When you go for a job interview, you start out with the attitude that you need to impress the people at that company. Are you good enough to get this job? But then you realize that you are also finding out about the business and the people you'll be working with, and if you go to enough interviews, you'll run into at least one that's completely bonkers.
The Name of the Year Tournament is a little late getting launched, so it can't called itself March Madness, but the excitement is there as it is every year. The full-size, readable 2018 bracket is here. The number one seeds are Salami Blessing, La Royce Lobster-Gaines, Dr. Narwhals Mating, and Makenlove Petit-Fard. Can those names of real people fend of the likes of Forbes Thor Kiddoo, Darthvader Williamson, Fabulous Flournoy, or Beau Titsworth? Voting will begin soon at the tournament's blog. -via Metafilter
The Fermi Paradox asks the question of why we haven't found extraterrestrial life, considering the billions of planets in the universe. There are plenty of possible reasons, but the idea is that the rest of the intelligent species of the galaxy just don't want to be around us is as good as any. Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to exterminating us yet. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
For some reason, we had to learn the difference between Roman columns in elementdary school. It may have been so that the school could check off "architecture" in our curriculum, but the lesson was disconnected to anything else in world history, so it didn't mean much. The real reason that columns were so important is that they held the building up, which would be important if we ever bothered to learn more about architecture. But now that we're older and know more, we get the fascinating tale of why Corinthian columns were made in the same pattern for thousands of years, from the Greeks and Romans all the way up to today.
Disney Dan has a series of videos he's made over the past several years that trace the evolution of costumed Disney characters. Mickey Mouse was making public appearances decades before Disneyland opened, and he is the first character to get a deep dive into the costume. You'll learn some stories you haven't heard before, like how the first Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland were borrowed from the Ice Capades because Walt didn't have any cast members or costumes.
My kids were excited to meet Mickey in 2002 at Walt Disney World. If we'd waited a couple of years, he could have spoken to them, but by then my daughters would have been older and not as thrilled. Disney Dan has 14 videos in the series so far, covering Donald Duck, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Dumbo, and more. Eventually, he'll get around to doing costume videos on the Disney Princesses. -via Metafilter
The newest Steven Spielberg movie, Ready Player One, opens nationwide today. In honor of the occasion, we can indulge in some a Spielberg's greatest past work. A set piece is "a scene or sequence of scenes whose execution requires serious logistical planning and considerable expenditure of money." They can often stand alone without the rest of the film, but they cannot be taken out of a film without damaging the whole. For example:
7. Melting Nazis, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
More than a decade before Spielberg The Grownup Filmmaker plunged audiences into the full horror of the Holocaust, Spielberg The Ageless Adolescent tackled history’s darkest chapter from a more boyish, innocently rousing vantage. Raiders Of The Lost Ark is all about sticking it to Hitler—a kind of fantasy score-settling that culminates in the film’s karmic, cathartic Grand Guignol climax. Tied to a nearby post, Ford’s Dr. Jones and Marion Crane (Karen Allen) avert their eyes as the Nazi bad guys pry open the titular artifact and get some supernatural comeuppance. The ethereal effects look primitive by today’s standards, but there’s a timeless (and, sadly, rather timely) thrill to watching these Third Reich scoundrels go from solid to liquid for their sins. It was neither the first nor the last time Spielberg would push the limits of the PG rating; everyone tends to attribute the introduction of PG-13 to the heart-ripping violence in his second Indiana Jones movie. But with Raiders, Spielberg traumatized all ages for a greater good. Remember, the next best thing to clocking a real Nazi is melting off the face of a fake one.
The AV Club looks at 25 such set pieces, arranged in chronological order, maybe because it would be too hard to rank them. Oh yeah, the videos are there, too. Scrolling through them is like watching all your favorite movies again.
Robbie Barrat is testing the limits of machine learning. He gave a neural network lessons in art, and asked it to paint landscapes (digitally, of course). More recently, he turned his attention to classical nudes. He fed thousands of nude portraits into a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to see what would result.
Generative adversarial networks are defined as a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, which uses two different neural networks, one called the "generator" and one the "discriminator."
"The generator tries to come up with paintings that fool the discriminator, and the discriminator tries to learn how to tell the difference between real paintings from the dataset and fake paintings the generator feeds it," Barrat told me. "They both get better and better at their jobs over time, so the longer the GAN is trained, the more realistic the outputs will be."
Sometimes, Barrat explained, the GAN will fall into what's called a "local minima," which means the generator and discriminator have found a way to keep trying to fool each other without actually getting better at the task at hand.
Here are some AI generated nude portraits I've been working on
Usually the machine just paints people as blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out - I think it's really surreal. I wonder if that's how machines see us... pic.twitter.com/tYgzCHGfse
The two neural networks may be quite pleased with themselves, but their nudes are so abstract that they'll never flag a moderator. The one in the middle right of this Tweet looks like Olaf from Frozen. However, people have asked if they could buy a print. Read about the algorithmically-generated art at CNET and see more digital paintings in Barrat's Twitter feed. -via Boing Boing
Now that the home version of The Last Jedi is out, we get to see a lot of the extra features -at least the shorter ones. This one is labeled "bloopers and outtakes," but while there are some bloopers, most of it is just silliness on the set.
People have been lifting ideas from Mother Nature for decades. Velcro was inspired by the hooked barbs of thistle, and the first highway reflectors were made to mimic cat eyes. But today, the science of copying nature, a field known as biomimetics, is a billion-dollar industry. Here are some of our favorite technologies that came in from the wild.
