According to legend, the Buddha gave a hermit a single strand of his own hair, which was made of gold. The hermit gave it to a local king named Tissa. In exchange, King Tissa used his magic to pull an enormous boulder out of the sea and place it on a cliff. Then the king built a pagoda on the top of the boulder to serve as a shrine for the golden hair.
This is the Kyaiktiyo Balancing Pagoda in Burma. The entire rock and shrine is painted with gold. For a thousand years, pilgrims have come to the base of the rock to pray.
Etsy seller LanVy Nguyen of New York City used to work in corporate finance. Now, she is "a designer of things beautiful." And they certainly are! She designs wooden wedge shoes that are so beautiful that they look like they belong in museums instead of closets. They're custom made by craftsmen in Vietnam, who take 18 days to make each pair.
My best guess is that the camera is angled precisely to create inaccurate impressions from both the viewer's perspective as well as the mirror reflection. When the hands turn the forms, they briefly take on strange shapes that don't jibe with the previous impressions
Sugihara quite rightly won second place at the Best Illusion of the Year competition this year with these odd cylinders.
Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University. Recently, he mused about why the settings of Star Trek and Star Wars are so different. There are advanced technologies in both--far beyond our own reality--but enormous differences in the politics, economies, and cultures between them.
1. The armed forces in Star Trek seem broadly representative of society. Compare Uhura, Chekhov, and Sulu to the Imperial Storm troopers.
2. Captains Kirk and Picard may be overly narcissistic, but they do not descend into true power madness, unlike various Sith leaders and corrupted Jedi Knights.
3. In Star Trek, any starship can lay waste to a planet, whereas in Star Wars there is a single, centralized Death Star and no way to oppose it, short of having the rebels try to blow it up. That seems to imply stronger checks and balances in the world of Star Trek. No single corrupt captain can easily take over the Federation, and so there are always opposing forces.
I think that the core difference is that Star Trek (at least in The Next Generation era) is highly utopian. The Federation at the center of the Star Trek story is prosperous, peaceful, and incorruptible. Factionalism, let alone tribalism, is rare. Hundreds of species with radically different cultures and even biological systems live together without serious disagreement. Material wants and injustice are almost unknown.
I love Star Trek and prefer it to Star Wars, but it's quite unrealistic. The reason why Star Wars is so savage and tragic compared to Star Trek is because real life is savage and tragic.
The long-running Japanese TV show Masquerade asks contestants to re-enact scenes with low-tech visual effects. The overall theme appears to be something like the pantomime tradition in Western theatre.
Here's an impressive clip from that show. The performers are dressed as pool balls. The player smoothly breaks the rack, sending the heads rolling toward the pockets.
How do you convince a baby to clean your house? It's really easy because before they hit the terrible twos, babies will do pretty much whatever you ask of them. The dad of the How to Dad YouTube channel shows how in his latest instructional video.
The entire channel is worth exploring, as it provides helpful tips for new dads, such as how to put a baby to sleep, how to get a child to fetch you a beer, and how to develop a dad bod.
Chris-ShaRee Castlebury has a special gift for her "precious Picassos." She's a first grade teacher at Pat Henry Elementary School in Lawton, Oklahoma. Toward the end of the school year, she asks her students to draw on a dress with fabric markers, which she wears on the last day.
Castlebury calls it her "memory dress." It's her unique way to remember the children that she taught that year. She tells the Today show:
"It is a memory dress because I don't want to lose the beauty of the kids as they have to grow up and move on from me," Castlebury told TODAY in an email interview from South Korea, where her husband is stationed in the U.S. Army. "It is a wonderful thing, but so sad each year to fall in love with these kids and then have to say 'see ya later.'
Good news, my otaku brothers! There may be opportunities beyond our dakimakuras! Yes, you love your waifu. But you need a backup plan in case things don't work out.
That's why you should consider Otaku Speed Dating, a new dating service in New York City. It holds hour long speed dating events that match single anime fans with each other. At the end, the participants fill out cards expressing who they'd like to get to know better. The service then introduces matches to each other. Rocket News 24 gives us the details:
Participants must be 18 or older, but there’s no dress code to adhere to. Otaku Speed Dating says to come in whatever is comfortable for you. The company even expressly states that light cosplay is welcome, although it asks that attendees refrain from wearing bulky, walkway obstructing outfits or bringing weaponry, even of the fake variety. Snacks and soft drinks are served at all events, and alcohol can be purchased at certain venues if you’re over 21 and need a glass of liquid courage.
