Got an idea for a food truck? Awesome! Can you afford to buy a food truck? Probably not.
And that fact prevents many culinary entrepreneurs from getting started. That's why Amsterdam community organizations Mama Louise and HOBU created this food truck. It's called De Grote Wisseltruck. Every six months, it's loaned to a different entrepreneur to experiment with his or her idea for a successful business. Pop-Up City explains:
The goal is to kickstart local entrepreneurship in several areas in the city. With support from business and marketing professionals, local entrepreneurs and cooks get the opportunity to test their food concept at a very low risk. After half a year it’s time for a new entrepreneur — whether the business turned out to be successful or not. The ambition of the project is to help find a permanent location for successful concepts.
When the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the Mysoreans entered the conflict for their own reasons, the American Revolutionary War became a worldwide conflict that stretched as far as India and Senegal. During that time, the French dusted off plans for an amphibious invasion of Britain. To defend against that possibility, the British prepared militia forces that would be mobilized in the event of a French landing.
That militia consisted entirely of men.
This distressed a woman writing pseudonymously as "Thalestris" in the Morning Post in July of 1778. Jim Piecuch writes in the Journal of the American Revolution:
Evidently Thalestris had given a great deal of consideration to the specific elements of her women’s corps. She proposed that the enlisted ranks be recruited from “every stout, well-made woman, measuring six foot, in London, and different parts of the country.” Once “formed in regiments, and habited en militaire, they would make as noble, and formidable an appearance as the Grenadiers.” The officers “of the female army, should consist of persons of all sizes, that every one might be allowed to serve in some capacity or other; a consideration, apparently in favour of myself, being but five feet three and half.” Thalestris did not intend to allow her short stature to deprive her of the opportunity to perform military service.[7]
The women’s corps, the writer declared, might be “equally successful” in battle as the most famous existing regiments. She added facetiously that their enemies might be “struck with wonder and admiration at the dazzling sight” of female soldiers, and that there was no “nation so savage, but would yield their arms, and acknowledge the power of all conquering beauty.”
Some historians think that the letter is actually a work of satire rather than a serious proposal.
Image: actress Charlotte Walpole dressed as a soldier for a play.
Ducks, Newburyport requires, shall we say, an extended attention span. This new novel by Lucy Ellmann is, from one point of view, rather short. It's mostly just one sentence. That sentence is a doozy, though. Parul Seghal reviews it for the New York Times:
“Ducks, Newburyport,” the new novel by Lucy Ellmann, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, unspools as a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages — occasionally interrupted by a more traditional story, albeit one from the point of view of a mountain lioness.
I doubt that it was Ellman's goal, but I'd like to see a writing contest aimed at creating the longest possible sentence that is still grammatically and stylistically correct.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Patricia Wall/New York Times
Meghann Winters of The Ohio State University is a hero for our times. Sure, you carry a few strips of bacon in your everyday carry kit. But what if you run out and don't have time to cook more? That's when you need to stop by the bacon vending machine.
Winters, an employee of the Ohio Pork Council (it's sort of like a state legislature--or it was when I lived in Ohio), was tasked with finding a new way to deliver bacon into the hands of the needy. OSU reports:
“Originally, we were going to rent a vending machine, but that didn’t make much sense financially. So I ended up finding an old, used one on Facebook,” she said.
The next task proved to be much toughter: “baconify” the vending machine. [...]
“There was a lot of trial and error involved in that,” she said.
Configuring the bacon packages to fit within the rows and coils and then fall into the bottom bin proved to be quite tricky.
“Most vending machines are made for candy bars, not necessarily bacon,” she said. “We had to make sure the packaging didn’t get caught as it was falling out. We also had to find shelf-friendly bacon.”
So the machine does not cook bacon on the spot and then drop it out of the slot, but provides pre-cooked bacon in packages. That's okay because it just provides the heroic Winters with a new goal to aim for.
“We couldn’t keep it stocked fast enough,” said Lyda Garcia, an assistant professor of meat science, and faculty advisor to the Meat Science Club. The club worked to keep the machine stocked and available to students during finals week last December.
Four to five times a day, bacon had to be added. As a result, about 275 pounds of bacon were sold over the eight days the machine was on campus.
It's freakin' huge! 20-year old Jacob Pina of Westport, Massachusetts has a ridiculously long right thumb. He shows it off in Tik Tok videos, which Caters News compiled in the video above.
Even though he's never lost a thumb war, Pina doesn't let his Internet fame go to his head. Metro quotes him:
When people see my thumb, they freak out and measure it next to their own thumb, I feel great about it.’
‘It’s always great to be different and embrace your own essence.’
Before humans tamed them, pugs saw humans as only one thing: a source of food. When the feeble facade of civilization eventually crumbles, they will resume the hunt, as They Can Talk warns us. Either way, the pugs will endure.
She hasn't even been born yet, but this child is already tied into the machine. It's a startling image within an otherwise homey and comforting depiction of humanity. This piece, titled Crypto Connection, is typical of Federico Clapis, an artist in Milan. His works often show an intersection between humanity and technology, where one establishes order for the other.
Something went wrong when downloading your requested image file. The perfect duplicate of one of the ornate and richly-detailed still lives of the Dutch masters was garbled in transmission.
This is the work of Filipino artist Olan Ventura. It's one of several acrylic paintings that tweak a classical style for a digital age. He perfectly shapes and blends his paints so that subjects appear to dissolve into incoherence.
