When the bubonic plague returned to Florence, Italy in the 1600s, enterprising wine merchants found a way to continue selling their wares to fearful customers. They cut tiny windows into their exterior walls through which they could pass bottles or glasses of wine. About 150 remain in place today and some, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, have been returned to service. The New York Post describes this revived architectural phenomenon:

“Everyone is confined to home for two months and then the government permits a gradual reopening,” the Wine Window Association website reads. “During this time, some enterprising Florentine Wine Window owners have turned back the clock and are using their Wine Windows to dispense glasses of wine, cups of coffee, drinks, sandwiches and ice cream — all germ-free, contactless!”

“Everyone is confined to home for two months and then the government permits a gradual reopening,” the Wine Window Association website reads. “During this time, some enterprising Florentine Wine Window owners have turned back the clock and are using their Wine Windows to dispense glasses of wine, cups of coffee, drinks, sandwiches and ice cream — all germ-free, contactless!”

-via Comfortably Smug | Photo: Wine Window Association

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Possibly one of the best swims of my career! Check out the full swim here. What can you do without spilling a drop?! #gotmilk #ad Check out the #gotmilkchallenge on Tik Tok! [Link in bio]

A post shared by Katie Ledecky (@katieledecky) on Aug 3, 2020 at 9:53am PDT

US Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky demonstrates perfect body control as she swims the length of a pool while balancing a glass of chocolate milk on her head. Without the glass, it would look like an easy lap. It is only with this additional challenge that we can understand what she has managed to achieve through decades of effort.

-via Born in Space

Are you durable enough to endure the full trauma of a journey through a frog's digestive tract? The Regimbartia attenuata beetle species can, thus teaching us an important life lesson. Scientists at Kobe University in Japan found that fully of the 93% of beetles who made the trip finished it alive and well.

Because the beetles are so large, they tend to plug up the frogs' butts, so they probably stimulate the frogs' digestive systems to loosen up. Again, another life lesson provided to us by Mother Nature. Let us do likewise.

-via Dave Barry

As the Imelda Marcos of the fox world, this fella has a good start building a shoe collection. Humans in the Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin found that a local fox had stolen a hoard of over one hundred shoes, mostly crocs. BBC News reports:

For weeks residents of Zehlendorf were baffled that a thief was stealing their flip flops and sports shoes from their gardens at night.

Finally a man spotted the culprit on a patch of wasteland, "in flagrante, carrying two blue flip flops in its mouth", the daily Tagesspiegel reports.

The fox had a hoard of over 100 shoes, but not the man's missing running shoe.

What would a fox do with crocs? April Kit Walsh goofs on Dr. Seuss:

See fox?
Fox sees crocs!
Stock crocs in box or fox takes crocs.
Fox in box?
Put locks on box of crocs!
Socks with crocs?
"A pox on socks with crocs!" says fox

— April Kit Walsh (she/ze) (@prilkit) August 1, 2020

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Felix Hackenbruch

What's stopping you from firing up your time machine and traveling back in time to alter the past so that you benefit your current self? Well, you're probably worried about the Butterfly Effect, which is the concern among time travelers that they, through some small, unintended action, may set in motion a cascade of events with major negative consequences.

Good news, everyone! Quantum physicists (quantum physics is like physics, only more so) at Los Alamos National Laboratory say that there's nothing to worry about:

Using a quantum computer to simulate time travel, researchers have demonstrated that, in the quantum realm, there is no “butterfly effect.” In the research, information—qubits, or quantum bits—“time travel” into the simulated past. One of them is then strongly damaged, like stepping on a butterfly, metaphorically speaking. Surprisingly, when all qubits return to the “present,” they appear largely unaltered, as if reality is self-healing. 

“On a quantum computer, there is no problem simulating opposite-in-time evolution, or simulating running a process backwards into the past,” said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper with Bin Yan, a post doc in the Center for Nonlinear Studies, also at Los Alamos. “So we can actually see what happens with a complex quantum world if we travel back in time, add small damage, and return. We found that our world survives, which means there’s no butterfly effect in quantum mechanics.”

So what are you waiting for? Let's grab the keys to the DeLorean.

-via Instapundit | Image: Universal Pictures

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

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狗狗時鐘~ #leatherart #leathercraft #leatherworks #leathertooling #leathercarving #皮雕 #皮雕藝術 #皮雕工藝

A post shared by 黃一誠 (@yichen_leather) on May 14, 2020 at 4:21am PDT

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

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Latest V Dub Camper Van parked up outside my house and ready for departure. Loving the colours on this one 👍🔥 #vw #volkswagen #vwcampervan #camper #campervan #vwbus #vwlife #vwshow #vwsplit #woodburner #logburner #firepit #fire #sculpture #metalart #steelfab #paint #heatresistant #artisan #art #trashmetalfabrications #smallbusiness #handmade #classicvw #classiccar #welding #forsale

A post shared by Danny Lyons 🎨🔨🔩🔧 (@trash_metal_fabrications) on Sep 30, 2019 at 11:22am PDT

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