Here we see a collection of ten physics simulations in which balls are released to bounce around. The astonishing part is the point in the middle of each sequence where the balls arrange themselves in a pattern. That can't really happen, can it? It's really nice to see anyway, and if you want to know how it's done, click on the spoiler quote.
Spoiler Quote
As soon as I saw the latest xkcd comic by Randall Munroe, I had to look up "spinthariscope" to see if it was a real thing. And it is. William Crookes invented it by accident during his nuclear experiments in 1903. He spilled a tiny amount of radium bromide (a radioactive salt) onto a thin screen of zinc sulfide. Since radium bromide was a very expensive material, he carefully picked up every speck, using a magnifying glass to see them. He noticed flashes of light, produced by the radium bromide throwing off alpha particles. This was a pretty neat discovery, so Crookes fashioned an enclosed device for observing the effect. That's how the spinthariscope was born.
As a scientific instrument, the spinthariscope soon became obsolete, but it was still impressive to non-physicists and kids. In 1947, you could order one from the back of a cereal box. In the 1950s, a small spinthariscope was included in the Chemcraft Atomic Energy Lab for children.
(Image credit: Theodore Gray)
What's more, United Nuclear still sells spinthariscopes, although their modern version uses thorium instead of radium bromide.
It's such a natural idea for a Quentin Tarantino movie- the life stories of Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) from Reservoir Dogs and his brother Vince Vega (John Travolta) from Pulp Fiction. Don't get too excited, The Vega Brothers is not a real movie, but a mashup from Luís Azevedo. Both Madsen and Travolta have plenty of film clips showing them being violent at different ages, now woven into an almost believable narrative. Well, let's say it makes about as much sense as any Tarantino film. The Vega Brothers also features Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and a slew of other stars. This trailer contains NSFW language. -via Kottke
(Image source: louiseverard)
Creative plating now means getting rid of plates completely. We've brought you images from We Want Plates before, but it's been some years. Since then, the trend in trendy restaurants has only gotten worse. In addition to the website and the Twitter account, there's also a subreddit dedicated to the phenomenon of serving food on random objects instead of plates.
(Image source: nonsonosvizzero)
This is supposed to be a salad, but it more resembles the parts I'd end up throwing away. But that's secondary to the "tree" it's served on. Are you supposed to eat it with your fingers? That gives a whole new meaning to Salad Fingers.
Check out 30 of the more egregious submissions in a ranked list at Bored Panda. The list contains a disturbing number of foods served directly on the table.
Atari held its first arcade world championship tournament on Halloween weekend 1981 in Chicago. Video games were becoming hotter by the day, even though to play them, you had to go to an arcade and feed quarters into a console weighing hundreds of pounds. The hottest of the arcade games that year was Centipede, the first arcade game that appealed to women as much as it did to men. Centipede was the game chosen for the tournament. But that 1981 tournament had a lot more going on than gameplay, and you don't even have to be familiar with Centipede to be sucked into the shenanigans of that weekend.
The tournament story is actually five stories. First, it follows three women who came to dominate the competition. They had very different backgrounds and very different motives. And after the tournament, they went on to very different yet fascinating lives.
Another story concerns the inventor of Centipede. Game developer Dona Bailey was a fish out of water in the male-dominated Atari company, and she designed a game that appealed to her own taste. That it became Atari's hottest game and the tournament choice that year was gratifying, but on that very weekend, she was called out to court to defend her creation from pirates hoping to cash in on the tournament. One of the challenges of that case was a judge who didn't quite understand what an arcade game was.
The final story concerns the organizer of the event, who bluffed his way into the job and hoped to make enough money on the side to cover his house of cards financing before Atari found out they had hired the wrong organizer.
Read all those stories together at Truly Adventurous, or you can listen to it as a podcast at the same link. -via Damn Interesting
What in the world would inspire a Hollywood studio to spend $100 million on a comedy? Sometimes it's because they think they have a sure thing, like the biggest box office star of the era, in the case of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, or maybe a parody of another franchise, which shouldn't cost that much. Or it's a beloved cartoon character getting the live-action treatment, which can work, but it's never a sure thing. Or it's a sequel to a big hit, so of course it will work again, right? Again, there are no guarantees.
