Or maybe I say say, campfire OF snow. Brendan Schaffer of Schaffer Art Studios created this hot snow sculpture using art and food coloring in a spray bottle. Although we’ve all heard the warning about eating yellow snow, I’ve never heard anything about eating giant snow marshmallows! -via reddit
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While the northeast U.S. brace for a snowstorm today that is expected to leave two to three feet of snow, there are already comparisons with the record-setting storm of 1888.
The Great Blizzard of 1888 paralyzed the northeast U.S. Up to 60 inches of snow fell on New England, with snowdrifts up to 50 feet! The trains couldn’t run, and many people were stuck in their homes for a week. The effects of the storm in the cities of New York and Boston spurred urban planners to start work on underground communication lines and subways.
Check out a roundup of photographs from that blizzard at mental_floss.
January 26 is Australia Day, and the Aussies get to celebrate it earlier than most of the world. In honor of the occasion, Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Cathy Wilcox gives us an illustrated alphabet of what the holiday means to Australians. From the misheard lyrics of their national anthem to chilling out after a good time, each letter will make you smile -or think. Especially if you are Australian, know an Australian, or have been to Australia.
The newspaper also has a profile of the “average” Australian, who they say does not even exist. Aussies come in an enormous variety. -via Metafilter
For hundreds of years, workers broke and hauled salt out of the Salina Turda mine in Romania. That stopped in the 20th century. Since 1992, the huge chambers left behind have been a tourist attraction, which became a full-fledged theme park in 2010. The features include a 65-foot-tall Ferris wheel, an amphitheater, bowling alleys, a miniature golf course, and a lake where you can ride a boat, all contained in the huge underground chambers. Read more about Salina Turda and see lots of pictures in a slideshow at Scribol.
(Image credit: Cristian Bortes)
This cat is named Nico "El guapo," and he has his own Instagram account. Not only does he have wonderfully expressive eyes, he loves a good bath. That is a little odd for a housecat, as most cat owners will tell you. But while Nico is in the minority, he’s not alone. Buzzfeed rounded up pictures of 17 Cats Who Actually Love Being In The Water. You’ll enjoy seeing the rest of them, too.
The following article is republished from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader.
Ever since he first saw Flipper in the 1960s, Uncle John has been fascinated by dolphins. He’s not alone- some scientists think dolphins are humans’ closest relatives. Whether they are or not, we’ve still got a lot in common.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Few other animals evoke such mystery and curiosity as the dolphin. The more we study them, the more we want to know about them. We know that dolphins live 30 to 40 years. They have a distinct social structure, traveling in flexible groups of between 6 and 12 called pods. Young dolphins stay with their mothers for three years or longer before moving on to a new pod. Yet, remarkably, a daughter will often return to her mother’s group to have her first calf.
A dolphin’s cerebral cortex -the portion of the brain that plans, thinks, and imagines- is larger than a human’s and, indeed, dolphins are adept at planning, thinking, and imagining. According to professional trainers, there is no limit to what a dolphin can learn.
(Image credit: Flickr user Michael S)
Here are some amazing examples of dolphin intelligence:
* Dolphins learn quickly. Two dolphins at Sea Life Park in Hawaii knew entirely different routines. One day the trainer accidentally switched the two dolphins and didn’t know why they seemed so nervous about performing the stunts. One dolphin, trained to jump through a hoop 12 feet in the air, refused to jump at all until she lowered it to 6 feet. The other seemed shaky about navigating through an underwater maze while blindfolded. Not until the show was over did the trainer discover the error. The dolphin who had jumped through the 6-foot-high hoop had not been trained to go through a hoop at all. The other dolphin was familiar with the blindfold but had never navigated the underwater maze. Yet, somehow, each had figured out how to perform the other’s tricks before the end of the routine.
* Dolphins can learn sign language. They can understand syntax and sentence structure, knowing the difference between “Pipe fetch surfboard” (“Fetch the pipe and take it to the surfboard”) and “Surfboard fetch pipe” (“Fetch the surfboard and take it to the pipe”). When asked, “Is there a ball in the pool?” the dolphin is able to indicate yes or no -meaning it has understood the language, formed a mental image of the object referred to, and deduced whether the object is or is not there. This is called referential reporting and is otherwise only documented in apes and humans.
(Image credit: Flickr user César Astudillo)
* Dolphins consistently demonstrate imagination and creativity. At the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lab in Hawaii, two young trainers were working with a pair of bottle nose dolphins named Akeakemai and Phoenix. The trainers got the dolphin’s attentions and then, together, they tapped two fingers of each hand together, making the symbol for “in tandem.” They both threw their arms in the air, the sign language gesture that means “creative.”
The instruction was “do something creative together.”
Enjoy a collection of Japanese prints from the 1800s that depict cats in human situations, mostly having a grand old time. The picture above is a pun, as the title Roku kesen (猫の六毛撰) can mean either Six Immortal Poets or Six Cats with Fur of Different Colors.
