The Twitter account Skeletontunes began earlier this month and took the Twittersphere by storm. Every Tweet is the same video, a six-second sequence of clips from the hilarious classic dancing skeleton video. What’s different is that each is set to a different pop song. Scroll through and you will find a song you can’t wait to hear a skeleton dance to. My favorite is the first one.
Alas, after 70 songs, the skeleton’s last Tweet was Sunday. Maybe he’s just out of town for a few days. He hasn’t even danced to “Yakety Sax” yet! -via The Daily Dot
There are thousands of feral cats in the streets of New York City. They were abandoned, or else were born to feral cats. They hide in the shadows and don’t trust people. What to do about all those cats?
There aren’t enough homes for the feral cat population, so the response until recently was to catch and put them down. But in the last couple of decades, the T.N.R. method has shown some promise. That’s "trap, neuter, return (or release)." It’s been found to be effective in slowly reducing the population of feral colonies. This video from The New Yorker follows volunteers as they go about trapping and caring for feral cats in Brooklyn. -via the Presurfer
Michael J. Fox received a letter from Nike designer Tinker Hatfield (previously at Neatorama) today.
Hey, Michael,
Almost thirty years ago we embarked on a journey to create a glimpse into “The Future”.
Although the project started as science fiction, we’re now proud to turn that fiction into fact.
As the first, most celebrated wearer of the Nike Air Mag we wanted you to be the first to receive a living pair. “I meant Nike Mag” (I must have ‘Air’ on the brain)!
What is so special about the Nike Air Mag is it’s impact continues to resonate. We may never know it’s final legacy, but we continue to work on projects that carry and progress some of its principles.
As you well know innovation never stops at Nike so we’re about what lies ahead for this idea. We know if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
In addition to your personal pair, we’re creating more pairs for support in aid of the Michael J Fox Foundation in 2016.
We hope that the combined effort will raise even more than the $9.4 Million collected in 2011 and contribute in some way to eliminating Parkinson’s Disease in our lifetime!
Yeah, he got the shoes, as the Michael J. Fox Foundation shows us. A limited edition release of the shoes in 2011 raised $4.7 million for Parkinson’s Disease research (plus a matching donation from Sergey Brinn). Those didn’t even lace themselves. The new self-lacing Nike Mag will be available in the spring of 2016. -via Uproxx
Christian Kent Nelson experimented with many different recipes before he came up with the perfect chocolate coating for an ice cream bar, which became “I-Scream Bars” and later, the very popular Eskimo Pies. What sank the company he founded was the patent he applied for, which his advisors didn’t think would be granted because it was too broad. Yet it was granted in 1922.
The difficulty of making the Eskimo Pie lay in the formula for the chocolate coating. So one would imagine that the patent would have described precise specifications for making that coating. Precise ratios of cocoa butter to chocolate, temperatures for heating and cooling, or the number of seconds to dip, for example.
The patent contains none of that. Running a scant page and a half of text, the patent merely describes “a core consisting of a block or brick of ice cream, of general rectangular configuration,” that is “sealed within a shell … of edible material which may be like that employed in coating chocolate candies, although preferably modified to harden at a lower temperature.” There is no description of how the coating’s composition or how it is to be “modified.”
Instead, the patent focuses on features that seem irrelevant or tangential to the actual inventive discovery. The “claims” of the patent are supposed to identify an invention’s key features. But instead the Eskimo Pie patent identifies embarrassingly obvious features: “normally liquid material frozen to a substantially solid state” (i.e., ice cream), an “edible, sustaining and form retaining casing” (i.e., hard chocolate), and a “bar-like contour” (i.e., shaped like a rectangle).
Winning a patent for simply chocolate-coated ice cream seemed like a bonanza at the time. But other companies came up with their own methods of coating ice cream with chocolate, and Nelson and his business partner Russell Stover (yes, that Russell Stover) spent more money fighting patent battles in court than they could make up with even phenomenal ice cream sales. The case serves as an example of what can go wrong when patents are granted for broad ideas instead of the invention itself. Read the entire story of the Eskimo Pie patent at Slate. -via Boing Boing
However, the Toyota Mirai is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, that uses fuel that can potentially be made from garbage. The Mirai was first sold in Japan, is now available in California, and is also being rolled out in Europe. It will set you back about $57K.
An unidentified object was reported in the road, on fire, in Kingston, London, UK. Police were called about midnight Saturday.
A Kingston police spokesman said: "The officers that arrived on scene described the item as looking like a crash landed UFO."
The object turned out to be a pizza oven with a decorative mosaic finish. But it’s still a mystery as to how it came to be on the road, on fire, and who it belongs to. Before it was identified as an oven, Kingston Police asked Facebook users to guess what it is. Commenters are starting to come to the consensus that aliens who are hovering over Earth to monitor us accidentally lost their pizza oven. -via Arbroath
Any time that time travel is mentioned (and it will be many times today), the conversation gets Godwined pretty quickly into a discussion on the feasibility of killing Hitler before he begins his reign of terror. Rob Manuel of b3ta posits the idea that it’s been done, or at least attempted, many times. Out of 27 unsuccessful attempts at assassination (that we know of), how many of them could be the result of a future in which time travel is possible? And at what point did these future people figure out it couldn’t be done?
