It’s been a while since we posted a clip from Next Media Animation, but this news story has so many factors to address that a short computer-animated cartoon with hardly any English is suddenly the fastest way to sum it up. Ammon Bundy and a group of armed friends moved into a federal wildlife refuge in Burns, Oregon, on Saturday to protest government land use and other points of contention.
The group has vowed to stay until their demands are met -or until the snacks run out. What does this situation look like to the rest of the world? Next Animation Studio in Taiwan tries to explain it for a global audience. -Thanks, Brother Bill!
Things have changed a lot in the last 40 years. Julia Lepetit of Dorkly contrasts the experience of watching the original Star Wars trilogy with the experience we have with The Force Awakens. There was no internet back then. No having to be diligent to avoid spoilers. No global community discussing every aspect of fandom. But the biggest difference is the existence of those three prequels that came in between. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Even bad guys have to have fun sometime! Brian Kesinger is an artist for Disney and Marvel Comics. He’s done several portraits of Star Wars: The Force Awakens characters in the style of Calvin and Hobbes. The dark side looks almost whimsical here! Buzzfeed has a selection of Kesinger’s work, including Spaceman Finn, Poe Dameron, and Rey with BB-8, and you can see more of creative mashups at Kesinger’s Instagram site.
There are so many steps to becoming an adult, and they all take place at different times in one’s life. At what point do you really consider yourself an adult? Puberty is too early in modern society. Buying a house or having children doesn’t apply to everyone, at any age. And having a job or moving away from your family depends more on the current economy than one’s age. Defining when someone becomes an adult is like trying to pinpoint a certain drop of water in a moving river.
In fact, if you think of the transition to “adulthood” as a collection of markers—getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids—for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.
And yet these are still the venerated markers of adulthood today, and when people take too long to acquire them, or eschew them all together, it becomes a reason to lament that no one is a grown-up. While bemoaning the habits and values of the youths is the eternal right of the olds, many young adults do still feel like kids trying on their parents’ shoes.
“I think there is a really hard transition [between childhood and adulthood],” says Kelly Williams Brown, author of the book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, and its preceding blog, in which she gives tips for navigating adult life. “It’s not just hard for Millennials, I think it was hard for Gen X-ers, I think it was hard for Baby Boomers. All of a sudden you’re out in the world, and you have this insane array of options, but you don’t know which you should take. There’s all these things your mom and dad told you, presumably, and yet you’re living like a feral wolf, who doesn’t have toilet paper, who’s using Arby’s napkins instead.”
The Atlantic looks at the transition to adulthood in many dimensions: physical maturity, intellectual capability, legal status, those markers we often use, and the changes in society that make them less useful in determining what adulthood really is. When did you start to consider yourself really an adult? Or have you? -via Metafilter
Leang Jarie, or “Cave of Fingers,” in the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia has long been known for the stenciled handprints on the walls. But it was only announced in 2014 that the actual age of the paintings there and in other caves on Sulawesi were determined to be at least 35,400 years. That would make them among the oldest art in the world, and opens up many questions about the evolution and dispersal of humans around the world. The method used to date the paintings is fascinating. Archaeologist and geochemist Maxime Aubert knew that analyzing radioactive decay would give a date to inorganic material that carbon dating can’t.
Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wanted to date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks in trace amounts. Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these two elements in a sample reveals its age; the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample. The technique, known as uranium series dating, was used to determine that zircon crystals from Western Australia were more than four billion years old, proving Earth’s minimum age. But it can also date newer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively as speleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock.
Aubert got a chance to analyze the cave paintings on Sulawesi, which were partially covered by speleothems (called popcorn). As they formed on top of the images, they have to be younger than the paintings themselves.
Aubert spent a week the next summer touring the region by motorbike. He took samples from five paintings partly covered by popcorn, each time using a diamond-tipped drill to cut a small square out of the rock, about 1.5 centimeters across and a few millimeters deep.
Back in Australia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers before separating out the uranium and thorium in each one. “You collect the powder, then remove another layer, then collect the powder,” Aubert says. “You’re trying to get as close as possible to the paint layer.” Then he drove from Wollongong to Canberra to analyze his samples using the mass spectrometer, sleeping in his van outside the lab so he could work as many hours as possible, to minimize the number of days he needed on the expensive machine. Unable to get funding for the project, he had to pay for his flight to Sulawesi—and for the analysis—himself. “I was totally broke,“ he says.
The very first age Aubert calculated was for a hand stencil from the Cave of Fingers. “I thought, ‘Oh, shit,’” he says. “So I calculated it again.” Then he called Brumm.
“I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying,” Brumm recalls. “He blurted out, ‘35,000!’ I was stunned. I said, are you sure? I had the feeling immediately that this was going to be big.”
A rare and jaw-dropping anti-cyclonic tornado touches down in open farmland, narrowly missing a home near Simla, Colorado.
“Dirt” also topped the nature category. There are are also winners in the categories of people and places, and quite a few honorable mentions that are just stunning. See all the top photos in a gallery of winners at National Geographic. The photos can be downloaded as wallpaper.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
Actors, musicians, and companies sometimes make creative decisions for the worst possible reason: Because they legally have to. The result is usually awful.
