Alwyn Wils (YouTuber Lelijke Eendje) bought a dozen quail eggs at the grocery store and incubated them. One of them hatched! And now he has a pet quail named Albert. Now, this is in Europe, where eggs are not necessarily pasteurized or refrigerated, but fertilized eggs in the grocery are still rare. We don’t know how many times he bought eggs to get this result.
Wils has further videos of Albert as a newborn, learning to fly, and taking a dustbath. -via reddit
The music video for the song “Stormtrooper” tells the story of a Stormtrooper, stranded on a foreign planet, who searches for acceptance and finally finds a girl nerdy enough to appreciate him for what he is. It was a love that was meant to be.
Bara Heiða is an Icelandic singer and songwriter. In the lyrics to the song, the Stormtrooper goes off into battle and leaves his love behind, carrying a child he doesn’t know about. The implication is that they won’t see each other again, which is a much more melancholy story than what the video tells. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Did you know that, until recently, if you have so many visa stamps in your U.S. passport that you run out of room, you can get more pages added? You’d have to travel a lot to even know that. How many pages could you possibly need in ten years before it expires? Eric Oborski has one passport with 331 pages! Altogether, he’s used over 1,400 passport pages. Oborski has been an avid traveler since 1965, and eventually became a travel agent.
All that international travel put a real strain on Oborski’s passport. That’s where the loophole comes in: At the time, U.S. citizens could take their passport to U.S. embassies to have more pages added. Oborski got to know the staff at embassies in Tokyo and Bangkok because he was there so often. They began adding pages to his passport—no questions asked. Oborski claims that the U.S. policy that no passport could have no more than three sets of extra pages was just that: a policy, not a law. Soon, his passport was spilling over with new pages, all full of stamps and visas.
But that changed at the beginning of this year. New U.S. passports can contain only 28 or 52 pages, which means that no one will surpass Oborski’s record. That doesn’t mean he will travel any less. Read how Oborski racked up so many miles over the years at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Eric Oborski)
Dutch navigator Willem Barents was on an expedition to find a trade route through the Arctic Circle in 1597. His ship and crew were iced in and had to spend the winter on a small island.
On November 3 they saw the sun for the last time as it set below the horizon. They didn’t expect to see the sun again until February 8.
But on January 24, 1597, three of the crew caught a glimpse of the sun a good two weeks before its predicted return. Captain Barents did not believe them since he knew that the sun was well below the horizon. Three days later, the sun made another appearance, and Barents himself witnessed it along with many crew members. Once the explorers returned to the Netherlands, Gerrit de Veer, one of the crew, published an account of their observation. Barents, unfortunately, had died during the return journey.
At least the Barents Sea was named after him. Most scientists of the day did not believe the accounts of the unusual sunrises, though. It took several other observations, hundreds of years apart, for the Novaya Zemlya Effect to be believed, and eventually, understood. It has to do with temperature inversions and light bending, which is explained at Amusing Planet. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)
Parents want to introduce their children to the music they love. But there’s a catch. A child may very well claim that music for her very own, as in the case of 2-year-old Millie. She’s singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the car. But she doesn’t want anyone else to sing! It’s her music now! Too bad, Mom and dad. -via Viral Viral Videos
Tonight is the night we set our clocks forward one hour to go into Daylight Saving Time, at least in most of the U.S. The custom of Daylight Saving Time is by no means universal, and you’ll find people who are completely against it, and also people who think we should use it year-round. Benjamin Franklin is credited with the idea way back in 1784, but most believe he wasn’t at all serious about it.
French ambassador Franklin flashed his legendary wit with a letter to the Journal of Paris in which he claimed to be astonished, upon being awakened at 6 a.m., to find that the sun was already up. He, and no doubt his readers, had never seen the sun before noon. (Related: "Daylight Saving Time: 7 Surprising Things You May Not Know.")
“I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.”
Money would be saved, Franklin argued, if people rose with the sun and turned in earlier at night, replacing hours of expensive candle use with free morning daylight.
