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Amaury Guichon is not just a master pastry chef and professor of the pastry arts, but also a top-tier artist. That expertise on full display with his latest creation. This chocolate dragon is so strong that he can mount it on the wall without any apparent internal supports aside from the chocolate itself. Watch this video of its creation and be wowed by his delicate sculpting of the eyes and scales, as well as the painting of the skin.

About one third of the way into the video, you may think that he’s sculpting something else. But that’s only because you have a dirty mind.

-via David Thompson

The dancers weave in and out of heavy bamboo poles that are rhythmically clapped together. They have to jump quickly and at just the right times, lest their ankles get hit.

This is tinikling, a traditional dance from the Philippines. It's named after a chicken-sized, long-legged bird of the same name. This bird is known for jumping up and down in rice paddies, deftly avoiding bamboo traps set for them.

Philstar News reports that this performance from last April shows members of the Filipino Student Association at the Georgia Tech University performing a modern, hip hop inspired version of the traditional dance.

-via TYWKIWDBI

Tigger of North Vancouver is a Bengal, which is a beautiful but not necessarily ferocious cat breed. Nonetheless, Tigger is known in his neighborhood for courage and aggressiveness. He’ll chase away dogs who give him too much trouble. And, from a cat’s point of view, a bear is just a very large and odd smelling dog.

Tigger’s resident human, a pair of brothers, saw their cat staring down the intruding bear. But, CTV News reports, when Tigger wouldn’t back away, the brothers decided to record the incident. Tigger knows how to play for his audience, which is now worldwide.

-via Dave Barry

Tim Peake (left), a British astronaut who stayed on board the International Space Station in 2016, isn't pointing fingers at anyone in particular. Nor is he inviting anyone to pull his finger. He's just explaining that the human digestive tract works differently in microgravity.

The tabloid Daily Star reports that Major Peake was asked what it was like to burp with a space helmet on. He explained that people don't burp in space because burping--the rising of gas in the the digestive tract--doesn't happen in microgravity. The air doesn't go up. It exits the body the other way.

As a result, Peake explains, the space station is a stinky place. It smells "like a barbecue that’s gone wrong. Burnt meat, scorched, metallic smell."

In space, no one can hear you scream. But they can smell you.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: NASA Johnson

For any given geographic point in the world, which peoples and nations have lived there? Point in History, a project by professional data visualizer Hans Hack, informs us. Just click on any spot on a map of the world and the site creates a timeline dating back to prehistoric times.

For my example above, I chose the modern Italian city of Brindisi. The application tells us that after the Stentinello Neolithic culture, the heel of the Italian boot saw the presence of Greeks, Romans, Ostrogoths, and Byzantines, followed by the rule of Sicily, Aragon, Naples, the odd-named Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and, finally, unified Italy.

-via Flowing Data

The board game Reversi was invented in the late Nineteenth Century in Britain, but became enormously popular in Japan during the Twentieth Century. The modern version of the game most commonly played around the world is Othello. It's not as complex as chess, but the game has depth. Now it's even more complex with this 3D variant recently unveiled at a toy show in Tokyo.

Sora News 24 reports on this development. The new Othello comes with two platforms that can be placed anywhere on the board, so as long as the corners line up with all diagonal lines facing the right way. The Japanese-language video embedded above explains the rule changes. If I understand the diagrams correctly, placing tiles on opposite vertical sides of the platforms can flip all chips between them on multiple or single levels, depending upon which rules the players agree to.

Photo: Sora News 24

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Airbnb and its competitors let you rent out your house to strangers in search of a place to stay. This real estate aspect of the sharing economy is expanding. The New York Times (paywalled article) reports that new businesses let people offer up their household pools, living rooms, and backyards. The article focuses on Sniffspot, a company that turns ordinary household backyards into dog parks.

This company is thriving in suburbs outside of large cities, such as New York and Seattle. Wealthy dog owners who live in crowded apartments in the city will pay $35 an hour or more for access to fenced-in backyards. This large fee encourages hosts to make their yards especially appealing to dogs, such as adding agility equipment, play structures, and shallow pools.

-via Althouse

The Barter Theatre building in Abingdon, Virginia dates back to at least 1876. But it got its current name during the Great Depression. When it reopened its doors under new management in 1933, guests could purchase tickets to see plays by bartering with farm and garden goods, such as pickles and eggs. Paying in cash was an option, but, Atlas Obscura reports, 80% of guests paid in trade.