The TV network ABC Family is a family network in the loosest of senses. For years, it’s mostly focused on one particular element of that family—the older teens and young adults that make up the massive wave of millennials that appeal so much to advertisers. In fact, the term “Family” barely made sense—which is why the network decided recently to change its name to Freeform, a change that takes effect January 12. What took them so long? You can specifically blame televangelist Pat Robertson, who (in a brilliant bit of foresight) required whomever owned the network to keep the word “Family” in the channel name, as well as ensure Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting network always had a place on that channel, no matter what. That got us to wondering: What other contracts are out there that led to the creation of terrible content? Let’s talk about it.
The Fox Family and ABC Family Deals
“Fox Family was doomed from the start because it’s very hard to be [programmed for] kids all day and have The 700 Club in the middle of your daytime lineup, and then in prime time at 11 p.m.”
— A former executive for Fox Family, the direct predecessor to ABC Family, discussing the issues the network had programming around Pat Robertson’s genius contract, which required The 700 Club to air during two prime hours of the day. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network had initially sold to 20th Century Fox in 1997 after rebuffing a deal from Disney, who Robertson was boycotting at the time. Disney eventually agreed to buy the network for $5.3 billion in 2001, despite the fact that the contract continued to require both the use of the name “Family” in the name and the airings of The 700 Club—a requirement that first became controversial among the broader public in 2005, when Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez on his show.
That time Keanu Reeves was tricked into making a terrible movie
In this ad for Heathrow airport, Stephen Fry explains how they do things in the United Kingdom. The small things that matter, like the After You Loop and the constant passive-aggressiveness that dominate social interaction. How dare that guy disagree about the weather!
It’s all in good fun, however. At least, that’s what they want tourists to think, just in case it doesn’t go completely over their heads. Bless their hearts. -via Tastefully Offensive
For some reason, people around the world are watching a livestream of a puddle in Britain. They are leaving messages left and right, in many languages. What’s up?
At approximately 6 a.m. EST on January 6, 2016, an advertising agency in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England set up a livestream of the puddle outside their office building.
At press time, 19,000 people are watching other people try to cross this puddle. If you want to get in on the exciting action, you can join them here. Stay dry.
Oh! I just saw a police vehicle go by! You can watch, too. If you happen to be in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, you can even become part of the spectacle. -via Atlas Obscura
We all like to learn about dinosaurs, and there’s always something new to learn! Seriously, the body of knowledge about those extinct reptiles is growing and changing every day. You can’t count on movies to keep up with the latest dino findings, and those of us who went to school long before the latest research tend to carry misconceptions that have since been debunked. Learn some new things about dinosaurs in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.
An artificial intelligence program from the University of Zurich can try to peg your age and attractiveness. I get the feeling that they launched the program publicly because the software team is looking for more data in order to tweak its algorithms. Anyway, after seeing this around the internet with people laughing at its inaccuracy, I decided to try it. I uploaded a picture that’s about ten years old, and it pegged my age quite well. So I guess it may be accurate when it decided I wasn’t the least bit attractive. I’m old enough to take that. Besides, I’ve become much more attractive in the ten years since the picture was taken. Try it yourself, but don’t take the results seriously.
Please keep in mind the following points when using our tool:
Attractiveness is highly subjective and its perception differs from culture to culture. Our algorithm is trained on the pictures of the BLINQ community that is mainly based in Switzerland. In other parts of the world the perception might be very different. We do not show results for underaged people. Please only use our tool if you have reached adult age. We do not save the uploaded image. Have fun and don’t take the results too seriously.
The birthday girl’s name is Starr. That’s Starr, with two “r”s. Got it? Sure they got it. And this is the cake they got. Cake Wrecks has a roundup of incomprehensible cakes that had to undergo forensic analysis to figure out what went wrong in the communication with the bakery.
In doing etymological (word or term origins) research, one fact seems to become apparent above all others. This fact is that origins of word or terms are often disputed. Spoiled as we are with the internet, we must remind ourselves that past generations were not always so blessed.
Folklore, local tales, verbal data, opinions (as opposed to facts) all enter into the picture and actual and factual etymology can become foggy and difficult. These, along with those people who want their 15 minutes of fame, make correct research tough. That said, let's take a look at why and how New York City came to be referred to as "the Big Apple".
The origin of New York City's most famous nickname has been the subject of conjecture for many years. One view is that one New York gentlemen's guidebook to the "houses of ill repute" in the 19th century referred to New York as having the best "apples" (in this usage a euphemism for hookers, prostitutes) in the world. Given that New York claimed to have the most and best "houses of ill repute,” it was inevitably called "the Big Apple.” (As a sidebar, I wonder if any other single thing in this universe has as many euphemisms as "women"?)
A second view is that the name derived from a 1909 book by Edward S. Martin entitled The Wayfarer in New York, which made a reference to New York being the Big Apple and receiving more than its share of the "national sap.” However, there is no evidence to suggest that either of the above two sources had any influence on the popularity or spread of the term.
Enjoy bloopers, gags, and behind-the-scenes silliness from the sets of the Star Wars prequels and (starting at 6:30) the original trilogy. There are flubbed lines, falls, and technical difficulties galore. Some of them leave the green screens in place; for others, such as Jar Jar scenes, they actually added the CGI to the bloopers.
Jack Shepherd wanted to make a nice play fort for his cat, Jenkins. He ended up building “The World’s Most Glorious Cat Fort” complete with two stories, towers, windows, ramps, beds, tunnels, scratching posts, a bridge, and a lighted entry. It’s made of cardboard held together by duct tape, but Jenkins loves cardboard, so it’s all good. You can see a pictorial on how the fort was built, plus more pictures of Jenkins enjoying his new cat palace, at Buzzfeed.
