Experimental musician Andrew Huang (previously at Neatorama) made a song out of the whistles, clangs, and growls that the radiant heating system in his building makes. Oh yeah, he also collected sounds from another building to round out the collection of tones he had to work with.
This is not the first music made with the weird sounds that buildings make. Who could forget this awesome Triple Concerto for Faucet, Water Pipes, and Fiddle? -via Tastefully Offensive
Cracked readers were asked to submit their best "brush with greatness" stories, and the top 19 were published. Some were delightful, some were just plain weird, and some were sadly lame. The best ones were funny. I liked this one because of the epilogue.
You can see them all at Cracked.
Before Kotex sanitary napkins came on the scene in the 1920s, women handled menstruation in private, using whatever fabric they had, and only discussing its use with the women in one's family. Then stores started stocking mysterious plain boxes, labeled with only the brand name Kotex. It was a product that would make life easier for millions of women, but how could they be helped if they didn't know what it was for?
Like a number of other products that first came to market in the 1920s, Kotex sanitary pads originated as a wartime invention. Kimberly-Clark, an American paper products company formed in the 1870s, produced bandages from a material called Cellucotton for World War I. Cellucotton, which was made of wood pulp,, was five times as absorbent as cotton bandages but much less expensive.
In 1919, with the war over, Kimberly-Clark executives were looking for ways to use Cellucotton in peacetime. The company got the idea of sanitary pads from the American Fund for the French Wounded, according to historians Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor. The Fund “received letters from Army nurses claiming they used Cellucotton surgical dressings as makeshift sanitary napkins,” the pair write.
Kimberly-Clark employee Walter Luecke, who had been tasked with finding a use for Cellucotton, understood that a product designed to appeal to about half the country’s population could create enough demand to take the place of the wartime demand for bandages. He jumped on the idea.
But Luecke ran into problems almost immediately. The firms he approached to manufacture sanitary napkins from Kimberly-Clark’s Cellucotton refused to do so. “They argued that sanitary napkins were “too personal and could never be advertised,” Heinrich and Batchelor write. Similar doubts plagued Kimberly-Clark executives, but Luecke kept pushing and they agreed to try the idea, making the sanitary napkins themselves.
They found a way to advertise their product, too, although figuring out what the ads were talking about was strictly on a need-to-know basis. Once again, that was discussed only with the women in one's family, for the next 50 years or so, when other brands gave Kotex some competition. Read up on the history of Kotex and its discreet advertising campaigns at Smithsonian.
If you've ever watched a domino artist set up a run by hand, you probably decided that's too much trouble and time to even attempt. The next step? Design a machine to do it for you. Matthias Wandel (previously at Neatorama) built a strangely simple wooden device just for that. It's quite impressive.
If you just want to see it in action, skip ahead to about 5:20. But then, you'll want to jump back and watch him build it, too. -via Digg
According to this bread bag alignment chart by Aurelian Rabbit, I am a lawful neutral (my bread comes with a twist tie instead of a plastic clip), my husband was a chaotic neutral, and my children were chaotic evil through most of their time with me. Twitter followers had to inform Aurelian Rabbit that even with a bread box, you have to use the plastic bag the bread comes in. There aren't very many people who use a bread box anymore. Its utility is mainly in keeping people from stacking things on top of the bread and squishing it. -via Nag on the Lake
You might think you'd be pretty good at designing a roller coaster, especially if you've played with any of the online design games. But the people who have actually done that and had their ideas rendered in life-size steel know a thing or two that you don't. Brendan Walker is one of several roller coaster designers who shared some secrets.
There is absolutely nothing random about the length of a coaster’s track. In addition to designing a ride based on the topography of a park site, designers take into account exactly how much space they’ll need to terrorize you and not an inch more. When England’s Alton Towers park was preparing to build a ride named TH13TEEN for a 2010 opening, they asked Walker exactly how much of a drop was needed to scare someone in the dark. “It was a practical question,” Walker says. “For every extra foot of steelwork, it would have cost them £30,000 [roughly $40,000].”
He doesn't tell us how much of a drop they ultimately included, but he and other designers have plenty to tell us about roller coaster design in a list at Mental Floss.
This hen is having a hard time with a piece of hollowed-out bread. She somehow gets it over her head and stuck around her neck. But the bird-brain hasn't learned a thing, because she manages to get a second piece of bread stuck around her neck.
However, at the end of the day, this chicken goes back to the coop with bread she can eat later (if she figures out how), so how is that dumb? Meanwhile, all I could think of while watching this video is that the person laughing in the background sounds more and more like a chicken as the video went along. -via Tastefully Offensive
Don't gloat. You should never gloat about your successes, because you're very likely to receive some kind of comeuppance. This neural network is smart, alright, but we humans still have some tricks up our sleeves. One of them is the ability to enjoy a good paradox when we see one. This is the latest sarcastic comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd.
