Cassidy was a feral kitten missing his rear paws. He was taken in by TinyKittens, and regained his health. Then he got a gift of a wheelchair and really took off! Since then, he’s outgrown the wheels and tried prosthetic back legs. Here’s the kicker: he’s now using an electric wheelchair. Yes, it’s a Roomba.
You can follow the further adventures of Cassidy and his family at Facebook. -via Fark
The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
If you had to list the tools an archaeologist uses, you’d probably include a pick, a shovel, and maybe a trowel, a brush, or even a dental pick. Here’s one to add to your list: an airplane.
BACKGROUND
In 1899 Italian archaeologist Giacomo Boni was leading an excavation project at the Roman Forum, the massive collection of structures that made up the center of ancient Rome, when he decided to augment the slow, painstaking work on the ground with something new: he took photographs of the site from a hot-air balloon, floating 250 feet off the ground. The photos gave Boni a perspective nobody had ever seen before. The entire site— about seven acres— was laid out below him, much the way you’d see the site on a map.
Within a decade, aerial photography was being used at ancient sites around the world, and a whole new field of study— aerial archaeology— was born. The field has expanded exponentially in the century since because of advances in both flight and imaging technology, and today is considered a major part of archaeology in general. And while it is most often used to expand understanding about already known sites, it’s used to discover new ones, too. Here are the stories of a few of those discoveries, with some insights into the tools and tricks of the trade developed in the years since Boni’s humble balloon flight.
THE BIG CIRCLES
In 1920, British air force pilot and archaeology enthusiast Lionel Rees was flying over a vast, remote desert region in what is now Jordan when he saw what seemed to be three large circles drawn on the empty desert below him. They were enormous— one was more than 1,200 feet in diameter— and they were so close to perfectly round that Rees felt they had to be man-made. He took photographs from his plane and wrote about the circles in archaeology journals. Amazingly, though, they were largely ignored for decades and have only been formally studied in the last 20 years, during which time several more “Big Circles,” as they are known today, have been discovered in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. Ranging from 700 to 1,400 feet in diameter, the circles are actually made from low rock walls, a few feet high and a few feet thick, constructed at least 2,000 years ago— possibly much longer. Nobody has any idea who made them or what purpose they served. And nobody had any idea they were there until Rees spotted them from his airplane in 1920. Studies of the circles— and searches for more— are ongoing.
Submit your suggestions for a name https://t.co/6feXAM3qXV @BAS_News #NameOurShip pic.twitter.com/GNLVgck7Yi
— NERC (@NERCscience) March 17, 2016
The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council has a new ship. It’s a polar explorer ready to carry 90 scientists and staff to the Arctic and the Antarctic for research expeditions. And they decided to name the boat by an open internet poll. You know how that goes. The current leading name is an awesome one, though: the RRS Boaty McBoatface. Other notable names in the running are:
RRS Usain Boat
RRS Ice Ice Baby
RRS Boat Marley and the Whalers
RRS I Like Big Boats & I Cannot Lie
RRS Pee-Eee Cee Tee
RRS Motörboat
RRS Feed
RRS Icey Smashy-Smash
RRS Thanks for All the Fish
NERC appears to be trying to encourage names like Titan, Orca, Ada Lovelace, or David Attenborough. Good luck with that -Boaty McBoatface is unstoppable, although I really like RRS Pee-Eee Cee Tee. You can suggest a name or place your vote here. This site is overwhelmed right now, but bookmark it, because voting will be open until April 16. Meanwhile, Boaty McBoatface has its own Twitter account. -via Metafilter
This is what happens when people don’t read the directions on an unfamiliar product. Lush’s Wiccy Magic Muscles massage bar is a disc of solid lotion that slowly melts from your body temperature. It’s also embedded with beans, which gives it a texture to rub stiff muscles. But some people use it as soap in the shower. So the lotion melts, the beans fall out, wash into the drain, and a few days later, you have bean sprouts! See several examples of this at Buzzfeed.
(Image source: imgur)
In 1986, two aspiring Washington, DC, filmmakers lugged their video equipment to a parking lot in Largo, Maryland, where people were coming in to see a Judas Priest concert. They shot footage of hyped-up fans and edited it into a 16-minute documentary called Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Now what? John Heyn and Jeff Krulik had no clue how to distribute a film, so they screened it at a local club and took VHS copies to some rental stores. People liked it. Their friends made copies and passed them around. And they kept passing copies around for years.
Krulik: A friend of mine was moving - his name is Mike Heath. We call him the Johnny Appleseed of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, because he asked for copies because he was moving out west in 1992.
