The world's longest mosaic wall runs for 6.5 kilometers in Hanoi, Vietnam. The the Hanoi Mosaic Road is an artistic enhancement to the city's flood wall in which artists, government bodies from around the world, and corporations sponsored sections of art made from ceramic tiles. The mosaic was finished in 2010, and was certified as a record-holder by the Guinness Book.
Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell, who moved from Saigon to Hanoi, documented the different styles of mosaic art, which you can see at Hanoi for 91 Days.
After eight years in the NFL, Richie Owens retired and became a graphic designer and web developer. He also started a webcomic called Ow! My Knees! about his life in transition from athletics to information technology, and sometimes about his home life. There are only 13 comics so far, and I would recommend reading all of them. Each comic is accompanied by a blog post that may or may not have anything to do with the comic. The comic above is the only one so far that actually references the title of the webcomic. -via Don't Hit Save
This video shows an escape system to evacuate people in a hurry from the upper floors of a high-rise building. It actually looks like it could be pretty fun as a carnival ride. The idea is to slide down a fabric chute that slows your descent just enough to keep you from splatting against the ground. What could possibly go wrong?
The first thing everyone thinks of is the wide range of people who would be using it. Would an obese person slide down at the same rate as a skinny person? Or would they tear the fabric? Or get stuck? Would people in a panic tumble down too close together? What of someone had a sharp object attached to them? You know there would be at least one fool who would try it head first. What I see as most likely is that people at the bottom would fall on their butts, or sides, and take too long to get up and move out of the way. There would be a pile of people to land on! -via Digg
This was the very first x-ray ever taken, in 1895. It shows the hand of Bertha Roentgen, the wife of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, inventor of the x-ray. The image helped him win a Nobel Prize in 1901. It had to have been very weird to see the inside of her hand, the long, thin, bones, the skin barely visible, and her wedding ring. The x-ray was a side effect of research Roentgen had been doing with Crookes tubes, which later evolved into cathode ray tubes. He had tried diverting the electrons with aluminim foil.
In early November, he repeated the experiment in the dark in his lab at the University of Würzburg in Germany. But then he noticed something happening far away from the Crookes tube. A screen coated in barium platinocyanide, the fluorescent material that was used on photographic plates, was sitting on a chair near the experiment, and every time Wilhelm turned on the electricity, the screen glowed. Not quite believing what he was seeing, he dedicated his time to rigorously testing and documenting the strange rays, which he called “X.” He put objects made from different materials on photographic plates and exposed them to X-rays, and found that the mysterious rays passed through some but not others. Eventually, a few days before Christmas, he asked his wife to help him in the lab. Anna held her left hand on a photographic plate for 15 minutes while Wilhelm beamed X-rays at it. According to legend, she said, “I have seen my death!” and never set foot in his lab again.
Those who are trying to automate our work have a problem. They can develop all the artificial intelligence they want to, but what they really need in order to take over our jobs is to develop artificial patience and/or artificial desperation for employment. Until then, it takes a human to put up with the demands of the job. It would probably be easier to develop artificial clients! This is the latest from CommitStrip.
An HVAC guy in Plant City, Florida, tracked down a disconnected duct in a house he was working on last month and discovered a secret room in the attic above the garage. The video contains some NSFW language.
After having the video up for a day, people were fascinated by it and started sharing it and a man came to me with information about the room and who lived there. He told me of a boy named R.J. Moore and his mother Dee Dee Moore, better known as the lottery killer. Later, someone sent me more screenshots of the plates that were hung in the secret room confirming they belonged to Dee Dee Moore. I'm not sure what the secret room was used for, but if I had to guess I would guess it was from hiding out from the police."