How did the Urinator montanus get its name? The paleontologist Jason Poole was on a dig in Montana in 1999. He need to relieve his bladder, so he found a secluded spot and got down to business.
When he looked down at his target, he realized that it was a fossil. It was an Allosaurus, which he knicknamed Urinator montanus after his method of discovery.
It was a stroke of sheer luck, so don't try to replicate Poole's research. But other scientists have also found fossils through unusual encounters. Smithsonian magazine describes several, such as the Haley O'Brien's pre-menstrual meeting:
While digging at some fossil mammal sites in eastern Africa, O’Brien says, “I was lady-hormone-ing real bad one day and decided the best option was to quietly remove myself from the quarry under the guise of prospecting so I could go nuclear by myself.” This is a part of fieldwork that’s not often talked about. “Your body doesn’t exactly stop functioning when you’re in the field, hormones included,” she says. So O’Brien decided to disappear along a winding riverbed leading away from the excavation.
The local geology was perfect for stress relief. “I followed my way around a river bend to an outcrop that hadn’t produced any fossils for years and started picking up half dollar-sized concretions out of the wall for stress relief,” O’Brien says. Just minutes into this exercise, she plucked out an intact rodent skull, which meant that she would have to call the crew over. O’Brien continued to wander, “trying to put off lady-Def Con 10”, but more plucking and chucking stones only revealed more fossils, some of which became type specimens—or the emblematic representatives—of their species. “It was like a Groundhog Day best-worst fossil-finding PMS-fueled nightmare,” O’Brien says.
The artist Daku created this unique mural in New Delhi. The front of this building is covered in letter forms perpendicular to the wall. As the sun moves across the sky, the letters slant. By this, Daku expresses that time constantly changes all things, including the values and priorities on the wall. Chaos, perception, faith, fear, ego--these are just a few of the features of human experience that shift as people grow.
Obvious Plant is Jeff Wysaski's ongoing project to leave funny but fake signs in public places to confuse and amuse people. Most recently, he left official-looking signs at the Los Angeles Zoo that educate visitors about the animals that they see. They describe meerkat psionics, why the Southern Crested Screamer screams, and koala deceptions.
Yes, we know about Phillip. So do Edna and Edna's divorce attorney.
20 years ago, actors Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith defeated an alien invasion as described in the 1996 documentary Independence Day. To promote the sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, Goldblum composed a children's book recounting those famous events. This will help children who weren't born at the time to learn about the tumultuous invasion and resistence.
Jesse Usher, who appears in Resurgence, was only 4 years old at the time. Watch Goldblum mesmerize him with his storytelling.
As a teambuilding exercise, the Finnish energy firm St1 had 130 employees wear and use one pair of skis. The custom-built skis (yeah, you can't find these in sporting goods stores) were 140 meters long.
Have you ever seen the aurora borealis or the aurora australis? They're wonders to behold, but auroras are not limited to Earth. Jupiter has them, too. NASA and the European Space Agency has recently been training the far-seeing Hubble Space Telescope on nearby Jupiter. It reveals ultraviolet auroras larger than the Earth itself. The Juno space probe, which will enter Jovian orbit on July 4, will study them in detail.
This light display is even more spectacular during a solar storm. Scientists based in London recently discovered that Jupiter’s X-ray auroras become “eight times brighter than normal and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s aurora borealis” during a solar storm. […]
Aside from emitting UV and X-ray light, the northern lights of Jupiter also paint the air in red, green and purple. The planet’s strong magnetic field — at times 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s — attracts charged particles not only from solar wind, but from those spewed by supervolcanic explosions on Io, its moon. The eruptions brighten the blue auroras on Jupiter, and the Hubble and Juno partnership aims to look deeper into the phenomenon.
Big brother and little sister will always have a special, loving relationship--until the cash changes hands. He loves her because he's invested a lot in the relationship. So join in the fun and keep in mind her resale value.
