This is what happens when you don't obey the librarian and she has to shush you one too many times. The UT Dallas McDermott Library had an incident yesterday. No one was injured, but it ended up being a lot of work.
We'd call this a minor setback. Some of our shelves collapsed today during our renovation. Boy was it fun picking up all those books.
The Facebook post has a couple more pictures of the carnage. Found at reddit, where I also got the post title. They’ve got every book and library pun possible in the comments.
One doctor overwintering in Antarctica is responsible for the health of around 150 people, 2800 miles away from the nearest hospital, with no transportation available for months at a time. Combine that with the danger of freezing, and you have a rather stressful job. You may spend months treating sports injuries, respiratory illness, summer insomnia, and the rare case of frostbite, but there is always the possibility of a major emergency -and the patient could even be the doctor.
It’s a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare: alone in the Antarctic, with the lone physician too ill to care for anyone else. Modern screenings have reduced that possibility, but the area has been home to a series of legendary crises.
Some countries require their doctors undergo an appendectomy to ward off the potential for appendicitis. If that seems excessive, consider the case of Leonid Rogozov, a Russian physician who diagnosed himself with a swollen appendix during a 1961 expedition. Trapped in the Austral winter with no flights in or out—the harsh weather can prevent aircraft from functioning properly—he deputized a few researchers to be his surgical assistants and cut out his own organ using only local anesthesia. He recovered in just two weeks.
In 1999, Jerri Nielsen discovered a lump in her breast. She performed a biopsy using only an ice cube to numb the area; upon discovering a cancerous growth, she had drugs air-dropped to her until she was able fly out for treatment.
Mental_floss talked to Dr. Dale Mole and Dr. Sean Roden about their stints as physicians at the bottom of the earth. Their experiences will give you new respect for those who volunteer for such duty.
On January 30, James Mort, Daniel O’Sullivan, Andrew, and Leonard went skiing on a meter of new snow in the Alps on the Swiss/French border. Mort was in front when a avalanche buried him. The whole story is here.
As the snow piled higher and higher, It became darker and darker until I was surrounded by an eerie black silence, broken only by the sound of my slow breathing and racing heartbeat. "Okay" I thought to myself; "You’re dead." I had a shovel and probe in my backpack and I was wearing a transceiver, however, the others were only carrying a shovel and probe. I was convinced that they would not find me in time. Unable to move I focused on slowing my breathing, relaxing and conserving oxygen. I felt bizarrely emotionless and wondered for a moment what death would be like. Then I remembered that I was reaching upwards with my left arm, ski pole still attached. I tried to wiggle my hand and I felt a ‘pop’ as the top 5cm of the pole broke the surface of the snow. Suddenly emotion flooded through me as I realised that Andrew, Dan and Leonard would be able to locate me under the snow if they saw the tip of the pole. However I still forced myself to remain calm as I sat in wait.
O’Sullivan was wearing a GoPro on his helmet and captured the action. -via reddit
The Magna Carta turns 800 years old this summer. The British Library thinks we should all learn a little more about that document on this auspicious occasion. That’s why they’ve given us two beautifully illustrated videos on it, narrated by Terry Jones of Monty Python. The Magna Carta itself didn’t change life much for everyday people, but it started England -and the world- on the path from absolute monarchy to the rule of law. It eventually led to the idea and the ideal of democracy. The second video in the series explains how that happened.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
The Beatles arrived in Manila to give two concerts in early July of 1966. This was to be one of their gigs on their 1966 final-ever tour; they had just finished a few very pleasant gigs in Germany. There were “bad vibes” almost from the word “go” as the boys arrived at the Manila airport.
Ringo: “I hated the Philippines. It was like that hot/gun/Spanish inquisition attitude.” George stated, “As soon as we got there, it was bad news. There were tough gorilla-little men in short sleeves who acted very melancholy.”
The boys were greeted at the airport by severe-looking armed guards and were sternly instructed to get on a boat. A bit scared already, they complied. This was actually the first time in their time together that they were separated from their manager or any of their aides while on tour. They were taken to a limo and solemnly escorted to their hotel.
No one except them knew it, but they had another reason to be scared. The Manila guards had confiscated the boy’s traveling bags- which contained marijuana, illegal there as in many places. (Fortunately for the Fab Four, their bags were not searched and their secret stash was never discovered.)
At the time in Manila, the country was ruled by the dictatorship regime of Ferdinand Marcos and as soon as the Beatles got settled in, they were told they were to attend a reception for the country’s matriarch, Imelda Marcos. Tired and jet-legged, they politely informed the guards they would not be attending. A bit of arguing back and forth went on, but the boys stuck to their guns and settled in for the day.
They were soon joined in their room by their roadies, a few aides and their manager, Brian Epstein. They played two concerts that night, each before crowds of 40,000, and all went well. Their dressing room had been “a mess” and they had been served a horrible meal of corn flakes with lumpy, sour milk and some other horrible-looking food, but thought nothing of it. Little did they realize what was in store for them.
