This lovely picture of a pair of raccoons may startle you at first. No, the rock is not about to hit the smaller raccoon. The stone is jutting out of the water, which is perfectly reflecting the sky! Now look closer. The raccoon on the left has apparently taken off his mask, not thinking that anyone would take his picture. Have you ever seen a maskless raccoon before? Link -via reddit
(Image credit: Flickr user Raccoon Photo)
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
In 1967, Dr. William Podlich and his family went to Afghanistan for two years while he taught at a teacher's college in Kabul. He took plenty of photographs during his stay, which show Aghanistan as a fairly progressive country in which foreigners were welcome, girls went to school, the military was strong, universities thrived, libraries and archaeological sites were protected, and lush parks were maintained. What a difference 40 years of war makes! See a selection of Dr. Podlich's photos at the Denver Post. Link -via the Presurfer
You Had One Job is a photo repository for the meme, which contains hundreds of photos already, with more coming in constantly. You can eat up quite a bit of time looking through them! Continue reading to see some of the best.
The Crown Prosecution Service in West Midlands, England demanded a statement from a witness named PC Peach about an arrest. Officers on the case tried to explain that PC Peach was a police dog, but the demand for a statement stood. So the dog's handler made out a statement for the dog as best as he could.
The statement read: “I chase him. I bite him. Bad man. He tasty. Good boy. Good boy Peach.” It stated that the age of the witness was “four” and that his number was PD4341. The document was pinned to the wall at West Midlands Police Station, much to the amusement of colleagues. One officer took a photograph of the statement and it soon appeared on Facebook and on several police Twitter accounts.
The CPS, however, failed to see the funny side and complained to the police that their mistake had been turned into a very public joke. PC Mark Tissington, of West Midlands Police, who is believed to have shared the original picture of the witness form, has referred himself to the internal discipline unit although sources suggested he was unlikely to be reprimanded.
Last year, a group of Sasquatch investigators in Texas announced that they had sequenced Bigfoot's DNA, but they had trouble getting the results published in a scientific journal. Now that data has been published in a brand-new journal called DeNovo, which was recently purchased by the Texas researchers and contains only one paper: the Bigfoot DNA report. The thing is, you have to pay $30 to read it. However, Ars Technica got a copy and lets us in on some details. The researchers pose the hypothesis that Bigfoot is a hybrid of human and some unidentified primate.
To begin with, the mitochondrial DNA of the samples (when it can be isolated) clusters with that of modern humans. That isn't itself a problem if we assume that those doing the interbreeding were human females, but the DNA sequences come from a variety of different humans—16 in total. And most of these were "European or Middle Eastern in origin" with a few "African and American Indian haplotypes." Given the timing of the interbreeding, we should only be seeing Native American sequences here. The authors speculate that some humans may have walked across the ice through Greenland during the last glaciation, but there's absolutely no evidence for that. The best explanation here is contamination.
As far as the nuclear genome is concerned, the results are a mess. Sometimes the tests picked up human DNA. Other times, they didn't. Sometimes the tests failed entirely. The products of the DNA amplifications performed on the samples look about like what you'd expect when the reaction didn't amplify the intended sequence. And electron micrographs of the DNA isolated from these samples show patches of double- and single-stranded DNA intermixed. This is what you might expect if two distantly related species had their DNA mixed—the protein-coding sequences would hybridize, and the intervening sections wouldn't. All of this suggests modern human DNA intermingled with some other contaminant.
There will be more analysis coming from various science writers about this paper, but you can get a good overview from Ars Technica. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Katy Kristin)
Evan Seitz has another fast-moving video quiz in which 26 movies are represented, in alphabetical order. How many can you name? He says this is the final episode of his ABCinema series, which includes movies by numbers, movies by colors, and alphabetic video games, as well as the earlier alphabetical movie quiz. -via Geeks Are Sexy
See all the films in Seitz's series. Link
You've seen plenty of those ads that start "_____ hate him! ______reveals the secret to _____" that are accompanied by a picture of the so-called expert you can buy information from. But sometimes the picture is of someone you recognize, like Isaac Asimov, or the gentleman here, who is Paul Karason. Karason was in the news a few years ago for having blue skin due to the ingestion of colloidal silver. Who selects the random pictures for these ads? I would not be surprised at all if it were a bot. Link
A shift in the political focus in China coincided with a box of mangoes in 1968, which led to a year-long fad that equated mangos with China's leader Mao Zedong. The rejection of the overzealousness of the Red Guards gave way to the promotion of the working class as the vanguard of communist idealism. And the mangos just happened to be in the right place at that time.
One week after Mao dissolved the Red Guards, on August 4, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Mian Arshad Hussain, and his wife met with the Chairman. It was not an especially momentous occasion on the order of, say, President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. Rather, it was your basic, run-of-the-mill courtesy call from a foreign dignitary paying homage to a bigger, mightier neighbor. And because China is a gift-giving society, Mr. Hussain brought a case of mangoes with him, in the same way that you or I might stop off at the liquor store on the way to a party to pick up a bottle of wine so we don’t arrive empty handed.
The next day, Mao delivered a message to the workers, who were still stationed at Qinghua University, designating them as the “permanent managers” of the nation’s education system. Accompanying the message was the untouched case of Pakistani mangoes. In the days to come, much would be made of Mao’s “refusal to eat the fruit,” which was interpreted as “a sacrifice” on the Chairman’s part “for the benefit of the workers.”
