The entire purpose of having photo identification cards is to have a record of what someone looks like, so it defeats the purpose to alter them. High school student love_a_good_ood is a senior at an all-girls school. They were issued ID cards with their school picture on them at the beginning of the year. For the second semester, seniors were issued a new card -with pictures that were changed.
I have a round face that I have grown to love and now I get my photo back with a different face. The new photo no longer even looks like me but rather a prettier twin sister. When we go and have our photos taken we are flat out told that our skin will be retouched to hide blemishes. We are not told, however, that more drastic changes are made.
Going to an all girls school we are constantly reminded about positive body image and accepting ourselves for who we are. Having these changes made to make me appear thinner makes me wonder how must our school practices what they preach.
You can see an overlay for comparison here. Photographers in the comments commenter said that some school picture companies now do this automatically. But the point of school pictures is to serve as a record of what the student looked like at that age! Removing zits is one thing, but making a student look like someone else is taking it a bit too far, don’t you think? -via Uproxx
You’ve heard the phrase “Nice guys finish last” all your life. It turns out the phrase was coined by someone who was looking for an excuse to be not-so-nice. Science says otherwise, as we learn in this video from AsapSCIENCE. Yes, scientists have actually done experiments that translate to this. Wise folks have always known that no matter what your accomplishments are or how much wealth you accumulate, you will ultimately be judged on how you treat others. -via Viral Viral Videos
Can you find the cat in this living room? Sometimes they don’t want to be found, and sometimes they just want to enjoy us looking stupid while searching for them. Redditor cewallace9 says he spent ten minutes looking before he found him. We don’t expect you to spend that much time, but give it a try. You can enlarge the picture at imgur if necessary, or if you give up you can look at an alternate version of the image for the answer.
I spent the last ten years of my radio career playing country music, and I have to say that this is a pretty good song. The problem is that it’s supposed to be six different songs, all released by different artists in 2012, 2013, and 2014. But once you start mashing them up, you see they are completely interchangeable. The songs are:
"Sure Be Cool If You Did"- Blake Shelton "Drunk on You"- Luke Bryan "Chillin' It"- Cole Swindell "Close Your Eyes"- Parmalee "This is How We Roll"- Florida Georgia Line "Ready, Set, Roll"- Chase Rice
I swore off country music when I retired from the business, so I’m not familiar with any of them. But if I were, I’d be tempted to do exactly this. The mashup is from Gregory Todd, an aspiring songwriter in Nashville. I think he’s found the tune that will make him a success. -via Digg
How a Yale research team made history by teaching capuchins to spend money ... and discovered that they're just as smart—and stupid—as your financial advisor.
It’s a little bigger than a quarter and about twice as thick, but because it’s made of aluminum, it weighs roughly the same. It’s flat and smooth, except for what seem to be a few tiny bite marks around the perimeter. To you, it might look like a washer without a hole. To Felix, an alpha male capuchin monkey, and his friends at Yale University, it’s money.
“When one of the monkeys grabs a token, he’s going to hold onto it as though he really values it,” explains Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale. “And the other monkeys might try to take it away from him. Just like they would with a piece of food. Just as you might want to do when you see a person flaunting cash.”
During the past seven years, Santos and Yale economist Keith Chen have conducted a series of cutting-edge experiments in which Felix and seven other monkeys trade these discs for food much like we toss a $20 bill to a cashier at Taco Bell. And in doing so, these monkeys became the first nonhumans to use, well, money.
“It sounds like the setup to a bad joke,” says Chen. “A monkey walks into a room and finds a pile of coins, and he’s got to decide how much he wants to spend on apples, how much on oranges, and how much on pineapples.”
But the remarkable thing about the research isn’t that these monkeys have learned to trade objects for food—after all, a schnauzer can be taught to hand over your slippers in exchange for a Milk-Bone. The amazing part, Chen and Santos discovered, is how closely the economic behavior of these capuchins mimics that of human beings in all its glorious irrationality. Viewed in the context of the daisy chain of near-disastrous human failings that brought the world to the verge of fiscal collapse over the past few years, monkeynomics is eye-opening stuff.
So how much of our wild, dangerous economic behavior is hard-wired, and how much of it is learned? And most important, how much of it can be changed? Watching Felix and friends make financial decisions—some extremely smart, others profoundly dumb—provides groundbreaking insight into the roots of our own dysfunctional relationship with money. And why it all may have started 35 million years ago.
