These large snowballs have been washing up on the shores of Nyda, in the Yamal Penninsula of eastern Russia. Some of them are as big as three feet in diameter! The locals say they've never seen anything like it.
They result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs.
Russians are having fun with the phenomena. One commenter predicted they would hatch into "snowsaurs." See more pictures of the snowballs at BBC News. -via Boing Boing
In March of 2014, an episode of Rick and Morty called "Something Ricked This Way Comes" aired for the first time. Here is a memorable scene from that episode.
a mini servo, 3D printer and a "ispy Mini Wilreless Spy Tank Rc Car", oh and also a rubber band, I'll create another video this week and uploaded with all the parts and the files to so anyone can 3d printed
And when that tutorial video arrives, everyone can shatter the dreams of a small robot. -via reddit
Many guys have tried to convince me that men can sit and think about absolutely nothing, that it's a fundamental difference between the sexes. Women can't stop thoughts from happening, so it's hard to believe that men can. Maybe it's just that their thoughts are so weird that it's much easier to try to convince us they are empty-headed than to explain what's going on in there. Honestly, that's a two-way street. You know the old adage, "It's better to be silent and thought a fool than to say something and remove all doubt." This comic, based on a Tweet by ErinChack, is from Dami Lee at As Per Usual. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Cracked has the stories of men who refused to die under circumstances in which most would have succumbed. Whether it was luck, skills, or an inner toughness, we can't say. But just putting oneself into these various circumstances takes bravery far beyond most people. Here's what Jack Lucas did during the war. The big one.
14-year-old Jacklyn "Jack" Lucas was big for his age. But rather than squander his gifts playing football or buying beer for his friends, Lucas instead forged his mother's signature on a recruitment form and went to fight with the Marines in World War II. While trenched in on the shores of Iwo Jima, two grenades threatened to take out Lucas and his squad-mates. Here's what happened next, in Lucas' own words: "I hollered to my pals to get out and did a Superman dive at the grenades. I wasn't a Superman after I got hit. I let out one helluva scream when that thing went off."
Lucas' heroism earned him "more than 250 pieces of shrapnel in his body and every major organ, including six pieces in his brain and two in his heart." He returned home at 17 years old -- not even old enough to technically enlist today -- where he became the youngest Marine to ever be awarded the Medal Of Honor.
Ryan Hunter (redditor yanray) is the co-author of the coloring book Coloring for Grownups. He also came up with these crayon colors for a contest. These are the colors you don't forget. -via reddit
Have you ever decided you're going to read a Tolstoy novel, and then were so intimidated by the book's size that you put it off for eternity? These spoilers might help. No, they won't motivate you to read the books, but they will make you feel better about skipping them. And now you know you're not alone. This is the latest from John Atkinson at Wrong Hands. Happy families are all alike; every reader avoids Tolstoy in his own way.
We've shown you neat effects with ferrofluid and magnetic putty. Did you know you can make your own iron putty? This video makes it looks quite easy. Don't forget the magnets -that's where the fun begins! In case you forget the recipe, it's written out at Buzzfeed.
The Dreamworks movie Trolls is out this weekend, so we may as well learn something about the little dolls that inspired it. They were everywhere in the 1960s, and make a comeback every couple of decades or so. Their origin goes back to one craftsman in Denmark.
1. THE FIRST TROLL DOLLS WERE WOODEN.
Danish fisherman Thomas Dam was very often out of work, but he had a talent for carving figures out of wood. Though he initially carved little gifts for his children, his wife recognized the monetary potential in his hobby. She encouraged him to sell some door-to-door, which turned into a job making larger Christmas displays for a department store window in 1956. Customers began asking to buy the trolls from the displays, and before long, Dam was spending all of his time carving troll dolls to sell. Soon after, he opened a factory and switched to the more economical method of making the bodies out of rubber stuffed with wood shavings. By the end of the ‘50s, he was selling more than 10,000 trolls in Denmark each year.
4. DAM HAD A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOR.
Dam seemed to know he had a damn funny name (it’s pronounced more like "dahm" than the American "damn"). Once his trolls took off, he named his toy-making company Dam Things, and the highest quality of these trolls became known as Dam Dolls. One design even went by the name Dammit.
A photo posted by Quandary Q Lotus Lady (@exploration_cat) on Oct 17, 2016 at 8:49pm PDT
Graham Shuee adopted a kitten eventually named Quandary Q Lotus Lady from a Colorado shelter to use in his proposal to Erin. He placed a basket in her path as they were hiking in the mountains, which contained both the kitten and a ring. Of course, she said yes. Graham and Erin have since married, and have three cats. And Q, as she is called, still goes mountaineering with them.
