At the town of Wagah, a major road crosses the border between India and Pakistan. Every evening at sunset, they hold a ceremony to officially close the crossing for the night. Soldiers from both countries come out, lower the flags, strut and salute, then close the gates on each side of the border. The ceremony is highly choreographed, and a crowd gathers every night to watch -and cheer for their country, although they are admonished not to say anything bad about the other nation. The high-stepping, stylized show is a tradition built on the idea of one-upmanship: who can step the highest and scowl the fiercest?
Francine Christophe was a little girl in France when her father became a POW and she and her mother were shipped off to the camps. In 1944, they were taken to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. In this excerpt from the movie Human, she tells a story about that time, in French with subtitles, with a surprise ending.
The U.S. Post Office has big plans for stamps to be released in 2016. Among them are four designs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the TV series Star Trek.
In the series called Views of Our Planets, we get eight stamps, one for each of the planets. But what about Pluto? Pluto gets its own honor in the stamps called Pluto -Explored! That last time Pluto got stamps was in 2006, when they were called Pluto: Not Yet Explored.
Other new stamps include honors to Shirley Temple, Richard Allen, Sarah Vaughn, Jaime Escalante, the Year of the Monkey, the moon, pickup trucks, fruit, and more. See them all at the Postal Service site. -Thanks, Mark Saunders!
The Manchester Evening News published a bunch of pictures of New Year revelers, and one taken by Joel Goodman stood out and has become a viral talking point. Groen Maar Niet Gek saw the golden ratio in it.
He even used one of our old posts to illustrate how the golden ratio works with news photography. Other people compared the image to a painting, and one even turned it into a painting.
A year ago, we introduced you to Derby, the dog with 3D-printed legs. Derby’s front legs are deformed, so he rests his weight on his elbows atop the prosthetics. Tara Andersen of 3D Systems tells us how the design of the legs had to change as he grew.
And you can see here how it doesn’t matter whether the prosthetics actually resemble legs, as long as they work for Derby. You can read more about Derby at gizmag. -via Uproxx
Getting to work in the morning is a pain when you have to shovel a few inches of snow to get anywhere. This squirrel gets around by way of overhead cable, and it will take him a while to get his walkway cleared.
The first comic of 2016 from CommitStrip will cause a reaction when geeks wake up and see it. Many will laugh through their hangovers, while others -a few already in the comments at the strip- will get a sinking feeling in their stomachs and then jump to their stations. BRB!
Master filmmakers do more than tell a story. They craft an entire experience for the viewer, which means manipulating every detail in a way that leads you through the drama.
How do you emphasize to the audience that something is important? Well, you could always cut to a close-up, but how about something subtler? Today I consider ensemble staging — a style of filmmaking that directs the audience exactly where to look, without ever seeming to do so at all.
Tony Zhou explains the intricacies of ensemble staging in another episode of the fascinating series Every Frame a Painting, using the 2003 South Korean crime-drama Memories of Murder. I had never heard of the movie, but now I want to see it. -via Digg
In 1903, there was no New Year’s celebration in Times Square. For one thing, it was called Longacre Square at the time, and New Year celebrations were pretty much like those anywhere else. The big New York celebration started on December 31, 1904 to usher in 1905 -and the newly-named Times Square. See, it was named after the New York Times newspaper, when publisher Adolph Ochs built the headquarters there.
August Belmont, the president of the new subway and a New York Times shareholder, was probably the one who suggested the renaming of Longacre Square. He had to have been aware that the Times’ archrival, the New York Herald, had successfully named the intersection of 34th Street, Sixth Avenue, and Broadway – now Herald Square – after itself. “Belmont wanted to get the most bang for the bucks he was putting into the railroad,” said David W. Dunlap, a longtime reporter at the Times’ Metro section.
Mayor George McClellan made the name change official on August 8, 1904. To commemorate the newspaper’s new address, Ochs planned a spectacular street party for December 31, 1904. At the time, New York’s main New Year’s Eve celebration was a relatively somber affair at Trinity Church downtown, where revelers sang hymns and bells clanged at midnight. The Times’ party, in contrast, would usher in 1905 with fireworks, noisemakers and Fanciulli’s Concert Band at the foot of the Times Tower.
The party was so much fun that they did it every year since. While the crowds are still coming, the celebration has changed. Read the history of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, including the origin of the ball drop, at Atlas Obscura.
White orchids, chocolate flowers, emotional manipulation, and other interesting things we encountered on our trip inside a top secret fragrance factory.
