In World War II, the Indian battalion known as the Fifth Gorkha Rifles fought for the British in Burma. One of the brave riflemen who went missing in Burma was named Chinta Bahadur. The battalion searched for him for days, and never found a trace of him. But a sheep found the Gorkha Rifles and followed them. The soldiers got used to the sheep and adopted him, naming him Chinta Bahadur, as if he were an incarnation of their lost colleague. They even made him a member of the battalion!

And the sheep Chinta Bahadur (Chintey for short) serves with the Fifth Gorkha Rifles to this day. Chintey wears a "uniform" of horns painted in the unit's colors, and his attendance is marked at all activities, although he is not judged by his performance. He gets promotions, too, and often outranks the soldiers that accompany him. A sheep will live around eight to ten years, and when Chinta Bahadur dies, he will be replaced by a lamb with the same name, but he must work his way up the ranks again. All the members of the unit have the utmost respect for Chintey, a living memorial to a fallen soldier. Read about Chinta Bahadur at Indian Express. -via Strange Company

How to make a great mashup: write down as many pop culture names as you can think of, separate them into piles labeled action, horror, comedy, science fiction, etc. Pull one each from two different piles. The more disparate they are from each other, the more intriguing the combination will be. Bonus points if the source materials are from vastly different decades. And so we have the Three Stooges and The Incredible Hulk! As Dr. David Banner testifies as a witness in court, Moe, Larry, and Curly's usual shenanigans anger him enough to cause his transformation into the enraged Hulk. Talk about disorder in the court! This mashup from Tvcrazyman in the spirit of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein will brighten your day. -via Boing Boing

The earliest written documentation on "portable soup" goes back to the late 1500s. It's described as somewhat akin to a bouillon cube, with more gelatin. In a 12-hour process, meat and bones were boiled, the solids picked out, and the liquid was boiled further to reduce it to the smallest size possible and the texture of a dried gummi. The result is mostly protein and flavor, perfect for travelers. Ships that explored new continents took portable soup with them. It could be reconstituted with boiling water as a soup base, or added to oats or other available grains. It could also be chewed by itself. Lewis and Clark took 193 pounds of portable soup with them on their exploration of the American West, and instructions for making it appeared in cookbooks up until the 19th century. Other methods of preserving food eventually made portable soup unnecessary, but Britain’s National Maritime Museum has a cake of portable soup from the 1700s. It doesn't look much different than it would have back then, but no one has tried eating it. Read about portable soup at Atlas Obscura.

Naver Labs has developed a robot named Ambidex that is learning to assemble IKEA furniture. In a video at Mashable, you can see how Ambidex is connected by a haptic device to a human so it can learn to use tools like a human, and apply the proper amount of force and torque to put the pieces together. This is a pretty neat way to teach a robot, but I have questions.

First, this robot is being taught by an engineer who works in a robotics laboratory. He's probably assembled IKEA furniture before. I doubt he will be able to recreate the experience of real-world assemblers, who can't make heads or tails out of the illustrated instructions, can't find the included Allen wrench, and end up arguing about why they ever thought this was a good idea.

Second, what is the purpose of a robot putting furniture together? We have hi-tech furniture factories that do that already. The reason IKEA sells their furniture in flat packs for home assembly is to make getting it home easier and to reduce the labor cost. Does Naver Labs think that IKEA customers will arrange for a robot to come to their homes and put their furniture together?

My guess is that this is a proof of concept project, testing how well a robot learns from a human teacher with a haptic device. Teaching a robot to assemble furniture on its own doesn't have much of a real-world market. Oh yeah, Ambidex can play table tennis, too. That's more in line with what robotics engineers really want to do. 

Drive up, place your order, drive further and pay, then drive some more and get a bag of dinner. Fast food has come a long way in the past 70 years or so, since the time you'd walk into a McDonald's and they slipped however many hamburgers you wanted into a bag from their pile of ready-made burgers. As you can see from this charted data from the top ten fast food chains, Taco Bell is the overall fastest, with KFC not far behind. That makes sense when you think about it.

Have you ever walked into a Taco Bell and had to wait for them to notice you while they concentrate on drive-through orders? There's your chance to watch what they do. They have an extensive menu, but those items are made from the same ten ingredients, just combined in different ways. There are small ovens designed to quickly heat food and melt cheese for specific food items, and each dish has a simple process for quick assembly. KFC is fast because they only serve one kind of main dish, and they make plenty of it in huge batches. I'm sure there are other factors involved in each chain's speed, too.