"It was her idea in our minds, ever since the proposal she's been tagging along on most our adventures. She's almost like a dog in that respect, she's very vocal and makes it known when she is restless and when she wants to get out and explore."
Erin hopes their adventures with Q help other people realize that just because they have a cat, it doesn't mean they can't take it outdoors and do things like hiking. Quandary was adopted from a rescue in Colorado Springs, Erin wants Quandary's adventures to inspire others to adopt shelter cats.
In 1960, photographer Alberto Korda snapped a photograph of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, who went by the name Che. Fifty-six years later, the photograph, cropped into a portrait, is everywhere. Che campaigned against capitalism, and he never liked having his picture made, yet his face has been used for everything from government buildings to political posters (promoting any and all views) to advertisements to dorm room posters to currency.
In this era of anything-goes globalization, Che doesn’t really stand for anything partly because he stands for so much. Once a symbol of a society struggling toward the ultimate abolishment of money—during the 1960s at least three communal experiments were launched in the Cuban countryside to achieve this goal—Korda’s Che has now been converted into its own form of capitalist currency: a cool knickknack or keepsake, a pin or poster or touristy T-shirt. When the Rolling Stones performed in Havana’s Sports City this year (provocatively, on Good Friday), Korda’s Che welcomed “their satanic majesties” from the audience in his usual heroic form, except for the big, fat, redder-than-ever Rolling Stone tongue protruding from his mouth. And you can bet that tongue came thanks to a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop.
People have made money from the image all around the world, yet the little that photographer Korda received was the result of lawsuits. And Wikipedia has a long explanation of why the photo is now in the public domain. Read the story of how the photograph was taken, why it wasn't used for the project at the time, and what happened since then, at Smithsonian.
The future of artificial intelligence! Brian Kane installed an Alexa Voice Service in his Billy Bass. They weren't kidding when they said you could add it to any device! The common response to this is, "Shut up and take my money!" But you can do this yourself, if you have a bit of skills. "Alexa, sing Take Me To The River!" -via reddit
Kevin Richardson (previously at Neatorama) is called "the Lion Whisperer." He runs a sanctuary for big cats and other wild animals in South Africa. Here he shows us a dental clinic for the animals. Veterinary dentist Dr. Loïc Legendre and anesthesiologist Dr. Adrian Tordiffe put their lives on the line to help these magnificent beasts with their toothaches.
We start to see animals about three minutes into the video. Root canal patients include a hyena, a leopard, and an elderly lion. Things get a little tense at one point. -via Digg
Why choose between the lesser of two evils for president when you can select between three evils? Pop culture has given us plenty of evil megalomaniacs, and looky here, they are running for president. Shredder (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) Cobra Commander (from G.I. Joe), and the Joker (from Batman) all lay their platforms out to win your vote. See their speeches and hear their pitches at Geeks Are Sexy.
Since there's a lot of snow and the date stamp on this dashcam video is October 30, we can assume this happened in Russia. Also the video description is in Russian. This guy stopped on a single-lane country road to talk to another driver, or relieve himself, or something. Then this happens.
Manual transmissions can slip out of gear! Even automatics can slip out of gear when they get really old and decrepit. Always set your parking brake. We don't know how bad the vehicle was damaged, but the dash cam video was fine. -via Digg
You can own an award-winning newspaper and still not be able to afford a house with a flush toilet. But Tom Morphet is proud of what he's built. After working at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska, for 25 years, he bought the newspaper five years ago.
At 55, he needs a new career. His wife, Jane Pascoe, has her eye on a house in town that, unlike his cabin in the woods 8 miles out, has power and water.
"I said, 'Honey, we could live for free in the cabin.' But she wants to flush a toilet," Morphet said. "When I met her she was a girl living out of a backpack and she didn't care."
Morphet accepted poverty for decades to do no-nonsense journalism in a tiny town that could barely support it and didn't always appreciate it. The News has won 20 Alaska Press Club awards in the last three years but sells only 1,500 copies at the height of the visitor season.
Morphet tried to sell the paper -at a great loss- to his only reporter, but the deal fell through. Meanwhile, he is running for a seat in the Haines Borough Assembly. But the real story is Morphet's biography, from the advice he got in college to his accidental job at a fish-processing plant to his adventures in local journalism. Read it all at Alaska Dispatch News. -via Dave Barry
