Okay, which is better, the laboratory in the Bat Cave underneath Wayne Manor or Heisenberg's RV? Maybe there's a better fictional laboratory that impressed you greatly, but you've forgotten it since. PopSci takes a look at the ten best, ranked, with reasoning for each. I managed to guess the number one lab before I saw it. Link
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Anthony Cumia of the Opie and Anthony radio show has a kitten who wants what he wants when he wants it. And there's no saying no to a cute kitten! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Ed Wozniak writes about bad movies a lot, but I think he's outdone himself with this martial arts film. The Dragon Lives Again (also known as Deadly Hands of Kung Fu) was a 1977 "Brucesploitation" film in which another actor plays the deceased martial arts film star Bruce Lee. The plot has Bruce Lee arriving in the underworld after death and meeting up with people he will have to fight. They are not real people, though -not even dead people. They are fictional characters like the Godfather, James Bond, and the Exorcist. And it gets weirder.
For some very odd reason there’s also Emmanuelle from the erotic film series bearing her name plus, for some even odder reason, there’s Dracula, who’s neither living nor dead so you’d think he wouldn’t be here at all. In the film he leads his famous army of … zombies? Yep, instead of a legion of vampires at his side Drac has an army of “zombies” who are really just guys in black costumes with full-body skeleton designs on them like the outfit worn by the Turkish film character called Killing (my head hurts). Later in the film Drac leads an army of mummies, just to make things even more confusing.
Before we bother worrying about all the foregoing weirdness, let me point out that another denizen of this netherworld is the cartoon character Popeye, yes, FREAKING POPEYE, played by a real-life Asian actor who squints and puffs up one of his cheeks in an attempt to look like his namesake. He even eats a can of spinach to increase his strength during a battle with Drac and his army of mummies.
Read more about The Dragon Lives Again at Balladeer's Blog. Link
Do you still want to watch this movie? It's available at YouTube, rated R. Link
A recent trend at Sina Weibo, China's biggest social networking site, is for people to post their most embarrassing childhood portraits. Kotaku selected some of the funniest to share with us, including children dressed as adults, wearing military uniforms, wigs, or various costumes. And of course, there are the poor babies wearing way too many sweaters. Link
You can make homemade children's modeling clay-like stuff, but you can't totally recreate Play-Doh, because it has some special ingredients to make it last. Nothing dangerous, of course, but the recipe makes it clear that Play-Doh is easier to buy than to make in your kitchen. This video was produced by Giant Ant for Wired's What's Inside series. -via the Presurfer
Once upon a time, bookbinding was more than just a way to preserve words. Colleen Theisen of the Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa make several moving gif images of books that have artful fore-edge paintings. At rest, the books show the edges of the pages in gold. That's fancy enough, but when you fan those pages just a little, the painting shows up.
Fore-edge painting, which is believed to date back as early as the 1650s, is a way of hiding a painting on the edge of a book so that it can only be seen when the pages are fanned out. There are even books that have double fore-edge paintings, where a different image can be seen by flipping the book over and fanning the pages in the opposite direction.
When I realized the book Theisen shared was only one of a series about the seasons, I got in touch and she agreed to photograph the other three so we could share them with you here.
See the books demonstrated at Colossal. Link -via Laughing Squid
The Gardiner’s Seychelles frog is the smallest frog ever found, at only 11 millimeters in length. This frog doesn't have a middle ear, so scientists assumed it was deaf. Or were they? An experiment in which frogs sounds elicited a response indicated they could hear! But How?
So the scientists refocused their experiments on the frogs’ heads. By making various 3-D simulations of how sound travels through the frogs’ heads, the scientists found that the bones in their mouths act as an amplifier for sound waves.
Further x-rays showed that sound travels from the mouth to the inner ear, thanks to an evolutionary adaptation: The frogs have thinner and fewer tissue layers between the mouth and inner ear.
In essence, these frogs' mouth bones act as the equivalent of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup bones in humans. Read more about the experiments at NatGeo News. Link -via Marilyn Terrell
(Image credit R. Boistel/CNRS)
Many folks have considered putting chickens in their backyard to have fresh eggs, but have no idea whether the effort would be worth the investment. A couple in Pennsylvania have stepped in with a business called Rent the Chicken. They supply laying-age chickens, a coop, accessories, feed, and instructions from May to November.
“It really is a trial period for someone who wants to have chickens long term,” said “Homestead” Phil Thompkins, who runs Rent the Chicken with his wife, Jenn. “A lot of people don’t know where to start.”
Jenn Thompkins graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a degree in business entrepreneurship, and the fledgling company serves residents of Armstrong, Butler and Indiana counties.
