year, General John Burgoyne landed an army at the southern end of the lake and marched it south with the goal of linking up with British forces then occupying New York City. But surrounded, outnumbered, and cut off from supplies, he surrendered to the Americans near Saratoga. It was a devastating blow to the British war effort.
