As a commenter from Estonia said, there's no reason for any of us to be interested in British river crossings, but Tom Scott makes them interesting anyway. The two ferries and a bridge operate in weird ways because they are governed by laws that are over a century old, from the days when people didn't have cars. Could they change the laws? Maybe, but they apparently don't want to bother. -via reddit

Nikon's annual Small World Photomicrography Competition has announced its winners for 2021! This is the 47th year for the competition, with first place going to Jason Kirk of the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas for the image you see above.

This year’s first place prize was awarded to Jason Kirk for his striking image of a southern live oak leaf’s trichomes, stomata and vessels. Using various lighting techniques and design tools, Jason’s final image is a masterful example of the dynamic relationship between imaging technology and artistic creativity. Using a custom-made microscope system that combines color filtered transmitted light with diffused reflected light, Jason captured around 200 individual images of the leaf and stacked them together to create the stunning image.

Second place went to Esmeralda Paric and Holly Stefen of Macquarie University in Australia for this image of 300,000 or so networking neurons.

Frank Reiser of Nassau Community College in New York won third place for this picture of a rear leg and trachea of a louse. 

See the top 20 images in this gallery, and click on each to read more about them. See more in the honorable mentions gallery.

-via Metafilter

The colonial guns of the British Empire terrified and subdued cultures around the globe. The same happened when Samuel Wallis landed in Tahiti, the first European to sail there. His show of force subdued the Tahitians who did not want to be claimed by Britain, but it had a different effect on an ambitious young man named Mai. Although wounded, Mai could only think of how useful those guns could be in reclaiming his home island from invaders from Bora Bora. It was a long journey from that day to sitting for the above portrait in England.

The portrait’s subject—Mai, or Ma‘i—was the first South Seas Islander ever to visit England. He arrived from Tahiti in 1774, as part of the second voyage of the celebrated navigator James Cook, and stayed in Great Britain for two years. It was a cross-hemispheric anthropological experiment that in many ways succeeded, but one that was also tinged with tragedy. In London, Mai became a sensation, a star of the press, the darling of the intelligentsia, the subject of poems, books, musical plays—and a curiosity that some of the country’s finest artists sought to paint. It’s doubtful whether any other non-European figure had inspired English portraitists to put so much oil on canvas. Indeed, few Indigenous persons had ever been so widely or vividly described, analyzed and documented by European society.

But the man immortalized on canvas was not quite the man who posed for Joshua Reynolds’ 1775 or 1776 portrait. Back in Tahiti, a society with a highly stratified system of social classes, Mai was a manahune, a commoner, powerless and impoverished. There was nothing regal or patrician about Mai; he was a nobody who happened to hitch an epic ride to England, a regular guy who went on a most excellent adventure—all of which makes his story even more spectacular.

Somehow, the young man who hitched a ride to England became royalty by the time he arrived, and Mai was smart enough to avoid correcting those assumptions. Read Mai's story at Smithsonian.

Here's something that will surely lift your spirits! Listen to "Ordinary Day" joyously performed by Alan Doyle and the Shallaway Youth Choir.

Ordinary Day is a song that reminds us about the power of positivity and the beauty of overcoming life's biggest obstacles. As we look for our new normal, we’re grateful for kids and youth and the example of resilience they continue to show us every day.

-via Nag on the Lake

Janelle Shane works with artificial intelligence algorithms, and when she sees something weird or funny, she tells us about it on her blog AI Weirdness. For the third year in a row, she is challenging her readers to produce art for October, or as the algorithm calls it, "Botober." You can see art inspired by Shane's AI-generated prompts in previous years here. 

This year, five different algorithms have produced lists of art prompts that should inspire you to create something really strange in the categories of animals, Halloween, more Halloween, more animals, and landscapes. Check them all out, and when you've done your part, post your contributions to social media and tag them with #botober.

