Movie producer Michael Bay is famous for the explosions that unnecessarily punctuate his movies. It is a destiny that he was born to. Similarly, the delivery room staff was temporarily blinded with lens flare when J.J. Abrams was born.
-via Tastefully Offensive
(Image: Jonathan W. Arbuster/Disney)
Peckoltia greedoi is a newly-classified species of suckermouth armored catfish found in the Gurupi River of Brazil. Jonathan W. Armbruster, David C. Werneke, and Milton Tan, who are researchers at Auburn University in Alabama, named it after Greedo, a character from Star Wars. Greedo is best remembered as a bounty hunter who cornered Han Solo on Tatooine. Solo quite properly shot him at the first opportunity.
The resemblance is obvious, so I would advise shooting first upon encountering such a fish.
-via Geekologie
The popular HBO drama series Girls is about young women in their 20s who live in New York City. Their stories are apparently timeless because lines from the dialogue can be perfectly matched with classical works of Western art, such as Caravaggio’s head of Medusa.
Mean Girls Art History is a Tumblr blog filled with similar combinations. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all day, and I’ve never even watched Girls.
(Head of Adriane by Gaspare Landi)
(Photo: Highways Agency)
Would you like to be happy? Of course you do! Your supervisor considers your happiness to be essential. It will have a great impact on your quarterly evaluation. So keep your happiness level high because a new device invented by Hitachi monitors it continously and informs your boss of your happiness -- or lack thereof.
Hitachi's new gadget is about the size of a credit card. You wear it (presumably it's not yet available as a subdermal implant). Sophie Chara of the Wall Street Journal explains how it works:
Essentially, Hitachi has come up with a happiness algorithm based on how much you sit, stand, nod, type and walk around at work. The badge houses an accelerometer to measure your activity, including how quickly, say, you are moving and collects data on your movements an incredible 50 times a second throughout the day.
The benefit of the system is that ideally all employees in a business would wear a badge with the wearable sending data to cloud based servers in real time. The aim isn't to get individual data but an overall score of workplace happiness. It's a system Hitachi dubs Human Big Data.
So keep smiling!
-via Rocket News 24
(Image: Lewis Walpole Library)
Sidle up to some handsome fellow and say:
Sir, Sleep is not more welcome to the wearied Traveller, than thou art to my House.
If you know what I mean and I think that you do.
In 1713, Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, published The New Academy of Compliments: Erected for Ladies, Gentlewomen, Courtiers, Citizens, Countrymen, and All Persons of what Degree Soever, of Both Sexes : Stored with Variety of Courtly and Civil Complements, Eloquent Letters of Love and Friendship : with an Exact Collection of the Newest and Choicest Songs a la Mode Both Amorous and Jovial.
(Back then, book titles were loooooooong.)
Sackville's book is filled with suggestions on how to woo a man. Ask the Past offers a few selections from it, such as this pick-up line:
Sir, You are so highly Noble, that Your Purse is my Exchequer.
Ask the Past also lists suggested phrases for gentlemen who wish to impress ladies and acquire their romantic companionship. But they are so brash that using them will likely result in a slap than a kiss.
(Photo: Elvert Barnes)
We all do it when we're talking. As we're trying to come up with words to express, we say "um" or "uh." Linguists call these expressions filled pauses. Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying them for about 10 years. He's gathered and analyzed a lot of data about who uses which of these terms. BBC News describes his findings:
"As Americans get older, they use 'uh' more," he says. "And at every age, men use 'uh' more than women."
If you look at "um", exactly the opposite is true. Younger people say "um" more often than older people. And no matter the age, women say "um" more than men.
Liberman and his colleagues have also studied these interjections in other Germanic languages. What they've noticed is that the dominance of "uh" has been eroding over time. More and more people prefer "um." Josef Fruehwald, a sociolinguist at the University of Edinburgh, doesn't understand why this change is taking place. But it's clearly happening:
"When you have two options, you can start using one more frequently and maybe replace the other one so that it's no longer an option," he says. "So why 'um'? It's just one of these things. There's always a little bit of randomness to the whole situation."
-via Marginal Revolution
There are no small jobs. There is no work that cannot be refined and perfected. And when it has been mastered, the master has earned our respect.
Erin Mosbaugh of the food blog First We Feast calls this anonymous artisan a "back-of-house hero." Dishes flow from his hands smoothly into place. How many dishes did he process before he achieved this level of excellence? Tens of thousands? A million?
Seph Lawless, a photographer, explores abandoned places in America. His new book, Black Friday, chronicles the death of the American shopping mall. For this project, Lawless explored the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. Fresh winter snow fills the empty interior of what was once a place to buy and sell, spend time with friends, and have a good time. You can see more images from the series at Business Insider.
