PES has really made the big time. This two-minutue Honda ad has a long list of credits and a massive investment in time.
Dozens of animators and illustrators, thousands of original drawings, and four months of work. Everything in the film is done by hand and shot in camera.
Get a taste of the work that went into this stop-motion video in the behind-the-scenes video. -via Digg
In 1992, the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky, produced the millionth Chevy Corvette sports car. It was a grand milestone. That car was on display at the National Corvette Museum last year when a sinkhole opened up underneath and swallowed eight cars. Some could not be salvaged, but GM wanted to save the millionth. That meant a painstaking restoration job, complicated by the fact that so many of the parts were autographed. Really. The car was signed by every person who had a hand in building it. That meant those parts needed to be repaired instead of replaced.
Only two signed components couldn’t be saved, so the team had the autographs scanned, reproduced as transfers and placed on the replacement parts.
“We went to great lengths to preserve every autograph,” said David Bolognino, director of GM Global Design Fabrication Operations. “In the end, we saved every one of them, which was an unexpected and important element to the restoration.”
One component with a single signature from Bowling Green Assembly employee Angela Lamb was too damaged to save or even accurately scan for her autograph. Chevrolet worked with the National Corvette Museum to secure a new signature from Lamb on the replacement part, so the 1-millionth Corvette will be historically accurate down to the last signature.
The Corvette has been returned to the museum. You can see before-and-after pictures, and read more on the restoration at Chevrolet. -via mental_floss
If you watch as much TV as I do, you had no reason to watch the Emmys last night, since you wouldn’t be familiar with most of the nominees. Even if you do watch a lot of TV, you knew the best of the awards show would be on the internet today.
Here’s Andy Samberg’s opening bit, which is being called one of the better parts of the evening. It’s the first video from Lonely Island in quite some time.
Have you ever had a great idea come to you in a dream? These people have, according to the new book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.
DREAMER: Otto Loewi
DREAM: Two live frogs with their hearts exposed
RESULT: Figured out that chemicals communicate nerve impulses to the body’s organs
In the early 20th century, there was a lot of debate about whether nerve impulses were communicated to the organs via electrical or chemical messages. Loewi believed it was chemical but couldn’t prove it. Then, one night in 1921, he dreamed of an experiment that would settle the issue. When he woke up, he feverishly scribbled notes but in the morning discovered that his notes were unreadable and he couldn’t remember what he had dreamed. Luckily, he had the same dream the next night. It was a gruesome experiment on the still-beating hearts of two frogs.
(Image credit: Nrets)
Loewi followed the procedures in the dream: he slowed the heart of one frog using electrical stimuli and collected the chemical secretions that resulted. Then he injected the secretions into the other frog’s heart, and it slowed too, proving that chemicals were how the nervous system communicated with a body’s organs. Loewi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.
DREAMER: Elias Howe
Tiana is six years old. In this video, tells how she wants her divorced parents to be friends and get along. Her mom recorded this after they had a fight and posted it to Facebook.
“My heart is something. Everyone else’s heart is something, too.” Excuse me, I have to go get a whole box of tissues. -via Buzzfeed
Imagine if all the movie stars got on the phone with each other at once. That would probably make less sense than this supercut of movie phone calls that are actually strung together in a fairly coherent order. There are classic scenes and great lines from obscure films as well. What they all have in common: talking on the phone. You can probably guess some of the better ones before they appear.
Oh by the way, the call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE! Don’t hang up! -via Viral Viral Videos
Who employs more people than anyone else in the world? I once heard it was Indian Railways, but that was quite a few years ago. They still made the list, but are far from the top. This chart is from Forbes.
The U.S. Department of Defense is the #1 employer, even as the number of active duty personnel continues to decrease. Of 3.2 million employees, only 1.7 million are active duty military. Defense contractors and civilian employees make up the rest. Although the Chinese military comes in second, the size of China’s military as a percentage of its population is much smaller. China has 1.4 billion people.
