In just four panels, this comic shifts gears several times, but tells a coherent tale. By the end, you realize that it never had anything to do with a genie in a lamp, except for the idea of asking for your wish. How many times has this exact scenario played out in real life? This is the latest from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
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Austin McConnell tells you very quickly what you should do if your parachute fails, apparently because you Googled this video when it happened. Yeah, it would have been better if you paid attention before you jumped out of the plane, but whatever.
Your chances of survival are slim, but not zero, so you may as well do what you can to raise those odds on your way down. If you survive the impact, there's plenty more to do to keep from dying. Good luck. -via Rusty Blazenhoff
Chef Jun Yoshizuki and his wife Rachel (previously at Neatorama) give us westerners some tips about confronting squat toilets, which are found all over Asia. Watch as Rachel suffers from STSD- Squat Toilet Stress Disorder. This does not have to be you! A little knowledge ahead of time will help you avoid falling in, losing your phone and money in the toilet, peeing all over the floor, or injuring yourself.
Learning to squat properly is good for your health, too, and will undo a lot of the damage to our bodies from sitting all day. With a little practice, we'll all be able to do away with chairs altogether (yeah, right). -via Viral Viral Videos
There are so many different types of spiders in the world, it's no wonder that they evolved different ways to do their spider-things. Some of them have super powers! Spider-Man uses his "spidey sense" to detect danger, but some real spiders design their world to enhance their sensory perception.
Despite lacking ears, spiders have some impressive musical talents. They treat the strands of their webs like the strings of a guitar, tuning them just right so they can detect certain vibrations. For their study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers from the University of Oxford and Charles III University of Madrid observed garden cross spiders maintaining their webs. They learned that adjusting the tension and stiffness of the silk allows the spiders to sense frequencies they can recognize. One signal might mean that prey is near, while another could be connected to structural issues with the web.
You may know some of the weird and wonderful things spiders can do, but its impressive to see so many of them compiled in a list at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Christine Matthews)
How many pop culture logos would you recognize? Are you more familiar with logos and symbols from TV, movies, comic books, or video games? Signs.com did a survey of over a thousand people to see which of 181 pop culture symbols they recognized. We don't know much more about the survey, although I would guess it was voluntary and internet-based. The results are presented in a series of charts, broken down by genre and age of participants. Unsurprisingly, older people did well with movies and TV symbols, younger people did better with comic books and video games. I am a bit surprised that more participants overall recognized Heisenberg from Breaking Bad than the Star Trek insignia. But the fact that the Transformers symbols did so well should tell you about the overall ages of the participants. See all the charts at Signs.com. -via TVOM
Monday was World Kindness Day. The Washington Post published stories from all kinds of people about a kindness they received that had a lasting impact. In response, the comments have many more such stories. And so does Metafilter. Mefite forza told about the time she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mozambique and the bus to her village broke down in the middle of nowhere.
It was about 30 minutes' drive from the nearest village but there wasn't much in that village. I don't even know if it was on the map, but it basically consisted of just huts and small plots of land. I knew nobody there, there was certainly nothing in the way of hotels or campsites or any kind of place to sleep, and I had no way of getting in touch with anyone (this was before cell phones were ubiquitous). I had no idea what to do. Some people were bedding down on the side of the road and I figured I'd just have to do that. But I was pretty freaked out at the idea. For one thing, there were unexploded landmines along the road and we were constantly warned never to go off it. It was probably okay, but... landmines! Worse, most everyone else was traveling with their families or other companions, and here I was, a very young woman, alone, with pale white skin that just screamed out "I'm a rich foreigner and do not belong." I spoke Portuguese reasonably well but not any of the local dialects, which is what most people spoke, which made everything even more difficult.