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What kind of monkey would Santos be? “A bonobo,” she says with a laugh. “They’re kind of a hippie monkey.” With an infectious smile and curls that cascade down her back, the 35-year-old Santos exudes the cool prof vibe of someone who—all things being equal—would really rather be in a dorm, holding court about the meaning of life. “I’m fascinated by human beings, and monkeys are like humans in their purest form,” she says. She’s quick to offer a funny story about how she decided to pursue primate research after seeing a picture of the lush Caribbean island where the fieldwork was being done. But the truth is that her interest began with the idea that monkeys are like human beings without the cultural baggage.
As a Harvard undergraduate, Santos worked with behavioral scientist Marc Hauser and then signed on to do her dissertation based on research in his lab. Her work centered on basic questions of monkey cognition: How high can monkeys count? (To four.) Do they have a good sense of the practical physics of falling objects? (Not especially.)
This body of work earned her a tenure-track position at Yale, where in 2003 she was charged with setting up the school’s Comparative Cognition Lab. Santos chose capuchin monkeys for practical reasons. They’re smaller and easier to care for than chimps, but they’re almost as smart, resourceful, and social. She got 10 capuchins from noted researcher Frans de Waal at Emory University and planned to continue with the monkey cognition research that she had started at Harvard.
Then one day, one of the caretakers who cleaned the capuchin enclosures in the new lab told Santos that her monkeys were “geniuses.” Felix and friends, he explained with amazement, would hand him their discarded orange peels, trying to trade them for food. Maybe the monkeys were trying to make a point.
While out on a snowy walk, a man with a camera is approached by a playful fox. The fox is probably looking for a handout, which he gets in the form of something resembling a Slim Jim. A good time was had by all. But wait a minute, where is this? This delightful little walk happened in Pripyat, Ukraine, which you might recall is the town where the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown a few years back. Now we have to wonder what this fox would do to a Geiger counter. -via Tastefully Offensive
Artists Amy Rawson and Brian East send us their annual Santa Cthulhu project almost every year, but didn’t get the 2014 edition finished in time. We’ll see that completed this coming December. Meanwhile, as holiday decorators prepare for Valentines Day, Rawson and East have added a new design to their lineup: presenting Cthupid! Who would’ve ever thought to meld the dreaded elder god to the Roman god of erotic desire? These Valentines Day ornaments are for sale at Rawson’s Etsy shop. -Thanks, Amy!
Before we had postcards, refrigerator magnets, and keychains made specifically as souvenirs for tourists, people still wanted something to remember a particular place or event. Not everyone understood the concept of historic preservation; they just took items or pieces of items in what we would call vandalism now. Some of those souvenirs would be inscribed with identifying information, but often they only had a story, and sometimes not even that much. The National Museum of American History accepted such mementos, and last year presented them in an exhibition. Curator William L. Bird talked to Collectors Weekly about these historic souvenirs and the stories behind them.
Collectors Weekly: Have Americans always collected souvenirs?
William L. Bird: Yes, I think that’s true. You can make a distinction between a souvenir and a relic, but the overarching concept is something that has an actual connection to a place.
In the Smithsonian collection circumscribed by the exhibition and book, these objects were initially relics, and then they became classified as souvenirs. It took me a while to realize the operative search words were “relic” and “relic hunter.” Increasingly, into the late 19th century, those words often appeared in the same paragraphs with “vandal” and “vandalism.” For example, during the Lincoln presidency, there was a woman so obsessed with the White House that during a tour, she cut pieces of fabric from the drapes—these big, heavy, ornate velveteen draperies. She was escorted from the grounds and told to not come back, but it’s hard to imagine anybody doing that casually today.
In this interview, we also get a fascinating rundown of how the Smithsonian Institution’s mission has changed over time. The picture above is a fragment of the Washington Monument's 1848 cornerstone, broken during construction. Read the whole article on these souvenirs at Collectors Weekly.
The headline at reddit said, “Here's what happens when you leave half a cabbage in the fridge too long.” I clicked, thinking it would be a gross pile of mold, and was surprised to see this pretty plant. The photographer H0B0Byter99 said the cabbage was in the crisper for several months, and had sprouted about three inches of new growth. Then he set it in a bowl of water out in the kitchen, and watched it grow. I've done this with carrots and celery. Now, if anyone can figure out what’s in the bottles in the background, you’re smarter than I am.
