Dr. Michael Darden is a highly trained pediatrician and allergist. But he's more than just a man of science. He also has a gifted bedside manner. Here he is in his D.C.-area clinic giving two shots to a toddler. This would normally cause a young child to howl in pain. But Dr. Darden is so entertaining that instead the little boy laughs.
Here's another interesting video. It's an interview with Dr. Darden. At the 5:10 mark, he shares a fascinating story. When he was still in high school, he worked in a hospital. At the age of about 16 or 17, he had the opportunity to observe an autopsy. The body was that of someone that he knew well. It was, for Dr. Darden, an early encounter with the mysterious boundary between life and death.
Fans of both the Game of Thrones TV show and the Song of Ice and Fire novel series can appreciate the extensive worldbuilding that George R.R. Martin engaged in prior to publishing his work. Martin's stories are predicated upon carefully-developed history, geography, and ethnography.
The world in which the stories take place is huge. It can be helpful to understand its history. Thanks to a series of 16 maps by redditor hotbrownDoubleDouble, we can do so quickly. They take us from the dawn of known history in Westeros and Essos to the complete conquest of Westeros by House Targaryen. Each one contains a summary of historical events during that period.
How can you beat the scorching summer heat? Break open a watermelon and enjoy some cold, sweet, fruit. A friend of Twitter user @min18rff had that idea, but he bought the wrong watermelon. He could still turn it into a huge watermelon Jell-O shot. But only one.
A young boy bodyboarding off Crooklets Beach in Bude, Cornwall, UK, encountered a rip current and was pushed out to sea. He screamed for help. Joby Wolfenden-Brown, a lifeguard working for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, jumped into the water to save him.
Wolfenden-Brown was wearing a camera at that moment. Watch this heart-pounding footage of him saving the boy from drowning.
What's are rip currents? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US) defines them as "narrow, and sometimes strong, currents that flow away from the beach." They can go faster than 6 miles an hour, and thus are dangerous to even strong swimmers.
What should you do if you find yourself in a rip current? RNLI lifeguard Chris Wafer advises:
If you're stuck in a rip current do not panic or swim against the current, keep hold of your flotation device and raise your arm to signal for help.
Don't panic! Just hang this cross stitch on your wall to understand what other people are saying to you. In the universe of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish is an incredibly useful yet entirely natural object that translates speech:
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconcious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Etsy seller Jen made this cross stitch piece illustrating the internal composition of the wondrous animal. You can buy her pattern here.
He is more machine than man now. Twisted, welded, and evil. This is Darth Vader, an outdoor wood stove built by Instructables member doddieszoomer. He made it from an old gas steel bottle. He used an angle grinder to shape the helmet accents. Doddieszoomer then finished the project with spray paint for the rich black Vader look.
iDLights took two old plastic popcorn bins (like this one) and turned them into a cute lamp. There's a 15 watt bulb in the bottom and a 9 watt bulb in the top. With its warm light and appropriate theme, the lamp would be perfect for a home theater.
Genki Sudo's techno musical group World Order is noted for its videos of Japanese men in business suits moving in lockstep, often out of sync with the world around them. The visual impact of the precision movement is stunning.
World Order brings their skills and looks to this odd commercial for Toyota. The suited men drive into a jungle and experience a series of unexpected adventures. How buying a Toyota is a logical consequence of them is unclear, but the effect gets eyeballs on the screen, which is sufficient.
A mini domino is so small that it weighs only a hundredth of the weight of a regular domino. Setting them up for an orderly fall requires great concentration and precise movements. Sinners Domino Entertainment proved up for the challenge when it set up and knocked down a record-breaking 2,000 piece domino arrangement. The teenagers in this video performed this feat at the Wilhelm-Lückert-Gymnasium in Büdingen, Germany, on July 12, 2013.
Sinners Domino Entertainment usually operates on a grander scale. You may recall their domino arrangements with 277,275 pieces and the flags of the world.
My little pony, my little pony What does the future hold? My little pony, my little pony Isn’t the world a lovely place? My little pony, my little pony Everywhere you go is a smiling face. Running and skipping Merrily tripping Watching the morning unfold My little pony, my little pony What does the future hold?
Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox presents this slow jam version of the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. We've previously seen them rework "Royals," "Sweet Child O' Mine," and the theme songs of Game of Thrones and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now Bradlee's band shows the Elements of (musical) Harmony from Equestria. Welcome to the herd, Mr. Bradlee. *brohoof*
It's not easy to hit a golf ball several hundred yards and have it land neatly in a cup 4.25 inches in diameter. But, sadly, some golfers do experience this problem.
