Matt Shirley makes graphs all the time, which you can follow at Instagram. Most of them are about the minutiae of everyday living, such as traffic, time management, food, working, etc. Lately, they've all turned to the main subject of the day, the coronavirus pandemic and how it affects us.
Some are informational, but most are just amusingly relatable. Continue reading for more, but be aware than some contain NSFW text.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
On the off chance that you don't have enough interest in watching The Rise of Skywalker again soon enough to pay for it, but you'd be interested in the extras available on the home release, io9 has you covered. Their staff watched the two-hour making-of documentary and the featurettes that accompany the package, and gleaned a list of trivia you may be interested in. Among those tidbits, I learned about composer John Williams' cameo appearance.
John Williams’ cameo on Kijimi, as a bartender outside Babu Frik’s droid shop, was Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy’s idea. Williams was originally unsure about it but his wife convinced him.
In quite possibly the best Easter egg in the entire documentary, or maybe the Star Wars saga as a whole, every piece of seemingly random crap that populates the space where Williams’ character is standing represents one of the 51 films for which he’s been Oscar-nominated. Below are just a few of them...
See those pictures and a lot more trivia about The Rise of Skywalker at io9.
Matthew Brooks is a collector of old soap. He also manages the creation of new toiletry products, but his penchant for vintage soaps started when he was very young. A tour of an old Victorian home showed him how the scent of the vintage soap used there lent an air of authenticity and nostalgia to the past.
In many ways, the soap I seek could be described as mundane. I seek the brands which were once very commonplace, but which are now really very difficult to find. There was a category of soap called ‘household’, which encompassed the sort of all-purpose soaps sold in large, long lasting bars, which could be used for washing clothes and general cleaning, amongst a plethora of other uses. These soaps (which were made of natural materials such a coconut oil, tallow and pine resin) started to be replaced by washing powders and synthetic detergents in the 1950s, to the extent that there are now no existent consumer brands left in Great Britain. My key outlook therefore is for old packets of once famous brands, such as Lifebuoy, Fairy, Sunlight etc, and of these I have been lucky to find specimens which are over 100 years old. I find them in a great many different places, from friends moving into old houses and discovering forgotten packets scurried away under kitchen sinks, to rummaging through London’s many hardware shops looking for old stock at the back of shelves (it is alarming what you can find in such places!).
Read an interview with Brooks, in which he explains how soap led the world in branding, how the graphic design of the packages has changed, and how colonialism scattered the different brands of soap. Check out some of his collection at Soap Journal at Instagram, in which each entry tells the soap's history. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Wellcome Images)
The Whoopee Cushion was invented around 1930 by employees of JEM Rubber Company in Toronto. They found it quite funny, but also had troubled getting a novelty company interested in it. After all, as funny as fart sounds are, they are somewhat uncivilized. Johnson Smith & Co. finally took it on, and the Whoopee Cushion became an instant hit. Novelty collectors Stan and Mardi Timm know everything there is to know about Whoopee Cushions and other classic pranks you could once find at the dime store. And they are willing to tell us all about them.
Somewhere in between the water-squirting bow tie and the prank soap that makes your skin grimier as you wash is the Dribble Glass, a tumbler or cup with a hole in it, designed so the would-be drinker ends up with their beverage all over their chin and shirt.
“Collecting dribble glasses was Stan’s big thing,” Mardi tells me, indicating how even though they’ve shared this passion for novelties as a couple, they’ve each gotten excited about different aspects of the field. “In the last 15 years or so, Stan went nuts with dribble glasses. Every one of them is different. Several of those are made by S.S. Adams. I have pictures that give close-ups of the hole in the glass. You can see some are pretty crude, and then some are almost invisible. With the best ones, you can’t even tell the holes are there. But yeah, Stan has, like, 45 dribble glasses. He loves dribble glasses. I don’t know why.”
The Timms are facing retirement and are looking for a museum to take their dribble glasses, fake poop, magic tricks, and fart bags off their hands. Read what they have to tell us about the golden age of prank toys at Collectors Weekly.
It's time for some trivia about the songs you know and love! Well, you may know some of these facts, others have to do with songs you don't know, and some will surprise you. Here's one that I knew at the time, but kind of forgot, uh, 45 years later.
Yeah, that line in Young Frankenstein stayed with me, too. See all 27 pictofacts at Cracked.
Soap is the ultimate virus annihilator. We've heard about washing your hands for 20 seconds, and we've heard about how important it is to stop the spread of coronavirus. We've even learned tricks to calculate those 20 seconds. However, that lesson makes a lot more sense when you know exactly how it works. That 20 second rule isn't just the optimum time to wash your hands, it's the minimum time for soap to be effective. So soaping up for ten seconds and rinsing, then soaping up for another ten seconds just doesn't do the trick. If we do it right the first time, the coronavirus on our hands will die.
