Kevin Blandford won a free trip to Puerto Rico from his workplace. However, he and his wife Bonnie have a young baby, and they decided Bonnie would stay home because taking the child would be more hassle than it’s worth. Blandford dutifully sent home photographs of his trip, making it clear how miserable he was without Bonnie there.
You almost feel sorry for the guy… but not really. He also posted the album to reddit. You can see all 14 images at imgur. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Brian Stansberry)
When air travel took off in the 1960s, it looked at first like ocean liners were about to go the way of the horse and buggy. But then, the quick-thinking shipping industry adapted. With a few tweaks to onboard services and some smart marketing, they reinvented their fleets. No longer was a vast ship a way to get somewhere else- out was the destination itself. The idea took: More than 20 million people embarked on seafaring vacations in 2013. If you’re planning to join them this year, there are a few things you should know.
(Image credit: Jim G from Silicon Valley, CA, USA)
1. Prepare to eat a ton. How do you keep several thousand high-paying passengers happy? Massive provisioning, of course. According to one 2012 report, the Disney Magic cruise carried 10,000 pounds of chicken and 71,500 eggs for a weeklong jaunt for 2,700 people. Another boat stowed 2,000 pounds of shrimp. Rest assured that nothing is wasted. Ingredients left over from dinner later appear in the salad bar.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ricky Brigante)
2. Choose the room with no view.
The classic anthropological hypothesis on why humans have so much pain in childbirth compared to other animals, even our closest relatives, is the obstetrical dilemma (OD) hypothesis. That says that human babies have large brains, and human birth canals aren’t really big enough because we walk on two legs instead of four. It’s also why human babies are born so helpless and underdeveloped compared to apes. That’s the conventional wisdom, although if you look closely, there’s not much empirical evidence that even wider hips and a bigger birth canal would hinder a woman’s ability to walk. Biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth gives us a different hypothesis, called EGG (energetics, growth, gestation) to explain the length of human gestation, which controls the other factors.
The EGG hypothesizes that mothers give birth when they do because they cannot possibly give any more energy into gestation and fetal growth. And when you look at the data available on pregnancy and lactation metabolism in our species, it suggests that right around 9 months of gestation, mothers reach the metabolic ceiling for most humans.
Here’s Herman’s Figure 3 from our paper, showing the EGG for humans, plotted with real metabolic data. Circles are the offspring, squares are the mother. Notice how fetal energy demands increase exponentially as the end of a normal human gestation period approaches. To keep it in any longer, mother would have to burst through her normal metabolic ceiling. Instead, she gives birth and remains in a safe and feasible metabolic zone.
After explaining the EGG hypothesis that she published with several colleagues, Dunsworth switches gears and talks about how this hypothesis relates to any readers who may be pregnant.
You worrying that you gestated too long or too little compared to the species average is a bit like you worrying that you’re shorter or taller than average, have a larger or smaller head than average, have more saliva than average, or that you can’t intentionally fart. Stop worrying about your normal variation. Variation exists because it works. There’s safe wiggle room around most traits and sometimes there’s even full-on spasmodic dancing room. We’d be extinct if there wasn’t any room for variation in how to survive and reproduce. Celebrate your weirdness, your slightly long healthy gestation, your slightly short healthy gestation, your big healthy baby, your small healthy baby, your freckles, your asymmetrical face, your hairy knuckles, your lack of wisdom teeth, your pterodactyl toes. Who cares! If life’s getting on with your weird ass, then you can certainly get on with life.
The article at Scientific American is delightful in that it makes a difficult scientific concept easy to understand, with plenty of extra information about how evolutionary science really works. -via Metafilter
Whether you’re a true fan of the genre or not, you have to admit that a good epic Western adventure is pure escape from the trials and trivia of modern day life. This supercut by Robert Jones has only the best ones, featuring John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Redford, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Charles Bronson, Gary Cooper, and stars from a few Western comedies you know and love, too. Take three minutes for a nostalgia break with this video. -Thanks, Robert!
See, trees have knots, and the cat is on, or in, one. The fact that it’s a standard overhand knot is just plain weird. We don’t know the provenance of this picture, as it has been shared on Pinterest more than anywhere else. The caption style makes it appear to be quite old. But isn’t it a delight? -via Arbroath
Mental_floss takes a closer look at pigs in this week’s List Show. Why pigs? Because every time someone mentions pork, they have to put money in the piggy bank, and it’s time to fill the bank to finance a party. But there have been some pretty interesting pigs in our history, and fascinating facts about our delicious porcine livestock. And since it’s April Fool’s Day, they thought it would be nice to have a really silly subject. Still interesting.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
[Ed. note: In 2013, Eddie Deezen brought us A Few Things You Might Not Have Known About Abraham Lincoln. As Lincoln led a well-documented and interesting life, here is a completely new list of more trivia about President Lincoln.]
Perhaps our most beloved and revered U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln was our 16th commander-in-chief. As most of us know, Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated. He was also our first bearded U.S. president.
He also managed to get our country through the Civil War, the bloodiest-ever war in our nation's history. Although critics and revisionists may question his intentions, it is apparent to most people that Lincoln was instrumental in the ending of the horrible institution of slavery in america. Lincoln was, by all accounts, a brilliant man, a gifted writer and a captivating public speaker. Alright, let's take a look at a few facts you may not have known about Mr. Abraham Lincoln.
