Janne, a photographer in Finland, took this fantastic shot that looks like the moon is zooming through the night sky. It's a single exposure that was nearly 38 minutes long. Michael Zhang describes it at PetaPixel:
Janne was shooting with a Nikon D800 and 100-300mm lens at 300mm, f/8, and ISO 100. The trick behind the shot was a 10-stop neutral density filter, which greatly cut down the amount of light hitting the sensor and allowed Janne to shoot a 2258-second exposure — that’s a whopping 37.6 minutes!
Dp you want some suds on campus? You won't necessarily have to hide them at California Polytechnic University in Pomona. Like a growing number of schools, that college offers training on beer brewing. Student brewers can get immediate feedback from their peers because their beer is sold at campus dining facilities. The Associated Press reports:
“To make the beer here and sell the beer here and have a cafe and have an educational component, we’re the first to have put all those pieces together,” Aaron Neilson, director of dining services for the Cal Poly Foundation, said over a lunch of pizza and — of course — beer at the school’s new Innovation Brew Works.
A few feet away, senior chemistry major Stephen Moser was in the back room of this former campus bookstore, brewing up a batch of ale. In a few weeks, his work will end up in the glasses of patrons in the brew works’ cafe, where signs at the front doorremind people to drink responsibly.
The uninformed among you may think of it as Baffins Pond in southern England. It's not. In 2005, a school teacher named Louis Robert Harold Stephens (now addressed as His Grace, the Grand Duke Louis) realized that the three tiny islands in this pond had never been claimed by anyone. They were therefore open for settlement. He named them the Lagoan Isles, as the word "lagoan" means "pond."
His Grace does not reside on the islands, but non-resident lordship is a common practice. For example, the Queen of Canada visits that domain only occasionally.
Ah, academia! Where, as they say, the fights are so vicious because the consequences are so low. On Wednesday, Twitter users riffed amusingly with the hashtag #AcademicNovel. Contributors made puns with famous book titles tweaked for the cloisters of university life.
Harry Potter and the University of Phoenix #AcademicNovel
Andrew Peña of BuzzFeed altered images of Disney princesses and other animated characters to show what they would look like if they had been drawn in an anime style. You can slide a bar across each image to see the comparison. For example, here’s Pocahontas:
Old style: getting angry, logging into Twitter, then saying something regrettable.
New style: hulking out, logging into Twitter, then smashing your keyboard.
If the Avengers used social media, what would they use? Captain America is obviously your grandmother on Facebook. Tony Stark would post pictures of himself being awesome on Instagram. Jamie Jones of BuzzFeed photoshopped the 6 members of the Avengers team on different social media tools. Is there a Marvel superhero who would still be using MySpace?
Seb Lester is so good that he makes it look easy. He says, “I find the Latin alphabet to be one of mankind's most beautiful and profound creations.” He expresses this appreciation through typographical art. We’ve previously shown some of his complex work. More recently, Lester duplicated famous brand logos, including Ferrari, the New York Times, and Honda. He’s so precise that his quick renderings look like they’re machine generated. But they’re all the result of his superbly skilled hand.
This video shows a street vendor in Aqaba, Jordan. The brewer has a pan of sand over a gas burner. The hot sand evenly distributes heat over the cups. When he presses them in deeply, the coffee boils. Then it's ready to pour. It's an amazing technique that I've never heard of before. Starbucks, get on it.
BB-8 is the name of the spherical droid that appears in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Ever since it first appeared on screen for a couple seconds in an early trailer, fans have been fascinated by it.
You can count on nail artist Kayleigh O'Connor to express a pop culture phenomenon on her hands. In the past, she's made nails inspired by Breaking Bad, Futurama, The Lord of the Rings, and more. For Star Wars Day, she made this rounded thumbnail droid that looks like it's ready to roll off her hand.
Ben Zurawski is a collector of flipbooks and flipbook artist for people who want a tangible, animated story of important parts of their lives. Sometimes people hire him to tell their personal love stories. That’s what Wayne Brandes did. He married his wife Rachel in January and gave her this flipbook as a wedding present.
"I think it is perfect," Brandes said of the finished product. "Ben obviously put a lot of effort into making it special. Rachel loves it. She cried when I gave it to her."
The Pet Collective proves that everyone, regardless of species, can get into the thrilling story of Star Wars. It recreated scenes from the original trilogy using puppies in place of the main characters. It is up to Yo-dog to train Luke to avoid the Bark Side of the Force and show him how to defeat Darth Hound.
The Chocolate Covered Company covers things in chocolate, then sells them. That’s a great business premise! Everything is better when drenched in chocolate. I’ve never had chocolate covered jalapeños, but I can definitely imagine how wonderful the combination would be.
The crew at 7 Deadly took them even further. They injected half a shot of tequila into each pepper. The combination was perfect:
The result was an explosion of liquor (we used some leftover Los Abuelos), followed by the unforgiving single of a densely-seeded jalapeño. The heat was only lightly tempered by the chocolate, which for amusement’s sake, was quite tasty.
Jenny Harrison used to work with computers. But she found it unsatisfying. So she decided to become a faerie. Fortunately, Happily Ever Laughter, a company in the San Francisco Bay area, employs many faeries. Harrison found a way to stand out from the competition. In an impressive piece of longform journalism, Lauren Davis of io9 learned about the modern faerie world and how Harrison broke into it:
But she figured out a way to make her application stand out anyway. For one thing, she made her cover letter rhyme. For another, she transformed her resume from that of tech professional to that of a silly faerie who happened to work in the tech industry. She removed the references to servers and MySQL, for example, replacing them with job descriptions like, “I look at computer screens all day! And oh my gosh, there are so many numbers!” She scored an interview.
In 2005, Drs. Simone Shamay-Tsoory and Judith Aharon-Peretz published an article in the journal Neuropsychology that examined how the brain processes sarcasm. They studied how people with selected brain damage understood sarcasm and concluded that the prefrontal cortex provides essential information processing of sarcasm:
The authors explored the neurobiology of sarcasm and the cognitive processes underlying it by examining the performance of participants with focal lesions on tasks that required understanding of sarcasm and social cognition. Participants with prefrontal damage (n 25) showed impaired performance on the sarcasm task, whereas participants with posterior damage (n 16) and healthy controls (n 17) performed the same task without difficulty. Within the prefrontal group, right ventromedial lesions were associated with the most profound deficit in comprehending sarcasm. In addition, although the prefrontal damage was associated with deficits in theory of mind and right hemisphere damage was associated with deficits in identifying emotions, these 2 abilities were related to the ability to understand sarcasm. This suggests that the right frontal lobe mediates understanding of sarcasm by integrating affective processing with perspective taking.
A 2005 article in The Guardian summarizes the implications of these findings:
First the language centre in the brain's left hemisphere interprets the literal meaning of words. Next, the frontal lobes and right hemisphere process the speaker's intention and check for contradictions between the literal meaning and the social and emotional context. Finally, the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex - our sarcasm meter - makes a decision based on our social and emotional knowledge of the situation.
Therefore you should be sarcastic whenever possible in order to demonstrate to people your superior intellectual abilities.
