This report from last Saturday has people laughing out loud across the country. You have to ask why the raccoon didn’t tear the guy up when he first caught him. Well, he probably did, but the guy was drunk, so that part didn’t get mentioned in the report.
The sad part of the story is that it’s not true. The watermark logo is JTTOTS, which designates military humor. Yet enough people believed it to make the debunking itself worth a news story. People wanted this to be true because it paints such a funny picture. Expect to see the vignette incorporated into some movie screenplay before a year passes. -via reddit
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Caught on cam: Leopard gets his head stuck while trying to drink water from a utensil in Rajsamand, Rajasthan. pic.twitter.com/6aAcezAGvm
— ANI (@ANI_news) September 30, 2015
A leopard was seen wandering through the village of Rajsamand, Rajasthan, India, with its head stuck in a metal water pot. The animal had apparently tried to get a drink, but the opening of the pot was easier to get into than to get out of. Now, a fox stuck in a jar or a skunk stuck in a yogurt container can be helped by anyone willing to try, but a leopard is a dangerous animal, even with its teeth encased. According to ANI News, forest department officials responded to a call and sedated the leopard, making the job of removing the pot much safer. -via Buzzfeed
You’ve got to print a lot of money when hyperinflation hits -enough so that people could use them as wallpaper! But honestly, anything with value can be traded for anything else with value. Bills and coins are just a way to keep up with that value. Places around the world have done their trading in a lot of different ways. Adriene Hill from Crash Course Economics guest-hosts this week’s mental_floss List Show, in which we find all kinds of things about money. -via mental_floss
Atlas Obscura and Digg teamed up to plot a map of businesses with pun names in America. They asked for submissions, and ended up with about 1900 business names, which are plotted on an interactive map for your viewing pleasure.
I zoomed in on Lexington, Kentucky, and found four hair salons: Hair Jordan, The Twisted Scissor, Hair on Broadway, and Hair and Now. The nail salon is Clip Art. But you’d expect salons to have punny names, like Curl Up and Dye (from the movie Earth Girls Are Easy). There’s also the Thai and Mighty restaurant and Common Grounds Coffee House. But the one we all expected to see, and it’s there, is Hugh Jass Burgers. (Sadly, it closed this year. We still have Big Ass Fans.)
Check out the map here, zoom in, and look around. There are also links to editors’ picks in different categories. I haven’t had time to go through all 1900 yet, so what’s the funniest name you’ve found?
Mode brings us another 100 Years of Fashion video, this time for bridal gowns. You'll recognize the fashion eras, taken to the elegant extreme for a once-in-your life event.
If I had to pick one, I’d go with 1925; none other comes close for me. The 1955 gown looks just like my mother’s wedding dress, except hers was blue. The 1975 gown looks like what I wore to the prom that same year. -via Buzzfeed
See also: 100 Years of Lingerie History in Three Minutes, One Hundred Years of Men's Fashion in Three Minutes, and 100 Years of Fashion in 2 Minutes.
Introducing VODER (Voice Operation DEmonstratoR) from Bell Labs. From Wikipedia:
The Voder synthesized human speech by imitating the effects of the human vocal tract. The operator could select one of two basic sounds by using a wrist bar. A buzz tone generated by a relaxation oscillator produced the voiced vowels and nasal sounds, with the pitch controlled by a foot pedal. A hissing noise produced by a gas discharge tube created the sibilants (voiceless fricative sounds). These initial sounds were passed through a bank of 10 band pass filters that were selected by keys; their outputs were combined, amplified and fed to a loudspeaker. The filters were controlled by a set of keys and a foot pedal to convert the hisses and tones into vowels, consonants, and inflections. Additional special keys were provided to make the plosive sounds such as "p" or "d", and the affrictive sounds of the "j" in "jaw" and the "ch" in "cheese". This was a complex machine to operate. After months of practice, a trained operator could produce recognizable speech.