"Won't someone think of the children?" Apparently, when some people think of children, it's to protect them from the real world, even at an age when we should be preparing them for it. When a child has developed the skills to read general circulation books, there's really no controlling what they will read, and many parents are just glad they are reading at all. But time and again, people try to limit what students are exposed to in school libraries and reading lists. Books by Judy Blume have been a particular target over the years.

2. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

There's something about books depicting the real young adult experience that upsets people—which perhaps explains why so many Judy Blume books get challenged or banned. In the ‘90s, five Blume books were on the most frequently banned list: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Published in the 1970s, Are You There God explores the challenges of growing into yourself as a young girl, and it's often challenged, mainly because it talks about puberty and teenage sexuality. In 1982, the Fond du Lac school district in Wisconsin challenged the novel for being “sexually offensive and amoral.” In fact, Blume even wrote about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”—you know, something every teenage girl deals with. (Although it's arguably better than when Forever was banned for depicting “disobedience to parents.”)

The reasons for banning other books are even weirder, from the word "sweat" to a possible connection to other books by a completely different author. Read the stories of eleven of those books at Mental Floss.

What happens when the software Cyriak Harris uses to animate his disturbing ideas decides to crash? Well, he's not going to let that stop him! In this video, Cyriak uses meatspace tools to construct his own animation machine, complete with his signature style of movement and general weirdness.

Sometimes you see an opportunity to make a statement or a visual pun and you just can't help yourself, right? Well, we don't condone vandalism, but sometimes we can appreciate it. Even so, most of these images gleaned from the subreddit Mildly Vandalized are harmless. Some could even be called "street art" or "enhancements." Some just correct spelling or grammar on a sign that asking for it, and others are just captions added with a Post-it Note or something.    



See 37 such public "enhancements" that will make you smile at Buzzfeed.

A Canadian friend of mine learned Polish from her parents. She traveled to Ukraine and was surprised to find she could understand people speaking Russian. Another friend from New York said he could understand people in the Netherlands easier than he could people in Tennessee. And my daughter spent years learning French, but then picked up Spanish in about a month. Languages flow into each other, but sometimes they grow apart. So what really defines a language as distinct from a dialect? And how different must a dialect be before it is considered another language? The answer may surprise you, but when you think about it, you won't be surprised.

We know the outlines of the story of television. In the early 20th century, great minds across the globe, like Scotsman John Logie Baird, German Paul Nipkow, and American Philo T. Farnsworth were trying to combine motion pictures and radio broadcasts, with varying success. Which technology was best had to be decided before anyone would invest in a vast infrastructure of broadcasting networks, content, and receivers, and then selling to idea to the public. These competing systems were put on hold for World War II, and then Farnsworth's electronic television system emerged victorious. But let's back up to 1939, when a British boy's magazine printed an article about "television." The British were proponents of John Logie Baird's mechanical television system, and the history the medium was still short. When no one had a receiver, they turned to "television theaters."

Northern holiday crowds at Blackpool and Morecambe in July, 1934, were the first to test the pleasures of real television theatres in which reproductions of events happening up to 20 miles away were projected on the screen. A slight last-minute hitch prevented Morecambe's Television Theatre opening on the day planned, so for a short while the Blackpool venture, located inconspicuously near the Central Pier, stood unchallenged as the only place in Britain where the public could enter a darkened room and see a televised moving picture on the screen.

The inventor of the apparatus used at Morecambe was Mr. F. Cockcroft Taylor.

Actors and actresses who were willing to permit themselves to be televised in 1934, had, in the studio, to make-up like cannibals in full war paint. First they had to paint their faces dead white, then thick blue lines were put down the sides of their noses to bring that part of the face out properly. Their eyelids had to be painted mauve, their lips blue, and their eyebrows were made enormously big and heavy, like George Robey's. The rest of their faces were left dead white.

By 1939, things had improved somewhat. Read a contemporary account of early television in Britain at Malcolm's Musings: Strange but True. -via Strange Company

See also: TV's Father: Philo T. Farnsworth and Nazi TV.

