Way easier than I thought - and it’s 100% pure bittersweet, no coatings. When you catch the light at the right angle, it’s mesmerizing. pic.twitter.com/HFi0K5IGSG
AI design genius and Renaissance woman Janelle Shane describes it as "holographic." I'm not sure if that is the correct term. At a bare minimum, it's shiny. I'm going with iridescent because of the visual effect as you change your perspective.
Shane followed these Instructables instructions by jellmeister, which use diffraction grating sheets to add the visual impact to chocolate. Shane explains that the texture of tempered chocolate is so fine that it can hold the sheets and permit diffraction with good lighting. Read her whole Twitter thread to see optics experiments with it.
The famed Nineteenth Century British author Charles Dickens produced a vast volume of words preserved for posterity to endure in English literature classes. Some of those words have only recently become accessible thanks to a crowdsourced decoding project which has broken the cipher that Dickens used for his private notes.
The Dickens Code project, led by Dr. Claire Wood of the University of Leicester, has deciphered the shorthand system that Dickens called brachygraphy. It was a great challenge because Dickens expanded and changed the system over time.
BBC News reports that the crucial break came from a draft of Dickens's so-called "Tavistock letter". The team of over a thousand volunteers discovered that it was a letter to an advertising manager at The Times newspaper. The surviving response from that manager led the codebreakers to discover Dickens's symbols for "Ascension Day", "advertisement", "refused", and "sent back." Now Dickens's secret shorthand is beginning to reveal itself.
Core77 introduces us to the KBT-100 toaster, an unusual kitchen appliance from the defunct company Modern Maid. It's for people who were very serious about their toast.
You see, you don't just slap it down on your countertop and plug it in. It slides into a hole in your kitchen wall (or bedroom wall--I'm not going to judge your private activities) and is hardwired into the household electrical system. Slide the drawer out to insert sliced bread or remove toast.
What's uncertain to me is if the hole was a custom size that would have to be cut into the drywall or if it could fit within a standard wall-hole that could be swapped out for other, more useful appliances, such as chocolate fondue fountains.
The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, but the territory had been on the real estate market for a decade. Russia wasn't making money from it and, as a result of the Crimean War, Russia was also reassessing its overseas committments. The United States was a preferred buyer, but not the only customer that Russia was considering.
The Liechtensteiner Vaterland, the largest daily newspaper in the tiny Alpine nation, passes along an oral tradition within the ruling house of Liechtenstein. Prince Hans-Adam II, the current monarch, says that one of his predecessors spoke fluent Russian, had strong ties with the Tsars, and sponsored an institute in Vienna that focused on Russian and Slavic affairs. He was a special ambassador from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor to the Tsar in St. Petersburg.
At one point in conversation, the Tsar offered the personal sale of Alaska to the Prince, who was in a financial position to afford it.
There are no documents to support this oral tradition within the princely family, which Hans-Adam II blames on the destruction of documents during the revolutions and wars of Twentieth Century Russia.
Another problem that I see in the story is that Hans-Adam II attributes the incident to Prince Franz I, who was born in 1853. That makes him a bit young to be conducting such high level negotiations prior to 1867.
At its present borders, Alaska is 10,698 times the size of Liechtenstein. Can you imagine what it would be like today if the Prince of Liechtenstein had purchased it?
The Victoria Cross is the highest honor that a member of the British armed forces can receive. Since Queen Victoria instituted it in 1856, only 1,358 people have received this award for extreme gallantry in the midst of the enemy, witnessed by compatriots to who attest to the courage of the recipient.
Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope of the Royal Navy is one such man honored by Britain. An article in the January 1, 2010 issue of magazine Military History (sorry, it's paywalled) describes the unusual circumstances of this award. It was the enemy commander who recommended that the British War Office award Roope with the Victoria Cross.
On April 7, 1940, Roope was in command of HMS Glowworm, a destroyer. He encountered a squadron of German vessels in the North Sea on their way to invade Norway. At the center of this formation was the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.
Roope's Glowworm was massively outnumbered and outgunned. In keeping with the traditions of the Royal Navy, he nonetheless immediately attacked the enemy formation.
The German destroyers scattered and Glowworm was soon facing Admiral Hipper alone. Hipper's heavy guns delivered brutal blows to the much smaller British ship. Roope ordered his crew to throw up a smokescreen, which he used to feint a retreat. Then he turned and rammed the Hipper, doing great damage to the heavy cruiser.
The Glowworm began to sink. Roope ordered his crew to abandon ship, which they did. After Glowworm sank, Captain Helmuth Heye of the Hipper ordered his crew to pick up the survivors, rescuing 31 out of the total crew of 149 men. Captain Roope was not among them.
Captain Heye was so impressed with the intrepidity of Roope that he sent a message to the British War Office through the International Red Cross, urging them to award his foe with the Victoria Cross. Regulations required that at least three witnesses, preferably of high rank, attest to the courage of the honoree. In this case, the War Office decided to accept Captain Heye's testimony, as no British officers were available. In 1945, they postumously awarded Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope with the Victoria Cross. You can read his citation here.
Grocery store pickup can be helpful, but Cookpad Mart, an online grocery retailer in Japan, offers an even more accomodating service. The company already provides delivery to lockers inside convenience stores. Now, Sora News 24 informs us, it's offering grocery pickup inside train stations.
This service is, so far, available at four stations of the East Japan Railway company. Customers can make an online cart and choose a station. Their groceries will be ready for them when they arrive at the pickup point in the selected station.