The chart above is from rosetechnology at the subreddit Data is Beautiful, using 2020 data from Seelevel and 2021 data from QSR. -via Digg

The one thing that sets Star Wars fans apart from any other fandom is how much they hate Star Wars. It started when George Lucas made this perfect little space opera in 1977, and then a second good movie, and after that nothing else in the entire canon has ever been able to live up to expectations. As the Star Wars universe expanded, everyone found something to hang their frustrations on. Lucas even went back and changed the good movies, which made fans hate them, too. Now that there are a dozen or so feature films followed by a full schedule of TV shows on Disney+ (not to mention books, comics, and video games, and oh yeah a theme park), there's plenty for Star Wars fans to hate. It's as good a time as any for Comedy Cheat Codes to give us a fictional app to give those fans a way to vent. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A road trip is always made more enjoyable when you get off the beaten path (meaning the endless and monotonous interstate highway) and see the quirkier sites along the way. The online app Make My Drive Fun is a map that doesn't give you specific directions or driving time, but it can make getting there quite a bit more interesting. Just enter the starting and arriving point of a trip you plan to take, and the map will point out a bunch of intriguing but underpublicized places near your route. That's how I learned about Dr. Ted's Musical Marvels in Dale, Indiana, just off I-64, and Old Car City in White, Georgia, just off I-75. Even a short trip may reveal interesting stops you never knew about before! The stops on the map have no links, so you'll have to go to Google search, but most of the attractions have either a website or a review online somewhere. Wherever you are going anyway, you may as well take a break and see something that will make going to great aunt Susie's house worth the drive. -via Nag on the Lake

A family fight broke out at a funeral in Richmond, California, involving around 20 people and extensive damage to a cemetery. The people involved were not named, but the narrative resembles a Three Stooges script. Two of the deceased woman's children, a brother and sister, began to argue at the burial at Rolling Hills Memorial Park. The sister's boyfriend approached, and was attacked by the brother. The brother got into his car, intending to run over his sister. He hit another woman instead, sending her to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The car knocked over the casket (the body did not fall out), damaged headstones, and broke a water main, sending a geyser into the air which flooded the burial plot. When he got out of the car, a family member hit him in the head repeatedly with a cane, trying to get him under control.

Police responded and arrested the brother. Emergency medical services also responded. Police say the damage to the cemetery could be around $20,000. -via Fark, where you'll find more stories of funeral shenanigans.  

(Image credit: Cary Bass-Deschenes)

Many women have doulas to support and guide them through childbirth. Rachel Friedman is an end-of-life doula, trained to support and guide people through the final part of their lives. She tells us about her training, which not only deals with the prospect of death and making it as easy as possible, she also learned that you don't have to be close death to want to make the most out of the rest of your life. Her training involves three important facets: imagining your own death, engaging people by active, deep listening, and helping with legacy projects that will live on after a person is gone. Imagining your own death helps you to recognize your priorities and figure out what's really important to you. An exercise begins:

Write down your five most-prized possessions, your five favorite activities, your top five values, and the five people you love the most.

Close your eyes. Imagine you’re at a doctor’s office. You’ve just been given a terminal diagnosis and told you have approximately three months to live. Sit with that news. Breathe. Open your eyes. Cross any four items off your list.

Close your eyes. You’re back home with your spouse or friends or children or pet. You have to find a way to tell those you love: “I’m dying.” Breathe. Open your eyes. Cross another four items off your list.

By the time you have crossed off all your favorites, you should have an idea of what's most important to you. Read more advice from an end-of-life doula about living your life (no matter how much is left) and helping others live theirs at Vox.

