Classy restaurants often have dress codes and the Pinnacle Peak Patio Steakhouse & Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona is no exception. You can't get in with a necktie. If you wear a necktie inside, a restaurant employee will cut it off. And the ceiling is decorated with trophies captured from offending patrons.
According to the official history, the original owner was displeased when a business executive wore a necktie in the restaurant. He told the diner to take it off. When he refused, the owner cut it off with a butcher knife. Since then, the staff has cut over a million neckties from poorly-dressed patrons. You can see more photos of its massive collection of severed neckties at Amusing Planet.
Siri is the interactive digital assistant on current Apple mobile devices. Like the computer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, you can talk to Siri and she'll talk back.
The voice of Siri is Susan Bennett. The Daily Dot asked her to talk on the phone as Siri if Siri was the mother of an anxious young woman. Is Siri a helpful mom? Yes, if you ask her the right questions.
The Made Shop created this music video for the song "Change Is Everything" by Son Lux. It's an impressive work of stop-motion animation. The Made Shop composed it with map pins and rubberized thread painstakingly moved and plotted in sequence over a foam board.
The video consists of approximately 4,000 frames assembled over 3 weeks. You can read more about how it was made and see a behind-the-scenes video at NPR.
A Turkish Airlines 737 travelling between Istanbul and Nevsehir, Turkey, hit a bird nose-on. The dome forming the front caved in. The plane landed safely with no injury to any of the 125 passengers on board.
A spokesman for Turkish Airlines insists that it's not a big deal. That portion of the plane is made with soft materials in order to absorb impacts like this. The Daily Mail reports:
A spokesperson for Turkish Airlines told MailOnline Travel: 'The damage of the nose area (radome) by bird hit is a common incident on civil aeronautical operations.
'The radome area of a plane is constructed by soft materials (composit) to minimalize the impact of such hits.
'Therefore, such standard/normal deformation occurs as a natural result of such incidents.
'One can also state that the critical bird hits in aviation is the ones that occur on the engine area. Any other area of the aircraft than the engine area, such as radome, wings, hull, do not pose a risk when hit by a bird.'
That's good news. Perhaps Turkish Airlines can use this photo for its optimistic advertising.
What's it like to be trapped inside a coffin as it rolls into a crematorium at a funeral home? Now you can find out! Or, at least, you can get a sense of it. It's called the Samadhi Game, which can be found the Window of the World, an amusement park in Shenzhen, China. For a charge of about $40, participants can be locked inside a coffin, then blasted with hot air. The Belfast Telegraph reports:
Once inside, players are then blasted by hot air (up to 40C) and light to create an “authentic experience of burning,” according to its creators, Huange Weiping and Ding Rui.
When the “burning” is over, volunteers see a womb projected on the ceiling and must crawl until they reach a large, white padded area – supposedly representing a womb – where they are “reborn”.
Earlier this week, the State of Nevada granted a self-driving Freightliner tractor trailer rig a license--the first such license in the United States. To promote this event, Freightliner piloted the truck over the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. As the truck passed over the dam, projectors shined on the face of the dam, turning it into an enormous projection screen.
That projection earned a Guinness World Record for the brightest light projection. The Associated Press reports:
The company said 60 projectors used 1.17 million lumens — equal to about 1,400 household lightbulbs — to stretch videos, images, animation and an American flag onto the surface of the modern construction marvel finished in 1935 on Nevada and Arizona's border.
The program included live footage and recorded video.
Daimler says the video projection was equal in size to nine football fields or more than 87 average-sized IMAX screens.
James Franco is an American actor famous for roles in movies that include The Interview, 127 Hours, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. He now has fame, wealth, and influence. But he wasn't born that way. He worked his way up from the bottom, starting as an 18-year old in Los Angeles trying to break into acting. For three months, he worked at a McDonald's restaurant.
Today, Franco published a reflective essay on that experience in the Washington Post. It's a lovely affirmation of the dignity of honest labor:
All I know is that when I needed McDonald’s, McDonald’s was there for me. When no one else was. […]
I didn’t have a car, so I tried to get a job at all the restaurants within walking distance of my post-dropout Valley apartment. (I shared it with two other aspiring actors and slept on the couch.) I had very little work experience. In high school, I was fired from a coffee shop for reading behind the counter and from a golf course for reading while driving the cart on the driving range. All the waiter jobs were taken by more experienced actor/waiters.
Someone asked me if I was too good to work at McDonald’s. Because I was following my acting dream despite all the pressure not to, I was definitely not too good to work at McDonald’s. I went to the nearest Mickey D’s and was hired the same day. […]
I was treated fairly well at McDonald’s. If anything, they cut me slack. And, just like their food, the job was more available there than anywhere else. When I was hungry for work, they fed the need. I still love the simplicity of the McDonald’s hamburger and its salty fries. After reading “Fast Food Nation,” it’s hard for me to trust the grade of the meat. But maybe once a year, while on a road trip or out in the middle of nowhere for a movie, I’ll stop by a McDonald’s and get a simple cheeseburger: light, and airy, and satisfying.