This animal is Moschops capensis, an ancestor of mammals that lived 250 million years ago. It has a particularly thick skull, according to the fossil evidence, which made it look really weird. What we are learning about Moschops is thanks to some ultra high-tech research in France, where a combined CT and Synchrotron scanner was used to analyze Moschops skull fossils to see how really thick they were, and where the soft tissue would have fit inside.
With a body weight reaching up to one or two tons and a brain the size of a chicken egg, Moschops‘s brain was probably one of the smallest among its contemporaneous species. However, small brain size is not an issue when you are the largest animal of your time. Unlike mammals and humans, the ability of the Moschops to survive and reproduce was not a matter of how smart it was, but how strong it was, particularly when it came to fierce head-to-head combat.
Their anatomy shows that male Moschops were ramming into each other like giant, overweight goats using their skulls as a weapon.
The very fact that Moschops was practising headbutting testifies to a certain level of social organisation, which is often associated with hierarchical ranking in modern species. So, despite its small brain, the Moschops wasn’t stupid.
Okay, so they weren't stupid. But thanks to natural selection, they were rather ugly. Read more about the new research into Moschops and their skulls at the Conversation. -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Dmitry Bogdanov)
Here's another TED-Ed brain bender that can ruin your evening. I actually tried for a little while to solve the puzzle on my own, but I got bogged down and went for the answer. Yeah, there's math involved, as well as logic, which is why I got bogged down.
Even if you don't try to figure it out by yourself, the story turns out to be kinda cute, with endangered species, sharks, and a submarine. -via Laughing Squid
Back in 2011, we told you about Júzcar, Spain, the village that was painted blue. It was a publicity stunt by Sony Pictures, who agreed to use 4,200 liters of blue paint to cover every house in the village in order to promote its movie The Smurfs. But after the promotional period, the 250 or so residents of Júzcar voted to keep the blue color scheme. They discovered it to be quite a smurfy tourist attraction. Ever since, the town has been a destination for Smurf fans who travel from all over to see "the Smurf Village." That's about to come to an end.
But a bitter dispute between the town hall and heirs of the Smurf creator, the Belgian comics artist Pierre Culliford whose pen name was Peyo, resulted in locals agreeing to pay 12 percent in royalties on all Smurf-related income.
However, in a noticed posted on the council website last week, the mayor’s office announced that from August 15th, all smurf related activities must cease – although the village will remain blue.
Labelled “important information for tourists”, the communique stated that Júzcar had “lost the authorization to market itself as a Smurf town” and “from Tuesday August 15th there will be no more statues or references to that brand”.
So if you are determined to see the Smurf Village in all it's smurfiness, you'll have to get to Júzcar in the next four days. -via Atlas Obscura
(Image credit: Flickr user CEDER Serranía de Ronda)
Phil Berge is an artist at the Tattoo Shack in Quebec. He inked 19 different people with Bart Simpson on his skateboard, each one slightly different. When he put all 19 tattoos together, it's an animation of Bart doing a kick flip!
While the project is pretty cool, you have to wonder about all those people who thought, "Yeah, whatever you want to permanently embed on my arm, that's fine." Berge has done several of these tattoo animations; you can check them out at his YouTube page. One is NSFW. -via Boing Boing
Artist Saul Bass is renowned for his movie titles, credit sequences, and trailers, all done in minimalist style that made them artworks able to stand on their own. He also designed posters for movies, 37 of them in all.
Directors were floored by Bass’ ability to distill a story down to its bare essence — how his thick black lines and bold swatches of color seduced and focused a viewer’s attention where other posters would simply try to overwhelm it — and legendary auteurs like Otto Preminger would fight the studios to protect Bass’ creative freedom. His style was so striking and influential that it was widely copied in his own time, and many of the posters that are still attributed to Bass were actually created by imitators (e.g. “West Side Story” and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World”).
You can see all 37 of those Saul Bass's movie posters, from Champion in 1949 to Schindler's List in 1993, at IndieWire. -via Metafilter
Have you ever heard of auto soccer? The ball is eight feet wide, and you kick it around with a car! The goalies are excavator operators.
This is the 3rd Annual Fastracs game, played in Red Hook, New York, in 2016. It resembles the video game Rocket League, but auto soccer has been around quite a while: Top Gear has been doing it for years, and auto polo was played 100 years ago. The video game came out in 2015. -via reddit
We understand that when a character spends decades fighting crime in the comics, it's hard to come up with something new and different in a story. There's always a reach for an angle that the audience hasn't seen before. When your character is as weird as Batman, that quest can lead to some plots that, while they might make sense at the time, years later they have you wondering how they ever got away with it. Consider the unbelievable methods Batman has used to keep his true identity secret, some of which you may have missed if you don't read all the comics. The weirdest ones are related at TVOM.
