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
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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
Relax, they were secured with ropes. Rope swings, actually. In October, 245 people attempted to break a Guinness World Record by going on a simultaneous tandem swing off a 98-foot bridge in Hortolandia, Brazil.
Guinness has yet to certify whether these folks broke the previous record (which was also set by Brazilians), but a good time was had by all. You can see the jump from the vantage point of the bridge and also from a swinger's GoPro at Atlas Obscura.
The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
Question: How many intelligence agencies does the U.S. have? Let’s see…there’s the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and maybe…the DEA—that’s four, right? Wrong. How many do we really have? NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! Just kidding. Correct answer: 17. Here’s the history of the whole—mostly secret—business.
SPY STORY
In January 1790, President George Washington, in his first State of the Union address, asked Congress for funding for foreign intelligence gathering. The president wanted to ward off any foreign threats against the new nation by learning about them before they could come to fruition. Congress approved Washington’s request and established the Contingent Fund of Foreign Intercourse, more commonly known as the Secret Service Fund. Amount of money appropriated for the fund: $40,000 per year, which the president could use at his own discretion with virtually no oversight. (That set the foundation for future problems between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government over intelligence matters—problems that have existed ever since.) Within just three years, the fund had grown to $1 million a year. Funding for U.S. intelligence operations today is about $70 billion a year. (That we know of, anyway.)
Here’s a brief look at how we got here.
On the menus of Thanksgiving feasts of the past are some items that were once considered traditional, yet are almost gone today. Honestly, I dropped cranberry sauce completely for a few years until I discovered a recipe that uses pineapple and walnuts. You should serve what people like. The unfortunate recipes that have disappeared from Thanksgiving include creamed onions, winter corn, and various mid-century Jell-O based recipes, like Jellied Turkey-Vegetable Salad.
There’s only one way to improve a dish as alluring as Jellied Turkey-Vegetable Salad, and that’s to stick it in the freezer. From the sound of the recipe—which combines cream of celery soup, salad dressing, diced turkey, vegetables, and gelatin—this is basically the inside of a turkey pot pie if it was served frozen. And also if it was square.
That recipe is here if you want to try it, or just read about it. The list of regrettable Thanksgiving side dishes is at Mental Floss.
(Unrelated image credit: Ms Jones)
Why debate when you can destroy? Socrates, a 5th-century BC philosopher, and Neitzsche, the 19th-century polymath, play the dozens to the best of their ability. Socrates makes a good point, but Neitzsche has a couple thousand years of insult evolution on his side. Now, the development of insults does not mean they become more refined. It's just that they became more personal. Why insult the man when you can insult his mother? This is the latest comic from Jake Likes Onions.
French physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize a couple of months ago for his groundbreaking research in rheology, which is the study of how matter flows and deforms. One of the problems in rheology is the definition of terms. The definition we learn in school is that a liquid is the state of matter that takes the shape of its container, but not the volume. The definition is further refined for scientists.
At the center of the definition of a liquid is an action: A material must be able to modify its form to fit within a container. The action must also have a characteristic duration. In rheology, this is called the relaxation time. Determining if something is liquid depends on whether it’s observed over a time period that’s shorter or longer than the relaxation time.
If we take cats as our example, the fact is that they can adapt their shape to their containers if we give them enough time. Cats are thus liquid if we give them the time to become liquid. In rheology, the state of a material is not really a fixed property—what must be measured is the relaxation time. What is its value, and on what does it depend? For example, does the relaxation time of a cat vary with its age? (In rheology, we speak of thixotropy.)
The whole point of the article that won the award, "On the Rheology of Cats," (found in this journal) is that if cats can fit into the scientific definition of a liquid, then maybe most of us don't know enough about the states of matter. Fardin gives us non-physicists a short course in rheology, specifically a breakdown of the ideas and terms that went into the paper at Slate.
You can see more photographic evidence in a gallery at Bored Panda.
(Image credit: Flickr user Armando Torrealba)
A 4000-year-old Assyrian clay tablet found at an archeological dig in Turkey has been translated as a marriage contract. Some terms are spelled out quite explicitly, particularly what would happen if the wife doesn't produce a child.
The contract, written in Old Assyrian and signed before four witnesses, stipulates that the wife in question was to hire a hierodule, or female slave, to serve as a surrogate mother if the couple failed to conceive a baby two years from the wedding date. It also specifies that the husband could not marry another woman—Mesopotamians were monogamous—and that if one of them opted for divorce, he or she would owe the other five minas of silver (more than five pounds, or about $1,500 worth, at press time).
While the idea that either party could initiate divorce proceedings seems downright modern, the prenuptial agreement doesn't appear to stipulate what procedures would come into play if the slave also did not produce a child. Maybe the possibility of male infertility was unthinkable, or more likely, the child would only be considered part of the family if he/she were produced by the father. Read more about the marriage contract at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Ahmet Berkız Turp/Harran University)
Jodie Whittaker will portray the 13th incarnation of the Doctor when the TV series Doctor Who returns. The first woman Doctor is under a lot of pressure to live up to fans' expectations, so costume designer Ray Holman knew he had to get the look just right. To do that, he referenced past Doctors and incorporated details from many of them into the new costume. Also, one cannot help but imagine that he put some thought into how cosplayers will study each detail to recreate them themselves. Holman also designed the dress of Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi's characters. Fans have a mixed reaction, with many pointing out that the rainbow stripe reminds them either of Mork from Ork (Mork and Mindy) or Wesley Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation). Metafilter has a roundup of reviews of the new costume. Jody Whittaker's debut on Doctor Who is expected to happen during a special broadcast on Christmas Day, with the series returning sometime in 2018.
(Image credit: Steve Schofield/BBC Worldwide Creative)
Everyone's a critic, and every parent has had to deal with children who have a problem with what you serve them to eat. Imagine how harsh they would be with an adult's vocabulary combined with their immature social filter! Well, you don't have to imagine, because that's exactly what this video is. Or else these little girls have been watching too much Gordon Ramsay.
YouTuber Woodsie employs the Face Swap Live iPhone app to make videos of his daughters. That way, he gets to play all the parts. Even so, the finished product is indicative of how they feel about Dad's cooking. See more of Woodsie's videos that use this same technique. -via Tastefully Offensive
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