The Minneapolis Star-Tribune posted the history of the graduation cap and gown, and included a color-coding for the tassels that attach to the traditional mortarboard hat. The American Council on Education has recommended tassel colors for college graduates that indicate what discipline one's degree is in. Here's a sample:
Apricot: Nursing Brown: Fine arts, including architecture Citron: Social work Copper: Economics Crimson: Journalism Dark blue: Philosophy
Some colleges follow the recommendations or come up with their own variations on the idea, and others follow completely different schemes. Link-Thanks, Minnesotastan!
Eduard Khil, a longtime pop star in the Soviet Union, became famous in the west only a couple of years ago when his rendition of the wordless song "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home" became an internet hit. Khil's performance on a '60s TV show spawned a meme called Trololo. Khil embraced his internet fame and responded by coming out of retirement to perform again. Khil died today at a St. Petersburg hospital from complications of a stroke he suffered last month.
Eduard Khil was born in Smolensk in 1934. He started his music career in 1960 at the Leningrad Conservatory. He began performing in 1962 and very soon became extremely popular. In the late 1970s he commenced a lecturing career at the Leningrad Conservatory. He was later named an Honored Artist of the Russian Federation.
Victory at an International Youth Festival in Berlin in 1973 gave him a chance to see the world, as the singer made a global tour, visiting some 80 countries.
In the 1980s Eduard Khil was one of the few Soviet people to travel to the US and Europe. In Paris’s Rasputin cabaret, the singer’s performances were enjoyed by Mireille Mathieu and France’s 21st President, François Mitterrand.
Hoax master Alan Abel has been fooling reporters and hoodwinking the public for more than 50 years. Here, he reveals a few of his tricks.
Most careers aren't launched by the sight of a cow and a bull copulating in the middle of a road. But Alan Abel doesn't have a typical gig. One day in 1957, the aspiring jazz drummer was driving to a show in Texas when he got caught in a rural traffic jam. The cause of the snarl: a cow and a bull engaging in some very public relations. Abel didn't think twice about the bovine display, but the expression of moral outrage on other motorists' faces fascinated him.
By the time Abel reached his destination, he'd decided to launch the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Under the war cry "A nude horse is a rude horse," SINA strove to create a more moral society through clothing mammals. Two years later, with the help of actor Buck Henry (who posed as the group's president), Abel bamboozled the media into thinking SINA was a real activist group. Even the networks were fooled -Walter Cronkite covered the story for CBS News.
SINA was just the first of Abel's many stunts. For the past half century, the prankster has made a career out of giving Americans "a kick in the intellect." And he's done a lot of kicking. From 1975 to 1988, Abel posed as Omar, founder of Omar's School for Beggars, a long-running hoax that brough attention to unemployment and homelessness. In 1979, Abel paraded an imposter "Idi Amin" around New York City and staged an elaborate green card wedding with a young WASP to spotlight the State Department's coddling of the genocidal dictator. In 1985, during one of the first live tapings of The Phil Donohue Show, Abel stocked the audience with fainting women as a protest against bad television. And when David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991, Abel released music from the fictitious Ku Klux Klan Symphony, guest-conducted by Duke, to highlight the politician's former Klan ties.
With such a creative mind, Abel might have made millions in advertising or television, but he's never held a "real" job. For many years, Harry Scherman, the late founder of the Book of the Month Club, was Abel's benefactor, underwriting projects such as the Idi Amin caper. What little Abel makes comes out of his prank's budgets. You might say he lives hoax to hoax.
My cats know that the office chair at the computer is the best place in the house to sit. It must be, because I spend so much time in it! Sometimes there are two cats, which leaves little room for me. Yasmine at Cat vs Human knows exactly how it is. Link
Yesterday we saw a proposal delivered by a kitten. Today, it's a cow! Nathan Evans of Bracknell, England, wanted his ask Angela Olano for her hand in marriage in a way that would be meaningful to her. Olano really likes cows, so Evans contacted the organizers of the South England Show about borrowing a bovine. Catherine Elmes of Costow Farm clipped and bathed her show cow, Rosie, for the event. Then Rosie was fitted with a proposal banner and kept for Olano to find while on an outing with Evans.
