A year after their last installment, we get a new video from Melody Sheep in the Symphony of Science series.
This one features narration (turned into singing with autotune) by astrophysicist Brian Cox. It’s about how the origin of the universe is all about light. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A mother gray whale and her calf interact with tourists out on a sightseeing ride off Baja California. The event was captured by a drone recording the whales operated by wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine. How exciting for these tourists to go home and tell people they not only saw whales, but touched them!
Personally, I was waiting for the boat to tip over from everyone rushing to the same side to get close to the whales. -via Tastefully Offensive
Take a couple of minutes to enjoy another feelgood outdoor sequence by Devin Supertramp and his gang of daredevils. Team Supertramp traveled to British Columbia to a natural sluice leading to a waterfall. It’s nature’s own Slip'N Slide!
It looks like so much fun …but I can also see someone cracking their skull open doing this. The music is "Underwater" by Milkman. -via Viral Viral Videos
YouTube member carsandwater has another mission for his beloved nickel ball. He had a request to see what a red-hot ball of nickel will do to that foam that florists use to hold flower arrangements. Now, we are used to seeing the nickel ball tear through materials as the heat melts them, but this is different. Weirdly different.
It doesn’t so much melt the foam as it …”affects” it. Now I wonder what kind of weird chemistry went into creating that magical material. -via Boing Boing
I’ve never heard of a transporter bridge before. The Newport Transporter Bridge has served those who cross the River Usk in Wales for a hundred years now. It’s like a ferry, but it’s a bridge instead of a boat. In other words, you ride across in a cable car, sort of. Why?
Tom Scott (previously at Neatorama) explains the reasons the bridge was built this way, and the reasons they don’t make bridges like this anymore. He also walked across it, which you can see here. -via Digg
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
A systematic literature review of blank pages in academic publishing*
by Glen Wright, F.X. Coudert, Martin Bentley, Graham Steel, and Sylvain Deville
CNRS and Chimie ParisTech, Paris, France
The phrase “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank,” common in all areas of publishing, has been found in peer reviewed academic articles costing $30 to access. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first known review of Intentionally Blank Pages (IBPs).
We looked at the variations in samples from the existing literature, and quantified the amount of blankness on such pages using a new metric, the “Blankness Defect Rate” (BDR). After showing that most blank pages are defective, we suggest a number of alternatives, factually correct or less ambiguous. Then we offer some possible explanations for this phenomenon.
Context
The phrase “This Page is Intentionally Left Blank” is ubiquitous in the world of printed text, appearing most notably in instruction manuals and exam papers. It is generally accepted that its purpose is to indicate that the page on which it appears is purposely bereft of content. Yet the very inclusion of this phrase nullifies its intent: the page is no longer blank. Indeed, it is now intentionally not blank. By virtue of self-reference, the phrase denies its own existence, despite the fact that we know it is there. This is, essentially, a rather banal, academic version of René Magritte’s surrealist work The Treachery of Images (Figure 1).
The U.S. Code of Regulations (1984) actually mandates that blank pages in certain books and pamphlets must be marked as such.1 As such, they are especially common in technical works. This has lead to a large number of people attempting to solve the philosophical conundrum such nonblank blank pages create. The Office of the General Counsel at the U.S. General Accounting Office, acutely aware of the distress caused, purported in 2001 to have resolved the conundrum in its Principles of Federal Appropriations Law (second edition, volume IV).2 Text on page ii, which is otherwise blank, reads, “This page is intended to be blank. Please do not read it.” However, this appears to have only further entrenched the philosophical contradictions, and the subsequent third edition contained no such text on its blank page.
Figure 2. Screenshot of the ScienceDirect checkout page, accessed via an institutional login from Sciences Po, showing the cost of an IBP taken from Verified Synthesis of Zeolitic Materials (2001).
In October 2014, François-Xavier Coudert reported that a number of peer-reviewed academic “articles,” priced at $30 each on the website ScienceDirect, consist solely of one blank page apiece (Figure 2).3 In order to determine what value was being added to these pages by the peer review process that they have undergone, we set out to investigate their blankness.