Heyn: I worked at a video dubbing company, so it was free copies with labels and boxes and everything.
Krulik: Mike got copies, took them west. And in 1994, John gets a call from Sofia Coppola. She’d looked his name up in the phone directory in Maryland.
Eventually, Nirvana got a copy and played it on their tour bus regularly. Heyn and Krulik built a website in 1998. And Heavy Metal Parking Lot is still an underground hit. The documentary was screened for its 30th anniversary at SXSW this year, and The Verge has an interview with the filmmakers that tells the story of the movie’s long slow dissemination. Oh yeah, you can watch it, too. The video is full of profanity, minors drinking, unlicensed music, and a couple of criminally loud ads. -via Digg
The following is a list of some of the more notorious air travel tragedies we've seen, from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.
Wreckage of Baron von Richthofen's Fokker triplane.
THE RED BARON
When: 1918
Where: Vaux-sur-Somme, France
The bane of Allied aircraft, Manfred “the Red Baron” von Richthofen was a flying ace credited with at least 80 air-combat victories during World War I. But he who lives by the warplane will likely die by the warplane. Richthofen’s luck ran out with a single bullet fired from the ground. It pierced his heart and lungs, but he was still able to land his plane. According to the Australian soldiers who arrived on the scene, his last word before he died was “Kaputt!”
WILL ROGERS
When: 1935
Where: Near Point Barrow, Alaska
“I ain’t got anything funny to say. All I know is what I read in the papers,” was how humorist Will Rogers usually began his comedy routines. In the early 1900s, Rogers was the Jon Stewart of his day, making people laugh with off-the-cuff topical humor about the news, world leaders, politicians, gangsters, and masters of industry. He appeared in 71 movies, wrote more than 4,000 newspaper columns, and was a beloved performer on stage and radio. He even wrote his own epitaph—“ I never met a man I didn’t like”— and on August 15, 1935, got the chance to use it. While flying through Alaska on a plane piloted by Wiley Post (the first aviator to fly around the world solo), an engine failed. The plane plowed into a shallow lagoon. Both men died.
AMELIA EARHART
Burger Fiction put together a timeline of the many Batmans of cinema and TV. There have been a lot more animated versions of teh Caped Crusader than I ever knew! And they say they didn’t even include all of them.
It starts with the 1943 serial and go to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which will be out next weekend. You can bet this next week will be full of Superman and Batman both. -via Tastefully Offensive
Apparently, cats have a dominant front paw. You can check your cats by putting a treat in the bottom of a glass. Which paw does your cat use to fish it out? You may need to do this several times to make sure, like mugumogu did with Maru and Hana.
So Hana is left-handed, while Maru is right-handed, after first trying it with his face. According to RocketNews24, 40% of cats are left-handed, 50% are right-handed, and 10% are ambidextrous. BRB going to find glasses and treats for four cats. -via Fark
Once upon a time, we presented you with the puzzle about Four Men in Hats. That was difficult. Then we gave you three men with five hats. I never figured that one out on my own, either. Now comes a puzzle with the same type of situation, except there are now ten people, and they’ve been abducted by aliens. This time, they don’t know how many hats are black or white, but they get a chance to work out a strategy before they are lined up.
Alex Gendler presents a TED-Ed lesson on how the abductees could work it out -if they are intelligent enough. See, not only does someone have to figure out how to do it, the others must be able to follow simple instructions, and it’s hard to find ten people who can do that. -via mental_floss
John Elder Robison dealt with autism for 50 years. He had his life in place, with a wife, son, and a job. Then he underwent transcranial magnetic stimulation, or T.M.S., a non-invasive therapy for depression that is under experimental study for the treatment of autism and other uses. In his case, it was wildly successful, which came with a price. How does one deal with suddenly being “non-autistic” after 50 years?
After one of my first T.M.S. sessions, in 2008, I thought nothing had happened. But when I got home and closed my eyes, I felt as if I were on a ship at sea. And there were dreams — so real they felt like hallucinations. It sounds like a fairy tale, but the next morning when I went to work, everything was different. Emotions came at me from all directions, so fast that I didn’t have a moment to process them.
Before the T.M.S., I had fantasized that the emotional cues I was missing in my autism would bring me closer to people. The reality was very different. The signals I now picked up about what my fellow humans were feeling overwhelmed me. They seemed scared, alarmed, worried and even greedy. The beauty I envisioned was nowhere to be found.