Walmart is the largest private employer in the world. There are now over 11,000 Walmart stores in the world. I don’t know how they number them all now, but I worked for store #80 back in the days when Sam Walton could walk in any minute (1979-82).
The number of McDonald’s employees includes franchises. McDonald’s has 35,000 outlets in 119 countries.
The National Health Service is a special case. The government agency covers the four countries of the UK, and comprises the vast majority of healthcare workers there. In contrast, the U.S. has over 18 million healthcare workers, but they work for many different companies.
China National Petroleum and the State Grid Corporation of China are both state-owned companies. The oil company feeds the utility, and if they were combined, they would be at the #2 spot on this list.
If you exclude government agencies, the list is a bit different. This screenshot is from Wikipedia.
Hon Hai Precision Industry is also known as Foxconn. They make our iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Kindles, Xboxes, and Wiis, so there’s no puzzle about their growth.
Sinopec is an oil company in China. Although it is not a government agency, it is owned by the state. You say tomayto, I say tomahto.
The British firm GS4 is a security company with operations in 125 countries.
The Tata Group is a 147-year-old Indian company grown into a conglomerate that has a hand in everything from telecoms to industrial chemicals to cars to coffee.
If you don't work for any of these employers, I bet you know more than one person who does.
Wildlife photographer Jeff Cremer of the Tambopata Research Center is an occasional contributor to Neatorama. He set up a camera trap in the Peruvian rainforest to capture animals in their natural habitat and shared some of them at reddit.
You can see all the pictures at imgur. And here’s an additional photo of an ocelot. The camera was set up for four weeks before termites ate it. The memory card survived. Here’s that story.
See more of Cremer’s wildlife photography at his website.
A police raid can be a horrible experience, or it can turn into an opportunity for catharsis, reflection, and emotional growth. Like that ever happens. This is the latest comic from Buttersafe.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Domestic cats roll. Oh, they roll and roll and roll—not constantly, but often enough that the behavior eventually caught the attention of scientists. In 1994, Hilary N. Feldman of Cambridge University’s Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour did a formal study of the phenomenon. Feldman’s monograph, called “Domestic Cats and Passive Submission,” appeared in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Other scientists had made little leaping swats at the question. Feldman commends J.M. Baerends-Van Roon and G.P. Baerends’ book The Morphogenesis of the Behaviour of the Domestic Cat, and also L.K. Corbett’s University of Aberdeen Ph.D. thesis, “Feeding ecology and social organization of wildcats (Felis silvestris) and domestic cats (Felis catus) in Scotland.” Both came out in 1979, marking that year as the previous high point in cat-rolling scholarship.
(Image credit: Flickr user Louisa Billeter)
But Baerends-Van Roon, Baerends, and Corbett only glanced at rolling. Feldman focused on it, and spent six months observing “two groups of semiferal cats kept in a large outdoor enclosure.”
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Investigators on the trail of murderous felines
by Csikszentmihalyi Aeiou, Improbable Research staff
The UK has been especially prone to house scientists who study the hunting habits of domestic cats. Here are three studies that typify the effort.
Predation of Wildlife by Domestic Cats Felis catus in Great Britain
“Predation of Wildlife by Domestic Cats Felis catus in Great Britain,” Michael Woods, Robbie A. Mcdonald, and Stephen Harris, Mammal Review, vol. 33, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 174–188. The authors, at The Mammal Society, London, the University of Bristol, and The Game Conservancy Trust, Forest in Teesdale, UK, report:
A questionnaire survey of the numbers of animals brought home by domestic cats Felis catus L. was conducted between 1 April and 31 August 1997. A total of 14,370 prey items were brought home by 986 cats living in 618 households. Mammals made up 69% of the items, birds 24%, amphibians 4%, reptiles 1%, fish < 1%, invertebrates 1%, and unidentified items 1%. A minimum of 44 species of wild bird, 20 species of wild mammal, four species of reptile, and three species of amphibian were recorded...
