You’ve seen those huge human hamster balls, in which you roll around cushioned by a plastic pillow of air. Now imagine combining those with the initial scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, or maybe the annual running got the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Yeah, these folks are chasing each other around with huge rolling inflated hamster balls. We may be seeing the birth of a new sport! Remember this when you’re trying to come up with a birthday or bachelor party idea.
The Avengers will be back in the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron premiering on April 13, then going nationwide May first. To get you ready, Cinefix brings us some trivia about the group of superheroes and the movie franchise they inhabit.
His name is Joel Burger. Her name is Ashley King. They have been an item since they were in fifth grade, and recently announced their upcoming nuptials. The Burger-King wedding is scheduled for July. But then the fast food company Burger King heard about it.
Burger King got hold of Joel and Ashley and presented them with a surprise: BK is going to pay for the wedding. There will no doubt be chicken fries galore at the reception. If you were just telling this story without evidence to back it up, they’d think you were telling a Whopper. -via Buzzfeed
This is a promotional film from Dodge produced in the 1920s. Getting around in the mud at an oil field doesn’t look all that pleasant, but the point is that you could actually get there in these conditions, which was a great selling point before we had all these paved roads everywhere. Note that you could roll the whole thing and the windows wouldn’t even break. However, this is a promotional video, and there had to be outtakes. You don’t show off your failures.
According to Classic Lantern, who uploaded this video, Dodge installed electric starters, generators, and lights on their cars beginning in 1914. I don’t imagine there was anything like a suspension or shock absorbers. -via the Presurfer
If you are lucky to live long enough, the conventional wisdom you were taught in school will be reversed, and sometimes those reversals might surprise you. When I was in school, there were two Germanys, two taxonomic kingdoms, nine planets, and a place called Yugoslavia. You may have been taught that the dinosaur species called Brontosaurus was a mistake in fossil taxonomy, and only existed in movies and old gas station signs.
In 1903, only a couple decades after it was discovered, Brontosaurus was demoted. Leading scientists at the time decided that the fossils found in the western U.S. were merely a species within the genus Apatosaurus. Museum specimens were renamed, textbooks were rewritten, and Brontosaurus was relegated to history’s dust heap. Today the iconic dinos don’t even have a Wikipedia page.
Now, it appears that Brontosaurus was real all along. A new study from Emanuel Tschopp at the Unversidade Nova de Lisboa and his team takes into account recent fossil finds and in-depth study to conclude that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus both existed in the distant past.
“The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” explained Dr. Roger Benson, a co-author of the study from the University of Oxford.
What exactly killed the crows? A series of images at imgur tells the story of an avian investigation. It’s a fine example of how science works, and how researchers must learn to shift gears when evidence leads off in another direction. I apologize for the presentation of captioned pictures instead of text, but there is no single news link that gives all the facets to the story. -via reddit
In this video, Special Effects Supervisor George Gibbs tells the story of that bridge scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They could only do it once, so it had to be perfect. Well, I guess they could have redone it if they had to, but that would add days and dollars to the film shoot. Oh, and in case you're wondering, a Bailey bridge is a temporary bridge. I knew that, because when the bridge in my hometown collapsed around 1970, a Bailey bridge was the only way through for a good ten years. -via the A.V. Club
A quick look at Hollingsworth’s looks at certain effects of chewing compiled by Katherine Lee, Improbable Research staff
Harry L. Hollingworth wrote the book that can be considered the bible of psychological research about people who chew chewing gum. Called Psycho-Dynamics of Chewing, it was published in 1939 as an entire issue of the scholarly journal Archives of Psychology. (Thanks to Jean Berko Gleason for assistance in chewing on this matter.)
The research was sponsored by the Beech-Nut company, makers of chewing gum. The publisher explained:
This book offers a series of experiments that study the psychodynamics of chewing in various contexts. Chewing is such a satisfying activity, in itself, that random masticatories such as straws, toothpicks, rubber bands, are utilized in order to support it.... The familiarity and convenience of the confectioned masticatory provides a useful technique for the experimental variation of such a motor automatism as chewing. Its widespread use in daily life makes it a conspicuous social institution, or at least a custom, and it is a problem of some scientific interest to inquire into the intrinsic factors which presumably perpetuate and extend such a conventionalized practise. With all these interests in mind we have instituted an extended series of experimental investigations on the role of sustained mastication in the psycho-physical economy of human activity.
