Ok I can stop collecting now. pic.twitter.com/2rYtpw9KQc

— Go! Go! アンディロボ! (@GoGoAndyRobo) March 24, 2023

In 1997, James Cameron's film Titanic was a, well, titanic success at the box office and the launch of a major pop culture phenomenon. I distinctly remember there was a lot of general interest in the 1912 sinking, so it would make sense that toymakers would produce collectibles to take advantage of the craze.

This apparently included a Transformer-type toy that occasionally pops up on eBay. A more recent alternative version is also on the market.

I'm skeptical that Titanic-Bot would have been a popular combatant. Other transforming robots, knowing her track record, might hesitate to go into battle at her side, let alone travel on her.

-via Super Punch

YouTuber Everything Is Hacked is a computer programmer with interests in writing code under difficult circumstances and making working from home more practical. In the past, he created an interface for controlling a computer using facial movements and having Zoom put virtual pants on him for those times when he's forgotten to wear them.

Now he's radically departing from that sedentary lifestyle for energetic, full-body workouts. He's adapted flag semaphore into a computer interface that will let him type, program, and even control video games with body movements.

This video is a special treat and not just because Everything Is Hacked is smart and innovative technically. It's genuinely funny throughout as he tries to spell out the words for songs as he plays them.

-via Laughing Squid

John Venn (1834-1923) accomplished much during his life. He began as an Anglican priest, although his study of logic, mathematics, and philosophy eventually led him to shed the clerical collar. He taught at Cambridge and eventually became president of one of its constituent colleges. Venn also tinkered with machines and invented a cricket ball bowling machine that was better than top human bowlers.

But Venn is most famous for one of the diagrams that he developed to show partially overlapping sets of values. That design is the basis for a memorial window in his honor at Gonville and Caius College.

His birthplace in Hull is also marked with an Alternative Heritage marker inspired by Venn's diagram.

-via Richard Coles | Photos: Schutz and Dithy, respectively

20/ pic.twitter.com/sFxrwpUOI3

— 0xDesigner (@0xDesigner) April 2, 2023

The subreddit /r/ProgrammerHumor shares the joys, frustrations, and irreverent jokes from the world of computer programming. In 2017, the members held an informal contest to develop the worst possible volume control from the perspective of user experience (UX). These include selections that are necessarily random, difficult to manipulate, or deceptively labeled.

Twitter user 0xDesigner rounded up the best in a thread. Many of them include uses of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", which should, of course, always be played on full blast. That's hard to do when the slider bounces around the higher you raise the volume.

While preparing for post-apocalyptic travel across the barren wastelands of what was once your hometown, you'll need a bike that won't become useless after the first flat tire. YouTuber user The Q has a solution: making functional tires out of tennis balls.

Note that there's a lot of prep work that you'll want to do before the downfall of the civilization and regular electrical power. The Q made small rings of PVC pipe and used them to mount the balls on the rim of the wheels. Attaching the rings required the construction of a custom jig that drove balls inside the rings without rupturing them.

The finished product looks like a rough ride, but functional--at least enough to keep you ahead of the cannibals that have been following you on foot for several days.

-via Hack A Day

This is Dr. Ronald Weiss of Ottawa. Over the course of his career, he's performed vasectomies on at least 58,789 men including, according to the Toronto Star, celebrities, politicians, and entire hockey teams. He's a pioneer of a no-scalpel method and has a famously low complication rate, which has drawn to him patients as far away as Los Angeles and Japan.

In a 2016 interview for Ottawa magazine, Dr. Weiss shares his origin story. He had been a family physician who did minor operations in his office suite in the early 90s. Word got around that he could snip men quickly and painlessly. Eventually, it became his specialty and he would perform 14 each working day. This is why his wife calls him "the vasectomy machine."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Vasectomy.Ca

A few years ago, redditor /u/flashtone experienced a hailstorm that damaged his car. It appears that the plastic coating held even when the glass did not, thus keeping the ice from completely penetrating the barrier and damaging the interior.

Some redditors are making off-color jokes about other protective coatings preventing other types of fluids from leaking. Others are pointing out that the car now has, as a feature, a decorative chandelier or mirrored disco ball.

-via Massimo

Some people really enjoy conversations with their barbers. The rest of us would like to just get a haircut and move on to the next task of the day.

A chatty barber who doesn't pick up on social cues is annoying and Beyond the Pale Barbershop in San Francisco doesn't want to annoy its customers. The San Francisco Standard reports that this shop lets customers select "silent mode" from the beginning. The barber then knows not to even try to chat with the customer.

It's quite a shop. Owner Anthony Larrasquiti has designed his operation to be not just a business, but an experience for customers. You have a variety of haircut options, which might end up free. If you can hit a bullseye on the dartboard, your haircut is free and you get a beer.