The proposal came as a complete surprise to Ms Olano, 21, who thought she was being driven to a pub in the county to celebrate a relative's birthday.
She said: "I like cows, if I could have a cow I would, so I just thought he was going to take me for a walk somewhere to look at cows.
"So I was really amazed but it really means a lot to me. I know Nathan is the man I want to marry."
The wedding is planned for September. No, they will not serve beef at the reception. Link -via Fark
Subtitled "The World's Tiniest Police Chase," this video was made by projecting video onto various indoor surfaces with a handheld projector. Produced by Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp, together known as The Theory. -Thanks, Tom!
Ventriloquist Nina Conti shows us how to get a man to do exactly what you want. Her act usually involves a talking monkey puppet, but this twist brings something different to the art of throwing one's voice. Meaning, this is funny. -via reddit
Reading about HyperCard at Ars Technica brings back so many memories. I had used computers for a few years, but I never loved computers until I discovered HyperCard. That was in 1988, the same year the author places his experience:
I opened the app and read the instructions. HyperCard allowed you to create "stacks" of cards, which were visual pages on a Macintosh screen. You could insert "fields" into these cards that showed text, tables, or even images. You could install "buttons" that linked individual cards within the stack to each other and that played various sounds as the user clicked them, mostly notably a "boing" clip that to this day I can't get out of my mind. You could also turn your own pictures into buttons.
Not only that, but HyperCard included a scripting language called "Hyper Talk" that a non-programmer like myself could easily learn. It allowed developers to insert commands like "go to" or "play sound" or "dissolve" into the components of a HyperCard array.
Intrigued, I began composing stacks. None of them amounted to anything more than doodle-packed matrices of images, sounds, and aphorisms, but I eventually glanced at my wrist watch. It was 4:00 AM. Startled and quite tired, I turned in with visions of stack buttons dancing in my head.
To understand what a breakthrough that was, you have to place yourself in a time without the internet world wide web, without Windows, and in which most programs required pretty decent typing skills, if not programming skills. The concept of doing something on a computer by just pushing a button was revolutionary, and the idea of designing your own buttons to do things was out-of-this-world awesome. So whatever happened to HyperCard? If things had gone a little differently, it might have been the internet's first browser. Read the full article to get caught up on this program that influenced so much of what came after. Link -via Metafilter
Steven Wildish has another alphabetic movie quiz for you in poster form! This one is all war movies, which should be easier for you if you watched TV over Memorial Day weekend. Can you name all the films A to Z? I recognized about half of them right off. Link -via Blame It On The Voices
You can look at these tricks and say, "How do they do those things? It must be magic!" Or you can look at them and say, "I wonder how many times they fell perfecting those tricks." The footage was recorded at 1000 frames per second. At the YouTube link, you'll find a list of the skaters and a short description of each trick -just in case you want to try it yourself. -via reddit
by Gregory J. Crowther Department of Physiology & Biophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington Despite the importance of jelly as a sandwich ingredient, its molecular structure remains poorly understood. We therefore attempted a preliminary characterization of the jelly molecule using a novel technique we call "jelly electrophoresis." Jelly electrophoresis is a methodological cousin of gel electrophoresis, in which a molecule’s size is estimated from its speed of travel through a porous matrix. In the case of jelly electrophoresis (see Figure 1), the matrix, in addition to being porous, is generally edible. Details are presented below.
Figure 1. In jelly electrophoresis, the electrophoresis box doubles as a transparent toaster, allowing data to be generated and "cooked" simultaneously. (NOTE: the author’s camera lens was covered with a thin layer of jelly.)