The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago is closed temporarily due to coronavirus. But caring for the creatures who live there goes on, and the fun has gone online so people around the world can see. With the tourists gone, the staff decided to take the penguins on a field trip to visit the other exhibits. The penguin watching fish is named Wellington, and at 30 years, he is the aquarium's oldest penguin.
But wait, there's more! Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa, has also closed during the pandemic, but they have a substantial colony of rockhopper penguins that roam free every day! They have taken the internet by storm in the last week.
They are beautiful, they are charming and they are GIF-able. These favourite rockhopper penguin GIFs show just why they are one of the Aquarium's most-loved animals. 🐧 https://t.co/QxtD00emC9 #penguin #rockhopper #cute pic.twitter.com/h3Px6bbAM8
— Two Oceans Aquarium (@2OceansAquarium) February 21, 2020
Watch them hopping down the stairs!
my favourite consequence of the covid-19 societal lockdown is aquarium penguins roaming around freely and when this is all over I for one welcome them as our new overlords pic.twitter.com/jRAQsF9nqm
— sloane (sipihkopiyesis) (@cottoncandaddy) March 17, 2020
You can see more of the Cape Town penguins at Facebook or Twitter.
Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, who are scientists at Dartmouth College, married to each other, and Monty Python fans, have written a paper that does a gait analysis of the various silly walks performed in the classic sketch known as the Ministry of Silly Walks. John Cleese plays Mr. Teabag, who works at the Ministry of Silly Walks. Mt. Putey (Michael Palin) comes to his office hoping for a grant to develop a silly walk. Butler and Dominy did the study to celebrate the sketch's 50th anniversary, and to draw attention to the need to reform the peer review process for health studies.
For their own gait analysis, Butler and Dominy studied both Mr. Putey's and the Minister's gait cycles in the video of the original 1970 televised sketch, as well as the Minister's gaits from a 1980 live stage performance in Los Angeles. "If silly walking can be defined as deviations from typical walking, then silliness can be quantified using two-dimensional video-based motion analysis," they wrote. So that's what they did. Butler and Dominy found that the Minister's silly walk is much more variable than a normal human walk—6.7 times as much—while Mr. Putey's walk-in-progress is only 3.3 times more variable.
So what does all this silly walking have to do with academic peer review? The sketch might be satirizing bureaucratic inefficiency, but Cleese's Minister is essentially engaging in a hyper-streamlined version of the peer review process in his meeting with Mr. Putey that (the authors concluded) resulted in a fair assessment. In reality, "Peer review is a very time-intensive process, both for the application and the reviews," said Butler.
"If the process were streamlined and grants were awarded more quickly, researchers could start their work earlier, accelerating the timeline for research," said Dominy. This would also save grant administrators time and money.
Read more of their findings at Ars Technica. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Erin E. Butler and Nathaniel J. Dominy)
Since it's not safe to pack a large number of people into an arena or auditorium right now, many entertainment productions have canceled, or have continued in a weird manner without the usual studio audience. If you've watched the late night shows or the town hall meetings, you are probably impressed by how much the energy from the audience added to the usual show. Now imagine that in pro wrestling. While other sporting events were canceled, the WWE went ahead with Monday Night Raw in an empty arena. But they had fun with it. Paul “Triple H” Levesque joined the commentary team with plenty of jokes about the situation.
The wrestlers followed suit. Bayley, the dastardly women’s champion, and her buddy Sasha Banks worked the nonexistent crowd as they walked to the ring. Nikki Cross tried to get a crowd chant going. The Miz and John Morrison used the absence of an audience to talk themselves up without the risk of getting booed. (Triple H’s deadpan response: “It’s amazing how comfortable Miz and Morrison are without crowd noise. It’s like it happens all the time.”)
The episode culminated in the already-legendary faceoff between semiretired babyface turned bonafide Hollywood star John Cena and his current rival, demented children’s show host (yes, you read that correctly) Bray Wyatt. Without the roar of the crowd yay-ing and booing behind it, the clash between Cena’s steely hip-hop Superman persona and Wyatt’s Joker-fied madness felt uncomfortably intimate, which to be honest is exactly the way it should feel.
Read more of this madness and see clips from the show at Vulture. -via Digg
See more clips at Uproxx.
(Image credit: WWE via YouTube)
Disney's plan to remake every animated feature film into a live-action remake continues with Mulan, which is due out on March 27. Before you see that one, let's revisit the original 1998 movie with an Honest Trailer. Mulan seemed progressive at the time, but not so much now. The new version, a war film with no songs or magical sidekicks, will be very different.