Of a sample of 696 individual cats, 634 (91%) brought home at least one item and the backtransformed mean number of items brought home was 11.3...
The number of mammals brought home per cat was significantly lower when cats were equipped with bells and when they were kept indoors at night.
Effect of Bells on Domestic Cats in an English Town
A group of British university students have declared that in the Star Wars universe, Leia is 1.75 years older than Luke by the end of the original trilogy, despite the fact that they are twins, born on the same day. The reason involves Einstein’s theory of relativity. And math.
Students at the University of Leicester made their calculations based on the twins’ journeys to Cloud City. Leia travels from the neighbouring system of Anoat and arrives at Cloud City in around 6.72 hours, while Luke travels from the much more distant planet Dagobah, which takes around one week.
Additionally, as Leia travels in the Millennium Falcon, a much larger ship with more powerful engines than Luke’s X-Wing Starfighter, the students assumed that it reaches a higher speed.
Leia’s journey yields a time dilation of 62.6 days; however Luke experiences a time dilation of 700.8 days.
The students concluded that Luke is therefore 1.75 years younger than Leia, possibly rendering them the first twins ever to have more than a year between their ages.
Oh, there’s more, which you can read in the original research paper (downloadable here) or in shorter form at the Telegraph. There are, of course, arguments in the comments, about George Lucas’ lack of familiarity with astrophysics and the the difference between hyperspace drive vs. warp drive vs. jump drive, as everyone tries to out-geek each other. The first thing I thought of was that Leia, being a princess and a Senator from Alderaan before it was destroyed, probably traveled through the cosmos a lot while Luke was growing up as a moisture farmer, which probably skewed their ages way before they met.
A couple of years ago, we told you about a new clue in the mystery of Roanoke Island. That’s where a group of English colonists settled in 1587 and disappeared without a trace sometime before 1590. A previously-unseen mark on a 1585 map led investigators to think that the “Lost Colony” may have moved 60 miles inland. An archeological dig at the spot has since revealed some intriguing relics.
It’s here that archaeologists from First Colony have been digging for the past two years. In August, the foundation announced that it had found remarkable archaeological evidence of 16th century Europeans at Site X. Among more than 30 artifacts recovered here (including artifacts like nails and ceramics from both Indian and European sources that date from well after the Roanoke era) they found shards of a type of ceramics called Surrey-Hampshire Border ware. These helped researchers pin a date on the site.
Border ware, as it’s often called, was common among settlers of the Virginia company. But when the company failed in 1624, no new colonists were bringing the stuff to the area. Thus, finding it at Site X is a pretty good indication that at least some of the artifacts found dated from the time of the Roanoke colonists.
An article at Gizmodo tells about the dig, plus the history of the Roanoke Colony, some new findings about why the colony was evacuated, and more about the motives for settling in that inhospitable spot in the first place. -via Science Chamber of Horrors
(Image credit: First Colony Foundation)
Today is September 19th, and that means the annual celebration known as Talk Like a Pirate Day! In addition to talking like a pirate, which mainly involves affecting a harsh voice and drawing out your ARRRRrrs, some folks also dress up like pirates. Of course, that involves a few stereotypes: actual buccaneers from the golden age of piracy dressed in whatever they had that would work for seafaring life. Have you ever wondered why pirate costumes almost always include eyepatches, peg legs, and parrots? You’d suppose a few pirates had those, but not all that many. Mental_floss looks into the origins of those stereotypes, as well as some others we associate with the life of a pirate.
See also: More on Talk Like a Pirate Day.
(Image credit: Talk Like a Pirate)
You think driving your RV to a state park is camping? Try hanging a hammock over a gorge in the Alps! These highliners set up 17 hammocks for 26 people to sleep in under the stars at Monte Piana, Italy, and over the scenic gorge in the Dolomites where 18,000 soldiers died in battle in World War I.
Highlinemeeting 2015 took place last week. The photographs are stunning, and you can see more videos here. A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid
See also: last year's meeting.
(Image credit: Sebastian Wahlhütter)
