Students at the Columbus College of Art & Design (Columbus, Ohio) made an interactive mural that lets you put yourself into Super Mario Bros. Twelve students spent eight days making it. The mural measures sixteen feet tall and thirty-eight feet wide. You can view several full-size pictures at the link.
Are you tired of your chickens pooping all over your nice carpets and grandmother's table cozies? Now there's a solution to your problem (well, one of them): chicken diapers. Ingrid Dimock of Australia invented and sells them for people who keep their chickens indoors:
The nappies she sells are bought by families who encourage their birds inside to interact or for people in apartments or townhouses who keep birds but have limited space.
"Chickens have become incredibly interactive with people," Ms Dimock said.
"When you come home they are looking for you and run up to you. They make really good pets and are really social creatures."
The leads were developed because Ms Dimock said people wanted to take their birds with them when they left the house.
"People were telling us that they wanted to take their chickens to the park to have a scratch around while they watched their kids playing soccer," she said.
The above map shows the border between the United Arab Emirates (yellow) and Oman (green). Inside the UAE is a tiny enclave of Omanese territory called Madha. It consists of about 29 square miles. Inside that enclave is another enclave of UAE territory called Nahwa, which is under a square mile in area. At the link, you can view pictures of this enclave within an enclave.
Link via Dan Lewis | Map: National Geographic Society
A group of miners in Chile have been trapped underground since August 5. Rescue workers are doing their best to dig them out. The story has attracted a lot of publicity and as a result, the wife and mistress of trapped miner Yonni Barrios met each other:
Yonni Barrios' wife, Marta Salinas, and Barrios' lover, Susana Valenzuela, were both holding vigils for him outside the mine.
Salinas was stunned when she heard Valenzuela shouting his name amid a crowd of miners' loved ones.
Salinas, 56, is said to be "horrified". However, she is determined not to give up her man to her love rival.
She told friends: "Barrios is my husband. He loves me and I am his devoted wife. This woman has no legitimacy."
If you think that modern athletes make a lot of money, they've got nothing on the ancients. Peter Struck, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, states that a particular Roman chariot driver far exceeded the earnings of today's top athletes:
The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of “42 years, 7 months, and 23 days” as “champion of all charioteers.”
His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period—enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion. Even without his dalliances, it is doubtful Tiger could have matched it.
Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes:
Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the state and planet, famous landmarks, or slightly randomly selected (but loosely based on facts) from my brother and myself.
Artist Sarah Calvillo made a steampunk version of Mr. Potato Head. Calvillo works in a wide variety of media, so she also made a vintage-looking wanted poster, offering a reward for the capture of this ungentlemanly spud. At the link, you can view photos of it, as well process photos for the figurine.
Ascension Island, a British overseas territory in the south Atlantic, was originally a nearly-lifeless, uninhabited rock. It had no freshwater except for rainfall which quickly evaporated. But in an experiment, Charles Darwin and his friend Joseph Hooker introduced non-native plants that they hoped would encourage water retention. The result is that today Ascension Island has lush, vibrant forests:
Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's father was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.
The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.
So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.
Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.
Link via Radley Balko | Photo of Ascension Island by Flickr user Drew Avery used under Creative Commons license
If you go into some Japanese stores, the clerks have fist-sized orange balls behind the counter. No, the are not for sale. They're balls of paint that clerks throw at robbers so that police can more easily identify them:
The orange orbs you observed are called bohan yo kara boru (anticrime color balls). Basically, they're paint balls — plastic spheres filled with brightly colored liquid pigment. But unlike the fun-and-games variety, these balls are kept on hand in case of a stickup. The idea is to lob one after a robber and mark him to improve the chance of an arrest.
Make held a weird gadget contest, and Rick Prescott's modified Nerf Vulcan EBF-25TM machine gun came in first place. It uses heat sensors to track the movement of warm-bodied intruders and fire at them:
An idea sparked in my mind one day while walking the toy gun isle in a store with my kid and later that evening learning of the workings of a thermopile array while surfing the internet. The result is this infrared seeking sentinel which joins a realistically priced infrared sensor to a realistically operatable Nerf® machine gun to create a slightly less deadly yet still highly deterring automated machine. Personally I have grand plans to deploy the infrared seeking sentinel facing the entrance of my work cubical in order to speed interaction with less desirable visitors.
Researchers in Germany examined what news stories older people like to read. They found that grandma and grandpa tend to prefer stories that cast younger people in a negative light:
"Living in a youth centered culture, they may appreciate a boost in self-esteem. That's why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society," said Dr. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, of Ohio State University.[...]
All the adults in the study were shown what they were led to believe was a test version of a new online news magazine. They were also given a limited time to look over either a negative and positive version of 10 pre-selected articles.
Each story was also paired with a photograph depicting someone of either the younger or the older age group.
The researchers found that older people were more likely to choose to read negative articles about those younger than themselves
Link via Slashdot | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user little sourire used under Creative Commons license
In the New York Times, Guy Deutscher has a lengthy article about the speculations of some linguists that the language that we first learn strongly shapes and limits how we think. One interesting example that he cites is an Australian aboriginal language that has no personal spatial descriptors, such as the English phrases "to my right" or "behind me". Instead, it uses cardinal directions in everyday conversation:
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
Link via Popehat | Photo by Flickr user psd used under Creative Commons license
A man at the Shady Canyon Golf Club in Irvine, California hit a rock with his club, sparking a fire that required the labors of 150 firefighters to extinguish. Orange County Fire Authority Captain Greg McKeown said:
"Usually, we're able to close out the fire season in the winters here," McKeown added, "but we haven't been able to do that since 2006. That's just how dry it is out there."
McKeown said no charges have been filed against the golfer, whose name has been withheld. Apparently, he was trying to hit his ball out of the rough when he struck the rock, which sparked the blaze at 12:07 p.m. Saturday, officials said.
The Madara Rider is an 23-meter tall relief sculpture carved into a vertical face of a rocky plateau in Bulgaria. It shows a mounted knight, probably representing a Bulgarian Emperor, attacking a lion. The origin of the sculpture is uncertain, but it's thought to date back to the 8th Century AD, when the power of the First Bulgarian Empire was increasing:
Including the inscription in Medieval Greek, the rider covers close to 1400 square feet on a vertical 328 foot cliff face. The horseman is depicted in a hunting scene, spearing a lion. The lion is being trampled by the horse and a dog is trailing behind the rider. The Greek inscriptions tell the history of the Bulgarian state and the three Khans including Tervel, Krum and Omurtag.
Jersey Circus is a parody of the reality TV show Jersey Shore and the cartoon The Family Circus. It places quotations from the show's actors into the mouths of the cartoon's characters. In the above cartoon, Snooki speaks for the young boy Jeffy.