I’ve never dealt with IKEA furniture, but I know for a fact that building furniture, whether it’s from scratch or a kit, is a one-person job. Only ask for help if you need someone to hold something for a minute. I also know that if you buy furniture in a kit, you should add extra reinforcement of some sort. Man, that is one ugly desk these people built.
The other advice I would give about furniture is that you should buy it used, the older the better. You’ll get better quality pieces for the same money. However, you’ll have to pay for it up front and haul it yourself. It’s worth the effort. -via Buzzfeed
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Duke is a 7-year-old Great Pyrenees who lives in Cormorant, Minnesota. He was elected mayor of the town by a landslide over his opponent, store owner Richard Sherbrook. The exact vote count was not revealed, but Duke got the vast majority of the twelve votes cast, each backed by a one dollar fee. Sherbrook even voted for Duke.
“I’m going to back the dog 100 percent,” said Sherbrook. “He’s a sportsman and he likes to hunt. He’ll really protect the town.”
Sherbrook, who voted for Duke, himself, admitted that the town thought it would be “pretty cool” to have its first mayor be a dog.
The tiny town was established in 1874, but has never had a mayor before. The new mayor will be sworn in Saturday. As for his salary, he will be paid in dog food, a year’s supply donated by Tuffy’s Pet Food. -via Warming Glow
Science fiction stories, books, and movies can inspire as well as entertain, and everyone wants to see a movie pertaining to their own expertise, don’t they? And such books and movies are more enjoyable if you don’t hold them to the high standards of real-life science. But some books will amaze even specialists.
Dr. Chris Stringer, anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London: "Brazil -- quirky, with humour and horror juxtaposed, and full of little details about the alternative world that Terry Gilliam creates. And Michael Palin outstanding as a nice man turned into a torturer by the system."
Dr. Jack Horner, paleontologist at Montana State University and consultant for Jurassic Park films: "Jurassic Park is my favorite movie because the paleontologist Alan Grant says all the things I would have said if it had not been a movie!! And bringing back dinosaurs is a goal."
Read what tickles the fancy of astrophysicists, biologists, primatologists, and more at HuffPo.
Here’s a great list that will give you something to astound the people you watch movies with. Or even yourself. How impressive will it be when you point out a prop from a movie and name off the others it appeared in? To be honest, many of the same props get recycled over and over. No use in wasting them, right? But I bet you didn’t know the flying car from Blade Runner later showed up in Back to the Future II.
At the end of filming Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott wanted all of the prop vehicles destroyed so that no other movie production could use them in the future. However, the Spinner, the flying police car, wasn't destroyed—in fact, it was re-painted and re-purposed for Back To The Future Part II. Blade Runner's automotive concept designer Gene Winfield, who designed the Spinner, also worked on Back To The Future Part II to give the sequel a futuristic look and feel.
Read about nine other props that you can see in multiple movies, at mental_floss.
Video game characters often look impossibly extreme, with bodybuilder physiques and perfect hair. They are supposedly drawn that way because the players want to be those guys, you know, identify with them. But when does identification and admiration go just a little further than you might be comfortable with? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, female game characters are also a fantasy, but there’s no pretense that they aren’t drawn to be attractive to the game player. The Warp Zone had fun with that idea in this parody of “She Looks So Perfect” by 5 Seconds Of Summer. -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: NASA/ESA)
1. July 4, 1054 -- Day the Sky Got Brighter
This 2005 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope image of Crab Nebula shows the remnant of star's supernova explosion.
July 4th was a significant day long before America started celebrating it. It also marks the first time on record that a new object appeared in the constellation Taurus -- an object so bright it could be seen in the daytime sky. Not surprisingly, people around the world couldn't help but take notice. Chinese astronomers labeled it a "guest star" and noted that, at night, it shone almost four times brighter than Venus. They soon began speculating that its appearance heralded the Emperor at the time, Jen Tsung.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the Anasazi Indians of western North America may also have noticed the star. Archeologists believe images carved into Arizona rocks from that era depict the same mysterious phenomenon. But one group of people left no record of having witnessed the "guest star" -- the Europeans. It's speculated they considered it heretical to suggest that anything in the night sky was not eternal.
The Chinese astronomers were right about the object being a star. More specifically, however, it was a star in the process of exploding, otherwise known as a supernova. When stars burst, they are momentarily as bright as a billion stars, so even though the phenomenon had occurred so far away from Earth, its brightness was still immense.
Now known as the Crab Nebula, this supernova remnant is hardly a distant memory. Today, it consists of an expanding shell of gas that's 10 light years across and is moving outward at about 700 miles per second. At its center is a dense remnant called a neutron star, which is about the size of Manhattan in radius and rotates roughly 30 times per second. As a result, the Crab Nebula sends out pulses of radiation that reach the Earth at that same rate. Scientists wondered about the source of this mysterious pulsing when it was first detected in 1968, but they quickly pinned it on the ancient Crab and not, say, alien civilizations trying to contact us.