After watching friends struggle to learn what was involved in raising chickens for the eggs, they saw a need for a sort of starter-kit for other interested families.
They provided their first hen rental in July, and are spreading the word with a soft-opening of their business ahead of their grand opening next spring.
“I think it’s something a lot of people are into,” Thompkins said. “We’ve actually had a lot of positive feedback.”
After renting, the customer can opt to buy the chickens, send them back, or sign up to rent again next year. Link -via Arbroath
Will Braden tells how his one-off film of a neighbor's cat for a school project turned into an internet phenomenon. The cat Henri is really named Henry, and is an American cat from a Seattle animal shelter. -via Tastefully Offensive
It was a big weekend for alligator hunting in Missisippi. A six-person crew led by hunter Sean King of Yazoo City hooked what they joked was the Loch Ness Monster in Issaquena County.
The six-person party spent the following two hours trying to wrestle the behemoth into the boat and finally succeeded after two other hunters offered assistance.
When the harvest was officially weighed, it was obvious why they had so much trouble loading it. The gator came in at an enormous 723.5 pounds, beating the state record for heaviest male by 26 pounds.
But the record was only good for a short time. At the same time, Dustin Bockman of Vicksburg and his crew were chasing a very large alligator in the Mississippi River near Port Gibson. They were able to shoot the animal after a couple of hours of wrangling. Then there was a several-hours wait for help getting him into a boat. That's when he heard about the earlier 723-pound gator.
Bockman said he couldn’t believe it and thought he’d probably missed his chance at the claim of harvesting a state-record alligator by an hour. “I knew he was over 700, but I wasn’t sure about 723,” he said.
However, when Bockman’s 13-foot, 4.5-inch gator was lifted, the scales stopped at 727 pounds and the hour-old state record fell.
Believe it or not, those weren't the only gator records broken in Mississippi. Earlier in the weekend, Brandon “Boo” Maskew of Ellisville bagged a a female alligator weighing 295.3 pounds, setting a state record for the longest and heaviest female caught. Link -via Digg
Smithsonian has an interactive map in which a satellite image of New York is overlaid with a map drawn by cartographer Joseph Colton in 1836. Moving the earlier map around, you can see that the streets are mostly in the same place, but the shorelines have expanded, the islands are bigger, and there is no Central Park -in fact, a lot of the city was countryside and hills back then. Read more about it at the interactive site. Link -via Digg
Marquese Scott, also known as Nonstop, reinterprets Michael Jackson's "Thriller" with his own dance moves. If you remember Nonstop, you know that means defying the laws of physics. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Steve Nadis
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A
I have discussed the “holy grail problem” extensively in previous studies.1 Rather than
retread yet again on that same hallowed ground, I’ve elected, in this paper, to give the research a new focus -- that of specialization. The field of astronomy, in particular, is ripe for a treatment of this sort. As for why astronomy stands out in this regard, it’s not for me to say. My job (according to my grants manager) is to collect the data and present it in an even-handed way, without tipping my hand in a manner that might be perceived as uneven-handed or worse. However, I am allowed to speculate, albeit briefly, since my editor told me I could do so provided I limit my remarks to a few introductory sentences (the edited remnants of which you are reading here).
Allowable Digression
Astronomy, it strikes this observer, attracts an inordinate number of grail references because the field naturally lends itself to exaggeration: the biggest supercluster, the oldest galaxy, the most distant supernova, the brightest gamma-ray burster, the most massive supermassive black hole, and so forth. Given the penchant of bench scientists, as well as the reporters heralding their exploits, to resort to hyperbole, it is no surprise that the holy grail is an active (and some might say “hyperactive”) player in the celestial literature, cropping up, on average, once every two to three peer-reviewed articles and even more frequently in the non-refereed literature, where editorial “gatekeepers” are few and far between.2
The Twin Pillars
Having dispensed with my two allotted sentences -- digressive, as well as complex, and borderline run-ons -- I shall now proceed with the task at hand, an attempt to divine the meaning of the holy grail from the “twin pillars” of grail analysis upon which everything else (including all forms of punctuation, even the lowly apostrophe) rests: history and context. When the examples are lined up on the printed page, and laid out, logarithmically, in chronological fashion, does a pattern emerge? If so, is that pattern real or imagined? Likewise, one might ask whether we can ever define the “holy grail” in precise, unambiguous terms, or will its definition be limited to a set of transient qualities that shift endlessly like the proverbial sands of time?
Your favorite internet cats are now in kaleidoscope form! It changes constantly with your mouse moves. I see serious cat, keyboard cat, business cat, Shironeko, longcat, and others whose names escape me at the moment. Link -via Everlasting Blort
A compilation of kittens learning about slides. Sometimes they really like them -sometimes not. -via Tastefully Offensive
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