The Saudi General Authority for Statistics is running an ad gently asking people to stop inviting census takers into their homes for coffee and meals. pic.twitter.com/X7E5bKt9id

— ممنوع الوقوف على الأطلال (@WhiteShemagh) April 28, 2022

Saudi Arabia is famous for its hospitality. Guests must be treated very well and must never leave with an empty stomach.

This presents problems for census takers with the government's General Authority for Statistics. They need to collect information, then move on to the next house.

The news website Morroco News says that the agency created this ad to gently remind people that census takers are at work. They appreciate all offers of coffee and meals, but must keep on the go.

Redditor /u/Sensitive-Shoe2040 offers a translation of the dialog--if you really need one. The census taker's body language conveys enough of the story.

-via Super Punch

Candice Kloss, who is pictured above, has high standards for romance. If a man wants to date her, he needs to deliver the intellectual goods.

The Sun reports that Kloss has an IQ of 136, which puts her within the top 2% of the population. Her favorite topic is behavioral economics, but she's willing to talk about a wide variety of subjects.

Kloss works as a model, which leads some men to underestimate her intelligence. So as a screening tool, she gives a written IQ test on first dates. Candidates must score at least above average and prove through conversation to "be exceptionally smart in at least one subject."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Candice Kloss

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Simone Giertz, a roboticist and general-purpose genius, introduces us to her latest and perhaps simplest invention: a Phillips-head screwdriver ring. This is handy, as one occasionally needs a Phillips head in one's daily adventures. It could also serve, I suppose, as an improvised weapon, as it adds a bit of spiciness to punches and backhand slaps.

Hopefully Giertz will also offer the ring with various sizes of Allen keys, as access to a common size could be helpful for some people.

Giertz notes that she shaved off the hair on her knuckles to make this video, so we should be grateful not only for her invention, but her sacrifices that she made to promote it.

If your immediate answer is "to create the false impression that an impoverished country with a failed economic system is actually prosperous", you'd be correct. But the complete answer is more complicated.

Rakesh Krishnan Simha writes in a 2017 Russia Beyond article that in 1967, the Soviet government created the country's first and only advertising agency. The Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev ordered that this agency, the Eesti Reklaamfilm (ERF), focus on consumer goods. All Soviet companies must spend 1% of their revenue on advertising.

Many companies didn't produce consumer goods. But that didn't matter. They still had to spend a full percentage point of their revenues on advertising. So they often made up products and ads for these imaginary products. If these ads helped bolster the notion that the Soviet system actually worked for Soviet citizens, so much the better.

These video commercials became wildly popular with the Soviet people, who sought access to televisions in order to watch them. One of the most popular TV programs was a weekly 20-minute block of advertisements that aired every Saturday.

-via Amusing Planet

Ask a South Korean how hold s/he is, and you may get three different answers. It's not a straightforward question because there are three traditional ways of counting age in Korean culture and, for a society that grants respect partially on age, the final number is important.

The New York Times (paywalled article) says that one system, typically called "Korean age", declares that a person is a year old at birth, then begins counting with the calendar. So if a baby is born on December 31, then on January 1, he's 2 years old.

The second system is more commonly used throughout the world, including the United States: a person turns a year old a full year after his/her birth.

The third system begins with zero at birth and adds a year every January 1st.

The Times explains that some South Koreans would like to standardize aging to the second system, which would cause many people to get younger. This could be an unpopular move with Koreans who could lose status in age-based hierarchies.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: US Army Garrison Humphreys

Let's say that a Canadian astronaut traveling to the moon commits a crime, such as murder, extortion, or prostitution, can s/he face criminal charges in Canada upon returning to Earth?

Right now, the law is ambigious on that matter. Since Canada is participating in the US-led Lunar Gateway project to return to the moon and what I assume is Canada's practice of recruiting astronauts from its criminal underworld, it's prudent for Parliament to be prepared for the likelihood of crimes committed in space.

CBC reports that there is an amendment in the Budget Implementation Bill that says:

A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside Canada that if committed in Canada would constitute an indictable offence is deemed to have committed that act or omission in Canada.

The issue of crimes in space rose in 2019 when an American astronaut on the International Space Station was accused of illegally accessing bank records while in orbit. She was later cleared of the charge.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: ESA_events

#Japan - QR codes and cranes: Japan embraces modern cemeteries.
📸 @BEHROUZZZZ #AFP pic.twitter.com/uEKM8QVwS5

— AFP Photo (@AFPphoto) April 21, 2022

In a densely populated city like Tokyo (16,122 people per square mile), land must be used thoughtfully. A sprawling graveyard with plots for individual graves can be expensive. Japan has a solution. AFP describes a modern cemetery that takes up a floor of an office building. Vistors wait in individual mourning booths while a machine retrieves the ashes of the dead from storage and delivers them to the booth.

Facilities such as this one may, after 30 years, send the ashes to collective memorials far away from Tokyo. But these memorials are marked with QR codes for individual interred persons, which family members and monks use while praying for the departed.

Read more about these innovative burial solutions at AFP.

-via Super Punch

Walter Orthmann of Brusque, Brazil doesn't have to work at the age of 100, but he wants to. It gives him a sense of purpose. And he's carried that sense for the last 84 years at RenauView, a textile manufacturer. He's done so since he was 15 years old, when he started on the factory floor. Now he's a sales manager.

Reuters reports on Orthmann's secrets to longevity. Aside from a passion for productivity, Orthmann has paid close attention to his health for 60 years. He exercises daily and avoids junk foods. His methods have clearly worked well and have secured for him a Guinness World Record for the longest employment at one company.