Rorqual whales eat by swallowing massive gulps of water, then filtering out fish and krill from the water. Scientists at the University of British Colombia recently discovered that those gulps of water can be larger than the whales themselves, which can grow up to 20 meters long. The CBC reports:
The whale has nerves to its mouth and tongue that can stretch to double their normal length, then snap back without damage, said Wayne Vogl, a professor in the department of cellular and physiological sciences at UBC. […]
With a mouth thdat "basically expands like a balloon," it makes sense that "all the wiring and plumbing" would have to expand too, said Vogl.
But researchers didn't know how the nerves could reach such length without breaking.
It turns out the nerve fibers themselves aren't stretching at all — but folding and unfolding within a protective layer of tissue.
"So the nerves themselves aren't actually hurt or injured by the stretch."
Don’t punch the yellow question blocks. There are no coins inside them, but you might lose some of your security deposit.
This is a short-term apartment in Tokyo available for rent from Airbnb. From the bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom, it’s decorated for your inner plumber. It’s conveniently close to a train station. Do not slide down any pipes in the apartment—they’re purely decorative, not a form of transportation.
The only thing better than a chocolate bar is a chocolate bar that’s been chilled. Why? Dan, a doctoral student in chemistry, explains that the cocoa butter in chocolate exists in six different forms depending on the temperature. When chocolate is about 34-36⁰C, the structure of it begins to break down. This is called “fat bloom.” You can see it when chocolate appears to turn somewhat dusty and splotchy, such as the example above. Dan writes:
You then might ask how you can tell this has happened? The change in crystal structure is usually accompanied by something called ‘fat bloom,’ which is where the chocolate begins to look dusty, and pale spots appear on the surface as shown in the attached image. We’ve all been there (you’re incredibly lucky if you haven’t). It’s off putting, but still safe to eat. It happens because of partial melting in the solid which cases the fats within it to rise to the surface. It’s this strange occurrence that leads me to believe that keeping my chocolate in the fridge is in fact the correct way to keep it, and also why all the chocolate I bought on my exchange year in Australia just didn’t taste as good as the stuff at home in the UK due to their hotter climate!
The blogger Reality Collective spotted this flyer in Brooklyn. Sauron could have avoided a lot of trouble if only he had taken this approach. It was unnecessary to draw so much attention to his search. As the 49th item on the classic Evil Overlord List points out, it’s more effective to act discreetly.
Posted paper flyers can be helpful for satisfying local needs with a limited advertising budget. They’re also great for pranks and jokes, such as these:
Marc Hagan-Guirey is the Paper Dandy—an artist who specializes in cutting paper in precise, 3-dimensional forms. It’s an art form called kirigami. In the past, we’ve seen his renderings of famous horror movie moments. His most recent project, dubbed Cut Scene, shows immediately recognizable slices from Star Wars. Hagan-Guirey describes his work to CNN:
He picked some of his favorite scenes from the original Star Wars movies and carved them out of 8.27 by 11.7-inch sheets of paper: "I use an X-acto knife and I'm never frugal about saving fresh blades. A metal ruler and a cutting matt. That's it really. Oh, and a few skewers to pop out small sections."
Once it was a rasp that shaved horse hooves on Chelsea Miller’s family farm in Vermont. Now it’s a knife for an elite kitchen.
Chelsea Miller makes knives. Her materials are the old tools and reclaimed wood from her father’s home workshop. It’s a neat take on repurposing. But the process is than just that.
As this endearing video about her work explains, it’s about connecting with her father and the traditions of her family. Making these knives is a way of carrying the past into the future. It’s a sentiment that I recognize immediately. When I visit my parents, I work with my father as much as I can, building and repairing, learning new skills, and simply being with him as time slowly runs out.
This is the earliest known appearance of Einstein’s most famous equation. It was written in Einstein’s own handwriting, which typographer Harald Geisler describes as a mixture of the Latin alphabet and Kurrent, which is a classical German form of cursive.
Two years ago, Geisler turned samples of Sigmund Freud’s handwriting into a usable digital font. You can type like Dr. Freud wrote by using the font called Siggy. Now Geisler is doing the same with Einstein’s handwriting. Fast Co Design describes the process:
Like his Sigmund font, Geisler started his digitization efforts by combing through samples of Einstein's handwriting, and identified four versions of each character, both uppercase and lowercase, which could be considered typical samples. Simultaneously, Geisler tried to get a sense for the rhythm of Einstein's hand: how the discoverer of general relativity linked an 'a' to a 'b', or a 'b' to a 'c', making notes of the kinds of slopes and distances Einstein used. From there, Geisler meticulously copied every sample letter into a grid, and started tweaking it to make sure that it worked as a typeface.
Although the rest of us may throw away old keys, the Australian artist Moerkey puts them and old coins to beautiful use. He welds them together into sculptures that take on new forms while retaining their original visual imprints. He explains how he got started with this medium:
I'm a bit of a hoarder and searched around for all those old keys and copper wire, that were no longer needed, and got creative with them as well. I've progressed from making spheres, to footballs and bowls as well as angles and brooches.
You can see more photos on his Facebook page or buy his work on Etsy.
