Christian Long tells us about the time he got a job as a movie extra on the 2010 film Machete. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it’s full of violence, gunfire, and explosions, just what you’d expect from Robert Rodriquez. What goes on behind the camera may be boring compared to the finished product, but it’s a lot more exciting than sitting at a desk all day.  

There were a few explosions during the shoot, and they were all treated much more casually than I’d imagined. At random times, we’d be told things like “stay away from this barrel, we’re blowing it up in a few minutes.” On camera, we’d carry weapons made of rubber and plastic while the stunt coordinators would run around firing blanks. Off camera, they’d teach us how to fall like we’d been shot and how to land without getting hurt. This came in especially handy during this scene.

I do have to admit to feeling some disappointment when I asked about squibs and was told that all our blood was going to be added digitally in post-production.

See the scene he referred to (and others) and read the rest of the story at Uproxx. It turns out that Long was eventually promoted from extra to Robert DeNiro’s stand-in’s stand in. Go figure.

Medical treatment for severe injuries always advances in time of war, as there are so many patients. Doctors have come a long way in saving arms or legs mangled by explosives or artillery. But saving a limb can be painful, time-consuming, and isn’t always a complete success. Is it better to go the extra mile to save an arm or a leg, or go ahead and amputate?

It’s hard to make sweeping statements about which is a better choice, limb salvage or amputation, because so much of this depends on the severity of the injury. Above knee amputees have a harder time learning to use their prosthetic than below knee amputees, for example, as do those who suffer upper body injuries. Losing a hand tends to be far more life-changing than losing a foot. Because they try to lump a lot of things together, many of these results also solidify what might seem obvious. In the words of one study: “Participants with more functional lower limbs had better quality of life than did those with less functional lower limbs regardless of whether they underwent amputation or limb-salvage surgery.”

The best decision for each patient depends on a lot of factors: the location and severity of the injury, available therapies, community and family support, the patients’s future plans, and the pain involved, among others. Motherboard looks at these factors and follows one Army captain’s story as he is confronted with that decision. -via Digg

(Image: Will Reynolds)

Check out Mario and Luigi, now enhanced with LEDs! Mr. Lumafi and friend are just two of the thousands of people who showed up to show off their homemade costumes of characters from movies, TV, cartoons, videos games, and more at Comic Con. If you liked the pictures in 55 Cool Cosplays From the 2015 San Diego Comic Con, you’re in for a treat!

Jill Harness spent every day of San Diego Comic Con on the lookout for great cosplayers, snapping their pictures for our enjoyment. You’ll find even more at Rue the Day, with 160+ Amazing Cosplays From the 2015 San Diego Comic Con. It will make you want to book a flight for next year!

As the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1989, Russell Guy bought a group of crates from some military officers that turned out to be a treasure. They were intricately-detailed maps of the world, created by Soviet cartographers with the help of government spies.

During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories. They’re the kinds of things that would come in handy if you’re planning a tank invasion. Or an occupation. Things that would be virtually impossible to find out without eyes on the ground.

Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

The maps are a storehouse of not only geography, but intelligence about the places shown. Guy made a business out of them. But he wasn’t the only one to come into possession of such maps. Others, such as John Davies, have spent years studying them. Read about these beautiful and detailed formerly secret maps at Wired. -via Metafilter

Hippies found a great place to live in 1971- an abandoned military base in Christianshavn, a borough of Copenhagen, Denmark. They called it “Freetown Christiania.” It was a commune based on independence, collective ownership, and marijuana.  

The area of Christiania originally consisted of military barracks. After the military moved out, a group of hippies and squatters moved in and created a small community with idiosyncratic architectures placed alongside restored shacks. The residents declared the area free from the municipality, vowed not to pay taxes, created its own flag and set up bars, cafés, grocery shops, museum, art galleries, and music venues. The town’s biggest attraction is Pusher Street, where hash and marijuana are sold openly from permanent stands. The stands were evicted in 2004 but is said to have returned.

There are about a thousand people living in Christiana today, and they pay taxes now. No cars or guns are allowed. The neighborhood has become quite a tourist attraction, and the art, food, and entertainment provided for them generates income for the residents. See more pictures of Christiana at Amusing Planet. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Kieran Lynam)

I learned a new word today. Recrudescence is “the revival of material or behavior that had previously been stabilized, settled, or diminished.”  It makes plenty of sense as it pertains to this comic from Lunarbaboon. And it also made me a little bittersweet. I have one child wanting to spend all her time with me because she’s leaving for college soon, and another who needs my help finding one for next year. And then there’s my husband, planning all the stuff we’ll do when we’re alone together. 

If you are a fan of Lunarbaboon, you'll want to go to the webcomic site and leave a comment of congratulations on Chris' 500th comic.

Chuck Jones directed more than 200 cartoons for Warner Bros. You watched them over and over: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner, Pepe le Pew. Here we have a chance to see those wonderful characters again and learn about their motivations, personalities, and how they managed to give us so many laughs. There’s a lot more going on than you realized as a child watching cartoons.

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Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) takes a look at how legendary animator Chuck Jones crafted his wacky cartoons. -via Metafilter

A near-complete fossil specimen, including feathers, of a dinosaur in China has been named  Zhenyuanlong suni. It was about five feet long and closely related to Velociraptor.  

Claim to fame: Feathers didn’t evolve for flight. They allowed it. Paleontologists have recognized this since the 1970s, at least, and numerous discoveries of non-flying dinosaurs covered with fluff, bristles, and other types of wispy integument have confirmed that feathers and their forerunners must have had functions outside the aerodynamic realm. Described by Junchang Lü and Stephen Brusatte, the dinosaur Zhenyuanlong adds to that picture with its extravagant coat of feathers.