(Image credit: Textbook Example)
The concrete and glass headquarters don’t look like much, the sort of personality-devoid architecture you could find in any office park. It’s clever camouflage for the cutting edge Willy Wonka-style labworks within.
I’ve been following the scent of International Flavor and Fragrances (IFF) in Hazlet, New Jersey, for 10 days now. There’s a rumor that one company is responsible for perfecting the distinctive formulas of both Drakkar Noir and Cool Ranch Doritos, and I think I’ve found it. Of course, no one here is going to confirm who’s on the company’s top-secret client list. What I do know is that, with a little badge flashing and credential dropping, I’ve finally found my way in. I’m not sure what I’ll be shown, but I’ve been told I can’t photograph any of it. I’m just here to sniff.
In the spotless, light-filled lobby, there’s a promotional video playing on a loop: a man in a space-age lab coat sticking a loaf of crusty bread into an aroma-capturing device. My nose immediately detects a hint of my first crush’s perfume—a certain citrus with floral notes—and I wonder if her scent originated here. IFF, a multibillion-dollar international corporation, has fingerprints everywhere as the designer of flavor and scent profiles of many of the most popular products on the market, from the fruity rush that dazzles your tongue as you rip the head off a gummy bear to the pine-forest freshness wafting from a freshly cleaned toilet bowl.
The scientists who work here harness natural scents and meticulously reproduce them for commercial use. And they’ve been doing it for a while—the company’s roots go back to 1889, when two residents of the small Dutch town of Zutphen opened a concentrated fruit juice factory. The enterprise grew consistently and benefited from a cunning 1958 merger with van Ameringen-Haebler, a prominent U.S. flavor and scent maker. Back in 1974, IFF scientists created a synthetic version of ambergris, otherwise known as dried whale vomit, long prized as an essential for perfumes. In the ’90s, the company blasted a rose into space just to see if it would smell different in zero gravity. (It did!) Today, I’m hoping to get a peek at the art and chemistry of creating a distinct aroma and find out how they turn all those smells into billions of dollars.
Past reception, the long, dreary hallway feeds into a lush tropical rainforest. Housing some 2,000 plant species, IFF’s greenhouse—one of several dozen such facilities worldwide—is massive and immaculately kept. The humidity here is intense. There are orchids everywhere. I can hear what sounds like a small river. I almost expect to look up and see a macaque swinging over my head. The director of IFF’s Nature Inspired Fragrance Technologies program, Subha Patel, guides me along. This is her operation. “Everything in here has an odor, and you should smell every one of them,” Patel tells me as she parts low-hanging branches to lead me deeper in. This workspace feels like the Amazon (I would know, having grown up in South America).
Yesterday, the question was posed as to how a dog would wear pants. More than 80% of Neatoramanauts declared dogs would wear pants on their rear legs only, with the waist going vertically around the middle of the pup. Today, redditor Falcrest123 shows us dog pants that are actually sold in pet stores. They’re called Muddy Mutts Dog Apparel, and they are designed to protect your dog from getting snow and ice stuck in their fur, or wet when the weather’s cold, although they also keep you from having to wash off mud every time your dog ventures out in certain seasons. Some will argue that these are coveralls instead of pants, but on the other hand, why do we want to argue about dog pants?
We are used to the idea that every piece of land is owned by someone somewhere, and that every piece of land belongs to one nation or another. Antarctica is an exception, but not because no one wanted it.
The history of Antarctic claims is pretty complicated, and the present configuration is pretty weird, so who better than CGP Grey to explain it to us in less than five minutes? -via Viral Viral Videos
The moral of the story: never make a deal with the devil without haggling a bit first. Okay, let me rephrase that. Never make a deal with the devil. This comic is from Alex Driml at Thor’s Thundershack. -via Geeks Are Sexy
First, there were surfboards, one which one could glide on water. Then skateboards, so one could do the same on a hard surface. Then snowboards came, and one could glide on snow on a board. What’s next? Wingboarding!
Okay, you can’t really surf on clouds yet, but this company is up to a 40% scale model. Humans are harder, because they are heavy. But they are getting there gradually. This looks a lot like wake boarding, since the person is being pulled by an airplane. Would you try it? You can see more videos on wingboarding at CNN. -via Daily of the Day
Things don’t get better just because the calendar changed. Things get better because you make them get better. Just a reminder from Megan McKay at the webcomic Doodle for Food. -via imgur
