Two brothers, ages 3 and 10, were saved from an apartment fire in France when they dropped more than 30 feet from a window and were caught by neighbors below. The boys, along with 17 residents of the building, were treated for smoke inhalation. https://t.co/T8RsSpQsVPpic.twitter.com/99DSu5GFhE
An apartment building in Grenoble, France caught on fire. Two brothers, ages 3 and 10, were trapped inside on the third story. They jumped off the balcony and were caught by people gathered on the sidewalk below. Although they were treated for smoke inhalation, the boys otherwise escaped serious injury. BBC News reports that, unfortunately, two of rescuers at the bottom broke their arms during their rescue efforts.
A post shared by Falko Fantastic (@falko1graffiti) on Aug 5, 2019 at 9:25am PDT
Falko One, a street artist from South Africa, leaves elephants, snails, snakes, and more in unusual but perfect places. All of his subjects, such as Mister T, fit just right into their backgrounds. He explains to Colossal:
“My approach is just to add a bit of color to the space without breaking the scenery,” he tells Colossal. “I try not to make them too intrusive. I always respect that for that moment I am just a tourist to that specific community.”
Yes, at other times, submarines have fought each other. But only while one was surfaced. What was unique about the battle between Britain's Venturer and Germany's U-864 on February 9, 1945, was that both vessels were submerged at the time. At The National Interest, Sébastien Roblin explains why technology limited such combat at the time:
During World War II, submarines came to make greater use of hydrophones as well as active sonar; however, the latter models could only plot out a submarine’s location on a two-dimensional plane, not reveal its depth.
Furthermore, the torpedoes of the time were designed to float up to near the surface of the water to strike the keel of enemy ships. Although the “tin fish” could be reprogrammed to an extent, it was not standard to adjust for depth, and guessing the azimuth of an enemy submarine with the limited targeting information available posed an immense challenge.
U-864 was on a journey from Germany to Japan. The collapsing Germany hoped to deliver cutting edge technology to its ally, including jet fighter design schematics, two aeronautical engineers, V-2 missile parts, and 67 tons of liquid mercury.
The Royal Navy's submarine Venturer caught up with the U-864 off the coast of Norway. At the end of the chase, Captain Launders made a desperate ploy to sink the Germans:
After three hours of pursuit, the Venturer was running short on battery and would soon have to surface itself. Launders decided he would simply have to attack U-864 while it remained submerged. He calculated a three-dimensional intercept for his torpedoes, estimating his adversary’s depth by the height of the snorkel mast protruding above the water. However, he knew the enemy submarine would quickly detect a torpedo launch, and planned his firing solution to account for evasive maneuvers.
At 12:12, Venturer ripple-fired all four of its loaded torpedoes in a spread, with 17.5 seconds between each launch. Then the British submarine dove to avoid counterattack.
The U-Boat immediately crash dove as well, then swerved evasively. After four minutes, it had managed to duck under three of the incoming torpedoes. But Launders had launched the second pair of torpedoes at lower depths. The fourth torpedo struck U-864, breaking it in two; the gruesome sound of popping rivets and cracking metal filled the Venturer’s hydrophones. The U-Boat fell 150 meters to the bottom of the ocean, taking with it all seventy-three onboard and sinking Operation Caesar along with it.
Well, wouldn't you? It's a very Instagrammable moment!
These hikers at the Chipinque Ecological Park in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico saw a black bear on the trail. It approached, sniffed, and pawed at them. At the 0:30 mark, she appears to get a picture of herself posing with the bear.
By concealing her models in blackout paint and arranging them precisely, artist Riina Laine (content warning: artistic nudity) turns them into living vegetables. She made three as advertisements for the Finnish food company Apertit.
Every now and then, I'll randomly say out loud "Computer, deactivate holodeck program."
You know--just in case.
While out for a jog in a park in Los Angeles, Jeremy Yoder discovered these holodeck command interfaces. They were running a program called "Los Angeles City Park."
So Yoder has become a self-aware holodeck program character, thanks to a piece of street art by Arthur Edward Chadwick.
It's not so bad. Vic Fontaine has a pretty good life. If we're well-written and play our parts well, we can visit some pretty swell joints.
While kayaking on the Waccamaw River in North Carolina, Peter Joyce was suddenly charged by a submerged alligator. At the 0:50 mark in the above video, the gator rammed the kayak and flipped Joyce over for a few seconds before he was able to right himself.
Even after that terrifying experience, Joyce isn't done kayaking in the river. He tells WXII 12 News:
Joyce thinks the alligator could have been more aggressive because it was protecting its young and it is currently mating season.
He said he plans to paddle down this part of the river again, just at a different time of year.
A post shared by Ellie Lewis (@ellielewisartistry) on Nov 14, 2019 at 11:06am PST
Ellie Lewis, a makeup artist in the United Kingdom, has been experimenting with large-scale bodypainting lately. She's been composing herself as figures from pop culture, such as Rick Sanchez's brief time as a living pickle in Ricky and Morty.
