They should never have needed to come to us in the first place. They are the victims of poaching, even if they're still alive. We do everything we can to give them as normal a life as possible and the bigger they get, the less dependant on us they will become. Our bigger rhinos, which were once in the same position, are already grazing in the big open fields, without any form of human interaction.
We really do hope to have them back out in the wild one day!
Krystal Scott and her family were evacuated from the Fort McMurray fires in Alberta last week. She went into labor during the process, and under the circumstances, the family’s cat Meow Meow had to be left behind. Canadian North Airlines staff said they would watch the cat. They kept her in the office for a few days, posted pictures of her on Facebook and Twitter, and even gave her a little employee name tag. Since then, Meow Meow has been reunited with her family in Calgary. See more pictures at Buzzfeed.
My home project this year is replacing wall-to-wall carpets with some kind of hard floor. If I had the budget, I’d be tempted to install heated floors, but that’s just the beginning of the high-tech choices one has for flooring these days. New high-tech floors do a lot more than support your weight. Imagine a gym floor made of glass with programmable lights underneath!
The German ASB GlassFloor is the world’s most advanced flooring system. It is constructed with an aluminium substructure and a custom-manufactured glass surface built of reinforced glass panels. It is the deal sports floor, but it also appropriate for a contemporary building design. The floor contains LED lines which can be changed on demand. It is also possible to simply turn them off completely. The glass is ceramic, with a semi-opaque finish which controls light reflection. The lighting elements are embedded within the substructure of the floor.
The floor is similar in texture to a traditional basketball court made of hardwood. There are ceramic dots burnt into the surface to provide friction and protection against slips. Players can dive for balls and interact the same way as they would on conventional floors.
There are also new floors that clean the air, put on their own light show, and keep Alzheimer’s patients safe. Read about all of them at Housely.
While pharmacists appear behind a counter in a store and serve customers like so many other people, they also have to have a good amount of education, follow a maze of regulations, and watch out for their customer’s health. That makes pharmacy work very different from other retail positions. And your life may depend on their work.
1. THEY STOP DOCTORS FROM KILLING YOU.
Jason—he prefers not to reveal his last name—has been a retail pharmacist in the Midwest for more than 20 years. When he hears complaints about slow service from patients who think of the chain stores as glorified drive-throughs for prescriptions, he sighs.
“It’s not just putting pills in a bottle,” he says. “With a prescription, there’s a good likelihood of there being wrong information. We catch interactions that could kill you.” On an average day, Jason might see 200 orders. He estimates 10 to 15 percent contain errors in quantity, instructions, or dosing that need to be corrected by phoning the physician.
2. THEY USUALLY HAVE ABOUT 15 MINUTES TO ACCOMPLISH THAT.
Owing to the volume of prescriptions processed by major chains like CVS and Walgreens, the one or two staff pharmacists on the clock have precious little time to spare. While pharmacy technicians can count pills and perform other tasks, only the pharmacist can double-check a medication is accurate before it’s turned over. “We have a time limit,” says Aaron, a retail pharmacist in Texas. “Reports get printed out at the end of the week and we get reprimanded for not meeting metrics. People ask if there’s anything they need to know about their medication. Yes, lots, but I only have a few seconds to give you the highlights.”
Don has a couple of problems: his memory is poor, and his handwriting looks like a second-grader’s.
Lily is a smart kid, but her execution needs a little work. For one thing, it helps to find out what Mom’s name is and remember it. Her parents explained that Lily was promised a surprise if she stayed quiet enough for her mother to take a nap. The surprise was Reece’s sticks, so there’s no spoilers to keep from her anymore.
Ottawa just wrapped up a weekend of Comic Con fun, and Geeks Are Sexy and photographer Patrick-Michel Dagenais were there to record the best cosplayers!
The first gallery of 40 costumes are posted, and more will be added later on Monday.
George and Martha Washington owned hundreds of slaves over the course of their lives. The names of many are known, but most of the details of their lives have been lost to history. Here’s the story of one woman who hasn’t been forgotten.
In the early 1770s an English tailor named Andrew Judge signed a contract to work as an indentured servant at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s plantation in Virginia. Indentured servitude was a common way for Europeans with no money to pay their way to the American colonies. By signing the contract, Judge agreed to work for Washington for a set period of years in exchange for his passage to Virginia, plus his room and board for the length of the contract.
At Mount Vernon, Judge made military uniforms and other clothing for Washington. He also taught his tailoring skills to Washington’s slaves so that when his term as an indentured servant was up, they would be able to do the tailoring themselves.
Around 1773 Judge fathered a baby girl with an African American slave named Betty, who worked as a seamstress at Mount Vernon. They named their child Oney, but though Judge was white and free, Oney was born a slave because her mother was a slave. In the eyes of the law, she was “property” and belonged to the Washingtons; neither Betty nor Andrew had any parental rights over their child whatsoever.
LADY’S MAID
Oney became a favorite of Martha Washington’s and served as her personal attendant, helping her wash and dress, and accompanying her on social calls. Judge was one of eight slaves who accompanied the Washingtons to New York City, then the nation’s capital, when Washington was elected president in April 1789, and then to Philadelphia when the capital moved there in 1790.