While I was standing there, dismayed, trying to figure out what to do, one of the women I'd been chatting off and on with started gesturing to me impatiently. "Come with me" she said with a kind of take-charge, no-nonsense air that I admired. I don't remember what I said or did, but the long and the short of it is that she overrode any feeble objections I had and in short order I was hustled into the next chapa (a local taxi truck thingy) and taken to the nearby village, where she lived. She and her large family hosted me that night. We had chips and matapa, a delicious Mozambican dish that I loved but had never perfected making myself. Her kids laughed and circled around and were fascinated to have a visit from a real mulungu (white person). I held her baby, an adorably alert little girl with huge black eyes. For some reason I still remember the baby's name: Carlotta. I couldn't follow a lot of the conversation, because only the woman spoke Portuguese, but I felt so welcomed despite my foreignness. I remember nodding off to sleep in my corner after that meal, thinking how safe and full I felt, knowing it was only this woman's sheer kindness that lay between that and a night spent shivering in fear and hunger by the side of the road.
You'll notice in the stories that the giver receives a great boost in happiness.
This! I had a friend who had been broke as all get out post divorce, but then married a very wealthy man. She loved to give - to friends, to strangers, big gifts, small gifts, it was all good. Recipients would try to refuse her gifts, "Oh no, no, I couldn't possibly accept something this generous!" They didn't realize how much pleasure she got from giving. Heck, I didn't realize at first, until I watched her face. I've learned to accept generosity and kindness as its own gift.
Reading the stories in all these links can be a gift for yourself, and an inspiration to do something kind for someone today.
(Inrelated image credit: Leandro Neumann Ciuffo)
In an unassuming red barn in Litchfield, Connecticut, you'll find the Space Age Museum, with a collection of mid-20th-century toys and artifacts that celebrate the exploration of space and the bright future envisioned at the time. There are aliens, robots, rockets, spaceships, and lots of photographs that you'll only see online, as the museum is not open to the public. It's a family affair, the work of John Kleeman and his son Peter. The collection began as a project the two could enjoy together.
One of the key aspects of many of the sci-fi artifacts they’ve collected is their interactivity. “You could send away for Tom Corbett space goggles, or space helmets. You could participate with some of the shows, like Captain Video with decoders,” says Peter. For John and Peter, it’s this element of participation that turns the objects they collect into symbols of changing attitudes about space exploration. By picking up the ray gun of someone like Buck Rogers, kids were able to engage with the (then) ephemeral dream of the Space Age. “A lot of people talk about the Space Age beginning on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik was launched,” says Peter. “But we see the space age vision in popular culture growing for several decades before that. Where we really see it come into pop culture in more of a visual form is with the comic strips and toys of Buck Rogers in the late ’20s and early ’30s.”
Read more about the Space Age Museum, and get a peek inside, at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Samir S. Patel)
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
General Research About Lachrymal Fluids
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Tears and crying are not fully understood, despite the efforts documented in these four studies.
The Art of Crying
Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, James Elkins, London, Routledge, 2001.
Does a Herdsman-Jilted Llama Shed Tears?
“Tear Apparatus of Animals: Do They Weep?” Juan Murube del Castillo, The Ocular Surface, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2009, pp. 121-127. The author, at the University of Acalà, Madrid, Spain, explains:
Sexual relations between shepherds and the members of their flocks have existed for millennia, leading to the development of a certain type of love between them. The female llama, a ruminant related to the camel, is said by the local people in the Andean high plateau to weep with tears of jealousy when the herdsman replaces her with another female llama. The abandoned llama circles around the new couple, shedding tears of jealousy and sadness. I have had the opportunity to ask several shepherds about this. They told me that a replaced llama may gaze sadly at the new couple, but they had never seen one weep.
Hymenoptera: Apidae That Drink Human Tears
Who says cats can't speak English? Jason Ybarbo comes home from work and says hello to his cat. Recently, the cat started saying hello back to him. It's no Don Piano, but it is certainly a human greeting. It will be time to panic when he comes home and the cat asks why he's so late. -via reddit
Dr. Kevin Menes is an attending physician in charge of the Emergency Department at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. He works the night shift. On the evening of October first, he had three other emergency doctors, one trauma surgeon, and a trauma resident on duty when the hospital was notified of a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI)- someone was shooting people at an outdoor concert. Dr. Menes went into action, calling up extra staff and preparing operating rooms.