Yes, that's right: hitting a hole-in-one can be a bad thing.
That's because in some golfing cultures, particularly Japan the the UK, golfers who sink a ball in one shot are expected to throw a party. They should, at minimum, treat everyone in their group to drinks back at the clubhouse. In more extreme cases, social standards compel successful golfers to host lavish celebrations costing thousands of dollars.
After spending $650 buying the entire clubhouse champagne at England’s South Winchester Golf Club following a hole in one, Paul Neilson told Bloomberg, “I couldn't afford to go through all that again. I used to have a policy but never got around to renewing it.” Among the stories from Japan, the same article quotes Eiji Yoneda, who was one of 200 people invited on a dinner cruise by someone celebrating a hole in one.
A number of firms offer hole in one insurance, frequently bundled with other services that golfers commonly buy like insurance for golfing equipment or personal liability. (Apparently yelling “Fore!” can’t ward off lawsuits if you hit a ball right at someone.) Golfplan, a U.K. insurer, covers $340 to $510 worth of drinks for hole in one celebrations. (Clubs’ set of rules for validating a hole in one makes it easier to process claims.) When it is sold unbundled, hole in one insurance can be cheap; Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co. Ltd offers Japanese golfers hole in one insurance for as little as a $3 premium. Outside of individual policies, golf tournaments also get hole in one insurance so that they can offer huge cash prizes for a hole in one as a marketing promotion -- it's the same type of "prize indemnity" insurance that covers teams when a fan sinks a half court shot or makes a field goal.
It’s critical that we get this thing working properly. When the economy tanks, I need this flamethrower to defend myself and my own.
That's Nick from Doomsday Preppers, a reality show on the National Geographic television network. He wants to be prepared for the worst. Since he owns many rabbits, he wants to use their poop productively. With lots of nitrogen and phosphorus, rabbit poop is an excellent fertilizer. That may help feed Nick, but it won't protect him from predators.
To make his rabbit poop into a formidable flamethrower, Nick first used a kitchen blender to grind it into a fine powder. He explains:
In order to weaponize rabbit manure, you have to grind it into a fine powder that will allow more oxygen to mix very well with the hydrocarbons and nitrogens that are in rabbit manure.
He then used the rabbit poop to produce methane gas and a flammable powder. The results were, as you can see in this video, beautiful:
For today's feel good news story, we journey to the south side of Houston, Texas, where Mayura Dissanyake works as a clerk at a gas station and convenience store. He's also been a mixed martial arts fighter for a decade. In his native Sri Lanka, he was the national champion for five years. He still trains and competes in the United States.
"The first guy I saw, I just kicked him in the face," he said. "Then I punched the other guy."
They were moves he learned from cage matches. Dissanyake has been involved with mixed martial arts for more than a decade. He says he was the national champion for five consecutive years in his native Sri Lanka.
"We learn how to punch, how to kick and all that stuff you can use in the streets," Dissanayake said.
In the video, you see the accused crooks begin their retreat and the get-away car getting further away. As they ran, Dissanayake threw a punch that knocked one of the guys to the ground. His friends and accomplices left him there.
"I just kicked him until he lays down on the floor," he said. "Until he stopped moving cause I wasn't sure if he had a knife or a gun so I wanted him to stop moving."
One of the two would-be robbers escaped. Police arrested the other one.
Terry Siebert of Hamilton, Ontario died last Monday at the age of 58. His family published an obituary in the Hamilton Spectator. It described at length his loving family and friends and how he impacted their lives. Then, in the final line, Siebert snarked at the Maple Leafs, which is a professional hockey team in Toronto:
It was Terry's last wish that his pallbearers be the Toronto Maple Leafs so they could let him down one last time.
Pictured above is Daniel Bryan, a former WWE Heavyweight Champion. He was the winner of Wrestlemania XXX this past April. So he's a big, strong guy who knows how to throw his weight around--and someone else's too.
Bryan lives with his wife in Pheonix, Arizona. On Friday, for the second time, someone broke into his home. This time, he was present to deal with the culprit. He chased the suspect 400 feet before taking him down with his special skills:
He said he chased Sosa about 400 feet before grabbing him and shouting some “bad words.” And he said he used a rear naked choke hold to subdue him, rather than his trademark “Yes!” lock.
“He was very, very tired and it literally took zero effort to take him down,” Bryan told a news conference at police headquarters, seated next to his wife with the dog in her lap.