The Barter Theatre became a media sensation and has thrived ever since, drawing famous actors to its stage, including Gregory Peck and Ernest Borgnine. It has an active show schedule and sees 160,000 visitors every year, although one can no longer buy tickets with chickens.

Photo: Steven C. Price

Magic: The Gathering is an enormously popular fantasy-based collectible card game that launched that gaming genre. Since 1993, the corporate owner, Wizards of the Coast, has produced billions of Magic cards.

When you're looking at billions of pieces of paper with variable values, you need an economist to understand how they behave. That's why Wizards of the Coast is hiring a Senior Design Economist to study how the game is played and help the company make prudent design decisions about it.

The job posting is here. You'll need a graduate degree in economics or some other data science field and a familiarity with an analytical programming language.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Robert

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Eating, though it is great fun, is also a lot of work. Futurists promised us flying cars, but we don't actually need flying cars. We need automatic forks in order to ingest more food while using as little effort as possible.

Dave of DaveMakesStuff makes the best possible future a reality. He likes to say that "I don't usually know what I'm making until it's too late." This invention was supposed to be a 7-pronged screwdriver, but an eating utensil makes more sense. It's driven by eight beveled gears nested in a sphere. Dave kindly offers his STL files if you'd like to 3D print your own.

-via Ugly Design

The Laundry Jet is the first vacuum powered laundry chute that transports laundry from any room with ports installed, to the laundry room [read more: https://t.co/ad50LRzmkn] pic.twitter.com/vuPaVi8j40

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 9, 2022

Is it really necessary? No. Would it be useful? Yes. Would I use it for purposes other than laundry processing if there was one in my home? You'd better believe it!

Laundry Jet has up to four ports that open either with a manual slide or motion sensors. Vacuum force sucks the clothes down to a central repository in the laundry room. It works the other way, too. You can get an optional return system installed that sucks the clean laundry up to a designated location in the house.

Although Laundry Jet is best installed during the home construction, it's also possible to retrofit the system into a preexisting home by routing the 6-inch wide pipes through an attic. Those pipes are wide enough for most laundry items or carefully wrapped sandwiches.

-via Born in Space

Your flight with Singapore Airlines has not been delayed. It's not late and you are not early. The flight has simply been "retimed". The language is important because you should have a positive outlook. As the sage advised, "always look on the bright side of life."

John Ollila of the travel website Loyalty Lobby shares this email from Singapore Airlines for his flight out of Bali. The new wording should make the experience less difficult, right?

So, yes, Ollila's flight has been retimed. But at least it has not experienced an unscheduled terrain contact. That could really disrupt his plans for after deplaning.

-via Dave Barry

☹️ pic.twitter.com/VuOJe4rSU4

— Pablo Rochat (@PabloRochat) June 7, 2022

The worst has happened: there is a moment in time in which there is nothing distracting you from your own thoughts. You can sit in peace and think clearly for the first time since you first held a smartphone.

This is a disaster waiting to happen and Pablo Rochat isn't helping any. He's an artist and commercial art director in Atlanta. Rochat's Twitter feed is filled with many public pranks and visual jokes that bend reality. In this case, Thing from The Addams Family is disciplining you for your addiction to the phone. It's time for an upgrade.

-via Unnecessary Inventions

Or, to be more precise, having a name that takes longer to pronounce correlates with lowered job prospects with the sampled group for this study.

Qi Ge (Vassar College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) are economists. They studied the employment prospects of 1,500 recent graduates of economics doctoral programs by measuring the acquisition of tenure-track positions at institutions with high research productivity. An algorithm assessed the pronounceability of names by the "commonality of letter and phoneme combinations" within those names.

One standard deviation in the time that it takes to pronounce a person's name reduced the likelihood of attaining a tenure-track position by 8%. Although anti-bias training of hiring committee members may address the pronounceability of the names of candidates, such training does not appear to have made a significant impact on the cost of having a name that takes a long time to pronounce.

You can read the full text of Ge and Wu's paper at SSRN.

-via Marginal Revolution

Alasdair Beckett-King, a very English comedian, offers reasonably good Texas accents in this brief parody of The Lord of the Rings and King of the Hill.

I would really enjoy seeing a special episode of King of the Hill in which the The Lord of the Rings takes place in Texas. Hank Baggins is tasked with delivering a Super Bowl VI ring to Austin for its destruction.

Beckett-King envisions Dale Gribble as Boromir and Boomhauer as Gollum. Additionally, Bill Dauterive would be the ideal as Legolas, Luanne Platter should be Galadriel, Cotton Hill should be Saruman the White, and Bobby Hill should play Pippin Took.