Dee Dee Moore was convicted of the 2009 murder of lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare. Although the story is intriguing, I haven't found anything to confirm whether the house in the video was Shakespeare's home or the property where his body was found, or anything saying that Dee Dee Moore ever hid from police. It's possible this was a cubbyhole for someone who just didn't want anyone to know he'd started collecting crime memorabilia. -via Laughing Squid
We have been learning a lot about Neanderthals in the past few years, particularly about how they left genetic evidence that they interbred with modern humans. You may be surprised to learn that most of that knowledge came from sequencing the genes of four Neanderthals, only one of whom had DNA good enough to identify variations in the genome. But now there is another- a Neanderthal woman found in Croatia who died 52,000 years ago has yielded a full genome to study. Scientists named her Vindija 33.19. And that process highlights the difficulty in hanging assumptions on Neanderthals from such a small sample size.
Based on previous archaeological and genetic evidence, archaeologists and anthropologists suspected that Neanderthals were thinly dispersed across Europe and Asia. The lack of genetic diversity (low heterozygosity) in the Vindija 33.19 specimen affirms these earlier findings, showing that Neanderthals “lived in small and isolated populations” and “with an effective population size of around 3,000 individuals,” the researchers write in their study.
The earlier genomic analysis of the female Altai Neanderthal showed that her parents were half-siblings, which got scientists thinking that Neanderthals made it a habit of breeding with immediate family members. But the Vindija 33.19 genome is different; her parents were not as closely related, so we can no longer say that extreme inbreeding is a common fixture of the Neanderthals. That said, the Croatian Neanderthal shared a maternal ancestor with three other individuals found in the Vindija Cave (whose genomes aren’t nearly as complete).
No, we shouldn't assume anything is common about a culture from a sample size of one. However, the new genome shows that modern humans carry a few more Neanderthal genes than we previously thought, and that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals crossbred as far back as 100,000 years ago. Read more about Vindija 33.19 and the new findings at Gizmodo.
A few days ago, we learned the history of making human skeletons. In 19th-century Britain, human skeletons were often taken from criminals, who were either executed or died in prison. If you purchased a skeleton, it could have been the leftovers of a medical school dissection, and might originally have belonged to a petty thief, a murderer, or someone who was mentally deranged.
In the mid-19th century William Hicks, the mayor of Bodmin, in Cornwall, hosted a dinner party. As the story goes, rather than entertaining his guests with music or poetry, he chose to prank his guests with a fake seance. He brought in the skeletal remains of a purported witch and encouraged his guests to ask it yes or no questions. In response, the spirit of the witch would supposedly rap its responses with the extra bones placed in front of the witch’s remains. What he didn’t tell them was that the person doing knocking was a friend who was hidden nearby.
Everything that night was going to plan until the host and partygoers encountered actual paranormal activity. According to Cecil Williamson, the founder of The Museum of Witchcraft, the bones used for the rapping were “seized by the poltergeist force on that fateful night of the spoof seance organised by William Hicks and with which the assembled party guests were beaten about the head and shoulders.”
G. Herman Gottlieb got a bright idea in 1909. He went to the woods in Manhattan (there were apparently still woods in Manhattan then) and picked two large baskets of catnip. He then went door-to-door on Fifth Avenue to sell catnip to wealthy cat owners. Gottlieb did not consider the many New York street cats that picked up on the scent of freshly-picked catnip. Before too long, there were 30 or 40 cats following him.
When Mr. Gottlieb saw Police Sergeant John F. Higgins on 114th Street, he cried out with joy. At last, he thought, someone could help him disperse the band of felines. Sergeant Higgins wasn’t so kind though, and he immediately arrested the catnip peddler for causing a crowd to collect, which was against the law.
“Why don’t you arrest the catnip?” Gottlieb asked. “That is collecting the crowd. Not I.”
“Come on, before the cats from the Bronx and Jersey get here,” Higgins said, leading Gottlieb to the station house on East 104th Street. Several cats followed the men to the station house and made themselves at home inside while Sergeant Higgins reported the arrest to Lieutenant Lasky.