The Ig Nobel prizes for 2021 were awarded in a virtual ceremony Thursday night by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. The awards honor and highlight research that may look ridiculous on the surface, but almost always has some underlying purpose in advancing the field of science. In other words, "Research that makes people laugh and then think." We can't all get grants to develop life-saving drugs, after all. The winners this year range from checking out how orgasms may clear one's sinuses to an analysis of movie theater smells to correlating a nation's level of corruption with the obesity of its politicians. Researchers from the US won two awards (but also collaborated on others): one on controlling cockroaches on submarines and the other on whether humans developed beards to avoid being punched in the face. Continue reading for the full list of winners and their research papers.

When an artist renders three-dimensional objects in two dimensions, they normally give it perspective, so that it appears realistic to the eye. However, since the two-dimensional medium (a computer screen or a canvas) has no depth, you can mess around with the perspective part and really have fun. M.C. Escher was a master at such shenanigans. His use of confusing perspective inspired Macedonian artist Fleta Selmani to create the font she calls Impossible Type. Letters are three-dimensional, but their perspective defies reality.

The font is not difficult to read, as our brains perceive basic shapes in total at the speed we read, but if you stop and look closely at the letters, they are mind-bending. You can purchase and download Impossible Type (upper case, numbers, and punctuation) here.

-via Kottke

Benjamin was the last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, in captivity and as far as we know, the last thylacine in existence. He died in 1936, and the species has been considered extinct since then. Now all that's left are some lifeless anatomical specimens and a few photos and film footage. We posted this video of Benjamin before, although it was quite a few years ago. But through the miracle of technology, it's been brought to life in color. The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia commissioned a restoration of the film with added color.

The NFSA created a 4K scan of the original 33-mm negative of a 77-second video, shot by naturalist David Fleay in 1933. This was then sent to Composite Films in Paris, where Samuel François-Steininger and his team recreated the creature’s color in painstaking detail.

Unfortunately, no true color photos or video of the thylacine exist, so the team studied specimens preserved in museum collections, consulted sketches, paintings, scientific drawings and written descriptions from the time, as well as more recent 3D renderings.

“Because of the resolution and quality of the picture, there were a lot of details – the fur was dense and a lot of hair had to be detailed and animated,” says François-Steininger. “From a technological point of view, we did everything digitally – combining digital restoration, rotoscoping and 2D animation, lighting, AI algorithms for the movement and the noise, compositing and digital grading. More than 200 hours of work were needed to achieve this result.”

To be honest, the realistic depiction of the thylacine only underscores how sad it is that they are extinct. -via Damn Interesting

Can you guess the metro area with the highest number of college degrees per capita in the United States? My first guess was Raleigh-Durham, but I was wrong. Not very wrong, however, because this list divides the metro areas differently, and both Durham-Chapel Hill and Raleigh-Cary did pretty well. As the joke goes, North Carolina's biggest exports are tobacco and college graduates, even though some of them stick around to contribute to the work of the Research Triangle. The most educated metro area is Ann Arbor, Michigan, where you'll find the University of Michigan. WalletHub compiled the statistics to come up with the educational rankings of the 150 biggest metro areas of the US. They crunched 11 metrics, including degree attainment, quality of local schools, and equity in race, gender, and economic status. The top 20 metro areas are:

1. Ann Arbor, MI
2. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
3. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
4. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
5. Madison, WI
6. Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH
7. Durham-Chapel Hill, NC
8. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
9. Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, TX
10. Provo-Orem, UT
11. Raleigh-Cary, NC
12. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
13. Colorado Springs, CO
14. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO
15. Trenton-Princeton, NJ
16. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA
17. Portland-South Portland, ME
18. Tallahassee, FL
19. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI
20. San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA

See the rankings of all 150 metro areas and top rankings in various categories, plus methodology and additional statistics at WalletHub. 

-via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Kit)

Here's another clever yet dreadful mashup from the YouTuber known as There I Ruined It. He combined the classic Queen "Another One Bites the Dust" and laid it over the instrumentation of "Tequila" by The Champs. Since the song was necessary for the Pee-wee Herman dance, that's who stars in the video. -via reddit