Redditor Your_Brain_On_Pizza rides a motorcycle and uses a helmet cam. She saw something and thought it was just a leaf of the road, but as she made a left turn, she realized it was a kitten! Forget the bike, she had to get that baby out of traffic!
If you look again in full-screen mode, you’ll see that the kitten seemed to drop from underneath the red car as it went by at about :12. There’s speculation that the kitten climbed into the vehicle to stay warm, and could no longer hold on by the time the car passed through the intersection. The rest of the story is that she took the kitten home, and named it Skidmark. Continue to see an updated video.
Who played the best Dracula in the movies? You first think of Bela Lugosi, but there was Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, and John Carradine, too. Or maybe you preferred a comedic Dracula, like Leslie Neilsen or George Hamilton. Then there was Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski, whose characters were named Count Orlock, but we all know who that vampire was supposed to be. Den of Geek goes through the various incarnations of Dracula (actually more than 13), including a few that you may never have heard of before. So you might want to look those movies up, for a new Dracula experience this Halloween.
The problem with trying to look busy is that you end up putting more effort into the appearance than into what you were supposed to be doing anyway. I do my best thinking out in the garden, when it appears I’m taking a break to pick vegetables or something… because thinking at a desk in front of a computer can turn your brain to mush. Now, if I can only think of a way to remember those wonderful ideas by the time I get back to the computer! This is the latest from CommitStrip.
Why settle for tricks when you can have real magic? It’s science! The kids will be alright in the latest comic from Lunarbaboon. I looked up the experiment she’s about to do. It’s called the iodine clock reaction, and it’s pretty neat.
Pope Leo X was elevated to the papal throne in 1513. One of his claims to fame was that he had a pet elephant named Hanno, the first elephant in Italy since the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gift, which was expected in those times. National leaders from all over presented gifts to each new Pope, hoping for political favors, and the more magnificent and unusual the gift, all the better.
On the 70-mile journey from the Port of Hercules to Rome, Bedini wrote, “the caravan that was following behind daily increased in size, supplemented by workers from the towns, peasants from the fields, and gentlemen from their villas. All were curious, avidly seeking a view of the great animals and the strangers speaking a strange language who accompanied it.” The elephant had to spend the night in a piazza so that curiosity seekers wouldn't storm the stable it was supposed to stay in, and all along the way, wealthy noblemen tried to convince the elephant's handlers to take a detour to their castles.
Hanno arrived in Rome just before he was scheduled to appear before the Pope. And in his first official appearance, he made an equally dramatic impression. Walking through the streets of Rome adorned with handsome vestment and with a silver tower on his back, Hanno dropped to his dropped to his knees and bowed his head low upon reaching the Pope, before lifting back up to trumpet three times in the air. Then he sucked water into his trunk and sprayed water down on everyone assembled—including the Pope, who thought the whole of the elephant's performance delightful.
In the film, Back to the Future, the first time Doc tests the time machine is by sending his dog Einstein 1 minute into the future. Doc puts his dog in the car, drives it down the parking lot, and zap the car bursts into awesome flaming tire trails. Marty immediately thinks Doc killed his dog, because both the car and dog disappear. For a whole minute Einstein was missing until the DeLorean finally comes back from the past. This is why "Back to the Future 2" sending Marty into the future to see his own future children is impossible. When you travel into the future your timeline is you going into the future. A copy of you is not left behind to live on to 2015, so you can't go forward to see what your future self would be like. You would jump ahead to a world that lost you in 1985. People would think you had died. But that's not as fun of a story to tell is it.
There’s one problem with that. Einstein is a dog. He didn’t have the time or the knowledge, let alone the dexterity, to program the Delorean to go back to the past. Marty and Doc know how to program the time machine, so they can go where they want to in time. But the video is still funny. -via Viral Viral Videos
A cat with a bigger brain might have tried to find another way up to the table. This little guy is just stubborn -not that stubborness is always a bad thing. Perseverance and practice will get you to your goal. Eventually. Even if you have to grow up a little to make it. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
THE TRAILER IS JUST EEEEPPPPPPPIIIIICCCCCCC! Star Wars is back! gaaaaaad laaaaard! You know what! Let me just relax because this kind God oooo! Lmao! Seriously congrats to everyone ! December 18th!
Except for one thing- he’s not just any Star Wars fan. This is John Boyega, the 23-year-old British actor who stars as Finn in the movie. Put yourself in his place: he was only 13 when the last movie came out, and we thought we’d never get another. Now he’s the lead actor in what will be a record-breaking film that gives his generation their own Star Wars mythology. After all the work is done, he now gets to enjoy the anticipation we're all feeling. I’d be excited, too! -via Buzzfeed
