The Warner Brothers Studio Tour London held a Christmas dinner for serious Harry Potter fans right there on the movie set. Redditor DestinyBlues went, and had a magical time.
Dinner was served in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, which was followed by a ride on the Hogwarts Express. The participants also took the studio tour and saw the mini-sets, and the evening was concluded with a dance. Lots of people went in their Harry Potter cosplay Sunday best. See 37 pictures of the event at imgur. A good time was had by all. -via reddit
Christmas is the best time of the year for cats. Hey, if you look at it from the cat's point of view, you'll see the fascination. We bring nature's best combination scratching post/climbing tower inside the house, dangle cat toys from the branches, and string it with what brightly-colored lights. But then the humans pull out boxes, paper, and ribbons! Life couldn't get any better for a house cat. Cole and Marmalade (previously at Neatorama) love Christmas. As any cat would.
A Japanese illustrator on Twitter who goes by Noho draws Star Wars characters in a lovely anime style. That means Star Wars characters from all eight movies so far. Some of those illustrations combine characters from different eras, like Anakin, Luke, and Rey shown here. And then there's the Star Wars-Pokemon combo drawings you're gonna love. See a selection of Noho's works at Dorkly.
I once took a 16-hour nonstop flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, and was too excited to sleep during any of it. In economy. But there are longer commercial flights, and a new record-breaker is set to begin in 2018. Qantas has announced their new non-stop service between Perth and London, 8,989 miles, at 17.5 hours in the air. That may sound horrid in the abstract, but it beats taking multiple flights with layovers for those who need to go from one end of the earth to the other.
I guess it’s all better than the travel times of the 1930s. Back in 1938 a trip from London to Brisbane, Australia (the longest on offer at the time) took 11 days and had over two dozen scheduled stops.
Crazy inventor Colin Furze (previously at Neatorama) built a Star Wars playhouse for his kid that is also a huge AT-ACT from Rogue One. This one is the building phase.
Graphic designer Emma Lawton was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at age 29. The trembling it caused made it impossible for her to draw, so she turned to inventor Haiyan Zhang for help.
The special pen Zhang developed made all the difference in the world. It was well worth the effort to see Emma draw again. The device is even named after her. -via Nag on the Lake
Can you find the Photoshop disaster in this picture? Stop reading now if you want to look for it.
This is a picture of the singing group Fifth Harmony that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. In the middle is Ally Brook, who has two right feet. It's not a glaring or obvious error, but it makes you wonder why in the world some photo editor needed to change her foot in the first place. This is just one of 19 images from 2016 that Buzzfeed rounded up as notable for their weird Photoshop errors and artifacts.
Dolph C. Volker studied the heart rate of sleeping cheetahs by sleeping with them. This takes a certain kind of dedication to science that most of us don't have. He says he couldn't sleep because Faith was having dreams. If it were me, I wouldn't get any sleep because my bedmate was an apex predator known for its lightning speed and ability to eat animals much larger than me.
This video only covers the first night, as Volker slept with Faith. You can see more of the ten-night experiment at his YouTube channel. Because nothing is more relaxing than watching a man sleeping with cats. -via reddit
Ordinarily, when someone describes another person as “artificial,” they’re referring to a real person who only seems fake. But occasionally the expression applies to a fake “person” who seems real, like Apple’s Siri. Did you think she was the first artificial person? Think again.
ELIZA
What It Was: One of the earliest “chatterbots,” a computer program that mimics conversation between two people
How It Worked: Created in 1966 by an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was designed to imitate a psychotherapist interviewing a patient. An interview began when the human user typed a statement into the computer. ELIZA then searched the statement for any keywords for which it had preprogrammed responses. If the statement contained the word “father,” for example, ELIZA would reply with, “Tell me more about your family.” If the statement contained no keywords, ELIZA responded with a general statement such as “Please go on” or “Why do you say that just now?” to keep the conversation going. The program also fed the user’s statements back to them in the form of questions. If a user typed, “My boyfriend made me come here,” ELIZA responded with, “Your boyfriend made you come here?”