Methods
Three samples were placed in separate "lanes" atop a slice of multigrain bread: a tablespoon of jelly, a tablespoon of water, and a small piece of turkey (see Figure 2B). The samples were allowed to migrate vertically through the bread while the experimenter ate lunch, a period of approximately 20 minutes. The bread was then removed from the experimental apparatus for further analysis (see Figure 3). The water and the turkey, being of known composition, served as molecular weight markers against which to compare the jelly. The molecular weight of water is 18, while turkey is composed primarily of actin and myosin filaments of molecular weight 42,000 and 520,000, respectively.1
Figure 2. Raw data for (A) gel electrophoresis on a mouse muscle extract and (B) jelly electrophoresis on a slice of multigrain bread. Note the slight migration of the jelly down from the top of the bread.
Results
The distances traveled by the samples through the bread are reported in Table 1. The molecular weight marker results were used to construct the standard curve shown in Figure 4, which the author neglected to send to the editor. Based upon this curve, the migration distance of the jelly (0.2 cm) indicates that its molecular weight is approximately 90,000.
Figure 3. A post-electrophoresis piece of bread. (NOTE: the author’s camera lens was covered with a thin layer of jelly.)
Discussion
Jelly molecules are surprisingly large. Nevertheless, they migrate through bread at a measurable speed -- roughly 0.6 cm/hour, permitting them to pass all the way through a 1.5-cm-thick slice of bread in 2.5 hours. To prevent such behavior, a "crustless sandwich" design, in which the jelly is surrounded by a layer of impenetrable peanut butter,2 should be employed whenever possible. ------- -------
References
1. Muscle Contraction, C. Bagshaw, 1993, London: Chapman & Hall. 2. For an example of this kind of device, see "Plucked From Obscurity: Crustless Sandwich," M. Tsipis, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 8, no. 2, March/April 2002, p. 30.
Acknowledgments
M. Lambeth, D. Marcinek, E. Shankland, and R. Stuppard contributed and/or consumed materials used in this study.
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This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2002 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift! Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
On Valentine's Day, 1981, eleven-year-old Todd Domboski was walking through a field in Centralia, Pennsylvania, when a 150-foot-deep hole suddenly opened beneath his feet. Noxious fumes crept out as the boy fell in. He only survived by clinging to some newly exposed tree roots until his cousin ran over and pulled him to safety. What was happening here ...and why?
Eastern Pennsylvania in anthracite coal country. Back at the turn of the 20th century, miners were digging nearly 300 millions tons of coal per year from the region, leaving behind a vast subterranean network of abandoned mine shafts. In May 1962, while incinerating garbage in an old strip mine pit outside of Centralia, one of the many exposed coal seams ignited. The fire followed the seam down into the maze of abandoned mines and began to spread. And it kept spreading -and burning- for years.
Mine fires in coal country are actually not all that uncommon. There are currently as many as 45 of them burning in Pennsylvania alone. Unfortunately, there's no good way to put them out. But that doesn't stop people from trying.
We try to write about robots in every Bathroom Reader so we'll be in their good graces when they inevitably take over the world. With that in mind, here are some notable TV robots.
Robot: The Robot
Series:Lost in Space (1965-68)
Specs: His primary objective: to keep the Robinson family, especially the youngest member, Will (Bill Mumy) safe as they bumble their way through space. Despite giving the robot that important task, the Robinsons never bothered to give it a name, though it's technically a Class M-3 Model B9, General Utility Nontheorizing Environment Control Robot.
Specs: Rosie, a Model XB-500 from U-RENT-A-MAID, diligently serves as everything from a housekeeper to a nanny for "Mr. J's" futuristic family, and, for reasons, unknown, speaks with a Brooklyn accent. Sentient and caring, she even has a boyfriend, Mac, the robot assistant of the building superintendent Henry Orbit.
Memorable quote: "I swear on my mother's rechargeable batteries!"
How could anyone say no to this adorable kitten looking at you with those big eyes and offering you an engagement ring? Newly-adopted kitten Luke helped a thoughtful guy propose to redditor stenston's sister. Link -via Buzzfeed
When we watch someone play with a yo-yo, we normally see the yo-yo move while the person is standing relatively still. Douglas Khozam reversed that view by using motion-tracking technology to make the yo-yo stationery while the operator does the moving around. Or, actually just the hands. The video really gets wild when it turns into a kaleidoscope! -via Laughing Squid
