Etsy seller miniBIGS customizes LEGO mini figures. The latest set is the cast of characters from the HBO series Game of Thrones! You can order this set, and a couple of the figures are also available individually. Since this is called "series 1," there will probably be more figures to come. Link -via Warming Glow
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
The Supreme Court this week overturned a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The federal government will no longer provide oversight in those states that previously required a voter to pass a "literacy test" in order to vote.
After the end of the Civil War, would-be black voters in the South faced an array of disproportionate barriers to enfranchisement. The literacy test—supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters—was a classic example of one of these barriers.
The website of the Civil Rights Movement Veterans, which collects materials related to civil rights, hosts a few samples of actual literacy tests used in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s. In many cases, people working within the movement collected these in order to use them in voter education, which is how we ended up with this documentary evidence.
In case you've ever wondered how hard it would be to pass these tests, you can try one from Louisiana at Slate (only the first page is shown here). There are also links to tests from other states. Link -via Metafilter
Jeff Wysaski of Pleated-Jeans is left handed. Most of us aren't. So he is going to let you in on some thing you should know about lefties.
Fool your cat into thinking the odd vegetables are producing sounds, and you have instant entertainment. How could TV ever be this amusing? Now, if we could only get people to hold their phones correctly as they record… -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Sometime in elementary school, most of us endured memorizing multiplication tables, up to 12 x 12. However, in the past few decades, people rely more on calculators, and metric measures and decimals have replaced shillings and dozens in much of everyday life. So is there any purpose in learning multiples of twelve? Jon McLoone looks at the question, and finds that mathematical errors are reduced when you learn your "times tables," but only as far as the sevens, then the benefit of knowing more flattens out (see above graph). At least as far as future mathematical errors go, learning the higher tables may be useless.
However, looking back at my own experience, I believe that learning the nines, tens, elevens, and twelves will help a student to see the patterns in numbers. For my children, finding the beauty in mathematical patterns made the difference between hating math and exceling in it. What do you think? McLoone has a lot more to say about multiplication tables at the Wolfram Blog. Link -via b3ta
Buzzfeed has a collection of 27 screengrabs of various movies, cartoons, and TV shows with English translations that will make you laugh. Some of them make it obvious which is the translator's first language.
And then there are the animals, which give a translator a little leeway because we're supposed to know what they say. Or do we?
See the rest at Buzzfeed. Link
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad featuring Sherman Oliver Holmes, a mysterious crime solver and great-great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes. Can you solve the crime?
(Image credit: Flickr user Peter Huys)
Sherman Holmes sat on a park bench, watching as the neighborhood boys played a pick-up game of baseball. "I should retrieve my great-great-grandfather's bat and teach those lads the art of cricket," the amateur detective thought, then realized he didn't know how to play it himself.
"Oh, well," he sighed. "The lads are awfully close to those houses." And that, of course, was the exact moment when the batter hit a long fly in just that direction. Glass shattered and a home alarm began to wail.
The left fielder, a boy called Jake, went after the ball. He scrambled up a high wooden fence and straddled the top, gazing at the house and yard below. "The ball broke a window, all right," he shouted back to the others. Then his eyes widened. "Hey — you better call the police. I think there's been a robbery."
The game broke up immediately. Jake lowered himself into the backyard while the other boys circled around to the front of the house and awaited the police.
Jake unlocked the door from inside and let the officers in. Sherman sneaked in right behind. The rotund little Southerner was safely ensconced behind a potted palm when a man and a woman drove up in separate cars.
The newcomers joined the police inside. Sherman edged his potted palm into a good viewing position and managed to piece together the essentials.
The newcomers were brother and sister, Larry and Laura Conners. The house had belonged to their late father, who kept his coin collection on display on a table by the rear garden window. This was what Jake must have seen from the fence. The heavy table lay on its side, not far from the wayward baseball. Remnants of the broken window were everywhere. A patrolman walked across the fallen tablecloth and Sherman could hear the muted crunch of glass under the white linen.
The Conners both had keys and both knew the alarm code. They had been here together just this morning, arguing about the coins.
Heather Poole has worked for a major carrier for more than 15 years and is the author of Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy passengers at 35,000 Feet. We begged Poole to reveal 10 workplace secrets. (In return, we promised to buy her something nice from Skymall!)
1. IF THE PLANE DOOR IS OPEN, WE’RE NOT GETTING PAID.
You know all that preflight time where we’re cramming bags into overhead bins? None of that shows up in our paychecks. Flight attendants get paid for “flight hours only.” Translation: The clock doesn’t start until the craft pushes away from the gate. Flight delays, cancellations, and layovers affect us just as much as they do passengers—maybe even more.
Airlines aren’t completely heartless, though. From the time we sign in at the airport until the plane slides back into the gate at our home base, we get an expense allowance of $1.50 an hour. It’s not much, but it helps pay the rent.
2. LANDING THIS GIG IS TOUGH.
Competition is fierce: When Delta announced 1,000 openings in 2010, it received over 100,000 applications. Even Harvard’s acceptance rate isn’t that low! All that competition means that most applicants who score interviews have college degrees—I know doctors and lawyers who’ve made the career switch. But you don’t need a law degree to get your foot in the jetway door. Being able to speak a second language greatly improves your chances. So does having customer service experience (especially in fine dining) or having worked for another airline, a sign that you can handle the lifestyle.
The 4 percent who do get a callback interview really need to weigh the pros and cons of the job. As we like to say, flight attendants must be willing to cut their hair and go anywhere. And if you can’t survive on $18,000 a year, most new hires’ salary, don’t even think about applying.
Jayne demonstrates how steak goes from medium to well-done in an airplane kitchenette -a quick hot water bath!
