58-year-old Mick Wilary of Stanley, Co. Durham, England is in the hospital recovering from being run over by a piece of heavy equipment. It's only the latest in a long line of mishaps that has earned him his reputation as Britain's most accident-prone man.
It follows breaks to both ankles, after he fell over a potato, and cracking his head open by tripping over a cat.
He has also fallen out of a raised bucket of a JCB, and was left with a broken collar bone when the horse he was riding got spooked by a plastic bag.
In total the grandfather-of-two has racked up more than 30 injuries, including 15 broken bones.
This is only a partial list of injuries, as Wilary started having accidents as a child. As he recuperated, he remarked that it's a good thing he doesn't drive. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7579318/Britains-most-accident-prone-man-injured-again.html -via Arbroath
You don't have to have a printer to make your own envelops, but if you do, you can print a Map Envelope! Enter your location, print out and fold, and your envelope will have a Google Maps image of the place the enclosed letter (or whatever) originated on its inside. You can even add a message for a little something extra for your recipient. Link -via the Presurfer
Unlike the flier posted yesterday, this one advertises a real service. A dentist in Minnesota Muskegon had fliers posted with detachable teeth! Each one has the office address a potential patient can keep. Link -via Laughing Squid
Here is a site you should bookmark, because you never know when you'll need information on some household product. What kind of information? I click through to a particular hair care product and found the company's phone number and a toll-free alternative, the ingredients with links to more about each, emergency care instructions, ratings by independent councils, and a lot more. The database has information on recalls, warnings, and more resources as well. Link -via Interesting Pile
How do you study an extinct virus? They don't leave fossils behind! But some of them have left their DNA in other living things, including humans.
Over the expanse of evolutionary time, the genomes of virtually every animal species have become riddled with these proviral sequences, the so-called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Most ERV sequences have been degraded by the accumulation of mutations but are still recognizable as retroviral in origin. The human genome alone contains hundreds of thousands of HERVs (Human ERVs), outnumbering our genes. Extrapolate these numbers across the entirety of the animal kingdom, and collectively ERV loci may well comprise a “fossil” collection numbering in the hundreds of millions of specimens.
Find out more about paleovirology, the study of extinct viruses, at Small Things Considered. Link -via Boing Boing
The Star Wars Uncut project has been moving right along since we first reported on it. It's a collaboration among hundreds of filmmakers to recreate the movie Star Wars shot-by-shot, with each 15-second segment done by a different director in his or her own style. The entire movie will be shown at the CPH:PIX Festival April 19 in Copenhagen. In honor of the event, here are a few minutes of the movie. -via Buzzfeed
Recycling is a potent concept. Many regard it as simply the repurposing of objects in order to prevent waste, but in the right hands, it can be a process that charts all sorts of powerful aesthetic and cultural shifts. The "Throne of Weapons" and "Tree of Life" are two pieces of "recycling" that do just this. Made from decommissioned AK47s and other instruments of death from the Mozambique civil war, they take the physical remains of war and transform them into the collective hopes of a nation traumatized by violence and cruelty.
Both objects are the product of the imaginatively entitled "Transforming Arms into Tools" project. But despite its rather functional name, the scheme, set up in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique, is consistently creating some of the most the most poignant "recycled" art in recent memory. These guns began life in the poisonous smelting factories of Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea or Portugal, before being put to bloody use in the dense jungles of Mozambique's coastal lowlands. Now, under the initiative of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, they are crafted into icons that carry a nation's hopes for peace.
Under the guidance of the Christian Council, teams from the project (known as Transformação de Armas em Enxadas, or TAE) cut up the guns and re-mould them into sculptures: an elaborate, if disturbing chair, and a tree dedicated to 'life'. The chair alone is composed of guns that originated in seven different countries, pointing up the resolutely unresolved issue of international arms trade. The resulting artworks are not only hauntingly beautiful for the casual observer, but also draw together many intersecting currents for the people of Mozambique.
In one sense, we might think of them as cathartic: they perform a cleansing or purging movement, ridding us of painful emotional excess, not unlike the original intentions of Greek Tragedy. They give outer form to Mozambique' s collective surplus of sorrow, left to stew long after the firing stopped, a form of relief that prevents such pain from eating its people up, or worse still, erupting into further violence. Conversely, they also enable us as viewers to experience their pain in a controlled form, fostering a sense of profound empathy for the victims of such a tragic conflict, perhaps an implicit form of advice that we should never let this happen again.
At another level, they are also signs of peace that point the way to happier times. Just as these sculptures recycle guns that brought misery into art that brings pleasure, so they recycle the memories of those who perished, into a new feeling of humanity, brotherhood and charity. They serve as reminders of what came to pass, and of why we should strive to avoid human conflict in the future. In this sense they embody a change, and one for the good, that we hope is sweeping through the villages of Mozambique and other war-torn countries the world over.
The pieces were acquired by the British Museum in 2005 and spent the next few years touring the major cities of Britain, garnering huge applause. Now on display in the museum, they are definitely worth a trip to London we think; these moving sculptures may be recycled monuments to death, but crucially, also to life and a peaceful future.
Thanks to authorChris Ingham Brooke of Environmental Graffiti.
Many people find spiders terrifying, but they have a convenient shape for a robot as many legs radiating from a central core gives a mobile robot stability. Wired has a gallery of 13 robotic spiders built for all kinds of purposes from art to war to toys. Pictured is the Military Micro-Spider Bot, created for spying on the enemy. Link
This is the third Beer Geography quiz from Mental_floss (see the earlier quizzes here and here). Do you know where your favorite (and not-so-favorite) beers are brewed? I, no beer expert, was lucky to score as high as 44%. You can beat that! Link
Josh Millard turned a little idea into a flier which turned into a meme. Deservedly so, don't you think? Other people are now putting them up in far-flung places. Link -via Metafilter Update: Josh has started a blog to document these useless fliers.
When two dogs meet they can be rivals or playmates, and it's sometimes hard to tell. The secret is the "bow", which is explained at The Thoughtful Animal.
At first glance, the use of bows in play may appear random. They do not occur every N actions, or every N seconds. But it turns out that the bow has a very important function: the bow is regularly used before and/or after other actions that could be misinterpreted by the other dog, and could disrupt the social play. For example, bows were used either immediately before or after bites during play 74% of the time in infant and adult domesticated dogs, 79% in infant wolves, and 92% in infant coyotes.
In addition to communicating "I want to play," bows performed during the play sequence itself seem to mean "I still want to play despite what I am going to do or just did." It's like what your Mom used to tell you - it's always fun until someone gets hurt. The dogs seem to have internalized that rule, and continually make it clear that any damage done was all done in good fun. No hard feelings. (What I learn from this is: if my brother had simply bowed to me when we were kids, there wouldn't have been any fights in the first place. Right?)
Observations show that coyotes use the bow more often than domestic dogs, probably because a coyote fight is serious business for the pack. Link
I love antique plates just the way they are, but these will appeal to modern sensibilities as well. Etsy seller BeatUpCreations offers old plates with new additions like side show performers, political faces, music stars, artworks, and movie characters transferred onto the porcelain. Link -via mental_floss
Fard is an animated short directed by Luis Bricenco and David Alapont. It's in French with no subtitles, but the plot is visual. The action really gets going about four minutes in. The style and effects make it quite memorable. Link -via Metafilter
At this point, "antique typewriters" sounds like a redundancy. These eleven are early typewriters, before the qwerty keyboard layout became standard. In the 19th century, new and innovative typewriter designs fought to become the standard, but many just became rare and valuable artifacts. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