Think of what a great time saver this could be! People getting off of work could pick up food on the way home with only a brief detour inside a train station. I wonder if this could work in some American cities that have extensive rail networks.
High Wycomb is a small town west of London. Every year, the charter trustees elect a mayor, who, upon taking office, is immediately weighed on a huge scale by officials wearing period costumes from the Eighteenth Century. At the end of his or her term, the exiting mayor is weighed out. It is imperative that the outgoing mayor not weigh more than at the beginning of the term. If s/he does weigh more, public jeers follow.
Why? The New York Times tells us that the tradition dates to 1678, when the mayor developed a reputation as drunken lout who had got fat at the expense of the taxpayers. High increased weight was taken as proof of his profligacy with municipal funds.
Now, the ceremony is an excuse for a party and fun. The macebearer will read out the weight at the beginning of the term and say "and some more" if the mayor has gained weight or "and no more" if the mayor has not.
We librarians value patron recommendations for collection acquisitions. These usually come in the form of suggestions verbally presented to us. But 8-year old Dillon Helbig, a patron of the Lake Hazel Branch of the Ada Community Libraries of Boise, Idaho, took a more assertive approach to contributing to his local library.
Last December, Dillon wrote and illustrated an 81-page graphic novel in a blank notebook. Titling it Dillion Helbig's Crismis Adventure, he snuck it into the library and slipped it onto a shelf in the children's area.
Library workers discovered the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Branch manager Alex Hartman read it to his 6-year old child, who found it, the Washington Post reports, "one of the funniest books he'd ever known."
So, with Dillon's permission, the library staff added it to their collection as a circulating book. It's become so popular among patrons that there is a 55-person waitlist for Dillon's novel about the star on a Christmas tree that explodes, catapulting the young boy through space and time.
This is the sort of demand that would normally lead a library to purchase additional copies. But as it is a one-of-a-kind item, we will have to wait until The Adventure of Dillion Helbig's Crismis is available as an ebook.
The 255th Rule of Acquisition says that "A wife is a luxury; a good accountant a necessity." Managing your business enterprises requires prudent, detailed attention. This is even more true for "legitimate businessmen" who work in organizations unfairly maligned as mafia families.
Crime bosses hire accountants. Are those accountants actually skilled at their work? Pietro A. Bianchi and his colleagues, all professors of accounting at various universities, conducted a study of accountants who, due to criminal records, are associated with criminal organizations in Italy.
Their peer-reviewed paper, published last November, affirms that, in general, financial statements compiled by these accountants of dubious employment are of superior quality to those of a control group of accountants who lack such criminal connections.
Alex Falcone, his website tells us "is the only comedian and writer living in Los Angeles." That means that he's in high demand in the entertainment desert that is southern California. He's appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Portlandia. That's probably just a starting point for now, until casting directors start dragging warm bodies off the streets of Los Angeles to fill roles.
He has a very public face, but Falcone is also a private, even secretive person. He likes to hide special things in hollowed out objects, such as books. Strap in for a journey as he takes you through the many layers of his apartment, where nothing is as it seems. Warning: there are drugs involved.
Masks making it hard to understand people either audibly or because you rely on lip reading? Just got this hacked together - it displays my speech in real time with @DeepgramAI! pic.twitter.com/lPu4CZboIk
Do you wear a facemask on a regular basis? One of the challenges that this presents is that people who read lips to communicate can't see what you're saying. I've seen people use masks with transparent centers to help, but these often fog over.
Computer programmer Kevin Lewis has responded to this need with an amazingly accurate speech-to-text recognition app that uses the Deepgram AI. I've never seen a speech-to-text transcription tool as accurate as this one. Lewis displays that text in realtime on a screen on his chest so that people who lipread can just read what he's saying. It's like living with subtitles turned on.
Redditor Sir_Make_Alot makes a lot of great artworks inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Among them is this coin that has a hidden piece inside. When he moves his finger along the back, the eyes of the Beholder, a very dangerous monster in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, watches your every move. The text translates to, if I remember my Latin correctly, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Yes, but don't get close enough for the Beholder to leer.
If you don't have electricity running to your yurt, it may be hard to keep a freezer going. For long-term storage of your perishable foodstuffs, you'll need something that makes use of cold weather, can endure short hot spells, and keeps your food accessible.
This clever man that some people on reddit think lives in northern China uses a clever, multi-stage process to build a functional deep freeze. What's necessary is both ice and carefully arranged hot water.
I don't know who he is, but making things with ice and hot water is appearently his thing. Here's a video of him making a smaller ice chest with functional hinges.
Millie is a Jack Russell Terrier and Whippet mix who lives in Hampshire, UK. She wandered into the tidal mudflats near the coastal waters of Havant. This is dangerous ground, as it is difficult to traverse and easy to get stuck.
Rescuers encouraged her to move toward higher ground, but were unable until they brought in an aerial drone. A local resident cooked up sausages from Aldi, which the rescuers then dangled from the drone. Millie was hungry enough to follow the bait, which the drone pilot slowly moved toward higher ground that would not submerge with the tide.
Tori Yorgey, a reporter with WSAZ-TV News in Charleston, West Virginia was on the scene, reporting on the effects of a winter storm. The roads were slippery from the snow, as evidenced by the car that slid into Yorgey.
This is her last week on the job, as Yorgey is heading to Pittsburgh to work there. She now has the ultimate end-of-work story. Despite the impact, Yorgey stood up and was reporting on weather conditions within a minute.
I'm also impressed with anchorman Tim Irr, who maintains perfect composure as a colleague is cut down in front of him.