This device was demonstrated at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939 and at the Golden Gate International Exposition. Pretty amazing for the time, huh? -via Everlasting Blort
When Henry Hudson arrived in 1609, the island called Manahatta was a lush area with hills, swamps, beaches, forests, rivers, meadows, tidal flats, and a wide variety of plant and animal life. Landscape ecologist Dr. Eric Sanderson (previously at Neatorama) launched a project to detail what every block of the city was like back then. He’s worked on it since 1999, and now you can use the interactive map from the Welikia Project to see it yourself. The research that went into the work is staggering.
The 16-year process of uncovering what once lay beneath the super-dense urban fabric was (and is) a feat of incredibly detailed historical detective work. The geological and landscape data was the simplest–it came from a 1782 map drawn by the British that included locations of more than 60 miles of streams, as well as 300 natural springs and plenty of wetlands, beaches, and hundreds of types of trees, plants and soil types. Not to mention dozens of hills–after all, the island’s name is derived from the Lenape word Mannahatta, or “the island of many hills.”
But figuring out the specifics of the city’s more than 50 ecological groups was more difficult, as Sanderson explains on the project’s website. They created a list of species that lived on the island, then compared them against the existing data about different environment pockets in the island, creating a web of relationships based on which species were more likely to flourish or depend on which ecologies – they call this a Muir web, after the naturalist John Muir, who popularized this idea of interconnected habitats. The data visualization designer Chris Harrison created this Muir web of the associations between known habitats and species in Manhattan in the 17th century:
The Welikia Project is far from finished- they hope to eventually have all five boroughs of New York City mapped this way. The rest will be more difficult, as they weren’t mapped as early as Manhattan. Read more about the project at Gizmodo.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Angular approaches to, or with, hair
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Redrow’s Twist
“Hair Dressing Method and Device,” U.S. patent 3889692, issued June 17, 1975 to Redrow Allan Raymond. The inventor explains:
To use this invention, the hair to be manipulated is first combed and separated into a number of strands and the free end of each strand is engaged with one of the leaders to be drawn into and through one of the respective guide means. Each separate hair strand is thus led into the intertwined position of its guide with respect to the other guides and their hair strands. When all of the strands to be intertwined have been led into and through their respective guides their leaders are detached from the strands and the tubes are pulled longitudinally off of the free end of each strand to leave the several hair strands intertwined in the pattern that the guides originally occupied.
Daum’s Hair Twists
“Wordless Thoughts: Entering the Knot of Compulsive Hair Twisting,” Melissa A. Daum, master’s thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2012. The author begins thus:
In this thesis, I will be exploring my own habit of twisting my hair. I want to formulate an understanding of what motivates my hair twisting habit and what its purpose is in my life. By understanding the specifics of my own personal fixation, I am assuming that I will better understand the more general, commonplace phenomenon of bodyfocused repetitive behaviors.... To begin this journey, I will illustrate my habit and its origins in detail.
Moore’s Twist
Screen Junkies does it again, with an honest trailer for a movie that hasn’t even been released on DVD and Blu-ray yet. That may be why these clips are so fuzzy -is it it just me?
The second Avengers film didn’t quite make the splash the first movie did, even after years of hype. They do have a point about the unbelievable requirements of Age of Ultron in regards to the rest of the Marvel movie universe. No matter, if you liked it, you’ll like it even after seeing the Honest Trailer version. -via Tastefully Offensive
The movie Everest opened in theaters last Friday, and people are wondering whether it is embellished or even possibly toned down for one reason or another. Our feature article this morning gives plenty of reasons to watch the movie instead of climbing the mountain yourself, but how accurate is the film? Uproxx talked with mountain climbers Sean Swarner and Nick Heil, who have been there. They tell us that the climb itself isn’t all that hard compared to other mountains (Denali is actually taller from base to top), especially with the infrastructure that’s been built, but there are other, more serious dangers.