In Philadelphia, Judge enjoyed a measure of freedom unheard of at Mount Vernon. She ran errands around the city unsupervised, and in her limited free time, she explored on her own. President Washington even gave her and other slaves of the household money for the theater, the circus, and other entertainments in the city.
Sure, you support your favorite sports team. You wear the team ball cap, have a team logo decal in your car window, maybe even drink out of an official team mug. But do you love it enough to dress up in team colors and dance around in public?
Darrell Bailey loves the Los Angeles Clippers. In the 1990s, he was fired from his job as an electrician. He went home and turned on a Clippers game, only to hear the announcers talking about what losers the Clippers were— that the team was a lost cause and was never going anywhere. Bailey could relate— his boss had told him similar things that day. That’s the moment Bailey decided to devote himself to being a die-hard Clippers fan. He eventually got another job, affording him the season tickets that would make him “Clipper Darrell.” Since 2001, he’s been at every Clippers home game wearing a tailored suit in Clippers colors (red and blue). In 2010 the Clippers briefly lost Darrell’s support when they asked him not to use the word “Clipper” when making paid appearances. Darrell’s renunciation of his fandom made national headlines and drew support from star Clippers players Blake Griffin and Chris Paul. The two sides eventually came to a compromise: Clipper Darrell would notify the organization whenever he was hired to appear at an event. He’s now back in the stands at every game.
There are two constants for the Chicago Cubs: waiting till next year (their last World Series win was in 1908), and Woo Woo Wickers. Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, Wickers has been going to Cubs games and yelling his signature cheer of “Cubs! Woo! Cubs! Woo!” at the top of his lungs since the late 1950s. Wickers has had a hard life: he spent much of the 1980s homeless and, unable to hold down a job, earned money by washing windows and making personal appearances at Cubs-centric events. And not everybody loves him— some people find his loud cheers disruptive and annoying. But for most Cubs fans, Woo Woo’s unwavering optimism, even in the face of such criticism, makes him a living embodiment of baseball’s lovable losers.
Nudibranchs are ocean molluscs that come in a huge variety of shapes and colors. David Bowie was a music and art icon who unexpectedly died earlier this year. Bowie also came in a variety of shapes and colors over his lifetime. The Tumblr blog Bowiebranchia matches many of Bowie’s looks with a nudibranch. That is all, but it’s enough for a beautiful collection. -via Metafilter
Earlier this week, 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones died in New York City, leaving no one else in the U.S. who was born in the 19th century, as far as reliable record indicate. In fact, her death leaves only one person in the world known to have been born in the 1800s.
Born about a month before 1900 began and when England's Queen Victoria was still on the throne, Emma Morano is now the oldest living person. Incredibly, she still lives on her own in northern Italy.
On Friday, she was happy to hear the title had passed to her, one of her relatives told London's Daily Telegraph newspaper. “She was told this morning and she said ‘My word, I’m as old as the hills,’ but she was very pleased,” Rosi Santoni said.
Morano credits her longevity to a daily glass of brandy, along with other things that don't sound healthy (link contains auto-play video). Researchers are studying supercentenarian in Italy, who tend to live longer than people anywhere else in the world.
Remember the guy eating ketchup-covered corn mentioned in this post? Gav and Dan, the Slow-Mo Guys, decided that warranted a closer look. So they recreated the stunt in slow motion. It’s pretty messy.
Good thing they did this outdoors! You can see that it actually took him some time to get his teeth into it. And we learned the importance of getting the cob absolutely straight on the drill bit. Still, don’t try this at home -especially if you have long hair! -via Uproxx
We’ve seen how movies can be completely changed by just one letter of the title. Now a new game on Twitter has people changing a book title by removing one letter. Of course, that completely changes the plot, too. Check them all out with the hashtag #RemoveALetterSpoilABook. Maybe you can think of a great one!
You’ve seen a million parodies, remixes, and raps about Breaking Bad, but this one is from Robot Chicken. That means it will take a weird left turn almost immediately.
National Geographic has a new blog on their science salon Phenomena called All Over the Map, dedicated to maps of all kinds. Check out the introductory post and then a look at medieval apocalypse maps.
People in 15th-century Europe were convinced the end was near. The Roman Empire had fallen, the Plague was running rampant, and the Holy Land was in the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Dozens of printed works described the coming reckoning in gory detail, but one long-forgotten manuscript depicts the Apocalypse in a very different way—through maps. “It has this sequence of maps that illustrate each stage of what will happen,” says Chet Van Duzer, a historian of cartography who has written a book about the previously unstudied manuscript.
The geography is sketchy by modern standards, but the maps make one thing perfectly clear: If you’re a sinner, you’ve got nowhere to hide. The Antichrist is coming, and his four horns will reach the corners of the earth. And it just gets worse from there.
The tradition of flowers being placed on graves is over 2,000 years old. This custom can be traced to the ancient Greeks. They performed rites over graves that were called "zoai.”
Flowers were placed on the graves of Greek warriors. It was believed that if the flowers took root and blossomed on the graves, the souls of the warriors were sending a message that they had found happiness in the next world.
The ancient Romans also used flowers to honor soldiers who had died in battle. The Romans held an elaborate eight-day festival during February called "Parentalia" (Day of the Fathers). During this festival, roses and violets were placed on the graves of fallen soldiers by friends and family members.
According to acclaimed historian Jay Winik, the tradition began in America at the end of the Civil War.