-via Oddity Central | Photo: Guinness World Records

World War I was the first war in which submarines were used effectively on a large scale. German U-boats devastated British shipping in particular and the Royal Navy was keen to find new ways to destroy this new threat. In a 2006 issue of the International Journal of Naval History, David A.H. Wilson writes about efforts to use birds to locate and mark submarines.

The Royal Navy considered a variety of proposals involving seagulls landing on submarine periscopes. Seagulls have sharp vision and search out places to land while at sea. Inventor Thomas Mills advocated training seagulls or pigeons with a floating drone that would travel through the water, dispensing food at its top to bait seagulls. The machine is only a few feet long; it is not the same size as a submarine. But its elongated shape might encourage birds to associate submarine shapes with food.

Alas for Mr. Mills and other advocates for avian anti-submarine warfare, the Allied navies adopted other approaches to combating submarines, notably the newly-invented depth charge. The age of seagull warfare would not come yet.

-via Weird Universe | Photo: European Patent Office

It's a bit nippy out in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Although the temperature is above freezing now, it dipped below long enough that the city acquired quite a bit of snow.

These two enterprising lads understand the Ninth Rule of Acquisition: "Opportunity plus instinct equals profit." They walked around their neighborhood and with snow shovels and offered to shovel driveways for $20 each.

A Ring doorbell camera captured their plans when they approached one home. As the resident searches for money with which to pay the boys, they make plans for what they're going to do with their incoming fortune. Should they wait until they're 16 years old and buy a car? Yes, but which one? The smaller boy prudently suggests a Lamborghini.

Once paid, the boys get to work. Although they play a bit, they're also focused. As the Sixteenth Rule of Acquisition says, "A deal is a deal."

-via Dave Barry

クスノキに運搬中です。
葉見やってます。 pic.twitter.com/fckPVajv8D

— 京都大学クジャク同好会 (@KU_peacock) April 16, 2022

Now you have.

Information is only available in Japanese, but I gather that KU Peacock is student club that raises peacocks. So far, they have 300 humans and 3 peacocks. The birds are named Sakatan, Sky Rainbow Hurricane God Phoenix (hey, that's what the translation software says), and Tanaka-kun.

I suspect that the species imbance will shift when peacocks observe the chauffeur service available to bird members. Why fly when you can ride? This rolling advertising system is bound to attract interest from local peacocks.

-via Super Punch

I recreated the @netflix intro with $30 worth of yarn pic.twitter.com/dhi6Y5wSTE

— Kevin Parry (@kevinbparry) April 21, 2022

Kevin Parry, a master of stop motion animation, set a challenge for himself: to remake the animated Netflix logo using just ordinary arts and crafts supplies.

Parry created a set with a table and black cloth. Rather than moving the camera toward the N, created a rig under the table that pushed the N up to the camera. The N is actually three separate Ns, which he swaps out in order to create the grainy visual effect of stop motion animation.

As the N moves all the way up, he switches the framing to strands of yarn threaded into slots on boards, which gradually fill the screen and then disappear. The result is a highly effective visual take on an increasingly iconic image.

When she was seven years old, Ashley Peldon starred in the movie Child of Rage. Her role required that she scream a lot. This is when her ability to scream effectively and with variety was noticed.

Over the course of her career, Peldon has gradually developed a specialization: screaming. She adds screams to films and TV shows during the post-production phase to heighten the dramatic tension of the story. You may have heard her work in Free Guy, Paranomal Activity, and, appropriately, Scream.

Peldon has a lot more to offer than a Wilhelm Scream added into a soundtrack casually. She screams just the right scream for every occasion, as she explains in The Guardian:

As a scream artist you have to know the subtle differences between screams and determine whether they should peak at certain points, or remain steady for a very long time. I have to think: ‘OK, the character is scared here, but are they scared because their life is in danger or are they just startled?’ Those screams will sound very different. Ghost stories, for example, will often use a shrill, harsh scream because we need the audience to also experience fear.

-via Marginal Revolution

The Manuscript Writing Cafe is a unique shop in Tokyo set aside exclusively for writers facing deadlines.

When they enter, customers report a writing goal to the manager. Specifically, they have to state a number of words that must be completed. There's a consequence for failing to finish the goal: they don't get to leave.

After paying an entrance fee, the writers can order coffee with unlimited refills. The cafe has WiFi and each writing station has a USB charger and a PC cooling stand.

About every hour, the manager stops by each writer and asks if they're making progress. The customer chooses whether the manager asks that question in a "mild", "normal", or "hard" manner.

"Hard" is, presumably, a vigorous application of the query.

-via Super Punch | Photo: Manuscript Writing Cafe

World events have been rather boring for the past two years, so what's the worst that could happen?

The Guardian reports that archaeologists working in the ruins of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris during its reconstruction discovered a human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead. At some point during the 1300s, people in Paris decided that it was very important to bury whatever is inside the sarcophagus beneath the floor of the transept of the cathedral.

The transcept is the center of the cross of a crucifix-shaped cathedral. It is thus at the very heart of this consecrated ground.

The archaeologists are, as you might expect, doing this during the Easter season when, as historian Steven Van Impe points out, "people are known to come back from the dead."

The sarcophogus is made of lead. Why? I cannot find any lore about the properties of lead that would suggest why the people who buried it 700 years ago would use it as a construction material.

-via John Overholt | Photo: Drew de F Fawkes