The thing is, just because an idea worked once, doing it again is just as risky. It's not the stars, or the familiar characters and setting, or even the special effects that make a good comedy. But those things can add millions of dollars to a movie that should have spent more money on an original idea or a funny script. See 15 comedies where the producers' calculations went completely wrong at Cracked.
The violent eruption a few hours ago of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano captured by satellites GOES-West and Himawari-8. pic.twitter.com/PzV5v9apF6
— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) January 15, 2022
The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano near Tonga has been erupting occasionally for the past month. After a break in the action since January 5, it erupted again Thursday and Friday, but the biggest eruption was on Saturday (January 15), with an explosion that was heard 800 kilometers away in Fiji. A resulting tsunami hit Tonga's largest island Tongatapu, and tsunami advisories went out for parts of Japan, New Zealand's north island, and the US west coast this morning. Here's a video of the tsunami rolling in to Tonga.
BREAKING: Tsunami hits Tonga as nearby volcano erupts pic.twitter.com/TRM1iKtAft
— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022
Tonga's next challenge is falling ash and acid rain. Let's see that eruption from another satellite image.
I have never seen satellite imagery of a volcanic eruption quite like this. Incredibly powerful eruption of Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific. Tsunamis impacting nearby islands. Reports of people feeling and hearing the eruption in Fiji, 800 km away! Wow. https://t.co/EG2EYdssBX
— Elizabeth Leitman (@WxLiz) January 15, 2022
The shock wave generated by the recent eruption of Hunga Tonga #volcano is even visible on satellite imagery. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/5Hih2mPePs
— CyanideCN (@CyanideCN_) January 15, 2022
To understand how big the eruption was, this one shows the curvature of the earth.
Different perspective shows the waves propagating outward from the eruption. pic.twitter.com/fetNumZnYs
— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) January 15, 2022
CNN is providing continuing updates on the effects of the eruption. -via Fark
A common trope in Victorian melodrama that survives in stories today is the tale of a husband who comes home early and finds his wife with another man. The enraged husband shoots the interloper, and the question goes to the jury of how culpable he is of murder. Will he be acquitted of this crime of passion as a justifiable homicide? A case in Georgia from 1893 turns that story on its head.
When C. F. Stephens suspected his wife of carrying on with his employee Frank Wilkerson, who lived with the couple, he came home early one day and indeed found the two in the bedroom in a "compromising position." Stephens shot Wilkerson, but only wounded him. Wilkerson was armed (and therefore we can assume, not naked), and shot Stephens, hitting him between the eyes. Stephens, incredibly, lived long enough to jot down a note about the incident. Or did he?
Frank Wilkerson was put on trial. Was it murder or self-defense? There were a surprising number of witnesses for a crime of this sort. Read about the Wilkerson murder case at Murder by Gaslight. -via Strange Company
Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the popular monster movies of Universal Studios started doing crossovers, implying that Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and others all lived in the same universe and time frame. It was a way to churn out more and more sequels, because everyone loves a good monster movie. However, even though these monsters could meet each other, their cinema versions were developed over decades.
That's why it's important to know the difference between Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney, Jr. The older Chaney was known as "the man of a thousand faces" in the 1920s. He played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the title character in The Phantom of the Opera. His son, Lon Chaney, Jr. played the Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a mummy in three movies. This family had a whole universe of monsters in just two actors!
Find out a lot more movie trivia about the Universal monster movies in a list at Mental Floss.