Other images have cats at festivals or at tea ceremonies, playing games, dancing, lounging, acting out classic plays, flirting with each other, and generally being LOLcats. -via Everlasting Blort
A guy walks through the history of video games, from Pong to Grand Theft Auto. I almost didn't recognize Pong because the original graphic display wouldn't work here at all; it's been somewhat modernized. Sometimes the guy has to win a round before he can proceed. Of course, since this is a three-minute video, you won’t see all of your favorite video games, just several insanely popular games as a representative sample of the past five decades. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Peter Cohen is a home builder, so he can fix his house any way he wants to. What he wanted was to make his cats safe, healthy, and happy. One thing led to another, and now he has 15 cats and a house custom-designed for their pleasure. There are catwalks, tunnels, staircases, beds, a koi pond, ventilated litter box closets, and Roombas. So far, he’s spent almost $40,000. These cats have it made! -via Tastefully Offensive
The Locally Laid Egg Company puts their name right their on cartons of their eggs, which are available only in northern Minnesota and parts of Iowa and Indiana. In December they received a letter from a man who was offended by the name. How do you respond to that? Lucie B. Amundsen, the company’s “marketing chick,” wrote, in part:
Here’s why we named our company, Locally Laid. First off, it’s completely demonstrative of what we are. We are the first pasture-raised egg company in the Upper Midwest providing you with eggs which are laid locally. More on the sassy part of the name in minute, but let’s look at local. It’s important.
She goes on to explain the importance of free-range, organically-raise chickens and how they differ from nationwide factory farms. She also explains how important mid-sized farms are to preserving local economies. It’s pretty interesting, in a post that's all due to a customer with a dirty mind. -Thanks Carol Anne!
The most predictable thing in the universe is still clouded by human perception. The biggest days of the year for a child become mundane occurrences when you are an adult. How many years did you wonder if you’d still be alive when the 21st century arrived?
My kids consider all the Star Wars movies to be ancient. They had seen the earlier movies by the time Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, but I thought they were still too young to see that one in a theater. When they finally watched it, it was already an “old movie” in their eyes. This Star Wars tipping point is brought to you by Randall Munroe of xkcd.
While I check out Facebook links to bring you interesting posts, I try to stay away from my personal feed for just this reason. The people you know are always posting the best parts of their lives, which will only make you feel worse about yours. What’s more, your friends’ posts lead to you to notice other friends, and before you know it, your day is gone and you're still depressed. Yes, I’m all for posting pleasantness, but among friends it can become a game of one-upmanship or trying to keep up with the Joneses, even if it’s only in your head. This song is from comedian Pat Regan. I'd link to his Facebook page, but it's surprisingly inactive and the banner pic is NSFW. -via Viral Viral Videos
Pollsters asked French citizens who contributed the most to the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. The poll was conducted in 1945, then repeated in 1994 and 2004. As you can see in a graphic from Olivier Berruyer, the results changed over time. Of course, most of the people polled in 1994 and 2004 were not around during the war, and what they know was learned in classrooms and movie theaters. The movies aren’t necessarily wrong, but the Hollywood film industry tells stories they know, that are available in a language the industry speaks.
In another graph at the same post, Berruyer shows us that 11 million soldiers of the Soviet Union died in the war, and as least as many civilians, making the USSR the country with the highest casualties of all. China was second, as Chinese civilians bore the brunt of Japanese atrocities. The United States lost 184,000 soldiers in the European theater, and 407,000 when you include the Pacific theater.
The effectiveness of the USSR in defeating the Nazis is colored by the utter brutality of the Stalinist regime, and clouded by the secrecy of Soviet isolation over the ensuing 50 years. However, the sheer numbers have a tale to tell, and we haven’t been telling it as well as we could. The post at Les-Crises has more graphics on World War II, which are all in French but pretty easy to understand. -via reddit
(Image credit: Olivier Berruyer)
A couple of years ago, we linked to a story about how the variety of apples diminished to just a few kinds, and the efforts of one man to bring back their glorious diversity. The same fate has befallen potatoes. Thanks to market forces, particularly the demands of the French fry industry, the overwhelming majority of potatoes available in the U.S. are Russet potatoes. Contrast that with the many kinds of spuds that are still grown in South America. Potatoes were first cultivated thousands of years ago in the Andes mountains, on the border of what are now Peru and Bolivia.
Back then, the potato was synonymous with diversity. The Andeans inhabited a mountainous mosaic of microclimates in which one plot of land presented a very different set of growing conditions than its neighbor. No single variety could survive in such a heterogeneous landscape, so the Andeans diversified — to the extreme. Farming so many different types of potatoes also provided a more interesting and enjoyable diet, a tradition that is still alive today. “If you go to a typical Andean household,” explains Stef de Haan, a researcher at the International Potato Center in Lima, “they will eat what is called chajru, which means ‘mixture’ in the Quechua language. They sit around a big bowl of potatoes. And the joy of eating those, the culinary delight, is that every time you pick a potato, you pick a different one. In Quechua, especially when it comes to the taste of potatoes, they have this whole unique vocabulary — almost like somebody from France would tell you about the taste of wine.
Now a few folks are trying to bring back potato variety in the U.S. One is helping chefs develop ways to harness different tater flavors, colors, and textures, while another is encouraging diversity on farms. Read about the many types of potatoes we could be eating soon at Modern Farmer. -via Digg
We’ve posted about the annual Robocup meet a few times before, but here is the funniest video yet from the annual soccer tournament for robots. This team from the 2012 meet can barely stay upright, much less catch each other. They altogether suck at the sport. But what makes it special is the exciting play-by-play commentary from Ray Hudson and Phil Schoen. -via The Daily Dot
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