James Burrows built a working LEGO roller coaster and set it in an amusement park filled with dinosaurs. Right there you have a hit: LEGO, roller coaster, and dinosaurs. This construction, seen at BrickFair Alabama 2017, uses around 125,000 LEGO pieces. But wait! There's more!
This amusement park has a train, a mini-golf course, and more secrets and extra features you would only find if you look closely, or if you listen to the interview. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Simon Tofield of Simon's Cat fame illustrates the many ways cats show affection to humans. And the humorously unintended consequences of that affection. Suddenly, I realize that none of my three cats feel any affection at all toward me. Ungrateful beasts. -via Laughing Squid
There's a time and a place for everything. Today is not the day to give up candy. Anyone who isn't scanning the seasonal aisles for bargains the day after a Valentines Day are most likely working on a big box of chocolates they received yesterday. If you bring that idea of eating healthier up later, I'll think of some other reason to put it off. A good reason. This is the latest comic from Megacynics.
This is Amanda Diesen and Todd Krieg, who used to ride dirt bikes professionally, but now he has a different set of wheels. After doctors told him it would be "nearly impossible" for him to conceive a child naturally, they made this image to announce that Amanda is pregnant. And another to let everyone know it's a boy!
The two will be getting married soon, and are in the running for a dream wedding giveaway. You can read their story here. -via reddit
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Most people know of John Lennon's famous marriage to Yoko Ono, but many do not know of Cynthia Powell, the first wife and first great love of John Lennon's life. She was conservative, proper, polite, and addressed her elders as "Sir" and "Ma'am." He was rebellious, moody, impolite, incorrigible, and he probably never called anybody "Sir" or "Ma'am" in his entire life.
If ever there was a case of opposites attracting, it was the case when a teenage John Lennon lost his heart to Cynthia Powell.
The two met at the Liverpool College of Art. Cynthia Powell was actually a year older than John, being 18 during the 1957 school term, while John had just turned 17. (John was to marry his second wife, Yoko Ono, later, in 1969, with Yoko being a full seven years John's senior. Apparently, John loved "older women").
The truth is, John Lennon was a total washout at the time and, having nowhere else to go, he somehow had managed to get an invitation to be a part of the city's art school. ("Surely on the road to failure" read one of John's contemporary school teacher's reports).
John would lumber into their drawing class wearing a long tweed coat and skin-tight pants, his long hair slicked back a la Elvis with oily grease, squinting in a near-blind state until he hesitantly donned his thick glasses (which he seldom did in public).
Cynthia first noticed John's rude, boorish behavior in class, as he would ask to "borrow" her pencils, rulers, and brushes, and would conveniently forget to ever return them. John would stand around before classes, telling dirty jokes with his cronies, as Cynthia would enter. "Shhh, quiet," he would say sarcastically, "No dirty talk, it's miss Powell."
She was repelled by the loud-mouthed Lennon, but one day, as she watched the obnoxious character with disgust, she saw a fellow female student stroking John's hair as he sat next to her. Cynthia realized, to her horror, that the repulsion she felt was actually jealousy.
When the movie Wayne's World was in theaters in 1992, I saw it at least twice. Since then, I've only caught it in bits and pieces on TV, so I had no idea that the film's most memorable gag had been changed -forever. When Wayne goes to a guitar store to try out the instruments, he starts to play "Stairway to Heaven," but is directed to a sign prohibiting the song. By then, I'd heard ten years of requests for the song as a deejay, so I was tickled silly by the scene. But if you were to watch the movie on home video, or even in re-release, this is the scene you see.
Who would have thought that Wayne was trying to play "Stairway to Heaven"? Those are just some random notes! But there's a reason behind the change.
Watching Wayne’s World on VHS as a kid, I remember being baffled by this joke. A million monkeys on a million electric guitars couldn’t come up with a riff that sounds less like "Stairway to Heaven." So was the gag that the employee just assumed Wayne was going to start playing "Stairway"? Or that Wayne was such a bad guitarist that that jangly riff was as close to "Stairway" as he could get?
It was only later that I discovered the movie originally included a much more recognizable version of the song—but only in the original cut.
Blame Led Zeppelin. The band and Warner Music Group wanted to charge the film production $100,000 for the few notes Mike Myers played in the original movie. Read the story of "No Stairway. Denied!" at GQ.
Mia knows the agility course, and she's got plenty of speed and agility. But Mia is a beagle, and is therefore both happy and distractible. She delighted the audience at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
Don't be a beagle, don't be a beagle!
That's a good dog. To see how it is supposed to be done, watch Tex, the 2015 winner. -via Metafilter
In honor of Valentine's Day, the strangest math title you'll see.... Full Paper: http://t.co/Foa8hVBTaW pic.twitter.com/oewe5lOXD4
— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) February 12, 2015
In 1988, Steven Strogatz of Harvard University looked at a pair of star-crossed lovers to illustrate a math concept, "coupled ordinary differential equations." That sounds complicated, but the way he explained it with an example, even I can understand.
Romeo is in love with Juliet, but in our version of this story, Romeo is a fickle lover. The more Juliet loves him, the more he begins to dislike her. But when she loses interest, his feelings for her warm up. She, on the other hand, tends to echo him: her love grows when he loves her, and turns to hate when he hates her.