-via Daily of the Day
Because of the way many curses are coded, you can only get rid of one by selling the cursed item online. This is why you occasionally see people trying to unload unholy items on Craigslist or eBay, such as this cursed sword.
eBay seller wfatzinger has a 2007 MacBook that is in fairly good condition except that it's haunted. He didn't buy it that way. It was a normal MacBook until it became haunted while wfatzinger was spending too much time in cemetery next to an abandoned insane asylum. He describes at great length how it because haunted and the practical effects of this haunting in the item description:
Well, I took the computer home (still in perfect working condition) and, folks, this is when things started to get downright weird. First, I noticed that ALL of my songs in iTunes had become scary or haunted. Second, the desktop background was changed to a scary photo. The following week, we (my wife, Barbie, and I) noticed some of our stuff around the house had been mysteriously rearranged. One night, we went out to dinner with my wife’s parents and their friends and some people from my wife’s work and some of their parents. When we came home, my baseball cards were all out of order and my wife’s rare American coins were in total disarray. To make matters spookier, I occasionally saw the computer levitating. In some cases the screen and keyboard would open and shut quickly, as though the computer were attempting to speak. […]
Notable Facts: Not only was there a full moon on the night I left the laptop in the graveyard, but there were also reports of an eerie green fog in the area, which people said caused them to feel a sense of intense nostalgia. I later read that there was an anomalous electrical storm near that selfsame evening. Furthermore, there were police reports of a terrifying old crone capering through a contiguous neighborhood, setting trash cans ablaze and chanting incantations or curses, laughing and shrieking and brandishing a sharpened axe with a pentagram carved into the hilt. I’m NOT a computer expert, so I’m not sure which of these anomalous entities might have precipitated the haunting, but I thought it best to include all here.
The auction is open for another 4 days. The computer comes with 4 GB of memory and a Certificate of Haunting, so you should probably put in a bid.
-via The Mary Sue
I did my best to track down the artist responsible for this image. I was unsuccessful. That's sad because a work of this greatness should earn the highest accolades from the human race.
Now take a seat. You've missed the beginning of the show. The Enterprise D-Lites (Picard on the flute, Riker on the trombone, and Worf on the triangle), but you're in time for the main act.
How does this image inspire you? What story or caption can you write for it?
-via Steven Ross
(Photo: Matt Gardner/Daily Union)
Why did ancient Wisconsinites build the mysterious Icehenge on Rock Lake? Was it for religious rites? Astronomical research? Communicating with aliens? We may never know, unless we talk to the five guys who built it. Kevin Lehner and four of his buddies used ice cutters, chainsaws, and tongs to build this massive homage to Britain's Stonehenge. The blocks weigh about 200 pounds each.
The men have been doing this on Rock Lake near the town of Lake Mills every year for several years. It began as a religious act after a local tribe was defeated by a rival foreign tribe:
The men have built ice sculptures in the past, but this year's motivation was a little special.
"There may have been some anxiety over that Packers loss in Seattle. '06 and had to release some anxiety somehow."
Perhaps the gods, pleased by this extraordinary act of piety, may respond by granting them victory in future battles.
You can see more photos of Icehenge here.
-via Nerd Approved
(Photo: Jonas Löwgren)
Nine chimpanzees who grew up in a Dutch safari park would issue what BBC News calls “an excited, high-pitched” sound when asking for apples. In 2010, when they arrived at their new home in a zoo in Edinburgh, Scotland, they found that phrase ineffective. Scottish apes apparently use “a disinterested grunt.” But within 3 years, these chimpanzees were grunting the Scottish way. This indicates that chimpanzees can use grunts as human words--changeable expressions representing concepts:
The findings, reported in the journal Current Biology, suggest that when chimp grunts refer to objects, they can function in a surprisingly similar way to human words - instead of simply being governed by how the chimp feels about the object.
Indeed, our ability to learn new "words" from our peers might date back to a shared ancestor with chimpanzees, some six million years ago.
Of course, we'll only know that they're true Scotsmen if they wear their kilts regimental style.
-via Adrienne Crezo
(W Magazine/Raphael T. Harris/WorldRealEstate.it)
Three small limestone islands off the Amalfi coast of Italy are known as La Galli or The Sirenusas (The Sirens). Tradition holds that it was here that Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey encountered the tempting songs of the Sirens. Now the islands hold privately owned resorts and luxury homes. Some of the wealthiest people in the world own seaside homes on these islands or spend time at the expensive rental estates there.
When viewed from the right angle, one of those islands looks like a dolphin.
-via Messy Nessy Chic
On Christmas Day of last year, Okaloosa County, Florida Sheriff’s deputies responded to reports of a car fire. Officers Joseph Trimboli and Eric Keyes were wearing body cameras which recorded the encounter. They found an intoxicated and incoherent man inside a car that was burning and filling with smoke. The cops smashed open the driver’s window and pulled him out of it. Paramedics took him to a hospital, where he was treated for smoke inhalation and minor burns.
(Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office)
On Thursday, Okaloosa County Sheriff Larry Ashley presented Deputies Trimboli and Keyes with medals of merit in recognition of their work on that Christmas Day.
-via Daily Telegraph (warning: auto-start video)
(Photo: Michael Zahniser)
The wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) is a resilient creature. You can find it as far south as Alabama and as far north as Alaska and northern Canada. It's the only frog that lives in the wild north of the Arctic Circle.
How does an amphibian survive the harsh winters of those frozen lands? It freezes. Scientists working in Alaska found that local wood frogs can freeze solid for up to 7 months. When the ice melts, the frogs thaw and, amazingly, are still alive! Deborah Netburn wrote about this phenomenon last year in the Los Angeles Times:
"On an organismal level they are essentially dead," said Don Larson, a graduate student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who studies frogs. "The individual cells are still functioning, but they have no way to communicate with each other."
Larson is one of several researchers who published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology. They found that the frogs produce a lot of glucose during the winter, which keeps their cells viable:
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