August 26 was International Dog Day, so the Montreal offices of the Ubisoft game development company compiled this video of dogs wearing its motion capture suits. I had never thought of it before, but it makes perfect sense to add realistic canine motions into the video games using the same types of interfaces that humans wear.
56% of the world's ejector seats, including the one photographed above, are made by a British company named Martin-Baker. They are remarkably complex, precise machines that designed to keep pilots alive under extreme conditions. According to Popular Science, so much happens in 1.35 seconds after pulling the lever:
Pulling the handle fires the ejection gun for .2 seconds, starting the ejection at 50-55 feet per second. Simultaneously the aircraft’s glass canopy either shatters, is blown off, or the seat breaks through it, depending on the aircraft model. The rocket motor then fires for .2 seconds with a 5,000 pound thrust, and then a top-mounted side rocket fires for .05 seconds at a thrust of 584 pounds. This side rocket (located to the left of the front seat, and the right of the back one for aircraft with two crew members) ensures the two ejectees hurtle different directions with the person in the back seat always ejecting first, to avoid being burned by the front seat rocket.
Straps tighten around the pilots' arms and legs and an emergency oxygen supply is released. Then a drogue parachute at the back of the 214-pound seat opens. At the same time two small panels about 16 inches long and 8 inches wide open up on either side of the seat to keep it straight.
Then the parachutes deploy:
Then the small box at the top of the seat, which contains the main parachute (harnessed to the pilot) lifts away from the seat, the drogue parachute drops off and, as the main parachute opens, the pilot and the seat shell part company—apart from a section under the butt that contains the survival kit and a raft, which automatically inflates in water. These hang underneath the ejectee, deploying just 5.5 seconds after they’ve pulled the ejection handle.
The forces at work are brutal on the pilot and usually result in injuries:
“It was inconvenient,” one ejectee says, dryly. He was in the backseat of a plane when it collided with a bird in June 1999. “The overhead canopy was smashed and there was blood and gore everywhere,” he recounts. “I didn't realize it was the bird—I thought it was the pilot and when I looked in front he wasn't there, so I ejected. I broke five vertebrae and so lost a few centimeters,” he says wryly. In fact the pilot was there, just bent over checking for damage, and later able to land the plane.
On the upside, people who survive after ejecting with a Martin-Baker seat receive a complimentary necktie:
Ejectees whose lives have been saved by Martin-Baker seats automatically become members of the Ejection Tie Club.
-via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Martin-Baker, The Ejection Tie Club
The bleak existential exploration of the human soul from the voice of German filmmaker Werner Herzog can be cute and homey if it is well-presented. In this case, though, Amanda Kim cross stitched a tweet by @WernerTwerzog, a parody of the filmmaker. Every word of his here is true, yet I cannot find enough of myself to weep over them.
Will checking out a library book give you scarlet fever? That was a serious question a hundred and forty years ago.
In the second half of the Nineteenth Century, public health rose as a major social concern in many Western nations. Preventing the spread of infectious diseases through proper sanitation was a high priority for public policymakers.
At the same time, public libraries began to proliferate across the United States and the United Kingdom. This led to worries and, eventually, a public panic about library books as a locus of contagion. Joseph Hayes writes at Smithsonian:
Books were viewed as possible vehicles of disease transmission for several reasons. At a time when public libraries were relatively new, it was easy to worry about who had last handled a book and whether they might have been ill. Books that appeared to be benign might conceal diseases that could be unleashed “in the act of opening them,” Mann says. People were concerned about health conditions caused by “inhaling book dust,” Greenberg writes, and the possibility of “contracting cancer by coming in contact with malignant tissue expectorated upon the pages.”
The great book scare reached fever pitch in the summer of 1879, Mann says. That year, a librarian in Chicago named W.F. Poole reported that he had been asked whether books could transmit disease. Upon further investigation, Poole located several doctors who claimed to have knowledge of disease-spreading books. People in England started asking the same question, and concerns about diseased books developed “roughly contemporaneously” in the United States and Britain, Mann says. [...]
In response to the panic, libraries were expected to disinfect books suspected of carrying diseases. Numerous methods were used for disinfecting books, including holding the books in vapor from “carbolic acid crystals heated in an oven” in Sheffield, England, and sterilization via “formaldehyde solution” in Pennsylvania, according to Greenberg. In New York, books were disinfected with steam. A study in Dresden, Germany, “revealed that soiled book pages rubbed with wet fingers yielded many microbes.
Perhaps when my time comes, my obituary will say that I was "withdrawn from the library collection." That would be a pretty good way to say that I died. It would fit in well with this Instagram archive of unique and clever euphemisms for death in obituaries.
At a certain point, you've argued with the game master enough. You'll know that time has come when he brings out the d20 mace crafted by redditor King_Diamond_666.
He etched the numbers into the steel with a process called saltwater etching. This is something I've never tried before, but I'm now thinking about. It applies a mild electrical charge while the desired area is exposed to saltwater.
Instructables member Look_I_Make_A_Hat made this soul-consuming Furby and provides instructions on how to, if you dare, create your own to unleash upon the world. You and I are compelled to do so, for we crave to obey the centifurby.
Although the creature really reminded me more of a sandworm (Bless the Maker and His water) from Dune than a centipede. That thought got me Googling a bit, leading me to this wonderfully terrifying creature.