It’s possible that Zhenyuanlong suni, which scientists believe was flightless, may have evolved from earlier flying creatures. Read more about this unique feathered dinosaur at Lealaps.

(Image credit: Zhao Chuang)

Alfie is taking a walk through a field with his humans. But the grass is high, taller than Alfie! How is he going to find his way around and keep up with his people?

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With an intermittent vertical check to gain his bearings every so often! He looks like a Jack-in-the-box, but it worked for Alfie. -via Arbroath

I had never heard of the Magnus Effect before, but if it explains this weird flying basketball, clue me in! Derek Muller shows us how his buddies threw a basketball off the top of the Gordon Dam in Tasmania to see what would happen. A little backspin made all the difference.

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It turns out that you can do all kinds of things by harnessing the Magnus Effect. Cool! -via Viral Viral Videos

Florida has always been different. Now known as America’s retirement home, theme park destination, and the source of crazy news headlines, the history of the state is also strange and different. After Spanish conquistadors took charge, it was traded back and forth between Spain and Britain, and served as a refuge for those who didn’t want anything to do with the colonies that became the United States. That included those escaping from slavery.  

4. The First Settlement of Ex-Slaves

In the late 17th century, the Spanish government began offering official asylum to all slaves who managed to escape the British colonies and get to Florida, provided they agreed to convert to Catholicism and serve in the Spanish military. The newly free (or free-er) people settled in a town called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, a.k.a. Fort Mose. The fort was home to hundreds, and is now considered a precursor to the Underground Railroad.

8. Abolitionist American Indians

After Fort Mose closed, the Seminole and Creek tribes picked up the slack, welcoming runaway slaves into their communities. When officials ordered their return, Seminoles reportedly responded that they “had merely given hungry people food, and invited the slaveholders to catch the runaways themselves.” Partially because of this, the American colonies began warring with Floridian Indians in the 1810s, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams declared the whole territory “a derelict, open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States and serving no other earthly purpose, than as a post of annoyance to them.” He convinced Spain to give up Florida to the United States so that they could tame it; on July 17th, 1821, the reins were officially passed.

Florida was also a refuge for “lawless rascals,” Americans who didn’t care for that whole revolution business, and horses imported from Europe. Atlas Obscura has a list of highlights from the history of Florida that you probably didn’t know if you didn’t grow up there.  

Owners of the Colorado Cherry Company in Lyons, Colorado, got to work on Tuesday morning to find their shop had been broken into. The culprit was not caught by the shop’s surveillance cameras, but from the claw marks it left behind, the perpetrator is assumed to be a bear. A hungry bear. The animal had devoured 24 cherry pies and 14 apple pies. However, he left the frozen pies alone, and did not touch the strawberry-rhubarb pies. The bear has taste. The owners of the shop were able to clean up and open for business the same day. -via HuffPo

(Image credit: Colorado Cherry Company)

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Ethan Scott has been colorblind all his life. Some colors are muted for him, and others he’s never seen -like purple. Then his friends got together and bought him a pair of those new EnChroma glasses that allow colorblind people to see colors. They didn’t tell him what the glasses were for, so we get to see his complete surprise as he discovers what the world is supposed to look like. He gets a little emotional. Contains some NSFW language. -via Viral Viral Videos

Pollock’s Toy Museum in London has a room full of vintage and antique dolls that creep people out. Museum employee Ken Hoyt says the doll room is near the end of the museum tour, and some folks will backtrack through the museum to avoid going in there, because the dolls creep them out. Psychologist Frank McAndrew did some research on “creepiness,” and explains what it means.  

“We shouldn’t be afraid of a little piece of plastic, but it’s sending out social signals,” says McAndrew, noting too that depending on the doll, these signals could just as easily trigger a positive response, such as protectiveness. “They look like people but aren’t people, so we don’t know how to respond to it, just like we don’t know how to respond when we don’t know whether there is a danger or not... the world in which we evolved how we process information, there weren’t things like dolls.”

Some researchers also believe that a level of mimicry of nonverbal cues, such as hand movements or body language, is fundamental to smooth human interaction. The key is that it has to be the right level of mimicry – too much or too little and we get creeped out. In a study published in Psychological Science in 2012, researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that inappropriate nonverbal mimicry produced a physical response in the creeped out subject: They felt chills. Dolls don’t have the ability to mimic (although they do seem to have the ability to make eye contact), but because at least part some part of our brain is suspicious about whether this is a human or not, we may expect them to, further confusing things.

An article on creepy dolls and how they affect us at Smithsonian talks about the uncanny valley, pareidolia, and pediophobia, which is the fear of dolls. And if you think grandma’s antique doll collection is creepy, try having some around that look like you.

Check out this amazing shot taken by friend's parents at their vineyard in Orange NSW #colmarestatevineyard #orange #snow #nsw #australia #kangaroo #wine #wildlife #luvaustralia

A photo posted by @docholidayescape on Jul 16, 2015 at 5:59pm PDT

Instagram member docholidayescape took this picture in Orange, New South Wales today. Yes, that’s a kangaroo in the snow, something you don’t see very often, even though it’s winter Down Under. Up to 20cm (almost 8 inches) of snow fell in New South Wales, the most snow in half a century. Parts of Queensland were affected, too. Many roads are closed, thousands are without power, and quite a few schools cancelled classes today. See more pictures from the Australian snowfall at Buzzfeed.