Scotland-based artist Demetria Skye Logan (DeviantART member DeeeSkye) can draw anything, but lately she’s taken to the character Baymax from the movie Big Hero 6. She’s drawn him in many incarnations, particularly as other Disney characters. That includes Mickey, Rapunzel, Elsa, Aladdin, the Mad Hatter, and Wreck-It Ralph, among others. See more of them at her blog and her DeviantART gallery. -via Pleated-Jeans
Siberian photographer Alexey Trofimov captured extraordinary scenes of sunshine and ice on Lake Baikal. The turquoise blue ice shimmers like gemstones. Massive Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on earth, and the ice that appears this way every March draws tourists from all around to see it.
These unique frozen formations are in fact called ice hummocks. The knolls are created in part by pressure that develops gradually and unevenly in the layer of ice that covers Lake Baikal in winter. The physical make-up and temperature of the ice sheet then also become imbalanced, and hence the hummocks form and rise above the frozen surface.
Gluten intolerance is a real medical condition that’s fairly rare and a real hassle for those who suffer from it. However, it’s become the latest fad self-diagnosis, and so many people have jumped on that bandwagon that even real sufferers have become suspect -like autism or ADHD. If you want to contribute to this problem, JP Sears tells you exactly how to do it. -via Viral Viral Videos
Henri, the existential cat, is earning a living for himself. Yes, this is an ad, for bacon-flavored cat food. Henri does a decent job of it, but you have to wonder if anyone outside the internet will get the humor of the character. -via Tastefully Offensive
As a train from Moscow to Nice, France, was passing through Poland, border guards checked luggage for smuggled goods. A suitcase belonging to a French passenger in his sixties was found to have a 30-year-old Russian woman inside!
“’Hi, and this is my wife,’” the Frenchman said when officers opened the luggage.
“The woman in the suitcase was feeling well and did not require medical attention,” said Sienicki.
The border guards made no arrest, but sent the couple back to Russia. If they were indeed legally married, she could have applied for a visa and traveled to France legally. But then she would have had to buy a train ticket. -via Arbroath
A ferret played a crucial role in building our National Accelerator Laboratory. There’s a crab that comes with its own pompons. There are 11,000 species of bats. When hyenas laugh, it doesn’t mean anything funny. The difference between kangaroos and wallabies will surprise you. This week’s mental_floss List Show gives us a quick rundown of things you don’t really need to know about animals, but you’ll want to, because they are quite interesting.
In this video, the Piano Guys go for Baroque with a mashup that spans a couple of centuries: The Jackson Five and Johann Sebastian Bach. The result just proves that good music is good music, no matter when or where it came from. That’s one rockin’ harpsichord! -via Viral Viral Videos
A cave in Belize has earned the name Midnight Terror Cave. In 2006, it was discovered to contain many thousands of human bones, and tests on teeth found indicate that they were children. Further tests indicate that those children were not local to the area. Could it be a case of human trafficking in order to supply sacrifices to the gods for rain? Collectors Weekly put together the story of the cave by talking to Dr. James Brady and Dr. Jaime Awe, who excavated the cave; Samantha Lorenz, who is writing her thesis on the project; Dr. Naomi Marks, who investigated the teeth, and Dr. James Doyle, curator of Mesoamerican artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Various ethno-historic information from the Spanish suggest that if children were orphaned or something like that, the kids were snatched up immediately and used as sacrificial victims,” Brady says. “So we know that sacrifice victims also came from within a society. But if you’re sacrificing people on a large scale and you’re only drawing from within your own society, that could cause some real social unrest, which is why capturing warriors or importing victims from another kingdom probably came to be preferred. But we have no hard data on this yet for the entire Maya area.”
That may change as more teeth like the ones from the Midnight Terror Cave are tested for their strontium isotopic signatures. If those teeth are any indication of data to come, scientists and the general public may not like what they learn.
“Anything dealing with the sacrifice of children is going to be difficult to look at,” says Lorenz. “But it definitely piques my interest in the Maya culture, and makes me want to understand what would have been happening at that time to support a worldview in which children could be basically taken from their homes and sacrificed for what I would imagine was a belief in a greater good.”
These Star Wars squirrels are not Photoshopped: they’re a product of Teeters’ Taxidermy Studio in Halifax, Pennsylvania. And this particular piece is up for sale at eBay. When they’re not doing jobs for clients, taxidermists Corin Teeters and Ryan Hoffman make all kinds of works from dead squirrels.
As a smaller shop, Teeters said they’re free to think outside the box.
“We get to do a little more artsy stuff and have fun with it,” he said.
The squirrel projects tend to take 10 to 12 weeks to complete, Teeters said, and the shop has done about 30 so far.
“Pretty much, if you can think it up, we can do it,” he said.
It doesn’t matter how many cats you see every day, or how many cat pictures you look at on the internet. Every once in a while, one will come along that’s so fascinating to behold that you find yourself confused. Why is this cat so attractive? Who knows? Just enjoy it and move on. that’s all you can do. This is the latest comic by Kangel at Anything About Nothing.