In fact, says Murck, the truth may have been a good deal simpler. “Apparently,” Murck says, via Skype from her home in Beijing, “Mao didn’t like fruit. Mangoes are messy, so he would have needed someone to peel and slice them. It was an easy re-gift.”
Of course, that’s not how the workers saw it. For them, the mangoes were imbued with all sorts of power. They were the vehicle conveying a rare personal message from Mao, in which he thanked them for their heroism in the battle with the Red Guards. Even more auspiciously, the mangoes’ appearance coincided with the transfer of the Cultural Revolution’s stewardship from members of the nation’s intelligentsia (as personified by the student Red Guards) to its workers.
So mangos became a powerful symbol of Mao worship. The fruit was added to posters, dishes, and textiles. The original mangoes were preserved in reliquaries for proper veneration. There are even cases of people who were arrested for not showing the proper reverence for mangos! Some of those mango items are now part of an exhibit in Zurich about the era. See some of them and read the whole story of the Mao Mango Cult at Collector's Weekly. Link
The dark, cold Baltic Sea holds the remains of shipwrecks going back as far as 800 years. The sea's freshwater doesn't support the life forms that break down wood in salt water. In a photo collection at Environmental Graffiti we see a Russian team explore the shipwrecks of the Baltic, including a close look at an American-made ship that once belonged to Tsar Nicholas I, which sank in 1856. Link
(Image credit Viktor Lyagushkin)
This is the very definition of fluff snugglers: almost seven minutes of adorable animals of all kinds! Some of these you may have seen, but are worth another look, and some are new. My favorite had to be the poor turtle trying to eat the stickers on its aquarium. But the bunnies made my heart melt! (via Blame It On The Voices)
CNN affiliate KIRO tested drivers before and after they smoked marijuana to see how it affects their abilities. Something that had never occurred to me is how states with varying levels of legal marijuana use have to establish limits on how much would make you legally ineligible to drive a vehicle. They have, and if these test subjects are any indication, one would probably need to consume several times the legal limit before police will observe you driving erratically. That said, you should never operate a vehicle, or any heavy machinery, while impaired, legally or not. -via reddit
This classic article is from the Annals of Improbable Research.
by David D. Levine, Portland, Oregon
Illustrations by Lino Martins
The Cellfoan People are composed of numerous tribes. Although mutually dependent on each other, these tribes are fiercely competitive, and a good deal of their time is spent maneuvering for position, forming and breaking alliances, and bargaining in order to gain an advantage over other tribes. However, they seldom if ever engage in actual warfare. Instead, a special caste of shamans known as the aturni conducts complex and ritualized formal contests for dominance. These contests sometimes take years or decades to be decided, and at any time a tribe may be engaged in contests on dozens or hundreds of fronts. Because of the complexity of the contests, it is not atypical for both combatants to claim victory no matter what the actual outcome.
The costume of the Cellfoan People is uniform across all tribes and all levels of status. It consists of a woolen jacket and matching pants in a dark color, and a shirt of cotton or polyester in a lighter color. The overall somber appearance of this outfit, or süt, is relieved by a band of brightly colored fabric, called a nektai, worn about the neck. The significance of the colors of this band has not yet been determined, although it is of only limited use in determining the wearer's status. Status is instead displayed by subtle differences in cut and quality within the rigid framework of the standard style of clothing. A more reliable indicator of status is the presence or absense of various totemic objects.
Cellfoan People are usually seen to carry at least one totemic object, or toi, on their person at all times. These objects are used to communicate with the gods and obtain their guidance and blessings for any and all weighty events. Ownership of a powerful toi confers both power and prestige upon the owner; a Cellfoan Person who is so unfortunate as to lose his toi or have it stolen is completely devastated, and often can neither work nor sleep until it is restored or replaced.
Lilah and Nick built this wonderful cabin in West Virginia out of reclaimed lumber and filled it with eccentric castoff vintage and antique furnishings. One wall is made completely of old windows. I particularly like this imaginative use of an old cast iron bed frame -not as a bed, but as a hanging rack over the bed!
Found at Cabin Porn. Link
Pictures from the cabin's Tumblr site. Link
The new movie A Good Day to Die Hard opened last week to harsh reviews, but was still the top movie of the weekend. One good thing to come of it is this life-size replica of hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) sculpted of chocolate! This is apparently a promotion for the film in Japan. Link
I spent an hour curling one daughter's hair for an occasion this past weekend, while the other daughter woke up from a nap with a full head of wavy curls. What's the difference?
On one level, the texture of a person’s hair derives from his or her genes. A 2009 study looked at the genetics of waves and curls and reported a heritability of between 85 and 95 percent. (That means about nine tenths of the variation in hair texture within the sample could be ascribed to DNA.) How does this play out at the level of a single hair? Research shows that the curvature of a strand depends on the nature of its follicle. When a follicle is asymmetrical, the hair that it produces is oval in shape and tends to curl. When it’s symmetrical, the strand that emerges grows round and straight.
But there's more. Popsci described the microscopic differences in naturally curly hair and hair from the rest of us. But they offer no easy solution for wanting the kind of hair you don't have. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user hourig94)
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