Sisyphus Squirrel > Pizza Rat pic.twitter.com/XJUNE86GtI
— Nover (@YoungNobler) August 2, 2020
The squirrel can never hope to run down along the up-rolling escalator, and so Twitter user Nover has appropriately dubbed him "Sisyphus Squirrel." He was last spotted at 55 Water Street in Manhattan.
-via Nag on the Lake
A master craftsman, @yichen_leather of Taichung, Taiwan carefully tools and then paints leather images, mostly animals. The worked leather makes the images pop out in three dimensions. These are remarkably beautiful and effective relief sculptures.
David Bamberger made a fortune in the fried chicken business. When the company sold, he became rich. In 1969, he chose to use that fortune to buy the worst piece of scrub land in Texas that he could find--5,500 acres of overgrazed territory in central Texas. Then he began the long, slow process of rehabilitating nature there.
It's now a nature preserve called Selah. Drawing water out of the earth to grow grass and trees for wildlife to thrive in has been Bamberger's life's work. In an interview last year with Texas Monthly, Bamberger offers his advice to all of us:
I’ve made the statement many times that I learned more in my seventeen years as a door-to-door peddler than I did at university. The biggest thing I learned was how to handle rejection. When you’re selling door-to-door, you’ve got to knock on a lot of doors and talk to a lot of people, and you’re going to get turned down. It applies to your health, your economics, your family, everything. You have to be a positive thinker. You have to make the best of the worst. You don’t need to take everything as a personal affront. It means you go to the next door and knock with a positive attitude. That one simple thing transposed into all the other things I’ve done in my life. Fifty years ago, this ranch had the reputation of being the worst piece of real estate in Blanco County. I had to look at it as a positive, and to me it was the greatest opportunity I ever had.
-via Nag on the Lake
The artificial intelligence doesn't eat anything, so perhaps its sense of taste should not be trusted. And an evil AI may even poison you by giving you bad instructions. Nonetheless, tech reporter Rachel Metz trusted the software from OpenAI to come up with a cookie recipe. She describes the results at CNN:
The directions were pretty simple: stir the watermelon gently in a saucepan filled with sugar water over medium-high heat, add in the egg white, and mix in flour, baking powder and salt.
The result was barely edible. It looked more like a watermelon omelette muffin than a cookie, and tasted like a sugary, gloopy nightmare. My four-year-old daughter was the only fan in our house, saying they tasted "weird" but also protesting when I threw them in the compost.
-via Marilyn Terrell
Qing Deng's Aspirator is the perfect chair for 2020. To blow up the seat, scream into the funnel. Comfort comes to you only after suffering.
Appropriately, this design won an honorable mention at the imm Cologne Pure Talents Contest.
-via Core77
Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person could become an expert at a task if he or she spent ten thousand hours practicing it. I cannot say that the man in this video spent that long. Maybe it took longer. But greatness only comes through sacrifice.
-via Born in Space
It's one thing to modify DNA to reflect different genetic traits. It's quite another to use DNA as a data storage device. But that's what scientists at the University of Texas have manged to do. They encoded an Esperanto translation of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz onto DNA. IEEE Spectrum explains why this task is so challenging:
To make a workable DNA data storage standard, you need instead to worry about substitutions, insertions and deletions. The first is similar to a bit flip in which, say, an A nucleotide is substituted in the place where a T nucleotide used to be. (A, C, T and G and not 0 and 1 are the base language of DNA information.) The latter two classes of error represent cases, as the names suggest, where DNA base pairs are inserted or deleted from a strand.
Crucially, however, with DNA there is no reliable, inherent way of knowing that the strand you’re reading off contains any substitution, insertion or deletion errors. There’s no such thing as a countable and quantifiable DNA “memory register.” Every base pair is just another nucleotide in a long sequence. And together they all form just another strand of DNA.
After separating the text into nucleotide sequences, the scientists then had to encode it:
Encoding The Wizard of Oz into DNA, then, involved passing the data through an “outer” coding layer and an “inner” coding layer. (Think of these steps as two separate algorithms in a complex cryptographic standard.)
The outer layer diagonalized the source data so that any given strand of DNA would contain shards of many portions of the message. The inner layer, HEDGES, then translates each bit into an A, C, T or G according to an algorithm that depends both on the zero or one value of that bit plus additional information about its place in the data stream as well as the data bits immediately preceding it.
They then subjected the DNA to stresses. It proved to be remarkably durable, thus evidencing the utility of DNA for data storage.
-via Instapundit | Photo: Drümmkopf
Ah, the classic Hippie Wagon. You see, kids, back in the 70s, you could find these things everywhere on the road. The Volkswagen Type 2 microbus was a classic. It lives on now as a fire pit by craftsman Danny Lyons, who owns a shop called Trash Metal Fabrications. He makes many fire pits that look like Daleks, minions, Sauron, and more.
Would you go down the secret water tunnel? pic.twitter.com/A7gFeNCL03
— J. Motoki (@J_Motoki) July 23, 2020
I feel like gasping for air just watching this terrifying video of a fool going into a water siphon just above a waterfall. Julie Motoki asks us if we would try this fun ride. That will be a no from me. I plan to die in bed at the age of one hundred.
-via Born in Space
Do you thump or squeeze avocados in the grocery store to test their freshness? Students at Harvard University have developed a more precise method that examines the fruit chemically. The Harvard Gazette reports:
The device they developed incorporates sensors to measure certain chemical properties of an avocado.
Information from these sensors is incorporated into a machine-learning model the students developed to predict when an avocado will be ripe. The model’s output is displayed through an app that shows the estimated date of ripeness and the number of days until each tested avocado will be ripe for.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: SEAS Communications
American poet William Carlos Williams is most famous for his short work "This Is Just To Say", which goes as follows:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
It's quite an adventure and thus the basis for an excellent video game by Calum Rodger, which is free and playable in your browser. Drag the character around the kitchen and click on objects to interact with them. Eat as many plums as you can.
-via Nag on the Lake
James Defty salvaged an engine nacelle from a Vickers VC10 operated by the Royal Air Force. He converted it into a camping trailer.
Photographer and designer Tamara invents new uses for common objects, including her braided pigtails. They're ideal for holding small items, such as earbuds and eating utensils, so that she can keep her hands free.
Take our gloves off
Take our shoes off
Put them where they’re supposed to go.
You take off your brave feeling
Because there’s nothing
to be scared of in the house
That's "Coming Home" by the acclaimed British poet Nadim Shamma-Sourgen. He's four years old and has landed his first book deal. The Guardian exasperates:
Now he has landed a book deal with Walker Books, which will release his “astonishing” collection next summer. Walker executive Denise Johnstone-Burt said that she had been “astonished that anyone so young could write such sensitive verse”.
“The poems talk about such important feelings, like love and loneliness, and Nadim finds the perfect words,” she added. “They are simple, inspirational and have a wisdom all of their own”.
Clanchy said that the nickname she had given Nadim, the “Four Year Old Poet”, made him sound “scarily precocious”; in fact, as his mother explained on Sky News, he is still learning to read and write and he dictates his poems to her.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Picador
Wildlife photographer Mithun H has been watching Saaya the panther and Cleopatra the leopard, a bonded pair in the Kabini Forest in India. He writes:
Saaya and Cleopatra have been courting since 4 years now and whenever they are together it’s a sight to behold. The forest comes alive as they trot nonchalantly in his fabled kingdom. Usually in the courting pairs generally it is the Male who takes charge and moves around with the female following close behind. But with this couple it was definitely Cleo who was in charge while the Panther followed.
From this perspective, it looks the leopard is being followed by her shadow.
-via Colossal