When you live in cold weather country, you learn to take pleasure from ice and snow in creative ways. Breaking a layer of ice on a trampoline takes some effort in preparation -a lot of preparation, actually, which we thank this guy for as we watch this video in the heated comfort of the indoors. It’s two degrees below zero (-17°C) where he is. But Minnesotans expect it, unlike here in Kentucky where putting a hose outlet inside the house seems strange. Everything is relative, as Canadian commenters at the YouTube page laugh at two degrees below zero. -via Viral Viral Videos
Putting an extra bit of information in a movie after the credits roll has always been a trick to get people to stay in their seats long enough to see who worked on the film. Bloopers and outtakes are great for kids movies and comedies. Sometimes there's more in or after the credits because test audiences didn’t like the movie's ending, so something more palatable got tacked on, as we saw in Elvis Presley’s first movieLove Me Tender. It’s also a way to set up a possible sequel if ticket sales warrant one. Marvel movies have become famous for doing this, starting with Iron Man in 2008.
After the credits have rolled on the title character (Robert Downey Jr.) defeating Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), Iron Man’s alter ego, Tony Stark, returns home – presumably from a hard day’s work kicking ass – only to unexpectedly be greeted by S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Luckily for Stark, Fury’s news is good – and it also changes the face of the entire MCU. When Fury dropped the line, “I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative,” comic book geeks around the world wet their pants in anticipation.
There’s never any doubt that a Marvel superhero movie will have a sequel- they are already planned. However, some twists after the credits roll take away the entire sense of satisfaction of the film’s conclusion. You find examples of all these devices in a list of ten movies with post-credit surprises at Scribol.
Angelo Piccini arranged an elaborate boat ride based on a scene from the movie The Notebook in order to propose to Chiara Grimaldi. They are both as cute as can be, and the fact that it’s in Italian only makes it more unbearably romantic.
In case you think it’s all his doing, let me be the one to break the news …this proposal was produced by a company called The One Romance, who bill themselves as “romance planners.” It seems there isn’t any task you can’t outsource anymore. -via The Daily Dot
The new movie Jurassic World will star Chris Pratt, who plays Andy Dwyer in the TV show Parks and Recreation. The folks at Thanks Mom Productions took that connection a step further and put the character Andy Dwyer into Spielberg’s dinosaur theme park for this strange little mashup. -via Viral Viral Videos
If you were going to mash up two things that were as opposite as you could think of, maybe Happy Days and Pulp Fiction would occur to you. Otherwise, I don’t know how Robert Jones and Darrin Fullerton ever came up with this concept, but they made it work. You may suffer from a slight case of cognitive dissonance watching this, but the familiar, bouncy music will make it easier. -Thanks, Robert!
The character Frasier Crane was supposed to be a temporary distraction on Cheers, but he was so funny that they kept him around, and then he got a spinoff series that lasted 11 years. That’s a lot of history for Kelsey Grammar’s psychiatrist character, so there are some trivia tidbits even the most avid fan might not know about the show Frasier. For instance:
2. THEY WANTED TO SET THE SHOW AS FAR AWAY FROM BOSTON AS POSSIBLE.
Once it was agreed that Grammer would continue as Dr. Crane, the creators still wanted to distance themselves from Boston and the whole "crossover syndrome." They knew that the network would insist on having former Cheers characters make guest appearances if the show was set anywhere in Massachusetts, so they moved Frasier across the country to Seattle. The gourmet coffee scene was just taking root in that area, which provided a central meeting place for the characters. The creators didn't want Frasier Crane to work in private practice, since that had already been done on The Bob Newhart Show. Grammer's resonant voice seemed natural for radio, so the concept of a call-in psychiatry show seemed natural.
12. ...AND MOST OF THE Cheers CAST MADE APPEARANCES ON THE SHOW.
Most of the main Boston tavern regulars made appearances on Frasier. Lilith, logically, visited the most since she was Frasier’s ex and Frederick’s mom. Sam, Diane, and Woody all found themselves in Seattle for varying reasons, and a business trip to Boston in Season 9 enabled the Crane family to see the rest of the Cheers gang in one fell swoop. Noticeably absent, however, was Rebecca Howe, played by Kirstie Alley. Alley had contacted co-creator David Lee when Frasier was in the planning stages and informed him that as a Scientologist she did not believe in psychiatry and as a result would not be able to make an appearance on the series. Lee responded simply, “I don’t recall asking.”
There’s quite a bit more to learn, about Frasier, Niles, and all the other characters (and the actors who portrayed them), but especially the most popular of them all: Eddie the dog. Read all 18 things at mental_floss.
