James Gillingham was a shoemaker by trade, but found his real calling in 1866. That's when he met a man who had lost an arm in a cannon firing accident. Gillingham made him a new arm- for free.

The new leather limb he built was strong and rigid but also perfectly fitted. The medical world noticed his talent, and Gillingham soon began producing a variety of artificial limbs.

Using a secret process wherein he molded the leather to the client’s limb before hardening it, Gillingham started a business making prostheses.

By 1910, he had restored mobility and function to over 15,000 patients.

Not only did Gillingham make superior prosthetic limbs, he photographed many of his clients. His pictures appeared in medical journals, in which he advised surgeons on ways to amputate that would leave patients with more mobility in the future. Mashable has a collection of those photographs. Notice that the women in the pictures try to hide their faces, turning shy at the prospect of showing their limbs, while the men are proud to show off theirs. -via Everlasting Blort

Mark Rober taught us how to make a watermelon smoothie a couple of years ago. Now he’s got a neat watermelon party trick to impress everyone at this year’s Labor Day picnic.

(YouTube link)

I would add that it would behoove you to carry that watermelon in a cooler, tub, or at least put plastic under it until you get to the picnic, because it’s liable to leak a bit. And Mark, that potato salad would have been eaten up, and fast, if you had remembered to put mustard in it. -via Digg

See also: more from Mark Rober.

An artificial intelligence system produced by a team at the University of Tubingen in Germany can take any photograph and render it in the style of artists such as Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, or Paul Cézanne. The program separates image and style and can combine them any way you want.

When a photo is fed through the network, it goes through multiple layers, each layer analyzing a different piece of the photo, including colors, shapes, or more complex object recognition like “dog" or “cat." Previously, these networks could only identify the style and content of an object or a photo as one piece of data.

Now researchers have made it possible for these artificial systems to parse style and content totally separately by introducing style reconstructions on top of the existing neural network. It computes similarities between the features of each different layer and discards information about the content. This means they can take a photo of a street, and the system can turn it into an image that looks like it was painted by Van Gogh.

Read about the software at The Daily Dot and consider what style you want your family portrait on the wall to be.

Jason Frost and Brandon Key went fishing on the Black Warrior River in Alabama on Saturday. They didn’t expect to see kittens swimming toward them as if desperate for a boat ride.

(YouTube link)

Frost posted the video to Facebook, where he said,

I really don't know how to describe this video, but the Warrior River never fails to surprise me......this puts a new spin on the term "catfishing"

Both kittens already have a new home together. -via Time

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

by Stuart M. Shieber, Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

I demonstrate that Hinchliffe’s rule—if the title of a scholarly article is a yes-no question, the answer is “no”—is paradoxical, by providing an article whose title is a question whose answer is “no” if and only if its answer is “yes”.

Hinchliffe’s Rule
Hinchliffe’s rule, attributed with unknown veracity to Ian Hinchliffe (Holderness, 2014), is this: “If the Title of a Scholarly Article Is a Yes-No Question, the Answer is ‘No’.” It can be seen as the academic analog of Betteridge’s law of headlines (Betteridge, 2009).

In 1988, Boris Peon (which appears, thankfully if unsurprisingly, to be a pseudonym (Strassler, 2013)) distributed an article entitled “Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?” (Peon, 1988) Here is the abstract, which constitutes the article in its entirety:

Hinchliffe has asserted that whenever the title of a paper is a question with a yes/no answer, the answer is always no. This paper demonstrates that Hinchliffe’s assertion is false, but only if it is true.

Peon’s article hints at Hinchliffe’s rule being paradoxical, but it fails to manifest a true paradox. This is a lost opportunity, which I intend to correct by this very article.

In 1988, ABC launched a sitcom designed around the standup routine of comedian Roseanne Barr. It was totally different from everything else on TV: shows full of wealthy people who looked like movie stars. It was an immediate hit, despite the fact that Barr’s acting abilities were dwarfed by the rest of the cast. No matter- she learned the craft fairly quickly, as we watched. Here’s some behind-the-scenes trivia about Roseanne.  

2. THE SHOW WAS ORIGINALLY TITLED LIFE AND STUFF.

Roseanne creator, head writer, and executive producer Matt Williams said the benign title established the sitcom as an ensemble piece. But Barr argued that the show should be called Roseanne, since she was the lead character and the show was based on her life. (Williams left the show after season one.)

9. ALL THREE OF BARR’S EX-HUSBANDS MADE GUEST APPEARANCES ON THE SHOW.

Roseanne was inspired by life with the comedian’s first husband, Bill Pentland, and their three children. Pentland served as an executive consultant for three seasons, wrote two episodes, and played one of Dan’s buddies in an early episode. In 1990, Barr divorced Pentland after 16 years of marriage. Four days later, she wed comedian Tom Arnold, who had a recurring role as Arnie Thomas. Then in 1995 Barr married Ben Thomas, her former bodyguard, and gave him two bit roles as a cop. They remain his only acting credits.

Critics thought that Roseanne was a ratings hit because it portrayed working-class people that the audience could relate to. But we all know it was a hit because the lines were so funny, and we all wish we could be that fast on our feet with the perfect comeback. Read the rest of the trivia list about Roseanne at mental_floss.

