There’s a piece of a cardboard tube hanging from a string. The cat wants to grab it, but he’s a good foot or two away and seems to have no clue. Maybe he has a problem with depth perception.
If that’s the case, it’s a good thing he’s a house cat instead of a feral who has to catch prey. Then again, maybe he’s just had too much catnip. He’ll no doubt get ribbed about this incident by the other cat, who seems to be amused at his difficulty. -via Arbroath
The original trailer for the 1977 film Star Wars seems hopelessly dated now, so Tom F has reworked it to follow modern movie trailer conventions, in hopes that it gets us excited to see the film in the way that the trailer for The Force Awakens did. The fact that the 1977 film clips work here is a testament to how wonderful the movie looked to us at the time.
Tom F has a whole series of these trailers. You can also see his 21st-century trailers for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as well. -via Digg
Twitter use Burr Shot First spent Christmas Day watching the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time. Her excuse for never having done so before was that she watched The Phantom Menace first, and couldn’t even get through it. Fair enough. So she got the DVDs from her mom and Tweeted her reactions through all three movies. It was a hoot, but hard to show someone on Twitter UNTIL she got those Tweets collected in three links on Storify. Now I can recommend that you read them all. Here are a very few highlights.
Episode IV: Space Voldemort vs Whiny Space Criminals
Space voldemort = mufasa, I can hear it and IMDB verified it and I am thus CERTAIN he is the hero. #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 26, 2015
Luke's Aunt &Uncle die horribly, he's like w/e. Princess Leia scheduled for execution &he's like BUT SHE'S HOT WE GOTTA HELP #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 26, 2015
Luke is pouting while Space Indiana Jones is doing all the damn work #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 26, 2015
Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (finally)
Ugh but you don't have to kiss a gross whiny useless Luke just to make your point, c'mon Leia, have some standards #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 26, 2015
Lando Kardashian also has an amazing cape btw. BENEFITS OF THE EMPIRE #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 26, 2015
Episode VI: Luke is Disappointing
"Master Yoda, you can't die! I still have so many different ways to disappoint you!" #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 27, 2015
Space Voldemort & the Hoodie Turtle having a meeting "Soon young Skywalker will be one of us" Y'all don't want that trust me #StarsWars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 27, 2015
Teddy bear with a spear is poking badass Princess Leia. "I'm not gonna hurt you" she says. Who has the spear here, lady? #starswars
— Burr Shot First (@gaileyfrey) December 27, 2015
Her Tweets are peppered with a few relevant responses from friends. Tweeted in order, it’s a hilarious read. Contains NSFW text.
The last time we featured astronaut Leland Melvin was when he included his dogs in his official NASA portrait session. He’s been an NFL player, engineer, and astronaut, and now he is an associate administrator for education at NASA. Here he explains the effects of space on the human body.
Whoa. It turns out that gravity is what’s holding us together. Well, if we had to live in lower gravity for enough generations, we’d adjust and evolve to function properly. Until then, you have to be healthy, and really dedicated to space exploration to deal with it. Scott Kelly is spending a year on the ISS to study how it affects him, along with cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko. That’s dedication. -via The Kid Should See This
Screen Junkies picked up on the trend for movies to rescue Matt Damon as they skewer The Martian in their latest Honest Trailer.
But does Damon really need to be saved in The Martian? He appears to have all the skills to take care of himself indefinitely in this movie. And he’s certainly bettered equipped than Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Oh well, it’s only a movie! -via Tastefully Offensive
Every once in a while, you’ll see a tree that grew horizontally for a while before it returned to growing vertically. These bent trees could have resulted from ice or high winds, but there could be another explanation: they were bent by people, for a reason. Specifically, some trees found in American forests were bent by Native Americans for the purpose of marking trails. They were signposts, meant to last a long time. And many of them did. Dennis Downes heard this reasoning behind bent trees when he was a child, and later spent 28 years researching the idea by documenting trees, scanning the historical records, and interviewing Native Americans.
Much of the older work documenting marker trees happened before World War II and before the interstate highway system swept through the country, which required cutting down forests—be they bent or not. One Native American historian told Downes that before the concrete roads came through, it was much more common to find marker trees in Illinois and Wisconsin, for instance. By the time Downes started rediscovering them, even more had been lost. At one point, there were at least 11 bent trees along a trail that went from the shores of Lake Michigan to Skokie, Illinois, around a swampy area. When Janssen was writing, seven of those remained. Some of those seven have since died.
Perhaps the best evidence for man-made marker trees comes from tribal elders. In one case, for example, Earl Otchingwanigan, a professor emeritus and Smithsonian consultant, showed Downes a marker tree that had been created in 1933, by two men who had been 70 at the time–old enough to have at least learned the practice from people who might have shaped original marker trees.
Read about Downes’ quest to find trail marker trees and discern their meaning at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Dennis Downes)
The Crazy Russian Hacker has another “science experiment” in which he shows us how to use steel wool to set the world on fire, or just make pretty sparkles, while warning us over and over not to try this at home.
He does this with steel wool, a string, and a 9-volt battery. That’s all. How can something so simple be so dangerous? Surely, now that we know how easy it is, no one will dare try this at home. After all, safety is numbern perty. -via Viral Viral Videos
“Yet another infant carried off—how sad,” Gorey wrote of the scene on this envelope. “The altitude is in process of turning it blue with cold. It has reached the lavender stage apparently.”
Acclaimed storyteller Edward Gorey collaborated with Peter F. Neumeyer on three children’s books in 1968 and 1969. When they weren’t in each other’s company, they wrote many letters back and forth about their creations. Gorey tended to dress up his letters to Neumeyer with illustrations on the envelopes. At first, they were just corner decorations, but eventually filled the front of the envelopes and incorporated Neumeyer’s address as part of the artwork.