An argument ensued between Lasky and Higgins on whether the law against collecting a crowd was limited to a human crowd or could be applicable to cats. Meanwhile, the station cat defended his territory against the "crowd" that followed Gottlieb into the police station. The incident made the papers up and down the eastern seaboard. Read the tale of the catnip caper at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company
The shortest regularly-scheduled commercial flight in the world is operated by Scottish airline Loganair. It runs between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands. The entire flight takes 80 seconds to cross less than two miles. This video is three times as long as the flight. Passengers don't even have time to get scared. But then again, the plane doesn't climb all that high and it doesn't go very fast, either, for an airline.
The flight is a lifeline for the fewer than 100 people who live on Papa Westray, because there is no bridge between the islands, and the ferry is quite time-consuming. It's almost like a city bus service. There's no mention of the airfare, so I went to Loganair's website and did not find this flight listed for advance reservations. I guess you have to be there, like getting on a bus. -via Digg
"I don't mean to bother you but could I get a signature please?"
Redditor minipiemix dressed her pit bull in a UPS costume, but everyone else thought it should be PUPS delivery service. Her name is Peanut, and she's a sweetheart. She's not all that conscientious about her job, though.
"Hi there! Don't worry, your package is only slightly crushed!"
In fact, Peanut wrecked the entire costume not long after the pictures were taken. No matter, the moment was recorded for posterity.
When he said that, I knew there was something wrong. A gap in logic? No, he was perfectly honest in what he said, but what he meant went right over her head. Oh well, at least she had thirty years before she figured out his scheme. The thing is, even if he didn't live any longer by choosing to marry her, it probably still felt like eternity. This comic is from the deranged mind of Zack Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
The area around Lake Minnewanka in Alberta has been settled continuously for at least 13,000 years. One of those settlements was Minnewanka Landing, which thrived in the summer with tourists and campers. There were hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and boating. But it's all gone now. Well, the people are all gone. The town itself survives at the bottom of Lake Minnewanka. Dams were built there three times: in 1895, 1912, and 1941. It was the 1941 dam that finally flooded Minnewanka Landing.
Today the reservoir hides a secret that many people will never get the chance to experience—unless they're scuba divers, that is. Thanks to Lake Minnewanka’s glacier-fed, ice-cold waters, many structures of the former resort town still remain intact, including house and hotel foundations, wharves, an oven, a chimney, a cellar, bridge pilings and sidewalks. (A full list of sites is available here.) Even the footings from the town’s original dam, built by the federal government in 1895, along with the footings from the dam built in 1912, remain visible.
The new animation from Simon Tofield is this year's Halloween cartoon. The cat is up in the attic, and he doesn't want to leave. I've dealt with that situation. You don't want your cat to climb the ladder to the attic- you'll never find him again!
The attic can be a scary place, especially when the lights go out. It's full of spiders! After the new cartoon, there's a couple more classic Simon's Cat stories in this video. -via Tastefully Offensive
King Louis XIV was upset that so many members of the French nobility were dying off in a hurry. It started in the late 1660s. Autopsies showed the victims' insides were blackened, as it they were rotting. Were they poisoned? Was it witchcraft? At the time, there was only a short leap from alchemy to witchcraft to crime. The king established a special tribunal to investigate a prosecute the murders.
The “Affair of the Poisons,” as it came to be known, is a misleading name for one of the largest witch trials in modern history. Over just five years, from 1677 to 1682, 319 subpoenas were issued, 194 individuals arrested, and 36 executed (with perhaps dozens more dead from suicide, or in prison or exile). In total, it claimed between two and three times as many lives as the Salem witch trials across the Atlantic, 10 years later. It began with what appeared to be an isolated case, but then door after door after door opened, eventually implicating rich and poor alike.
As the events unfolded, suspects were tortured before being killed, and their confessions implicated others, and scandals among the nobility were uncovered. There was definitely some rotten things going on underneath all that wealth and power. You can read an account of the Affair of the Poisons at Atlas Obscura. (Image credit: Wellcome Library, London)