It's popular: Larrasquiti says that he has about 350 regular customers who schedule appointments with him. That's especially impressive since Beyond the Pale has been open since only February.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Beyond the Pale Barbershop

When I try to start conversations with strangers, one of my go-to questions is "What's the most surprising thing you've ever encountered in a colonoscopy?"

It doesn't have to be the person's own colonoscopy--just one that the person has experienced.

This gentleman (that's a man in the photo) had ladybug in his colon. A 2019 article in the medical journal American College of Gastroenterology Reports briefly describes the surprising appearance of a harmonia axyridis, one of 6,000 ladybug species in the world. If I understand the article correctly, the doctors assume that the patient swallowed the bug. His consumption of a full gallon of polyethylene glycol as part of the colonoscopy preparation may have protected the ladybug from digestion.

-via Science Girl

The news service of Swedish national television brings us news of an innovative program to provide safety lighting for bicyclists at night. This system, which is being tested in the town of Skara, launches when the bicyclist requests the lights through a phone app. Drones with bright lights fly to positions along the path that the bicyclist is taking and hover.

This approach, the project managers have determined, will ultimately be cheaper than the cost of permanently illuminating a bike path with street lights. It will also be safer than having bicyclists rely entirely on lights mounted on their own vehicles.

-via Wrath of Gnon | Image: SVT

When you read the place name Cleveland, which place do you think of? The big city on Lake Erie where the river used to catch on fire regularly? Me, too.

But there's also a Cleveland, Tennessee and a Cleveland, Mississippi. There's even a Cleveland, Texas (I've been there), five different Clevelands in Wisconsin for a total of twenty-seven Clevelands across the United States.

But which Cleveland do you actually think of when you read or hear the name? Pudding has crunched the numbers for towns in the United States with the same name. I'm skeptical of their methodology for answering the question, which appears to be driven by the length of Wikipedia articles about these various towns. Explore the site and see if you agree with the familiarity ranking of your town.

-via Kottke

Matt Dawson is a painter who lives in Louisiana. He recently became Internet famous when he published on Instagram a photo of his latest painting: Starry Waffles. It mimics the style and background of Vincent Van Gogh's iconic Starry Night, except that it shows a Waffle House restaurant instead of the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France.

Dawson explained to Fox 35 News Orlando that his painting shows a specific Waffle House in Sorrento, Lousiana. It has special memories for him: when his wife was sick, he frequently took her to medical appointments. They'd stop at this Waffle House on their way back home. It was a refuge in time of stress, which is exactly what an American diner should be in the middle of the night.

-via Boing Boing

Does this building look like a chocolate bar standing three storeys tall? That's completely intentional. This is the Meiji Chocolate Factory in Osaka, Japan. The facility dates back to 1955. When it was refurbished in 2011, the architecture firm Taisei Design proposed covering on side with a facade that looks like Meiji chocolate. It's visible to passengers on a rail line that passes nearby.

This chocolate factory is one of seven buildings in Japan that are shaped like the products sold from or manufactured in them. See Spoon & Tamago for more, including a brewery shaped like glasses of beer and a pet supplies warehouse that looks like a dog.

-via Nag on the Lake | Photo: Japan Travel

A total of 3,888 identified casualties are buried in the British Commonwealth’s Ramleh War Cemetery. But one grave attracts a disproportionate share of visitors. It belongs to Private Harry Potter, number 5251351 in the Worcestershire Regiment. pic.twitter.com/NLcYk9Vqgj

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) August 6, 2018

I've read only the first novel in J.K. Rowling's generation-defining story, but I take it that Harry dies at the end. Otherwise, why would this grave exist?

A better interpretation is that a real person also named Harry Potter died. The Commonwealth military cemetery at Ramlah, Israel contains 3,888 interments, including Private Harry Potter. This Harry Potter joined the British Army at the age of 16 according to the official webpage of the Worcester Regiment, in which Potter served. He was deployed to British Palestine, where he drove trucks and earned the nickname "Crash Harry." In 1939, Arab guerillas ambushed a convoy that Potter was in. He was killed in action and buried nearby.

Private Potter's grave has become a tourist attraction since news reports about his grave in 2010. But he's actually one of at least thirteen Harry Potters buried in located war graves around the world.

-via Amusing Planet

Jake Carlini is an inventor attuned with the needs of the modern world. When 21st Century challenges emerge, he develops practical solutions for them.

In the past, he's made a reliable snorkel apparatus that allows him to run a mile underwater, a functional sword out of gym socks, and a jet-powered longboard. These are necessary technologies for modern life, but we can and shall, thanks to Carlini, achieve even greater heights.

Carlini has, through painstaking labor and experimentation, made functional roller skates out of four tiny bicycles. They're skatecycles and they're amazing. In this video, we see how he ushered in a new dawn of transportation.

-via The Awesomer