Swarner: When you’re up above, in the death realm, above 26,000 feet, your brain’s not even functioning very well. Your body is deteriorating and you just can’t even think at that level. What would be simple down here in New York, like tying my shoes, up there would take a half an hour just because your brain can’t even process things that well. You really have to push yourself and be very cognizant of how your body feels and what’s going on, because being hypoxic, oftentimes you don’t even know you’re hypoxic, and that’s one of those things… Bad things happen.
Heil: The really sort of insidious danger on Everest is altitude. It’s about being up in these extreme altitudes and how debilitating that is. I think this is the thing that most people that read about Everest and find Everest interesting and compelling, but who haven’t been to altitude, can’t quite grasp because there’s nothing quite like being up at high altitude. You may not be even fully compos mentis in these environments. In fact, no one is. You’re making decisions based on very compromised mental facilities, and it’s easy to make mistakes.
I spent a day walking around Aspen, Colorado, and was astonished at how the altitude affected me, and it’s only around 8,000 feet. Everest, at 29,000 feet, is more than three times the altitude. Read the rest of the interview at Uproxx.
Fifteen years ago, the PBS series NOVA ran a special two-hour episode called “The Vikings.” That episode is still highly rated and available for rent. And the original promotional materials for it are still available online, including a generator that explains Viking runes.
Runes are the characters of the alphabet used by the Vikings and other Germanic peoples from about the second to the 15th centuries A.D. Some runes vaguely resemble letters in our own alphabet; others look more like symbols. All had meaning to the Vikings, who carved them into their so-called rune stones—large monuments that honor the memory, and the names, of Norsemen past.
Try your hand at it, but yours will probably be as incomprehensible as my name. I’m sure you can probably guess what I was trying to say in the example above. -via Everlasting Blort
Just about every time something new and different comes along -technological advances, that is- people get all uneasy, as if Skynet is about to take over. So many things that are unveiled as an improvement for our lives are regarded as taking us to hell in a hand basket. But it was that way for our ancestors, too. People were afraid of the telephone until they got used to it. It was seen as a device destined to power the downfall of society.
In 1909, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote a typical critique of the telephone’s influence in his book Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. “In our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house. And even in the country the same principle is at work, though less obviously, diminishing our economic and spiritual community with our neighbors.”
In fact, the invention served many existing needs beyond its business-related functions, particularly helping to cement social bonds in an era when families and communities were physically spreading further apart. In his 1992 book on the adoption of the telephone, America Calling, Claude Fischer writes that “conversation, even gossip, is an important social process, serving to sustain social networks and build communities.”
Fischer’s analysis of three California communities during the initial expansion of telephone lines found that phones actually increased the strength of ties to both immediate and distant social networks. “The net trend was in the direction of greater attention to the outside world. Yet, rather than indicating a displacement of local interest, these changes suggest a simultaneous augmentation of local and extra-local activities,” Fischer explains. Technology allowed people to be more social than ever before.
We’ve heard the same arguments about television, video games, and the internet. But as time goes by, those technologies become ubiquitous and society manages to survive. Read about many other technological advances and how they were first received at Collectors Weekly.
Above Average is making a series of videos called Criminal Crimes, which pokes fun at police dramas. It stars the sketch group Chess Club Comedy. This episode takes place in the morgue, as our detectives examine a murder victim.
The coroner needs to get out more, maybe see a movie or two. I know she’d enjoy Thor. -via The A.V. Club
Just how popey was the pope today? pic.twitter.com/hf9lvDL7GL
— Sean Leahy (@thepunningman) September 28, 2015
Sean Leahy, who also goes by The Punning Man, saw something in this photo of Pope Francis being victimized by the wind again. The resulting graph made me laugh out loud! He’s already got people using the phrase “Not as popey as I’d hopey” in their conversations. If you hear it, at least now you know where it came from. -via reddit
How would you rate me on a scale of one to ten? That’s a question you should never, ever ask. Or answer, although trying to get out of it would just as likely start an argument as answering.
Asking to be rated is akin to asking if these pants make my butt look big. You don’t want honesty, you want validation. But you might get honesty instead. -via reddit
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