Weizenbaum made ELIZA simulate a psychotherapist to take advantage of the therapeutic technique of repeating the patient’s own statements back to them. It’s a form of conversation in which simple repetition of one person’s speech plays a central role. Doing so saved Weizenbaum the trouble of having to program ELIZA with any real world knowledge. It could turn “I had an argument with my wife” into “You had an argument with your wife?” mechanically, without ELIZA having to know what an argument was or what a wife was.
Impact: Even when Weizenbaum explained the trick of how the program worked, he was startled by how quickly users came to believe -falsely- that ELIZA understood what they were saying and was putting thought and even emotion into her replies. “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he said. He was so disturbed by the phenomenon that he wrote a book, Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he discusses the limits of artificial intelligence and warns against ever giving computers the power to make important decisions affecting the lives of human beings.
The WAG Brigade is a group of certified therapy dogs that the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals take to the San Francisco airport to greet passengers. They provide comfort, entertainment, and smiles to weary and stressed travelers. Most of the dogs also have duties at hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities that could use a friendly, people-oriented pet. The newest member of the WAG Brigade is different. She's a pig, named LiLou, who is a certified Animal Assisted Therapist (AAT) and loves to interact with people. LiLou also has an extensive repertoire of tricks she performs for appreciative audiences.
According to the SFSPCA, "At a minimum, AAT pets must be solicitous and fully comfortable with handling. In other words, pets must be interested in and eager to approach people and accept handling, regardless of the person’s age, gender, race, size, mobility equipment usage, and apparel." LiLou nailed her training and is now dispatched to the airport once a month.
We've always heard that "Pride goeth before a fall," which is exactly what happened here. He might still be levitating if he didn't feel the need to gloat about it to his fellow monks. Another old adage that applies here is "He who laughs last, laughs best." This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
In the 19th century, cities became crowded, buildings were built higher, and there were plenty of things to cause fires, like fireplaces, boilers, stoves, and gas lamps. Inventive minds went to work on emergency devices to evacuate people from burning buildings, such as an angled chute that could be rolled out to slide people down to the ground. Too bad it was made of flammable material. But it was still more practical than the invention you see here.
...Pasquale Nigro proposed a fabric-covered set of wings that would allow a wearer to fly down to safety. He wrote: “In operation, the wearer engages the loops with his hands and is prepared to leap, the air imprisoned beneath the fabric material, serving to up-hold the wearer and break the force of his fall.”
Nigro asked for about $33,000 in 1909 to execute his invention, however, the idea never quite took off.
Greenery is a fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring when nature’s greens revive, restore and renew. Illustrative of flourishing foliage and the lushness of the great outdoors, the fortifying attributes of Greenery signals consumers to take a deep breath, oxygenate and reinvigorate.
Greenery is nature’s neutral. The more submerged people are in modern life, the greater their innate craving to immerse themselves in the physical beauty and inherent unity of the natural world.
Eh, it's nice in new plants, but I don't think I'll be looking for draperies or clothing in that color myself. -via Laughing Squid
Margaret Rican of Seattle is having a hard time this year, as her Christmas lights keep disappearing. A squirrel has been making off with the bulbs one by one. The brazen thief pulls off his heists right in front of her sometimes, while other capers are recorded from a distance. She uploaded a compilation of his trips to chew off and abscond with the bulbs one by one.
“This kind of behavior is reported each year as squirrels see the bulbs as similar to an acorn or fruit,” John Koprowski, a University of Arizona professor and noted squirrel expert, told The Huffington Post. “While hard to know if this indicates a difficult winter for food, this behavior is likely just the result of being an industrious squirrel and caching a bounty of potential food to be used over the course of the winter.”
Koprowski says that squirrels usually bury more food than they really need for the winter, and even forget where some of it is, so he should be fine.
The municipal Christmas tree in Riga, Latvia, was switched on by a process that took 412 steps and ten minutes to complete. The video is much shorter because the part where they brewed coffee was condensed, and there may have been other shortcuts for the video.
You have to imagine how frustrating all the tests were for this, and how nervous the builders must have been to make it perform perfectly, not just for the waiting crowd outside, but in front of Guinness judges. The company Scandiweb sponsored the record-setting chain reaction that Guinness has enshrined as the World's Largest Rube Goldberg Machine. -via Viral Viral Videos