An ad firm had asked Larry Weiss to come up with a way to make children’s underwear more appealing. He had a great idea -make them look like superhero costumes! Weiss knew it was a blockbuster concept, and he knew blockbusters, because he was the one who came up with the idea for Fruity Pebbles.
Weiss was confident it had appeal. But Hanes had passed on the idea. So did the Scott Paper Company, which spent a year in development before senior executives got cold feet. Though he began working on the project at the urging of an ad firm, Weiss had taken on the financial burden of licensing Marvel, DC, and other characters himself. When Scott backed out, Weiss had gotten them to agree to pay for the next year’s merchandising rights to Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and all the rest.
The money could buy another year of shopping the idea—but Weiss was broke. “I had my own $64,000 question,” he says. “I was poor at the time. I get a check from Scott. I could take it and say, ‘Well, bad idea, but at least I got a little money,’ or I could move forward.”
Weiss used the money to keep pushing his underwear idea, and Underoos debuted in 1977. You know they were a success, but just how successful they were is part of the story of Underoos that you can read at mental_floss.
The normal life cycle of a vehicle is to run as long as it can, then be stripped for usable parts, then the leftover scrap metal is recycled. But sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. Someone puts those vehicles aside with plans to do something or other and it never happens. Dust settles in, then rust, and sometimes even moss and trees grow up around them. One of those places is the Kaufdorf car graveyard in Switzerland.
A former junkyard owned by one Mr Walter Messerli, the cemetery began as far back as 1933. At the time, Mr Messerli was interested mainly in the money he could get from scrap parts. However, he also seemed to have a strange affinity for the vehicles themselves. Rather than doing as others in his business did and scrapping the abandoned cars entirely, Mr Messerli carefully preserved their shells, secreting them away on his vast and overgrown lot.
It was to become an obsession. By the time he was ready to retire, Mr Messerli had a collection of hundreds of cars spanning five decades. But the vehicle cemetery wasn’t finished yet. After he took over the business, his son continued to add to the collection until it contained some 1,500 vehicles, dating from 1930 right the way to the early 2000s.
In 2008, the cars were removed and scrapped, but we still have plenty of pictures. In a list at Urban Ghosts, you’ll also see ten abandoned vehicle graveyards populated by particular types, such as Reliant Robins, trolley cars, ambulances, and even rickshaws.
(Image credit: Norbert Aepli)
Heron of Alexandria was an inventor who died around 70 AD. He actually conceived the first vending machine to dispense holy water in temples.
That machine came about thanks to the handiwork of Heron of Alexandria. Now, Heron invented plenty of things that helped set the stage for our modern society. Steam engine? He was all over it. A wind-powered machine? That was him. The syringe? He got there first.
But many of these things pale in comparison to the machine he created that efficiently ensured that people weren't taking too much holy water at the temples where they went to worship. It was an annoying, frustrating problem, but Heron came up with a solution that was immensely clever.
It was a simple but ingenious mechanical device that used the weight of a coin to temporarily open the floodgates. It wasn’t a big hit, though, and the idea was shelved for 1800 years. But then the history of vending machines really takes off. Ernie Smith runs down the highlights of vending machine history for us in an article at Atlas Obscura.
His name is Ben and he’s only three weeks old. Sure, he can still get milk from his mommy, but he’s ahead of the game. He just doesn’t have all the skills yet. Curiosity gave the kitty a drink! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Does it bother you when your significant other squeezes the toothpaste tube wrong, or puts the toilet paper on the roll wrong? You tell yourself those are little things that shouldn’t matter, but it still gets under your skin.
Elliot Mason wrote a little song about it, with a wacky video. -via Arbroath
Dr. David Smith of McMaster University and Dr. Frauke Zeller and Ryerson University created hitchBOT, a cute robot that hitchhikes. It started its “life” in Port Credit, Ontario, and traveled across Canada by itself, relying on the kindness (and curiosity) of strangers. It also traveled across Germany and the Netherlands, and had plenty of adventures along the way, all the time communicating via Facebook and Twitter. See how that works in this video.