Two robots are mining a distant planet. It’s a lonely job, until they run into each other. No, it’s nothing like Wall-E, even though these robots are cute, too.   

(vimeo link)

Jack Anderson made this award-winning animated short film by himself. He said this took about a year of rendering. -via Boing Boing

(YouTube link)

Wonder what these things sound like…. AAGH! Run away! Run Away!

Highlighting the main charm of Vine, a video like this makes it clear that six seconds are all that’s necessary to make us laugh. However, if you are itching for an explanation, these are Swalkie Talkies, a dog toy I will make a note to avoid. Yes, I can see they are pelicans, but the original Vine is named Duck Army. -via Metafilter

Update: Since Vine is defunct, a YouTube video will do.

They showed a clip from the documentary Air Jaws: Walking with Great Whites, which premiered on Discovery last night in the US. Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson of the Australian morning show Today aren’t having any of it.

(YouTube link)

Considering that every type of wildlife in Australia is already trying to kill you, you’d think these folks would be unimpressed. If they are that scared, I don’t want anywhere near a Great White. -via reddit

I dunno about this. It doesn’t look quite safe to me. But it must have turned out all right, because the entire video descriptions says,

Witness the awesome pulling power of Dodge trucks.

(YouTube link)

Pulling down a tree with a truck is not a recommended tactic. You might save some money by not hiring a professional, but getting flattened, no matter how small the chance, can be a devastating consequence. -via Arbroath  
 

In the town of Burjassot, Spain, a historic underground excavation was recently opened to the public for the first time in 100 years. The 47 underground grain silos were used for food storage for several hundred years, then converted to a wartime bunker system, then closed.

In 16th-century Valencia, grain storage was a problem. The province didn’t have enough of its own, and imports from other Iberian regions were uncertain, as there were frequent bad harvests and peninsula-wide shortages. The best option was to import grain from Sicily over the Mediterranean Sea, but this made sense only if it could be done in great quantities, meaning Valencia needed a large storage solution.

So the first silos of Burjassot were authorized. This outlying town was chosen because of its elevated position and proximity to the capital. Three underground silos were initially built, but this would expand to 47 over the course of the centuries. Soil would be dug out of the ground, in the shape of an enormous vase, and then its walls would be fortified. These underground containers provided perfect conditions in which to store grain, and the silos remained in use until the beginning of the 20th century.

From the outside, all you see are small, capped holes in the ground. Inside is a different story. Read about the silos and see pictures, plus images of the picturesque town of Burjassot at For 91 Days.

Writer and director Wes Craven was responsible for Freddy Krueger’s invasion of your nightmares in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, which includes nine feature films and a TV series, plus books, comics, and video games.   

From his feature film debut, The Last House on the Left in 1972 to the four Scream movies, he was a master of the modern horror genre. Craven’s IMDb entry has a list of 36 writing credits, 27 producing credits, 29 directing credits, and 19 acting credits.

Wes Craven died of brain cancer Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.
 
(Image credit: Bob Bekian)

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.

The longest high-five chain in the world, and a few other interesting “longest” things. (Note: This is a pretty long article. So you might have to take your device into the bathroom for a break to read the entire thing.)

LONGEST CAT FUR

In August 2013, Guinness World Records awarded its first-ever “cat with the longest fur” title. Recipient: Colonel Meow, a Himalayan Persian kitty belonging to Anne Marie Avey of Los Angeles, California. Fur length: nine inches. (The length was verified by three different veterinarians.) “We already knew that he was the best cat in the world,” a proud Ms. Avey said, “but to be recognized in the Guinness World Records book takes it to the next level.”

(Image source: Guinness World Records)

Bonus fact: The best part of the story is that Colonel Meow was a rescue kitty. He was in a shelter in Seattle, Washington— and scheduled to be euthanized— when he was rescued by a Seattle group dedicated to rescuing Himalayan Persian cats. They put him up for adoption online… and the rest is cat-fur history.

LONGEST CARROT

Joe Atherton of Nottinghamshire, England, grows carrots in plastic tubes more than 20 feet long, each one filled with nutrient-rich compost and positioned so they lie at an angle of about 45 degrees to ensure proper drainage. In September 2007, Atherton carefully extracted one of those tube-grown carrots, being careful not to break its long, fragile root. That particular carrot had been growing for 14 months: Atherton had extended its growing season beyond the usual two or three months by regularly nipping off any seed buds that appeared on it, thereby preventing it from going to seed. Result: the carrot was 19 feet, 1.875 inches long. It’s the current record holder for “longest carrot in the world.”

When your world revolves around school, the real bad guy of the drama is the bully. And so it was with ‘80s teen movies, and there were a lot of ‘80s teen movies. Not all bullies fit the exact formula, but there were many similarities that a majority shared. Uproxx took the most common tropes used in teen movies from the ‘80s and crunched them into the ultimate stereotyped movie bully. I think you will agree with their conclusions. Now if we can get them to do the same with the jock, the cheerleader, the outsider, the nerd  …well, we know who the nerd would be.

(YouTube link)

Exactly what it says on the tin. Donald Trump talks about China a lot- enough to make it sound downright funny. This supercut from HuffPo may prove to be an earworm. My apologies in advance.  -via Viral Viral Videos