Then there's a math formula, but you can see where this is going, as if it were a movie.
The sad outcome of their affair is, of course, a never ending cycle of love and hate; their governing equations are those of a simple harmonic oscillator. At least they manage to achieve simultaneous love one-quarter of the time.
Does that remind you of anyone you know? The original paper is here. The equation can be found in various forms in math departments all across academia. -via Cliff Pickover
Fathers and babies left unsupervised will find something weird and fun to do. Adam Ballard and his infant son Miles show off some killer dance moves to the Michael Jackson song "Beat It." Miles does the Moonwalk made famous in "Billie Jean" and the impossible lean from "Smooth Criminal." He also does air guitar to Eddie Van Halen's solo. There's some nice shuffling and other fancy footwork going on here, too. -via Tastefully Offensive
The first successful human heart transplant took place in South Africa on on December 3, 1967. The patient, 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived only 18 days afterward, but became a part of history. In the year that followed, over 100 heart transplants took place in several nations. Each of those surgeries was groundbreaking, and the patients as well as the doctors became media sensations. Frederick West (pictured) became the first heart transplant recipient in Britain, followed that same week by two such surgeries in the U.S.
West’s operation was an object of national obsession in Britain, and it kicked off an unprecedented relationship between the media and the medical world, as historian Ayesha Nathoo meticulously chronicled in her book Hearts Exposed: Transplants and the Media in 1960s Britain. Photographers and reporters mobbed the hospital; one member of the operation team described a street clogged with arc lights and so many people “the whole thing looked like a royal wedding being watched”.
The hospital went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate the press. They held a hastily assembled press conference where attendees fought and shoved each other, and reporters were admitted into their halls. “As West was recovering,” wrote Nathoo, “photographers and film crews were allowed right inside the hospital space, turning the patient ward into a television studio and bringing the hospital world into public view.” In addition to posing with smiling nurses, West was photographed winking for the camera and even filmed playing chess.
Sadly, the early patient celebrities did not live long, and the number of transplants plunged until the surgery and aftercare was refined. Read about those early heart transplants at Atlas Obscura.
This article is part of Atlas Obscura's Hearts Week.
Dan's house was blanketed with several feet of snow. So was his "yard," if that's what you can call it when you live in the woods. Dan took advantage of the situation and turned it into a snowboarder's dream run.
Sweet! The only way extreme sports videographer Scott Barber could keep up with him was to snowboard along with him to catch the action in this video. -via Digg
Douee went on a Disney cruise. After dinner, the waiter asked what they wanted for dessert. Douee said, "Nothing," and that's exactly what he got. Even "nothing" comes with flair! From the discussion under the picture, it turns out that Disney does this all the time on their cruises. Also, if you ask for "the same thing" after someone else orders, you might get a plate that says just that, before you get your real dessert. -via reddit
When we say a volcano is dormant, that doesn't mean that it's dead; it just means that it hasn't erupted in some time. Iceland has more than its fair share of volcanos, and the nation is treating those volcanos as a national resource. A resource of thermal energy that is. The volcano under Reykjanes Peninsula hasn't erupted in over 700 years, but it will soon contribute to Iceland's energy output. A group of scientists and engineers dug a hole almost three miles deep toward the volcano's thermal core.
At this depth, the hole does not enter the magma chamber but does penetrate the rock surrounding it, which the researchers measured to be about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius).
Geothermal energy uses the heat trapped beneath the Earth's surface to generate electricity. Conventional geothermal energy utilizes steam from natural sources such as geysers, or by drawing water from the hot, high-pressue depths of the Earth. The hot vapors are then used to drive electric turbines.
In the case of volcanic geothermal energy, the heat comes from "supercritical water." The researchers explained that energy from so-called supercritical water is much higher than conventional geothermal steam. When molten rock and water meet, the extreme heat and pressure bring water to a "supercritical" state, where it is neither liquid nor gas. In this form, the water can carry more energy than normal steam, which could create up to 10 timesthe power output of other geothermal sources.
Iceland is already a big user of geothermal energy, but with new technology and some time, they hope to meet all the nation's energy needs and then export power to other countries. -via Digg
(Image credit: Milan Nykodym)
When you are judging whether the ice on a frozen lake is thick enough to walk on, you must take your own weight into account, which this moose clearly didn't. Norwegians Viktor Johannesen and Sigrid Sjösteen found a moose that had fallen through the ice. It wasn't that far from shore, but the animal was exhausted from struggling to get out of the hole. The two chopped through the ice, giving the moose a narrow path back to the shore, so he wouldn't have to climb out of the hole. They occasionally stopped work to take a little video footage.
The video is entirely in Norwegian with no subtitles, but we get the picture anyway. The translated video description said it was a "long and arduous" rescue, so once the exhausted moose was finally out of the water, I would bet that Viktor and Sigrid realized how exhausted they were, too. -via Boing Boing
A news crew trying to cover the snowstorm in Massachusetts were photobombed by a person dressed as a walking bushel of marijuana. This was apparently not the first time it happened that day to WWLP meteorologist Jennifer Pagliei. Her cameraman panned away to keep the video bomber out of the frame as much as possible.
From here, he just looks like some yeti trying to fit in. (via reddit)