Metabolism Costs of Chewing “Metabolism Costs of Chewing,” Harry L. Hollingworth, Archives of Psychology, vol. 239, 1939, pp. 14–26. Hollingworth explains:
Ai Pioppi is what happens when a man building playground equipment gets carried away in his creativity. The restaurant’s playground has thrill rides for people willing to push, pedal, or otherwise put in their own power to make them run. It doesn’t look at all safe, and indeed, Tom Scott (previously at Neatorama) ended up with seven stitches in a fall, but Ai Pioppi isn’t in the litigious United States. It’s in Treviso, Italy. Watch as Tom and a friend pedal their way around the “bicycle of death." He says,
Thank you so much to everyone at Ai Pioppi: I'm sorry for bleeding on your ride, and for pronouncing your restaurant's name terribly. Thanks to Paul, who drove me to the hospital; thanks to the doctors and nurses at Treviso Hospital, too. And Europeans: remember to take an EHIC card on holiday around Europe, so your healthcare travels with you. I didn't have to pay a penny or deal with travel insurance!
And more than that: if you do go, and I recommend you do if you're ever anywhere near it: TAKE CARE. Even when you're on an adrenaline high and you think you're invincible. I wasn't. You won't be either. Hospital visits in a foreign language aren't fun!
If you ever considered that the battle for the Iron Throne on the TV show Game of Thrones resembled a game of musical chairs, you aren’t the only one. That’s how the folks at Sesame Street interpret it, and that game is what happens in their latest parody video. Grover Bluejoy is tasked with running the game, and a Muppet that resembles Ned Stark with a slight Scottish accent plays the master of ceremonies. Notice the thrones are made of sports equipment, including one made of irons.
You know Iain Heath as Ochre Jelly, the LEGO artist who brings us brick versions of celebrities and internet memes. But Heath is branching out into the world of video and cosplay. He picked a big project for this one! Heath recreated the robot TARS from the movie Interstellar. And not just as a sculpture, but as a walking replica that can be used as a costume.
TARS was unveiled at Emerald City Comic Con in March 2015, where it interacted with the public and even won Heath the "One To Watch" award at the convention's annual costume contest.
Requiring over 100 man hours to construct, the replica weighs 40 lbs (a mere fifth of the one in the movie) and uses two iPads to recreate TARS' computer readouts. To allow the operator to interact with their surroundings, the aluminum-clad wooden frame includes a camera, LCD screen, audio amplifier, and head set.
As you can see, the folks at Emerald City enjoyed interacting with TARS. Heath plans to take it to several more conventions this year, so keep your eye out for it! -Thanks, Iain!
Here we have a case in which snooping just a little bit paid off big time for a photograph. While he waited for his car to be fetched, redditor mcdngr took a peek at what the parking valet was reading. The exact page gave him some concern, but when the guy returned, it turns out he is taking a criminology course. They had a good laugh about it. After all, the valet had gone to the trouble of buying a textbook instead of just reading it on the internet, so you know he’s not a criminal mastermind.
Yesterday, the site Humans of New York published a photograph of a young woman named Beyoncé and she spoke about how her famous name affects her life. The post on Facebook drew hundreds of comments, including quite a few people who can relate to Beyoncé’s struggle.
There’s more. Buzzfeed collected quite a few of the comments from people who were blessed/cursed with famous names, and then even more came in on the comments there. Some are famous, some are funny, and some are just unfortunate. Be glad your real name doesn't come with a ton of cultural baggage.
Over the years we’ve reported how Disney animators massaged, censored, and sanitized classic fables and fairy tales for mass audiences. But this is the first time we’ve ever heard of them “borrowing” so much of another artist’s work. Did they? Or was it just a coincidence?
INSPIRATION
In 1950, a Japanese artist named Osamu Tezuka created Jungle Taitei (Jungle Emperor), a story about an orphaned lion cub who is destined to rule the animals in Africa. From 1950 to 1954 it was a Japanese comic book series, and in 1965 Tezuka turned it into Japan’s first color animated television series. The following year, all 52 episodes were released in the United States under the name Kimba the White Lion. Over the next few years, Kimba enjoyed some success in syndication, mostly on local or regional TV stations, and Tezuka freely acknowledged that the work of Walt Disney -Bambi in particular- was an inspiration for the story of his lion hero.
In 1994, nearly 30 years after the creation of Kimba and five years after Tezuka’s death in 1989, Disney released its feature-length animated film The Lion King -about an orphaned lion cub destined to rule the animals in Africa.
FALSE PRIDE
Officially, the executives and animators at Disney denied they had ever heard of Kimba. But fans of the original Kimba the White Lion were incensed with the many similarities they found between the two projects. A group of more than a thousand animators in Japan sent a petition to Disney asking the studio to acknowledge its debt to the original series. Disney refused, citing only Bambi and Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as influences.
Walt Disney reportedly met Tezuka at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and mentioned that he someday hoped to make something similar to Tezuka’s earlier creation, Astro Boy. But Disney died in 1966, 28 years before The Lion King was made. If he really was a fan of Tezuka’s work, would he have approved of the project?