Archaeologists have found a 40-foot diameter building in Kostenki, Russia, that was apparently constructed from the bones of at least 60 mammoths. The bones, no doubt, made an excellent building material, after the mammoths had been eaten. Dwellings built of mammoth bones have been found before, but this one is much bigger and 3,000 years older. It doesn't appear to be an everyday living space, so researchers are speculating on its cultural significance.
"What a site!” says Penn State University anthropologist Pat Shipman, who wasn’t involved in the research. “I am completely intrigued as these remarkable finds differ meaningfully from previously discovered ones and can be more carefully and fully studied with modern techniques.”
The site stands out most obviously for its scale. “The size of the structure makes it exceptional among its kind, and building it would have been time-consuming,” says Marjolein Bosch, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Cambridge. “This implies that it was meant to last, perhaps as a landmark, a meeting place, a place of ceremonial importance, or a place to return to when the conditions grew so harsh that shelter was needed,” Bosch was not involved with the new research on this “ truly exceptional find” but has personally visited the site. Indeed, the structure’s sheer size makes it an unlikely everyday home. “I cannot possibly imagine how they would have roofed over this structure,” Pryor said.
The smaller mammoth houses feature more definite cooking hearths, and they contain the remains of reindeer, horse and fox, which suggests the people in them were living on whatever they could find in the area. The new mammoth bone structure lacks evidence of other animal remains. “It’s almost exclusively woolly mammoth remains and that is one of the interesting things about it,” Pryor said.
“With no other animal bones, this doesn’t look much like a dwelling where people lived for a while,” Shipman added.
The team has found some intriguing clues, which you can read about at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: A. E. Dudin)
At the North Pole, 24 time zones converge to a point, and time as we measure it has no meaning. Sunrise, sunset, and noon come only once a year. The same has true at the South Pole, but Antarctica is a continent with people. They've worked out a system where each research station coordinates their clocks with their sponsoring nation. At the North Pole, the clocks are set wherever you want them. Most of the time, this is unimportant, as the Pole sits in the Arctic Ocean, and anyone who happens to be there is just passing through, with no reasons to change their clocks at all. But the research ship the RV Polarstern is deliberately locked in the ice for a year to study Arctic conditions, and it has a crew of 100 people from 20 countries. What time is it for them?
At the North Pole, it’s all ocean, visited only rarely by an occasional research vessel or a lonely supply ship that strayed from the Northwest Passage. Sea captains choose their own time in the central Arctic. They may maintain the time zones of bordering countries—or they may switch based on ship activities. Sitting here in my grounded office, it is baffling to think about a place where a single human can decide to create an entire time zone at any instant.
Last fall the Polarstern captain pushed the time zone back one hour every week, for six weeks, to sync up with incoming Russian ships that follow Moscow time. With each shift, the captain adjusted automatic clocks scattered around the ship. Researchers paused to watch the hands of analog clocks spin eerily backward. And every time the time changed, it jostled the delicate balance of clock-based communication—between instruments deployed on the ice, between researchers onboard, and between them and their families and colleagues on faraway land.
And you thought you had trouble adjusting to Daylight Saving Time! Read about how the Polarstern deals with time at the North Pole at Scientific American. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Janek Uin)
Don't you just love it when someone combines two of our favorite subjects? Most people would think trying to set up a domino fall with cats around is a fool's errand, but it works here. These are the well-behaved cats who ring a bell to get a treat. The domino sequence is not only fascinating for the cats to watch, but there are several places where its progress depends on cats acting like cats. Which they do very well.
Austria built a nuclear reactor as a power plant before they asked the citizens whether they wanted one. Oops. But that was in the 1970s. Maybe they should ask them again. However, the facility has its uses, although not for nuclear power generation. Tom Scott tells the story.
The legend of a race of women warriors known as the Amazons has been around since ancient Greek scribes wrote them down. That's where we got our greatest comic book superhero, and indeed, the Amazon River and rain forest were named after them. But are they a myth in the same vein as Zeus and Poseidon, or were they a story meant to be taken as fiction even in its time? Or could there be some basis for the tale in reality?
Until fairly recently, it was believed that the Amazons were created from scratch by the patriarchal Greeks as a device to highlight things like the supposed inherent superiority of males. For example, in the myths, while the Amazons were frequently praised for their skill as warriors, they usually lost to the Greeks in the end. (After all, Theseus made Antiope his concubine, and when her Amazon friends came to Athens to free her, they were defeated as well.)
However, in the early 1990s, archaeologists Renate Rolle and Jeannine Davis-Kimball independently discovered evidence that began to challenge the traditional beliefs about the Amazons. Later research by Stanford historian Adrienne Mayor would go on to use this and other evidence to rather convincingly argue that there really was a group of warrior women that inspired the legends.
Read about that evidence, and what it tells us, at Today I Found Out.
Email This Post to a Friend