3. WE CAN BE TOO TALL OR TOO SHORT TO FLY.
Want to cheer someone up? Send them this happy little parade of cats from the Japanese video game Mitchiri Neko. Keep your eye out for the cat eating spaghetti and the one playing the broom! -via Metafilter
They say a lot of artistic expression is motivated by self-loathing. But not for these folks! Long before the Material Girl ordered papa to stop preaching, these six puffed-up virtuosos knew darn well how to strike a pose. Here's to the creative types who managed to raise egotism to an art form.
1. Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Hitchcock was, without question, one of the towering geniuses of cinema. And, like many greats, he wasn't exactly the best collaborator.
Hitchcock was particularly trying for screenwriters, who felt he never properly credited them for their work. But he was notoriously hard on actors.
He was once quoted as saying, "Actors are cattle" -- a quip that stirred up a huge outcry (actors can be so touchy). In response, he issued this correction: "I have been misquoted. What I really said is, 'Actors should be treated as cattle.'"
Although it began accidentally (when he was short an actor for the film The Lodger), Hitchcock soon made it his egotistical trademark to appear in his own films, amassing a total of 37 cameos throughout his career.
2. Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
The egotist's egotist, author Ayn Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) is the patron saint of Thinking You're Better Than Everybody Else.
Her most famous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are massive dramatizations of Objectivism, her self-spun Oscar-the-Grouch philosophy for success. Objectivism champions ego and accomplishment, shuns all religion as folly, and condemns any form of charity or altruism as counterproductive to society.
Rand's novels often focus on protagonists (invariably men) who are shunned by others because of their genius, but then persevere over the foolishness of morons to prove said genius and emerge triumphant.
Not surprisingly, she saw humility as a weakness and regarded laughing at yourself as "spitting in your own face."
So, just how much did Rand believe in her own philosophy? Let's just say a lot. With signature modesty, she ranked herself as the philosophical equal of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
3. Orson Welles (1915-1985)
When you create a cinematic masterpiece such as Citizen Kane at the ripe old age of 25, you're bound to get a big head. But Welles was convinced of his own importance much earlier than that.
In the early 20th century, when the development of intelligence tests coincided with the rise of tabloid journalism, the public became obsessed with child prodigies. Children who exhibited various special talents were rushed to print, and became celebrities. But fame came with its own problems.
At roughly the height of the prodigy craze, in 1926, Winifred Sackville Stoner, an author, lecturer, and gifted self-publicist, had the ingenious idea of bringing some of the little geniuses together. The founder of an organization called the League for Fostering Genius and herself the mother of a famous prodigy named Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr., Stoner wanted to introduce the celebrated children to one another and to connect them with rich patrons who might bankroll their future feats. “Surely there is no better way in which to spend one’s millions,” the New York Times quoted her as saying.
Though the full guest list may be lost in time, the party’s attendees included William James Sidis, a young man in his twenties who had been a freshman at Harvard at age 11, and Elizabeth Benson, a 12-year-old who was about to enter college. Benson would later remember Nathalia Crane, a precocious poet of 12, as being there as well, although if she was, contemporary news accounts seem to have missed her. So what became of these dazzlingly bright prospects of yesteryear?
Smithsonian has the stories of several of the most celebrated child prodigies, and what became of them later in life. The stories are not all sunlight and roses, as the publicity surrounding their childhoods led them to shun the spotlight and for some, even their talents. Link
No, nobody is juggling cats in this video, but the cat is participating in the juggling! Uniman166 says his cats occasionally help him practice. It's the least they could do, after he make them a super-deluxe platform to sit on. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The man known as Technoviking managed to win his lawsuit against the videographer who made him famous -without testifying and without revealing his identity. A court in Berlin sided with the plaintiff against Matthias Fritsch over the 2000 video of Technoviking dancing at a street fair that went viral in 2007. The judgement means Fritsch must pay Technoviking the money he made from YouTube ads, most of the court costs, and €10,000 in compensation. He can also no longer use the original footage or derivative works.
Fritsch told the Daily Dot he was not pleased with the verdict. While he said he supports a person's right to privacy, he also firmly believes the video was a work of art and that, by forcing him to pay back his YouTube earnings, the court is essentially saying an artist cannot profit from their work. He said he'd like to take the legal fight to a higher court, but that will put him "even deeper in debt."
The mighty Technoviking never showed up in court, Fritsch said, preferring his lawyer to serve as proxy for the entire process.
The lawsuit only affects Fritsch, so the many copies of the Technoviking video will live forever. After all, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Link
How much you do know about cattle brands? Modern Farmer has a post on the history, traditions, and uses of brands. Learn about the many ways a simple brand can be made in different ways, the clever ways rustlers try to alter them, and some of the fun cattlemen have coming up with puns (like the ones above). Link -via Laughing Squid
We've learned that dinosaur DNA from millions of years ago is too degraded to be deciphered, but scientists have been sequencing DNA from extinct animals, going further and further back as the art and science of genome sequencing advances. The oldest genome sequenced so far is from a leg bone of a horse ancestor that lived 700,000 years ago!
"We knew that sequencing ancient genomes as old as 70,000 to 80,000 years old was possible," said Ludovic Orlando, an evolutionary geneticist with the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. "So we said, why not try even further back in time?"
The Pleistocene horse genome Orlando and colleagues pieced together helped them determine that the ancestor to the Equus lineage—the group that gave rise to modern horses, zebras, and donkeys—arose 4 to 4.5 million years ago, or about two million years earlier than previously thought. (Learn more about the evolution of horses.)
The bone used was found in the permafrost of Canada's Yukon Territory, which is a good environment for preserving DNA. Read more about the research at NatGeo News. Link
(Image credit: D.G. Froese via Nature)
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