“I wrote to Edward Gorey that Helen had found his envelope illustration of the blue infant sad,” Neumeyer says of his wife’s reaction to the previous image. “We soon received another, wherein the baby triumphs.”
Neumeyer saved those envelopes and collected them into the book Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer. See a selection of them at Flashbak. -via Digg
Transportation options for those with unlimited funds will expand in 2016. We have new small private planes coming out that can take you and a few friends anywhere in a faster, more comfortable way. There are jumbo jets with private suites, showers, and staff to take care of your every need. There are luxury charter tours with hotel stays in the top getaway locations around the world. And for the really adventurous person with money to burn, there is the Virgin Galactic Space Plane.
A “seat to space” on a Virgin Galactic Space Plane requires a $250,000 deposit, and any would-be astronaut must apply for the opportunity to train for this ultimate in luxury travel. The aircraft that will travel past our Earth’s atmosphere into the near edges of space and zero gravity is called the SpaceShipTwo. It will launch from the space port in New Mexico, and currently, there are over 700 applicants waiting for their turn. The cabin they fly in is described as being spacious and focused on maximizing the views of Earth and outer space for all passengers. Each person who travels must train rigorously for the chance to go, and safety is the number one concern of all those involved with this project. With the space plane 90% structurally complete and two-thirds assembled and testing scheduled to commence in 2015, seekers of the world’s only out of this world ride are welcomed to apply in 2016.
The Space Plane is just one of ten luxury planes and flying experiences you can select from to travel in ultimate style. The other nine listed at Worthly require no special training, just bring all your money.
Victorian London was a filthy place. There were too many people living too close together without the infrastructure we consider necessary for modern life: electric lights, clean water, sewage service, garbage removal, refrigeration, etc. People died left and right from all kinds of communicable diseases. But they didn’t understand those diseases. The prevailing theory of infectious disease was the “miasma” theory -that foul smells spread diseases.
The true cause of disease—germs, or pathogens—wasn’t verified until Louis Pasteur conducted his experiments of the 1860s (though some scientists had proposed the idea much earlier), and it was another decade before the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, diphtheria, and other illnesses were identified and understood.
The Victorians made the classic error that correlation equals causation. Slums smell, due to poor sanitation, piles of garbage stacking up, and the lack of bathing and clothes-washing facilities; people in slums die of epidemics at a faster rate; ergo, stench causes disease.
And boy, did London stink.
The list of reasons why the city smelled so bad is not pleasant, but it led to efforts in cleaning it up. Which was the best thing they could have done at the time as far as stopping disease goes, even if they didn't understand why. Read the entire story at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Wellcomes Images via Wikimedia Commons)
A new German restaurant called Heisenberg Haus has opened, and it’s already got 4.6 out of 5 stars. The decor is based on the TV show Breaking Bad, while the menu is German, with Pork Knuckle, Schnitzel, Pork Belly, and many kinds of beer. The cocktails are inspired by Walter White and his crew, like the Blue Crystal Surprise, which is a combination of vodka, blue Curaçao, pineapple, and Pop Rocks. Really. So is this restaurant in Albuquerque? No. Germany? No. It’s in Brisbane, Australia. Sorry to burst your bubble. Maybe you can try making the Blue Crystal Surprise at home. -via Uproxx
Raccoons will eat anything. They also like to wash their food before consuming it. Those two traits sadly clashed when this raccoon got hold of a big hunk of cotton candy. It disappeared instantly on hitting the water. You can almost feel his excitement turn to confusion and then to disappointment. Poor raccoon! We could have warned you, if you only understood human words. -via The Daily Dot
Update: The original Vine was deleted, and has been replaced by a YouTube video.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
(Image credit: Leendertz)
Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize–winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the list of winners.
1995 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize
The prize was awarded to John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for Luak Coffee, the world’s most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.
First, get your luak to eat
Some coffee beans. Let it excrete.
Extract the beans. Brew.
And what will ensue?
An expensive and flavorful treat!
(Image credit: Flickr user simon sugden)
In 1901, the town of Keighley, West Yorkshire, UK, built an entirely new shopping district over top of a street of abandoned shops. The street level was adjusted, and new shop owners moved into the new Royal Arcade. The original shopping center was now underground, used as storage cellars for some of the new shops, but completely forgotten by everyone else. For a hundred years. Construction work in 2003 brought the underground street to public attention.
(Image credit: Flickr user simon sugden)
When builders found their way into the secret street more than a century later, while working in the cellars of the shops above, they discovered the original wooden shop-fronts and stable pens hauntingly frozen in time.
Electric lighting was installed to make the space easier to navigate during reconstruction work and it’s understood that various period items were also added for the benefit of future tours. Other items, however, may have been left over from the Victorian era, largely undisturbed since the abandoned underground street was sealed off and forgotten.
There are now plans to restore the complex and open it up to the public as a glimpse into the past. You can see plenty of pictures of this subterranean time capsule at Urban Ghosts.
A very dry reading of a script accompanies an explanation of evolution. The audio resembles a lecture class so much that you might miss the ridiculous things he says. But the crudely-drawn pictures help.
So when species specialized, ducks shed everything that benefits other species except buoyancy. Maybe they didn’t realize that all birds are pretty buoyant to begin with. At least ducks are delicious. But I was a bit surprised that platypuses don’t have stomachs. I had to look that up. Therefore, you can believe that, as weird as this lecture is, the facts are all facts. I am looking forward to more from Casually Explained. -via Digg