Let's say that you've been transported back in time to the Second Century A.D. You're in Eburacum, a Roman fort located in what is now Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK. You want to get Tanais, which is a Greco-Roman colony at the mouth of the Don River in what is now Russia. How do you get there?

Google Maps isn't going to help you. But ORBIS will. Provided that you can get a good WiFi signal, you can pull up this complex mapping and travel planning program from Stanford University.

ORBIS comes with many different options to help you select your route. You chose to go as fast as you could, by any means possible, and during the summer. Well, you didn't hire a horse relay--you're not made of denarri. But you did rent horses for the journey.

You're throwing a lot of money at this problem, but it's still going to take you a long time to get from England to Russia compared to modern standards. You're riding horses over what is now southern France, central Italy, and Serbia. You're also traveling by ship and riverboat. The trip will take you more than 60 days.

If you don't have a lot of money available, then you may have to travel by foot and slower sea-going vessels. Then the trip will take almost 84 days.

ORBIS is fun! You can explore it here.

-via Marginal Revolution

(Sarah Andersen)

Remember that fifty year-old man who wears shorts and black socks with sandals? Someday--perhaps soon--you're going to be him. And you'll like it. You'll be comfortable and won't care what other people think.

(Photo: Associated Press)

Yellowstone National Park is in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, along with a little bit spilling over into Idaho and Montana. At 3,468 square miles, it's larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island together.

(Image: National Park Service)

Yellowstone rests on a geological hot spot--specifically, a volcanic caldera. The enormous heat contained beneath the Earth's surface bubbles up through geysers and hot springs. 

The geothermal heat can damage human structures on the surface. This photo from the Associated Press shows a strip of Firehole Lake Drive. The subsurface heat has melted the asphalt.

-via Gizmodo

P.S. Harry Turtledove, a fantasy and alternate history novelist, wrote a trilogy about life in the United States after a massive Yellowstone eruption. The first book is called Supervolcano: Eruption.

(Image: BBC News)

Joel Vasquez Rojas is the mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico. This past week, in a grand public wedding, he married a young female crocodile that was wearing a white bridal gown.

The wedding was in keeping with an old tradition in this coastal fishing town. The crocodile is proclaimed a “princess.” Marrying her ensures good luck for fishermen in the future.

Residents filled the city hall, where the wedding took place. They danced, ate, and set off fireworks. The bride and groom, of course, took the first dance.

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This basenji isn't sure what to do with the odd ball. Is it alive? Is it a toy?

Just wait until it hatches, pup. You're going to be a daddy!

-via Tastefully Offensive

When they were engineering students at McMaster University in Ontario, Phil Weicker and Duncan Forster built a hot tub inside a 1969 Cadillac DeVille. It remains a fully functional car, with the original engine in the front. The water circulation system in the trunk processes 5,000 pounds of water and keeps it at a comfortable 102°F.

Weicker and Forster want to take the Carpool DeVille to the Bonneville Speedway. This area in the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah is ideal for land speed racing. If Weicker and Forster are successful, they will drive the Carpool DeVille on the speedway, making it the fastest hot tub in the world.

They recently conducted a Kickstarter funding project to acquire what they need to transport the car to Utah and equip the car with the safety gear necessary to drive at Bonneville. Over the weekend, they passed their $10,000 goal.

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Here's the promotional video from their now-completed Kickstarter project.

-via Nag on the Lake

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Darren Mullery, 39, of Ireland learned that he has pancreatic cancer while his wife, Danielle, was pregnant with their daughter. Now Darren is a father, so he's got a lot to live for.

But it's unlikely that he will survive. So Darren is focusing on what he can do for his family, especially baby Noelle. He made this music video to show her after he dies how hard he fought and took his cancer in good humor.

It builds slowly, turning into a funny and inspiring day-in-the-life story using music from "Eye of the Tiger" by the band Survivor. Darren and his friends ham it up, demonstrating how a dad fights cancer because he loves his daughter.

-via Huffington Post

Redditor machina99 spotted this sign at the Carolla Cantina in Outer Banks, North Carolina. Refraining from judgment is a great idea if you want your customers to leave good tips.

The Carolla Cantina allows pets on its patio, so feel free to bring your cat, dog, or howler monkey.

-via Tastefully Offensive

Honestly, you shouldn't be surprised to walk into a modern art gallery and see trash hanging from a wall. But that's not what Tom Pfannerstill makes. What you see above is not an old KFC bucket, but a painted image of one on wood. Pfannerstill makes highly realistic images of crushed trash with acrylic paint and enamel on basswood. You can find more examples in the series here.