* When Lincoln was nine, a horse kicked him in the forehead while he was in the middle of a sentence. He fell unconscious for several hours and when he awoke, his first words were the completion of the sentence he had been saying when the horse kicked him.
* Lincoln was a licensed bartender. He owned a saloon before becoming president.
* Lincoln and his future assassin, John Wilkes Booth, were photographed together at Lincoln's inauguration.
(Image credit: Mercury88888888)
* A Union captain once sent Lincoln a mail-order ad for pornographic pictures.
Google Maps has added a Pac-Man game for April Fools Day! The game is available now for you to play. Just go to Google Maps, and set it to your neighborhood if you like. Then click on the small Pac Man square at the bottom left. The streets become the maze for Pac-Man! Shown here is my neighborhood, but you can pretty much go anywhere that Google Maps goes. If you want to play, you DO need roads. -via Daily of the Day
Spring, when a young droid’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love! R2D2 falls head over heels for a pretty postal service drop box. She’s a bit shy, but our favorite Star Wars character is determined to win her over. Will there be a happy ending for our mechanical friend? -via Geeks Are Sexy
I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Interstellar yet, but I don’t mind spoilers, and this Honest Trailer certainly has them. I did see Contact. However, if you’ve seen the movie, you will no doubt get more humor out of the video. And I got enough even without seeing the film! Honestly, I have no qualms about okra going extinct. -via Tastefully Offensive
Wong Fu Productions shows us how difficult it can be to scope someone out, as a guy tries to figure out exactly how old an attractive woman is. Is she jailbait? His Mom's age? You don't just ask a stranger how old she is, but why didn’t he just ask her if she’s in school? That wouldn’t have hurt any feelings. As it is, we get way too much other information about her. But there’s a twist: as he is scoping her out, she’s also trying to figure him out! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Mark Saltveit writes palindromes. In fact, he is the Palindrome World Champion. In this video, he tells about how he became interested in palindromes, started a magazine devoted to them, and won the championship. His story is part of a planned feature documentary about the history of palindromes and palindromists. Learn more in an interview with director Vince Clemente at mental_floss.
Holland Island sits in Chesapeake Bay, near Wenona, Maryland. The five-mile-long island was settled in the 1600s, and at one time had a population of 360 people and 70 buildings. Erosion ate away at the island, which sat on silt and clay, and the residents moved away between 1914 and 1918. The island’s church was moved in 1922, and only one house remained standing. It was built in 1888. For decades, the water ate away at the island, and the last remaining house finally collapsed in October of 2010. What’s left of the island is now a marsh, home to hundreds of sea birds. See pictures of the island and the house -and the cemetery- at the Baltimore Sun.
The Ballad of Holland Island House is a song and video by Lynn Tomlinson, with music written by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle. The animation was done by manipulating a thin layer of oil-based clay. It tells the story of the house, from its beginnings as a home for woodland creatures as a tree, then generations of people, then birds, and finally fish. -via io9
The following is an article from the Annals of Improbable Research.
Research about, or said to be about, evolution
compiled by Katherine Lee, Improbable Research staff
Human Face Recognition of Machines (Autos)
Detail from the study “‘Cars Have Their Own Faces’: Cross-Cultural Ratings of Car Shapes in Biological (Stereotypical) Terms.”
“‘Cars Have Their Own Faces’: Cross-Cultural Ratings of Car Shapes in Biological (Stereotypical) Terms,” Sonja Windhager, Fred L. Bookstein, Karl Grammera, Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Hasen Said, Dennis E. Slice, Truls Thorstensen, Katrin Schaefer, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 33 , 2012, pp. 109–120. (Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winners Richard Wassersug and Chitteranjan Andrade for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at University of Vienna, Austria, bEFS Unternehmensberatung GmbH, Vienna, Austria, University of Washington, USA, University of Addis Ababa, Museum of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Ethiopia, and Florida State University, USA, explain:
It was recently shown that Austrians associate car front geometry with traits in a way that could be related to face shape geometry mapping to those same overall suites of traits.... Adult subjects in two countries (Austria and Ethiopia, n=129) were asked to rate person characteristics of 46 standardized front views of automobiles on various trait scales…. Car shapes for perceived maturity, maleness and dominance were highly similar in both countries, with patterns comparable to shape changes during facial growth in humans: Relative sizes of the forehead and windshield decrease with age/growth, eyes and headlights both become more slit-like, noses and grilles bigger, lips and air-intakes are wider. Austrian participants further attributed various degrees of some interpersonal attitudes and emotions, whereas neither Austrians nor Ethiopians congruently ascribed personalities.
The Descent of Cookbooks
“The Nonequilibrium Nature of Culinary Evolution,” Osame Kinouchi, Rosa W. Diez-Garcia, Adriano J. Holanda, Pedro Zambianchi and Antonio C. Roque, February 2008. (Thanks to Claudio Angelo for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil and other institutions, report:
How would Rube Goldberg serve the Passover feast? In the most complicated way possible, of course! This seasonal device incorporates dominoes, fire, liquid, Tinker toys, origami, food, and plenty of imagery of Biblical proportions. Together, it tells the Passover story in moving parts. Students from the Faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Architecture and Town Planning at Technion in Israel made this contraption, using everything they had and more. There’s a behind-the-scenes video about how they did it, too. -via Digg