2. November 11, 1572 -- The Day that Launched Tycho Brahe's Career
It's safe to say that Danish nobleman and amateur astronomer Tycho Brahe was familiar with the night sky. So it's no small deal that, on this date, he noticed "a new and unusual star, surpassing the other stars in brilliancy ... shining almost directly above [his] head." What Brahe was observing was a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia, about 10,000 light years from Earth. Brahe's discovery catapulted him to astronomy fame. King Frederick II of Denmark was so impressed that he donated the entire island of Hven to Brahe, in order for Brahe to build an observatory. There, using carefully calibrated instruments (telescopes had yet to be invented), Brahe spent years observing the positions of the planets in the sky. Eventually, however, Brahe lost his privileged position on Hven and had to move to Prague when a new king took the throne. (Brahe spent so much time with his head in the skies that he ended up being a crummy feudal lord, and his peasants were vocally unhappy.)
His legacy hasn't suffered, though. Brahe's data provided the groundwork for the research of his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who used it to formulate his famous three laws of planetary motion -- which, in turn, allowed Isaac Newton to derive his Universal Law of Gravity. We should consider ourselves lucky for that new arrival in the sky on November 11, 1572. If it hadn't shown up, Brahe might have gotten bored and switched hobbies.
3. March 12, 1610 -- THe Day Galileo Revealed All His Secrets
Thomas Leveritt showed people what they looked like on video shot in ultraviolet (UV) light. You can see the changes your skin goes through by contrasting young children with adults. But UV light does not see through sunscreen, which is sunscreen’s entire purpose. In UV light, it looks black! But you can see how it protects your skin from the damaging sun’s rays. And it looks pretty funny, too. Want some sunscreen? -via Bad Astronomy
When you keep your expectations low enough, you’ll never be disappointed. According to redditor xdrtypopx, this cake was for an intern who completed the term. Judging from the Batman logo and the Hannah Montana decoration, it was probably a fairly young intern. Best of luck in the future, kid!
Sean Bean has a reputation for acting himself out of a job. In other words, his characters tend to die. What am I saying? They all die! Bean is now starring in the new TV show Legends, and he’s finding it hard to break out of his old habits. -via Digg
You know how kittens are. They think they are invincible, and will take on any size foe. They imagine rivalries and battles where none exists. This curly-tailed kitten is willing to fight the dog for a spot in the playhouse cubbyhole.
You also know how dogs are. They are eager to please, yet often completely flummoxed by cat behavior. The bewildered Dachshund tries to figure out the rules of the game, but in the end just gives up. After all, he’s trying to be a good dog. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
This might make you feel old, but Luke Skywalker is all grown up. Mark Hamill posted a picture of himself on Instagram that gives us a small glimpse of what he will look like in Star Wars VII. He’s mentioned before that he was “contractually obligated” to grow his beard out for the movie. His son, who, like everyone else, is not allowed on the set, took the picture. -via The Daily Dot
(Image credit: Nathan Hamill)
Adam Barta recorded a techno song with additional vocals by Preston the Cat. This music video for the song is bizarre, surreal, and downright odd in an ‘80s kind of way. But it also has a whole slew of cute and funny cats in it. If you were to watch this video and gradually turn the sound down as you go, I would understand completely. -via Buzzfeed
Once upon a time, salmon swam upstream to spawn on their own with no real problems. It was exhausting, but it was their natural life cycle. In modern times, dams and other manmade water barriers have caused the fish no end of problems, yet they still try their best by instinct. Some dams are so high that wildlife agencies have been trucking salmon around the barriers.
But now comes the salmon cannon from the appropriately-named company Whooshh Innovations. It’s a vacuum-powered tube that shoots the fish 100 feet or so uphill on their journey (they have a 500-foot tube, but so far that’s only for frozen fish). What fun! As soon as the tests are done, some enterprising engineer is going to adapt these for water parks, just you wait and see. Read more about the salmon cannon at The Verge. -via Daily of the Day
When your life differs from everyone else’s, even a little bit, it can throw a kink into your normal everyday modern first-world problems. Okay, there’s no way this would be the worst part of his experiences, but going through those password prompts can dredge up bad memories. This is the latest comic from Doghouse Diaries.
Professional athletes are covered by journalists and sports fans closely, and when one of them is injured, and it happens quite often, it goes down in the record books. So when a pro athlete suffers a freakish, out-of-the-ordinary injury, they never get to live it down. In this week’s mental_floss video, Akilah Hughes (smoothiefreak) tells us about some really odd and memorable sports injuries
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