Pfannerstill notes that his paintings are not of generic pieces of trash. They reflect specific pieces of trash that he finds on the street. On the back of each painting are notes about where and when he found the original object. The paintings are memorials to these individual pieces of trash. Pfannerstill explains:

There is also a missing time element, an implied narrative about how the object travelled from where it originated to where I happened upon it.These objects have a life span so to speak (if not an actual one, at least metaphoric one), from their production through their usefulness to their ultimate disposal. As such, I see them as ‘memento mori’, reminders of mortality and the corresponding corollary ‘carpe diem’. They are subtle reminders of the temporal nature of all things.

-via Visual News

Joseph Pleban of Fredericksburg, Virginia learned that doctors would have to amputate his left foot because of a rare bone and joint disease called pigmented villonodular synovitis. This affliction caused tumors to form on the connective tissue of his joints. Doctors informed Pleban that the only way to stop the spread would be to amputate his lower leg.

Pleban is an athletic person who engages in snowboarding, wakeboarding, and rugby. The loss of a leg can be a heavy blow to an athlete. But Pleban decided to have fun with his looming amputation.

He took his left leg on a "farewell tour" and photographed it on adventures. His sister documented these events on a Facebook page called The Last Adventures of Joe's Left Foot.

Pleban goofed around, pretending that he would find a cheaper way to get rid of his foot.

He also got a tattoo that could be helpful to surgeons.

Pleban's amputation is now complete. He's back at home with his family, resting and recovering from surgery. He also appeared on reddit, inviting people to ask him questions about his foot and its adventures.

-via Dave Barry

There's one in every group--someone who is way too physically affectionate, even in formal environments. Anaïs Paulard, a French jeweler living in the UK, devised this solution to your hugger problem. It's a balloon filled with power resting delicately in a spiked broach. You may have to embrace your hugger once. But it'll be the last time.

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Paulard, though, did not design this piece with hugger-repelling in mind. That's just my own idea. She's thinking more romantically:

"My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst” Lester in American Beauty. The sensation you feel inside. The joy of sharing a moment with someone you like, simply give a hug. Hug, burst, share…

-via Lustik

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YouTube user Ivan Paras calls it an "infestation" and writes that "I think I have a hummingbird problem." Watch an ever increasing number of hummingbirds visit his two nectar feeders. One of those feeders rests in his hand, but the hummingbirds show no fear.

What would be a good title for a hummingbird-themed horror movie?

-via Twisted Sifter

On September 5, 1992, Batman: The Animated Series--one of the greatest American cartoons of the 1990s--first aired. It launched a great era of DC superhero cartoons known to fans as the DC Animated Universe. Here are 15 facts you might not know about this show.

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1. Animators Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski created this short pilot film in order to pitch their Batman series to network executives. They voiced it themselves, with Timm providing Batman's grunts and Radomski providing everything else.

2. Radomski developed the backgrounds for the series. In order to give it the film noir atmosphere that he and Timm wanted, Radomski started by painting everything black, then adding highlights. The visual effect of this decision is especially effective in the shots of Gotham's skyline. 

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3. Among the strongest visual influences for the show were the old Dave Fleischer Superman cartoons. These 17 cartoons, such as the one you see above, were made in the 1940s.

(Photo: Baldwin Saintilus, Warner Bros.)

4. When casting for the voice of Batman, voice director Andrea Romano searched for a voice that was “inherently sexy.” Batman was “a rule breaker,” and that dangerousness could appeal to women. Kevin Conroy had just the right voice and nailed his audition.

(Photo: Musicats78)

All parents dread that, someday, they will hear those words spoken to them. For Angie Widener, that possibility became a reality when she visited the Tanganyika Wildlife Park in Goddard, Kansas. There, animals roam a bit more freely than at conventional zoos.

The park doesn't allow visitors to bring in strollers, so Widener brought her nine week-old daughter Finley in with her car seat. She and her other children were having a great time. Then a passerby noticed that Finley had made a new friend:

She told HuffPost over e-mail that she was watching her two older children feed the animals when she heard a stranger laugh and say, "Um, ma'am, there is a lemur on your baby."

"I was shocked, but the zookeeper assured me she was safe, so my two older daughters and I got a few laughs and we snapped some pictures," Widener said. Pictures that have now made our day.

-via Dave Barry

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The splash in a puddle . . . the tapping on a metal roof during the night . . . the roar of a storm outside of your car. Rain makes different sounds depending on what it hits. Together, the drops can make a natural music. Yugo Nakamura demonstrates this in his video "The Origin of the Sound of Rain."

He recorded the sound of rain falling on different objects, including a snail, a glass, a rock, a flower, and more. He then played them in different orders and with varying tempos. The result is a beautiful, stormy symphony consisting of precisely 10,211,326 drops.

-via David Thompson