"Hey, you're doing just great"

Oklahoma little leaguer gets hit in the head and then comforts the pitcher who is shaken up afterward pic.twitter.com/hYYLiy511K

— Jomboy (@Jomboy_) August 9, 2022

Little League Baseball can teach you a lot of life lessons, and it's not always about winning and losing. During the Southwest Regional Championship today, Texas East pitcher Kaiden "Bubs" Shelton accidentally beaned Oklahoma batter Isaiah "Zay" Jarvis.  You know that had to hurt, yet Jarvis was up and on base pretty soon. But Shelton was shaken, guilt-ridden and repentant to the point of tears. Jarvis left first base to give him some consolation and forgiveness. Jarvis assured Shelton that he was okay, and was heard saying, "You're doing just great." Now that's sportsmanship, and just what was needed in the moment. Texas East won the game and will advance to the Little League World Series. Whatever else happens in the Little League World Series this year, this scene is what people will remember.  -via Digg

When a mycologist makes a cake. . . #fungus #cake pic.twitter.com/ydAfqFri5Q

— Ray Van Court (@rcvancourt) December 26, 2021

Remember Dance Your PhD? That contest is still going on every year. But for many science PhD candidates, dancing may be outside their wheelhouse. There are other ways to creatively communicate your research, and one very delicious method is baking. Some universities have a "bake your research" competition for the candidates at their schools, while others just bake a research cake for fun.



You can find plenty of these cakes on social media with the hashtag #BakeYourResearch. You'll find more cakes using #BakeYourPhD or #BakeYourThesis. Read the thinking behind some of these cakes and how the idea took off at Atlas Obscura.

Having a giant rabbit around the house isn't quite like the movie Harvey or Donnie Darko. It's more like having a long-eared dog that eats vegetables. Guus is a Flemish Giant rabbit. He is two years old and lives in Amsterdam, where he goes for walks on a leash and loves hopping around the garden. Guus weighs 10 kilograms (22 pounds), but looks looks even bigger because he is so fluffy. He loves to cuddle with his impossibly gorgeous humans, Danielle and Onno. Guus has identification tattoos in his ears indicating his birthplace and date. He can be quite destructive, but they've learned to work around that. See more of Guus at Instagram. -via Boing Boing

See more adorable pet and animal posts at Supa Fluffy.

Happy Birthday @DeMar_DeRozan! https://t.co/tTjRY1JR1G

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) August 7, 2022

The world has collected and photographed thousands of beautiful works of art going back to antiquity. But that documentation pales beside sports photography, where dozen of professional photographers are catching every minute of every game, race, or other competition. This extreme documentation is what makes a unique Twitter account like ArtButMakeItSports possible. For every classical painting, there will eventually be a sports action photo that accidentally recreates the scene. Sometimes they are spookily close.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Mattia Preti, 1675, 📸 Brad Smith/ISI Photo pic.twitter.com/gMR6YK1JSe

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 5, 2022

You have to wonder at the work that goes into finding and recognizing these matchups. The person that runs the Twitter account is taking submissions, so that must be a great help.  

The Mocking of Christ, by Carl Bloch, 1880 pic.twitter.com/e2Jj0bpaFm

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) August 5, 2022

Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1618-19, 📸 via @MattMoylansLegs pic.twitter.com/Eudu5ZJ2jz

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 30, 2022

You can follow the Twitter account ArtButMakeItSports here, and see an archive of past matchups at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

Once upon a time, mail would get to the right town with just a zip code. Once there, it was up to the local office to figure out exactly where the address was. These days, 99% of US mail is sorted successfully by machine with optical readers. But if your handwriting is so bad that the machines can't decipher it, or if the envelope got wet and the ink ran, it will be sent to the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Or rather, a picture of it will be sent there. At this level of sorting, a combination of human and computer power will use a strange but effective system of comparison to figure out where that mail is supposed to go. If they can't do it, the last resort is completely human before the postal service gives up and returns it. Tom Scott give us a look inside the Remote Encoding Center to see how it's done.   

We've been blown away by the images coming in from faraway galaxies taken by the Webb Space Telescope. The vivid colors are lovely, but how real are they? The telescope only collects infrared and near-infrared light, and humans can't see infrared light, so where are all those colors coming from?

Image developers on the Webb team are tasked with turning the telescope’s infrared image data into some of the most vivid views of the cosmos we’ve ever had. They assign various infrared wavelengths to colors on the visible spectrum, the familiar reds, blues, yellows, etc. But while the processed images from the Webb team aren’t literally what the telescope saw, they’re hardly inaccurate.

So while the colors are added, they are not added arbitrarily. You could call it a translation of sorts. And the colors are necessary to detect features of the original image that otherwise couldn't be discerned. It's our own fault, really, for not developing the ability to see light in its full range. Heavenly bodies shine in ultraviolet light, microwaves, and x-rays, as well as infrared light, which would all have to be translated for humans to see them. Read how and why this is done at Gizmodo.


(Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)