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

I know that it doesn't look like a pillow, but it's designed to function as one. The crew of Sora News 24 found a strange product on Amazon and insisted on trying it. This invention is called the "Practical Model Pendulum Neck Stretcher Comfortable Sleep Pillow / Revolutionary Sleep Pillow With Your Own Head Weight for Comfortable Sleep."

Pillows are supposed to provide a place to rest your head during sleep. You can think of this invention as a hammock for your head. The straps wrap around your head and keep it suspended a couple inches off the ground with a tripod.

In addition to keeping your head off the ground, it's supposed to stretch your neck. So it's a lot like this device that Barney Fife used on The Andy Griffith Show to increase his height:

When death comes to families, there is often a need to clean out homes quickly. This can be challenging for families in mourning, so they may hire professionals to do the job. In Japan, there's a growing industry of people who respectfully and efficiently pack up a deceased person's possessions for storage, sale, or disposal. It's called ihinseiri.

Anne Allison, a professor of anthropology at Duke University, has studied the cultures of death in Japan for many years. She describes the ihinseiri industry at LitHub.

Animism is foundational in Japanese culture. There is, as a result, attachment to and attribution of meaning to physical objects owned by deceased people. Ihinseiri workers are not simply laborers who work as movers, but professional mourners who sort and arrange possessions in emotionally and spiritually sensitive ways.

Ihinseiri firms can move quickly after someone has died, but it's also possible to hire them before someone has passed on. As a client is preparing for the final journey, s/he can hire these companies to do much of the preliminary decluttering and packing before death. Dr. Allison was able to shadow some of these workers on the job. She described the activity "as if a gentle dust buster had been programmed to silently, automatically empty the house."

-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Death Sweeper by Shou Kitagawa, a manga about people who clean up after death

The visual style—especially the human movements—of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise is instantly recognizable. Autoescola Brasiliense chose well to release its latest ad to resemble Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It shows the viewer playing a student who enrolls at this full-service driving school to learn how to operate motorbikes, cars, buses, and commercial trucks.

The actor is Matheus Senna, a bodybuilder and cosplayer. His Instagram page is filled with similar cosplays of Grand Theft Auto in real life. Ad director Anderson Mascarenhas perfectly executed this project with Senna’s help, making you feel like you’re really playing the game.

-via My Modern Met

In the classic TV series Exosquad, when humanity set about genetically engineering a slave race that would one day rise up in rebellion against them, they helpfully gave their slaves two opposing thumbs.

Thumbs are useful. They're pretty much the only reason we humans are in charge of this planet and not dolphins. So let's make best use of this advantage by doubling them.

Dani Clode and Tamar Makin of Cambridge University 3D printed a thumb that can be attached to a hand. The motor is strapped to the wrist and the battery on the upper arm. The controlling sensors are attached to big toes. So, if I understand this Guardian article correctly, twitch your toes to open and close the extra thumb.

At a recently science exhibition, Clode and Makin gave 600 people the chance to try it. 98% were able to figure out the control system within a minute, so this is clearly user-friendly technology.

-via Design Boom