While Franklin was poking fun at the French for sleeping in, he was also known for seeking out efficiency and conservation, so it may not have been entirely humor. It was a long road from that idea to what we have now. Along the way, there was a patchwork of problems, like keeping track of what time it was in each little town across America, and that time that the Soviet Union kept the wrong time for 61 years. Read those stories and more at National Geographic. -via The Verge
You may have had some fun in your early days of computing playing with the Zapf Dingbats font. Type something, convert it, and voila! You have a “code” of sorts. Then the internet grew and you had better things to do with your computer. But dingbats are way older than the internet, and there was a real use for them.
When typographers, engineers, and calligraphers got together to create computer fonts, there was still a purpose for dingbats, webdings, or wingdings. See, they aren’t a code for letters, but a language all their own. Read more about the history of the decorative fonts at Vox. -Thanks, Phil Edwards!
It’s been several years since Mike Hiller has seen a real summer. From November to April, he lives in Homer, Alaska. Then he travels to the opposite end of the earth to cook for the 18 or so scientists who overwinter at Palmer Station in Antarctica. Hiller is responsible for keeping the crew fed without driving them to mutiny.
The biggest challenge isn’t cooking and living on an isolated chunk of land in the middle of the Southern Ocean—it’s the fact that Hiller can only put in a single food order at the start of the season. Fresh fruit and vegetables, or “freshies,” are fleeting and eventually fantasized about.
“Two months in, it’s nearly all gone,” Hiller tells me. “I can hold some cabbage back if I’m lucky, maybe some apples or some carrots. Even if the budget was a million dollars, you can’t order four months of produce. Tomatoes don’t last that long.”
After the last of the mango cilantro salsa is lapped up, it’s up to Hiller to fight against beige-plate syndrome—to create meals that entertain, boost morale, and hold up on a buffet line.
But he manages to do it, six days a week all winter (they eat leftovers on his day off). Plus he puts on a special feast for the Winter Solstice, the most important meal in Antarctica. Read how he does it at Lucky Peach. -via Digg
(Image credit: Maddie Edgar)
(Image credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Being born into the right family has its perks. This is a picture of Deadpool talking to Sasha Obama, while her sister Malia gives a thumbs up in the background. Ryan Reynolds was a guest at the White House state dinner Thursday night in honor of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau. It was the Obama daughters’ first state dinner. They have grown up in their seven years in the White House. We tend to remember them as they appeared in 2008, at ages seven and ten.
And here they are Thursday night with Michele Obama, in front of the Trudeaus and the president.
(Image credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
You can see more photographs of the official Canadian state visit at Medium.
-via reddit
My, how times have changed. This is what Gilligan’s Island would look like in 2016, according to the webcomic übertool. Who wants to be rescued? Now we need to know what Neatoramanauts Mary Ann Summers, Lovey, Ginger G., and Roy Hinkley all think about it.
This was spotted on the whiteboard in a classroom, most likely a chemistry class. I will probably never need to know the chemical structure of formaldehyde, but now I know it by heart, and how to spell it, too. -via reddit
When you look through the list of great prisoner characters in movies at TVOM, you might be surprised by how many movies you’ve enjoyed that involve convicts, prisoners-of-war, or otherwise involuntarily institutionalized men. And they’re all men, because women-in-prison movies are rare and mostly exploitive. Some of the characters are horrible, some heroic, and some are just plain unlucky, but they were all fascinating.
Brigette and Paula Powers were 32-year-old identical twins in Australia when this video was recorded. They are closer than the average set of twins, and probably always will be. They are so used to talking at the same time that it doesn’t seem like they ever talk to each other, but then again, they probably don’t need to, since each already knows everything her sister knows.
Anyone who isn’t a twin would be hard put to understand what’s going on here. And many twins are even baffled by these two. -via reddit
Artist J. Shari Ewing illustrated a whole rogue’s gallery of Disney villains in mugshots. The attitude is there, although most are a bit upset that they’ve been arrested. Be sure to note the crimes they are accused of. I’m glad Cruella De Vil is up on reckless driving charges as well as being evil.
You can see all 12 villains at her website, click to enlarge them there. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Maybe by the 30th century, they’ll have all this figured out. Boy, we must seem so dumb to them. This is the latest from Alex Curang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
