Celine Chasteen and a friend were paddleboarding in Jupiter, Florida last week. To her surprise, a charming and bold manatee popped up out of the water, placed his flippers on her board, and made eyes at her.
Chasteen was delighted. And although the manatee didn't get her number, his chances are excellent. The Dodo quotes her:
I thought he was really cute. He was really nice and stuff. I hope he drops by again.
-via Huffington Post
This is Sumatra, a giant albino Burmese python. She works with Redding Reptile Parties, an event service in Redding, California that brings reptiles to parties. In this video, Sumatra enjoys a hot summer day in the pool with two young friends.
Don't worry about the girls! They're safe. Corey Williams, Sumatra's owner, describes how gentle she is:
She has been to over 500 birthday parties and many schools, she has been around kids since she was a baby, she has never killed anything she even likes our dogs and cat. funny story I have found the most humane way to kill a rabbit or chicken is to give them a strong hit to the back of the neck with a hard object this normally kills them instantly for I don't like to see any animal suffer. Anyway I came in later to see if Sumatra had eaten and the chicken was walking around her cage, she would not touch it unless it was dead so I killed it for sure this time and she ate it right away.
-via Gifsboom
(Photo: Imperial College London)
Do you remember Patrick, the proctology exam simulation dummy? He wowed the world with his almost lifelike representation of the human rectum. But in the intervening year, scientists and engineers have made even greater advances in the field of human rectal simulation.
Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a robotic rectum that feels almost exactly like the real thing. It provides responsive haptic feedback so that as the medical student searches for and examines the prostate, the flesh-like rectum responds appropriately.
Additionally, this robotic rectum is programmable. Not all rectums are alike and doctors have to get used to the feel of different rectums. This one can provide that same variety of experiences. Quartz reports:
Doctors learn what a cancerous prostate feels like through experience. The trouble is that people don’t easily volunteer for such a probing. In the UK, there’s just one registered “rectal teaching assistant,” as volunteers are known. […]
Rectums come in all shapes and sizes, so the device presented at the Eurohaptics conference this week can be programmed, allowing the anatomy to be altered each time. The current simulation is based on scans of the UK’s only rectal teaching assistant.
-via David Thompson
Wendy Burch of KTLA News in Los Angeles went to the beach to report on recent shark sightings. She did a man-on-the-street interview with James, a jogger passing by. He had muscles, an Australian accent, and no shirt. Burch was all into that.
After James was done talking and Burch was done pretending to listen to him, he ran off. "The story of my life," she says. Then Burch drops the microphone and starts chasing after him. Sharks are hunting in the water and Burch is hunting on the land.
-via BuzzFeed
Oyster cards are used for public transportation in London. Just swipe your card at the turnstile and step on the train.
Did you lose your Oyster card? Lucie Davis, a design student at the University of the Arts London, won't. She took the RFID chip from an Oyster card and embedded it into one of her fake fingernails. Now to board the Underground, she just taps her fingernails on the scanner.
In Ghostbusters, Dr. Egon Spengler tries to explain the level of paranormal danger that New York City faces. He uses a Twinkie as an anology:
Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. According to this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.
What does that mean, scientifically? J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats writes in great detail about the physical characteristics of a Twinkie this size and weight. The Spengler Twinkie creates serious problems because a Twinkie scaled up to that size would weigh much more than 600 pounds and collapse under its own weight:
A Twinkie 35 feet long would actually weigh 1.25 million times more than a standard Twinkie, or approximately 53 tons. And it gets worse. As any snack-cake historian could tell you, modern Twinkies are different from 1984 Ghostbusters-era Twinkies. Twinkies were discontinued briefly a couple of years back and reemerged from Hostess's bankruptcy as shorter, less dense versions of their previous form. While modern Twinkies are 9.9 centimeters long and weigh 38.5 grams, 1984 Twinkies were 10.2 centimeters long and weighed 42.5 grams. Redoing the calculations with those measurements gives you a Twinkie that weighs 54 tons.
But note that Spengler said that 600 pounds is the weight not the mass of the Twinkie. López-Alt calculates that it would be possible to make a Twinkie fitting Spengler's specifications--provided that it was placed in low gravity:
In order for that Twinkie to weigh 600 pounds, you'd have to blast it off on a rocket (shoring it up so it can withstand those G-forces, of course), fly it past the stratosphere, watch those meteoroids ignite into burning meteors as it whizzes through the mesosphere, wave at the astronauts aboard the International Space Station at 400 kilometers, photobomb the Hubble Space Telescope at 600 kilometers, disrupt armies and Uber drivers all over the world as you smash through GPS satellites at 20,000 kilometers, then leave them all in the dust and set the cruise control as you coast the rest of the way, pulling off that interplanetary superhighway when you're almost a quarter of the way to the moon.
-via Stella Park
(Go Trainer Go t-shirt on sale at the NeatoShop)
Police in Milford, Michigan were hunting for a man. The man in question was hunting for Pokémon. The two missions brought them together because the local police station was a Pokémon GO gym. The Detroit Free Press reports:
“A couple of our officers looked out the window and saw him standing out by the flagpole,” said Police Chief Tom Lindberg, noting after numerous run-ins, police recognized the individual immediately and went out to greet – and arrest – the man.