1. Sharkskin—The Latest Craze in Catheters
Hospitals are constantly worried about germs. No matter how often doctors and nurses wash their hands, they inadvertently spread bacteria and viruses from one patient to the next. In fact, as many as 100,000 Americans die each year from infections they pick up in hospitals. Sharks, however, have managed to stay squeaky clean for more than 100 million years. And now, thanks to them, infections may go the way of the dinosaur.
Unlike other large marine creatures, sharks don't collect slime, algae, or barnacles on their bodies. That phenomenon intrigued engineer Tony Brennan, who was trying to design a better barnacle-preventative coating for Navy ships when he learned about it in 2003. Investigating the skin further, he discovered that a shark's entire body is covered in miniature, bumpy scales, like a carpet of tiny teeth. Algae and barnacles can't grasp hold, and for that matter, neither can troublesome bacteria such as E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus.
Brennan's research inspired a company called Sharklet, which began exploring how to use the sharkskin concept to make a coating that repels germs. Today, the firm produces a sharkskin-inspired plastic wrap that's currently being tested on hospital surfaces that get touched the most (light switches, monitors, handles). So far, it seems to be successfully fending off germs. The company already has even bigger plans; Sharklet's next project is to create a plastic wrap that covers another common source of infections—the catheter.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Our story begins in November of 1950, when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were making one of their appearances on the popular weekly variety show The Colgate Comedy Hour. At the end of one of their comedy sketches on the show, a 16-year-old kid named Sammy Petrillo made an appearance as a baby Jerry Lewis, in a crib. Sammy was paid "around $600" for the gig -easy money- he had no lines. A few weeks later, Sammy made another guest appearance as a Jerry Lewis clone on Eddie Cantor's Colgate Comedy Hour turn (the show featured rotating guest hosts).
Actually, our story began 16 years earlier, when Sammy Petrillo was born in the Bronx, in 1934. Like Jerry Lewis, Sammy was born into a show business family. And also like Jerry, Sammy began performing at a very early age and would sometimes join his father onstage when he was performing in the Catskills.
Already bitten by the show biz bug, as a teenager, Sammy enrolled in the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. The turning point of Sammy Petrillo's life occurred one innocent day- when he was getting a haircut.
Sammy: “One day I went down to the Annex at the High School of Performing Arts. The Annex was a trade school and they had people who were learning how to cut hair. And so I got a freebie haircut and the guy cut my hair and he started to laugh. And I said, 'Whatta ya laughing at?' and he said, 'You look just like that Jerry Lewis!' And I said, 'Get outta here!' And everywhere I walked, people laughed and asked me if I was Jerry Lewis, it was unbelievable. And Jerry Lewis at the time, I guess, had made his second motion picture, My Friend Irma Goes West. I really didn't know that much about him. I kinda caught some glimpses of the movie and I saw he went, 'Ack! Ack! Ack!' And he talked kinda high... And I said, 'Gee, maybe I do resemble that guy and I can do that kind of a laugh, I could do that kind of a voice."
Even though species normally evolve in tiny increments, when one develops something that is different from their ancestors, there has to be a first one to try it. YouTube comedian CalebCity imagined how that very first plant decided it would be carnivorous and then evolve into a Venus Flytrap. He plays the roles of two plants and a bumblebee.
In this week's episode of Scatterbrained from Mental Floss, John Green and the gang tell us about shopping malls: their history, purpose, features, and a lot of little things you never realized before. It's a fact-filled primer on shopping malls! There are also tidbits on the most famous department stores that anchored those malls, plus the small shops that exist nowhere else, and the restaurants that were designed just for malls. Shopping malls will never again be what they were in the 1980s and '90s, but they still exist, and their heyday spawned other forms of community shopping.
While I was never obliged to drink turpentine as a child, I was haunted with the idea a few times. We had access to doctors. My parents, however, were given a few drops occasionally during their childhoods to ward off intestinal worms and other parasites. See, pines trees developed sap that kills parasites, and turpentine is distilled pine resin. Turpentine is good for thinning paint, repelling water, and as fuel for lamps. That doesn't mean it's safe to ingest, but it has a long history as a medicine.
Viewed in context, it’s easier to understand why doctors once used it as medicine. Pine tar, another related product, is still a useful medicine ingredient for rashes and skin problems, while turpentine oil, which was also considered good for lung health, is still an ingredient in Vick’s Vapor-Rub. (Although it’s listed as an inactive ingredient.) Turpentine is antiseptic, too, and the terrible taste and harsh effects could have been interpreted as signs that it was working. “King of the [medicines] was turpentine, a product of the tidewater pine forests,” Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark wrote. “Turpentine had three important medical requisites: It smelled loud, tasted bad, and burned like the woods on fire.” It also had the strange side effect of making urine smell like violets.
The Weeki Wachee mermaids were magical creatures to me as a child, even though I was old enough to know they were real women. Women with awesome jobs, in my eyes. Like many little girls, I wanted to grow up to be a mermaid. But not badly enough to move to Florida as an adult. I had no idea they were still putting on shows three times a day in 2018!
Tom Scott takes us on a tour of Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Florida, and gives us a bit of the history of the famous -and now gloriously retro- mermaid show.
Making s'mores out of Peeps is the true fusion of spring and summer confections. You can do that without even going outside with the Peeps S’mores Skillet Dip! A hot cast iron skillet under a broiler replaces a campfire, and a rainbow of Peeps provide the eye candy. That won't last long, as you swish a roasted, melty Peep with the melted chocolate using a graham cracker. Or maybe a fork, if you want a neater s'more. Since Easter is the last of the candy holidays until Halloween, you might want to stock up on Peeps so you can have this again and again. Get the complete recipe, with a video, at Hello Giggles. -via Pee-wee Herman