During the Apollo program, when missions got long enough to require food for astronauts, they had to rely on nourishment like roast beef squeezed from a tube directly intones mouth. Now that astronauts spend weeks or even months aboard the International Space Station, that fare won't fly. NASA Astronaut Megan McArthur explains how space food is engineered to be as much like normal food as possible, but it still looks like C-rations to us. They don't really cook, because everything they take with them is already fully cooked if needed, but they can warm it up or cool it down in the refrigerator. And since they can't wash dishes, everyone needs to keep up with their own spoon. At about six minutes in, we get to see the chaos of McArthur putting beef in a tortilla and chasing the stray bits around. -via Laughing Squid
Read the title again- this is not a list of the top-selling fast food chains. That ranking would rely heavily on the number of outlets, advertising, and longevity. You can see that list here, and as you might guess, McDonald's is on top. But a new list at Eat This, Not That ranked fast food by what people think of the chains.
According to YouGov, popularity is "calculated by taking the proportion of people who view something positively and showing it as a percentage of all of the people who have given any opinion about that thing, including 'have heard of.'"
This kind of calculation allows a higher ranking for a chain that does not cover the entire nation, and is less weighted toward customers that eat there often as opposed to once in a great while. So which chains benefit from opinions rather than sales? McDonald's came in at #14 in this list. The top chains in favorability lean heavily toward sweets! In fact, five of the top six are chains that specialize in sweet treats. Guess what they may be, then take a look at Eat This, Not That. -via Digg
(Image credit: Daniel Barcelona)
Occasionally we have posted a nighttime satellite image that shows where the lights are on in one country or another. But now we have a composite image that shows the entire world on a Mercator projection and how it is lit up at night. Yeah, of course it would have to a composite, because it's never nighttime for the whole world. The huge number of individual images used to make this map also allows us to zoom in and see what the light -or lack of it- tells us about different regions. For example, there are no lines normally visible from space to tell us where national borders are, but the policies of different countries can make it seem that way when one nation has plenty of light, while its neighbor has none. Comparing images taken over time can show population growth, economic growth, or the effects of war. -via Digg
Shawn Bradley played center in the NBA from 1993 to 2005. He is 7' 6" tall, making him one of the tallest NBA players in history. After retiring from basketball, Bradley became a coach and administrator at a school for at-risk youth in Utah. Then in January of 2021, he was struck by a car while riding a bicycle. Bradley suffered spinal injuries and was left a quadriplegic.
His life since then has been a struggle to return to any kind of normalcy. It is a paradigm shift for anyone to adjust to life in a wheelchair with professional aides for everyday activities, but for Bradley there are a few extra challenges. His very size makes everything more difficult. At 300 pounds, he must have a special crane to lift him from a bed to a wheelchair. His custom-built, 500-pound wheelchair causes his oversized van to list to the side when its lift is in use. During Bradley's initial hospitalization, the staff rigged up a padded table for his feet because he was too tall for the biggest bed they had.
There are also extra psychological challenges. Bradley's entire identity was centered around his height and his athletic ability. He went from looking down on everyone to looking up at anyone. His three-story home has a pool and gym he can't use and custom eight-foot tall doors he no longer needs. Read Bradley's story at Sports Illustrated. -via Damn Interesting
Watching a craftsman make something beautiful by hand out of raw materials can be so calming and satisfying. Watching omozoc build a milk crate is even more so, because he makes it look so easy! Don't tell anyone, but the secret is stop-motion animation, which can also be calming and satisfying. I particularly like the finishing, just as smooth as butter! He tells us this involved 2854 still photos. That's a lot of work, but the upside is that he ended up with a cool video and a really nice milk crate. -via Metafilter
Rubber hose animation is an animation style that arose in the 1930s, named for the characters' long rubbery limbs that bend in an exaggerated comic manner. The term became a catchall for the early animation style that so many cartoonists used. Younger people today might call it "Cuphead style."
Artist Kev Craven draws in many different styles, including rubber hose vintage style. Lately, he's been redesigning modern cartoon characters in rubber hose style. Of course you recognize Samurai Jack at the top, and Cow and Chicken from the late '90s cartoon above. And this is what Johnny Bravo would look like if he were in an early Popeye cartoon.
You can see the process of Craven creating these characters in videos featuring Phineas and Ferb, Ren and Stimpy, and even Spider-Man. Follow Craven's artwork at Instagram. He's asking for suggestions on which modern characters should be given the rubber hose treatment. -via Boing Boing