Lindberg said he wasn’t sure the man even realized where he was headed; the location-based mobile game uses GPS to guide users as they explore real life surroundings in search of virtual images, requiring users to look at their phone while not paying attention to surroundings.
“When I first learned about this game, I was very concerned it was taking young adults into places they shouldn’t necessarily be – and could get hurt, if they’re not paying attention to what’s going on around them,” Lindberg said. “But I never thought someone with a warrant would be so driven by the game that they’d walk right up to the police station.”
-via Dave Barry
(Owl Turd Comics/Shenanigansen)
Sure, your brain is your second favorite organ, but that doesn't mean that it's particularly useful. Your relationship is somewhat toxic, so you often work against each other.
Amy of the marvy food blog Oh, Bite It! is deepy frying again, so let's head to her kitchen to see what deliciously fatty treats we can get. This time, she's making a deep fried version of poutine, the essential Québécois treat.
First, Amy cut cubes of cheese curd, floured them, and dipped them in an egg wash. Then she rolled them in crushed potato chips (yes, I know that poutine purists may object), and put them in the deep fryer. Dip them in brown gravy and you've got the perfect breakfast food.
Look at that! You can see individual beads of sweat pouring down Kobe Bryant's head! That's masterful artistry.
Steve Butcher is a tattoo artist in New Zealand. He tells Inked magazine that he started as a painter and then, at the encouragement of a friend, tried his hand at inking. You can see how well Butcher's composition skills carried over into tattoo work. His tattoos are so realistic that they look like photographs printed onto the skin of his clients. You can see more of his work on Instagram.
This is Gwendolyn, a 11-foot alligator. For the past 47 years, he's lived with David Van Buren of Coconut Grove, Florida. The Miami Herald describes how they met:
This has been Van Buren and Gwendolyn’s routine for 47 years, ever since then-9-year-old Van Buren “cried and begged and pleaded” with his mom for the $2 gator while vacationing in Florida. He flew the tiny creature home to New York in the pocket of his baseball jacket and set him up in a fish tank. He used his allowance to buy goldfish (10 for a dollar) to feed his new pet.
Gwendolyn even went to college with Van Buren. Now he lives in a pond in Van Buren's backyard, where he hand-feeds the alligator pizza and chocolate chip cookies (specifically Chips Ahoy, which is his favorite brand).
They're lifelong friends, but the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission says that if Van Buren wants to keep Gwendolyn he'll have to make changes to his property. It's not acceptable for a large alligator to roam free in a residential neighborhood.
(Photo: MAD Pantry)
Mackenzie Hinson (right) is a 12-year old girl who lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Last year, she founded Make a Difference Food Pantry in the fellowship hall of a local church. Now she's expanded the operation massively, renting space from which she and her staff feeds 1,200 families in the area every month. She's very talented at getting support from local businesses to keep her charity thriving. WNCN CBS quotes her mother:
“She knows mostly everybody that comes in here by name,” said Paige Hinson. “If they’re new, she’ll probably know them the next time’
Mackenzie’s rent is $1,300 dollars a month to rent a 2,400 square-foot space. About 90 percent of her operating costs come from fundraising.
“I fund raise at local restaurants like Zaxby’s in Smithfield,” Mackenzie said. “Kelly Smith, the owner, asked me if I could do a fundraiser once a month.”
The 12-year-old is also determined to reach even greater heights. “I want it to be a warehouse, a 10,000-square-foot warehouse, that’s what I want it to be.”
-via Ace of Spades HQ
Put on your big girl panties and head down to the mall. You need to restock on underwear. Expect an awful experience, as cartoonist Cassandra Calin illustrates why in 6 cartoons at College Humor. If you search, you may find something stylish. Or you may find something comfortable. Good luck, though, trying to find both at the same time.
Megaprocessor: il supercomputer da 53k $ utile per giocare a Tetris - https://t.co/oC5v9lr9q6 - #DoYouGeek? pic.twitter.com/7DyM1raMZ9
— DoYouGeek? (@DoYouGeek) July 7, 2016
James Newman, a software engineer in the UK, spent 3 years and the equivalent of $51,000 constructing a computer that fills an entire room of his house. It plays Tetris.
That's it. Just Tetris.
That shouldn't be surprising. Although Newman's computer is physically large, it's technologically primitive. It's slower and has less memory that most desktop computers. It's a simple processor that he built piece-by-piece. With it, Newman hopes to educate people about how computers work The Huffington Post reports:
Newman is now planning on holding open days at his house for people to see the machine.
“In the longer term I would like to put it in a museum or go on a road tour to show people,” he said. “I want to show people how computers works and get children interested in electronics.”
-via VA Viper
The 2008 episode "Nautical Novice" shows SpongeBob's hard-earned driver's license. SpongeBob was born on July 14, 1986. That means that he's 30 years old today!
I hope that if he's gained a management position at the Krusty Krab if he's still there.
-via Tastefully Offensive