A few years ago, Dylan Walters of Pensacola, Florida, began experimenting with epoxy molding. He's developed a specialized skill within this carpentry field: crafting the resin so that it looks like waves crashing on beaches. This particular table uses a sheet of parota wood. I'm ready to dive into the water.
A post shared by Simon Duhamel (@simonduhamel) on Jul 11, 2020 at 5:06pm PDT
For an ad campaign for McDonald's, photographer Simon Duhamel shot arrangements of household goods in the back of a moving truck. From the right angle, they look like iconic McDonald's products.
There's something very enthralling about watching Mantenka Hime, a Japanese calligrapher, work at her desk. Sora News 24 tells us that she's popular in Japan, where a fanbase supports her enormous talents. There's a lot to watch here:
Mantenka Hime’s videos are focused on visual examples, and often include an overhead view or her writing in a separate window in the video’s top left corner. As a result, even viewers who don’t speak Japanese can learn the proper order, number, and direction of strokes to write each character. Watch closely, and you’ll even be able to spot where she performs hane, the subtle flourish where the artists leaves behind brush strokes while drawing the bristles away from the paper at the end of certain strokes.
And thanks to the scientists in MIT who first thought of the concept of the internet in the 1960s, we get to experience the fine arts of so many cultures around the world. Verily, it is an uplifting tool for all humanity.
I often hear skeptical voices say that today's youth don't have what it takes to thrive in a changing, demanding world. But then I read uplifting stories like this one in the New York Post. Teenagers are taking advantage of masking requirements to disguise themselves as old geezers and buy alcoholic beverages:
The “prank” has taken social-media platform TikTok by storm, with videos of users bedecked as boozehound bubbies — seemingly victorious, bottles in hand — racking up millions of views. [...]
“PSA: use ur fakes as much as possible bc if you wear a mask they can’t see ur whole face lol,” one adolescent posted to her not-of-legal-age brethren.
“Now that we have to wear masks, this is the best time to buy alcohol with a fake ID since the early 80’s . . .” standup comedian Jason Lawhead posted on Twitter.
Humanity being as it is, it is inevitable that, at some point, one person will murder another in space. Legally speaking, how will that criminal case be adjudicated? Popular author Sam Kean writes in Slate that one possible precedent may be a 1970 murder perpetrated by one scientist upon another in a temporary Arctic research station. It all began when Mario Escamilla shot Bennie Lightsy, his boss, over a bottle of raisin wine. The locations of the murder was unusual:
Escamilla worked on T-3, also known as Fletcher’s ice island, a Manhattan-size hunk of ice that at the time was floating north of Canada in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 350 miles from the North Pole. T-3 had been occupied off and on since the 1950s, and 19 scientists and technicians were stationed there during the summer of 1970, studying ocean currents and wind and weather patterns.
Which nation had legal jurisdiction? It was unclear:
T-3 was technically run by the U.S. Air Force, but Escamilla was a civilian, so they couldn’t court-martial him. The nearest land mass was Canada, but T-3 lay well outside Canada’s territorial waters, so it had no jurisdiction there. Perhaps the United States could have claimed the ice island—similar to the many uninhabited “Guano Islands” full of rich, natural fertilizer that the U.S. government seized during the 1800s. But unlike the Guano Islands, T-3 was temporary—it would melt away in the 1980s—so under international law, no nation could claim it. Perhaps the law of the sea applied? After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater. Except, the law of the sea applies only to navigable areas, and T-3 wasn’t navigable.
A few days later, US Marshals arrested Escamilla and brought him back to the United States. Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged him, which was legally messy:
First, there was the question of whether the government even had the right to try Escamilla, given T-3’s legal limbo. Second, there was the question of venue. Technically, the marshals and Escamilla had landed in Greenland first on the trip back home, so according to international law, he should have been tried there. The U.S. government simply ignored this. Federal prosecutors also attempted to charge Escamilla under special maritime law for crimes committed on vessels, despite the fact that T-3 wasn’t a “vessel” in any real sense.
After an initial conviction and then appeals, Escamilla ultimately went free. But the case, Kean (who is not an attorney, I should note) argues, may suggest how complicated resolving space crimes could become:
About the only existing law governing space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. But the treaty focuses almost entirely on what nation-states can and cannot do (e.g., deploy nuclear bombs, seize celestial bodies). It’s virtually silent on what private companies or individuals can do—which suddenly seems like a glaring loophole given the rise of private space companies like SpaceX, which recently transported its first astronauts to the International Space Station. These private vessels are far murkier in a legal sense. [...] So consider this scenario: a German woman poisons a Congolese man on a spaceship owned by a Chinese-Belgian conglomerate that’s headquartered in Luxembourg. Who the hell’s in charge then?
Toy maker extraordinaire Steve Casino has made, for some happy child, a pull toy that shows the duel between the Beatrix and Gogo in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. Let us hope that it is only the first in a line of toys that will educate young children about Quentin Tarantino's cultural legacy. I'd love to have some toy cars with which to re-enact the car chase scene from Death Proof.