The changes in Robison’s life hinged on the way he had built that life to fit around his autism. It’s a fascinating read that highlights the need to add professional counseling to experimental treatments, just in case they work. -via Digg
(Image credit: Giselle Potter)
This Japanese ad for Seiko watches features the world’s tiniest Rube Goldberg contraption. Since it is an ad, we can’t say for sure that there is no video magic involved, but a couple of instances of human intervention would lead one to think not. The device is composed of 1200 mechanical watch parts, the smallest being less than a millimeter in size.
The sequence sure is pretty. The video description focuses on the song, which was composed by Seiko CEO Shinji Hattori, with lyrics by Seiko employees, and sung by Etsuko Yakushimaru. -via Viral Viral Videos
You may have seen this image in your Facebook feed or some other internet forum. Or maybe an email from your aunt Gladys. The caption is usually something along the lines of
“Via Hubble: The cosmic "ice sculptures" of the Carina Nebula. Scientists are still trying to explain the beautiful spires.”
But it’s not. Yes, it’s an astronomy image, but it wasn’t taken by Hubble, isn’t the Carina Nebula, and the original doesn’t quite look like that. The finished image is an artwork by Adam Ferriss, who never intended it to be construed as anything else. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait tells the story of a neat image manipulation that took on a fictional life of its own. It’s an example the many things on the internet that turn out to be something other than what it claims, while the true story behind them is interesting anyway.
(Image credit: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute/Adam Ferriss)
Richie Jackson is a different kind of skateboarder. Rather than going faster, higher, or longer than the next guy, he looks at the possibilities of using his skills to do odd tricks that other skaters never think about.
Jackson’s tricks are not only impressive, but downright entertaining. How does he do it? With years of practice, risk-taking, and well-waxed shoe soles. -via the A.V. Club
The 1969 movie Easy Rider was produced by Peter Fonda, directed by Dennis Hopper, and starred both of them plus a young Jack Nicholson. The counterculture biker film was made for a million dollars and made back $60 million, winning awards along the way. It’s a classic. But since Easy Rider is 47 years old, you most likely don’t know what went into making it. Now’s your chance to learn.
1. THE MOVIE WAS MADE FOR THE YOUTH OF THE TIME.
Before Easy Rider, Hollywood was churning out happier films starring the effervescent Doris Day, but Dennis Hopper’s film changed that. “They were making films like Pillow Talk and The Glass Bottom Boat. Gidget? That’s not a kids’ film. Beach Blanket Bingo? C’mon,” Fonda told The Hollywood Reporter. “Those were not really films of the youth that I had grown into and up with, shutting away the establishment, going on their own. We made a movie for these people that didn’t have their own movie.”
Karen Black, who played one of the prostitutes in the movie, agreed with Fonda’s sentiment. “When you went to see a movie like Easy Rider and when you saw these guys really smoking grass by the fire, and really the camaraderie was warm, real, and rare, you went, ‘What the hell am I looking at? This has value! This has a completely different kind of value than Pillow Talk,” she said in the documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. “This is something extraordinary. I want more of that. And then I think it went a bit far, because I kept seeing movie people vomit.”
3. IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST FILMS TO INTEGRATE FOUND MUSIC.
Instead of hiring a musician to compose a score for the film, Hopper decided to use pre-recorded music from Bob Dylan, The Band, Steppenwolf, and Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack. “No one had really used found music in a movie before, except to play on radios or when someone was singing in a scene,” Hopper told Interview Magazine. “But I wanted Easy Rider to be kind of a time capsule for that period, so while I was editing the film I would listen to the radio. That’s where I got ‘Born to Be Wild’ and ‘The Pusher’ and all those songs.”
The filmmakers had to show the movie to the different bands involved in order to get licensing approval, and each band received $1000. They showed it to Dylan, whose song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” was in two scenes, but Dylan said they couldn’t use it. “He said, ‘Have [Roger] McGuinn do this first part, but you can’t do it after that,’” Fonda told Daily Camera. “I said, ‘But, Bob, any good fight’s a combination of punches.” McGuinn covered Dylan’s song, and Dylan and McGuinn wrote the closing credit song, “The Ballad of Easy Rider,” which was sung by McGuinn, and didn’t have Dylan’s name on it.
If you haven’t seen Easy Rider, be aware that this trivia list at mental_floss contains spoilers, but that shouldn’t keep you from reading it, or watching the movie eventually.
Funny how a change of viewpoint makes everything different. John McNamee at Pie Comic says he’s been sick, and this comic is the product of a fevered brain. His pain becomes our laughs.