I was out in the ambulance bay when the first police cars arrived with patients. There were three to four people inside each cruiser. Two people on the floorboards and two in the back seat, and they were in bad shape. These patients were “scoop and run”—minimal to no prior medical care but brought in a timely manner. They had thready pulses, so they went directly to Station 1, our red tag area. By textbook standards, some of these first arrivals should have been black tags, but I sent them to the red tag area anyway. I didn’t black tag a single one. We took everybody that came in—I pulled at least 10 people from cars that I knew were dead—and sent them straight back to Station 1 so that another doc could see them. If the two of us ended up thinking that this person was dead, then I knew that it was a legitimate black tag.
Before the night was over, Sunrise would treat 215 gunshot victims, not counting a few dozen who saw the trauma cases and decided their wounds could wait until later. Dr. Menes tells the story of how he and his staff handled that night at Emergency Physicians Monthly. Beneath the medical jargon, the account is intense and gripping. -via Metafilter
Occasionally we watch a movie that we regret spending our time on. That's a "bad" movie, often boring, and one we'll forget. Then we see something that makes you wonder how it ever got made. Along the way we start laughing because the poor acting, incomprehensible script, implausible premise, or a combination of those things are so over-the-top. These are the "so-bad-its-good" movies.
Jack Nugent of Now You See It (previously at Neatorama) explains how really great movies and so-bad-its-good movies have something in common. It's just that the great movies do it on purpose (and do it well), and the so-bad-its-good movies stumble upon it by accident. The result is that there are more clips from great movies in this video than from awful movies. And the lesson is that whether a movie is good or bad is less important than whether the movie is entertaining. -via Tastefully Offensive
We've posted enough about the Dunning-Kruger effect that you know the basics: incompetent people don't recognize how incompetent they are because …they're incompetent. That's the simplified version. David Dunning, one of the scientists the effect is named for, designed a TED-Ed lesson that goes a little deeper into the subject.
We are all subject the the Dunning-Kruger effect. People as a whole are very bad at evaluating their own skills and expertise in one area or another due to lack of knowledge. Even experts have a hard time evaluating their relative expertise because, while they may know their own subject well, they have a knowledge gap in evaluating others for comparison. The Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't have to hold us back, but overcoming it requires an open mind and at least some humility. -via Digg
Adam Savage tells a story on Twitter about a bathtub. All he needs is a picture.
“So we found a bathtub that’s the wrong width and and length for the space in the bathroom.” “Perfect! Put it in!” “Should we include any instructions on how to use it?” “Nah!” pic.twitter.com/AL2M8eLF1t
— Adam Savage (@donttrythis) November 13, 2017
Okay, it didn't fit, so in order to get the tub close enough to the fixtures on the wall, they had to cut into the tiled wall on the right. Look at all that hard-to-reach space that has to be cleaned! So I thought, okay, they can just turn the shower on to rinse all that, even though that would be a mess, and barely easier than scrubbing. But that handle isn't for the shower (if there is one at all); the handle must be for the faucet, since there's no other faucet handles. Let's just guess how to make the water hotter or colder. Maybe if we look closer, we'll find something else odd about this building project. It appears to be in a hotel, which makes you wonder if the other rooms have the same probems.
Although it seems like yesterday, the Disney/Pixar film Monsters, Inc. came out 16 years ago! The story sought to acknowledge that monsters are scary, but then reveals the truth that they have feelings, just like people. Kind of like the Muppets, but animated. If you liked Monsters, Inc. (and who didn't?) you'll want to see some of the things that went into the making of the movie.
10. The actress that did Boo was so young that she wouldn’t sit still for her lines.
She had such a hard time sitting still that they simply followed her around with a microphone and recorded the things she said.
9. It took 11 to 12 hours to render 1 frame for Sully.
All the individual hairs on his body made the filming take forever since they wanted him to have realistic motion.
Read more trivia about Monsters, Inc. at TVOM.
Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal brings us a comic that graphically contrasts taking care of a baby in comparison to taking care of a cat. It doesn't tell us anything we don't already know, even if you only have second-hand knowledge, but it is hilarious to someone who's been there, done that, and is now a confirmed cat lady.
He doesn't mention the biggest difference: taking care of a baby is intense, but temporary, while a cat is mostly the same its whole life. Inman left out the part that spans about two decades, in which you are constantly confronting a child with brand-new problems you never encountered before as they grow and develop. No doubt Inman will have things to say about that as time passes. -via Matthew Inman
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