Nothing went wrong with any of those trips -until hitchBOT came to the USA. An epic trip was planned, but two weeks into the journey, hitchbot was damaged by vandals in Philadelphia.
My trip must come to an end for now, but my love for humans will never fade. Thanks friends: http://t.co/DabYmi6OxH pic.twitter.com/sJPVSxeawg
— hitchBOT (@hitchBOT) August 1, 2015
The team is not going to press charges, and are focusing on learning from the experience. You can follow hitchBOT news at the website.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.
(Image credit: Mike Lewis)
Here’s the story of how two ordinary guys discovered an extraordinary cave and, vowing to protect it, kept it a secret for 14 years.
THE SCENE
One Saturday in 1974, two young men affiliated with Southern Arizona Grotto, a spelunking, or “caving,” group based in Tuscon, Arizona, were out exploring, looking for new caves near the Whetsone Mountains. Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen traveled about an hour outside of Tucson, where they were roommates at the University of Arizona. As they often did, Tufts and Tenen carried only the minimum amount of caving equipment they needed: two miners’ hard hats with gas carbine lanterns affixed to the top, some rope, hammers and chisels, and snacks.
Tufts had been introduced to spelunking by an uncle, and on this day he wanted to explore an area he’d first seen seven years earlier, when he was still in high school. He recalled a large sinkhole with a narrow crack descending into bedrock. On a recent walk, he’d rediscovered the sinkhole and also noticed that the U-shaped hill next to the sinkhole had what appeared to be a collapsed cave entrance. He wondered whether there was something interesting under the hill.
THE DISCOVERY
Tufts and Tenen found the spot and lowered themselves into the 15-foot-deep sinkhole, a dry and dusty space with a skull and crossbones carved in one wall. They found footprints, a couple of broken stalactites (mineral formations, or “dripstones,” that hang like icicles from the ceiling of a cave), and a 10-inch-wide crack. But most important, they noticed a breeze moving through the crack— a moist, warm breeze that carried the smell of bats, a sure sign of an interesting cave.
YouTube member dondrapersayswhat has worked his magic once again to bring us a supercut of movie characters singing a pop tune. I cannot imagine the work that goes into finding all these clips, much less stringing them together in proper sequence and rhythm.
This edit of “Uptown Funk” features clips from 280 different films, which are labeled in the closed captions. The project took three months to finish. -via Uproxx
No matter how thoroughly parents think they explain the world to their children, they can’t cover everything, because it’s difficult to remember what a context-free life is like. But that’s what children have. Everything is a new experience, and it’s easy to get the wrong idea. A roundup of these childhood misconceptions had me giggling.
8. “I thought the cops would come get me.”
“When I was younger I saw an accident on the side of the road and my mom said, ‘If you have an accident, the cops come.’ I thought she meant that if I peed my pants in the car the cops would come get me.”
—Kate Heidenreich, Facebook
14. “I am too young! I am too young!”
“When I was in the first grade a lot of my school’s teachers were pregnant. One day I ran home to tell my mom that my teacher announced that she was expecting a baby, too, and my mom said, ‘I guess she drank the Kool-Aid.’ The next day we were served Kool-Aid for a kid’s birthday and I freaked out, screaming, ‘I am too young, I am too young!’”
—jennifers160
There are dozens more in the comments.
My mom used to tell me that hairspray was used to "keep your hair from flying away". I thought that without hairspray your hair would going flying off your head like a bird and you'd be bald.
Janell Ebel
Well, we all have these. I refused to eat cotton candy because I thought it was made of the same material that was stuffed into the top of aspirin bottles. My daughter just recently told me that she’d watch me put dryer lint in a “magic pink box” when she was very young. It was a small wastebasket on a shelf. She thought it was magic, because when it got full, it would “magically” disappear. It was years before she figured out I just emptied it. Read the roundup of childhood misconceptions at Buzzfeed. And if you remember a funny one, share it with us!
(Image credit: Flickr user Pete Bellis)