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Colin Furze takes his souped-up mobility scooter for a spin in the snow, reaching speeds up to 50 miles per hour! If this kind of thing catches on, a stroll through the local mall could become a dangerous excursion. -via BroBible

Amputee athletes are running faster than ever, thanks to hi-tech carbon fiber sports prosthetics. Now Nike has designed a shoe called the Nike Sole for those prosthetic running blades.

Designed to work with the Össur Flex-Run blade, the Sole was a collaborative effort between Nike and triathlete Sarah Reinertsen. Like a normal running shoe, the Sole has an outsole and a midsole, and grips the carbon fiber blade with a material called Aeroply. Nike’s engineers even devised a clever system to secure the Sole to the blade, using an anchor and a rubber strip.

While it’s easy to dismiss this as either a cynical cash-in or an attempt to grab some good publicity, the Sole shows that a level of social acceptance and technological advancement where formerly insurmountable challenges now have consumer-grade solutions. I think we’re getting closer to the future, folks.

See a video of the shoe in action at Geekosystem. Link

by Joseph Cliburn, Dept. of Institutional Research/Planning, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College,
Perkinston, Mississippi
Andrew Russ, Department of Physics, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania
Tiny Montgomery, State Penn Center of Mathematics and Truck Driving, University Park, Pennsylvania
Zeke de Cork, Shady Acres Old Folks Home and State University, Perkinston, Mississippi

Starting from a statement brought home by Bob Dylan [1965aL we estimate the value of Love using basic algebra of need [Mottram, 1965], perhaps some calculus, maybe a bit of the geometry of innocence [Dylan, 1965f], and a lot of wishful thinking.

The Limits of Love

We begin with the following assertion by Dylan [1965a]:

(Love - 0) / No Limit (1)

using the expression on the record label in preference to the statement on the back cover [1965b], and taking a cue from the author's statement that it is a fraction [1965c]. Setting aside the question of whether the use of an expression here marks Dylan as an Expressionist, we set the expression equal to X, which is unspecified for the moment, and solve for Love:

x = (Love - 0) / No Limit (2)

Thus:

(No Limit) X = Love - 0 = Love (3)

where we've made use of the fact that for any A, A - 0 = A. Thus Love = something times "No Limit." The traditional quantity that has no limit is infinite, thus we get Love is infinite, assuming that X is finite. If X is 0, we have 0 times infinity, which is indefinite.

In the past year, we brought you the obituaries of Frank Buckles, the last U.S. veteran of World War I and Claude Choules, the last surviving combat veteran of that war. Yesterday, the very last member of the military from the War to End All Wars passed away.

Florence Green was only 17 years old when she signed up for the Women's Royal Air Force in 1918. She worked at the military airfields in Norfolk.

Mrs Green spent her war days working ''all hours'' serving officers breakfast, lunch and dinner and would often spend time wandering the base simply ''admiring the pilots''.

Before her death she said: ''I enjoyed my time in the WRAF. There were plenty of people at the airfields where I worked and they were all very good company.

''I would work every hour God sent but I had dozens of friends on the base and we had a great deal of fun in our spare time. In many ways I had the time of my life.

''I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates. I had the opportunity to go up in one of the planes but I was scared of flying.

''It was a lovely experience and I'm very proud.''

Mrs. Green was a couple weeks short of 111 years old. Link -via reddit

Is there any wonder why metal detectors are so popular in the UK? This list of six found treasures are all from the British Isles. Shown here is the treasure called the Hoxne Hoard, uncovered in Suffolk and valued at £1,750,000! Peter Whatling and Eric Lawes found it while searching for a lost tool in 1992. Link -Thanks, Danny!

(Image credit: Mike Peel)

If you ever opened a pouch of Big League Chew and pretended you were a baseball player chewing tobacco, then you'll enjoy the story behind it. Yesterday was the anniversary of the date in 1979 that the first batch of the bubblegum was shredded up by two baseball players, Rob Nelson and Jim Bouton of the Portland Mavericks, who didn't chew tobacco.

As Rob recalled, in January of 1979 he found a homemade bubble gum kit from an article in People magazine, and he “ordered a bunch, from a company out of Arlington, Texas.”   He baked those first batches of bubble gum in the kitchen of the Maverick’s bat boy, Todd Field.  [Trivia:  Todd is now a renowned Hollywood film director.]  From there, he cut up the gum with a pizza knife, and then mocked up a package to see how a rough prototype might look, so they would have something to show.   For those early samples, they emptied out foil tobacco pouches, and the gum went in – creating what was probably the very first pouches of shredded bubble gum.

And that's just the beginning of the story. Yesterday was also the launch of the blog CollectingCandy, on which this is the very first post. Included are lots of retro package designs. Link -via Metafilter

Artist Marcelo Gallegos has several lovely Valentine cards that stray from the normal hearts and flowers but still convey romance. This card depicting the elder god in love is my favorite. See the others at his Etsy store. Link -via Buzzfeed

The Lair of the Clockwork Book, the latest serial from Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual by Bradley W. Schenck is subtitled "A Tale of Privacy and Adventure from the Future that Never Was." The Clockwork Book is a book that constantly adds to its own knowledge.

The Book accumulates stories. It does this by trading the stories it knows for new stories. This sounds harmless: in fact, it sounds beneficial, until you think about it. Because stories are not neutral. Stories always say something about the person who tells them. They often say more than the teller realizes, and it's easy to become so wrapped up in the telling that we tell too much. Everything that the Book learns becomes part of the Book. And the Book grows by trading the stories it knows - to anybody who asks. Anybody. If that doesn't worry you, you're probably one of those people that natural selection hasn't noticed yet. Over the many years since the Clockwork Book collected its first story people have gradually learned to avoid the Book despite the fact that, in general, people really want to know things. And there must be a reason. There's a way to find out for certain, of course: you just have to be willing to ask.

Our story follows those who are brave and curious enough to ask. The beautifully illustrated serial began a year ago, so you can read just about all of it now, and the last few chapters will be posted twice a week until the story is completed in April. Link Eventually, a printed book may be available. Link

Three-year-old Noah Jeffrey wanted a toy so badly that he climbed into a claw machine in a restaurant in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. We've posted stories of children in vending machines before, but Noah took the adventure to a new level when he started handing toys out to other children who gathered around the machine! Then his mother saw him.

"I ran over to check and he was passing toys out and eating some of the lollies," she said.

But with electrical wires and little oxygen inside Noah was soon sweating as management and his mum worked to free him.

And the escape proved rather more tricky than getting in for Noah.

The toddler had to be coaxed to climb back down the chute and sit there while his mum pulled him around a guard panel blocking his escape.

"We had to tell him that he had to come out to get a toy," she said.

Noah managed to get out of the machine before the fire brigade arrived to rescue him. Link -via Arbroath

Certain subsidies and tax breaks for married couples and families were enacted to encourage marriage and keep children from falling into poverty. But is this fair to people who aren't married? Fewer U.S. households are headed by married couples every year. And all those single people aren't happy about paying more and getting less.

Activists say that unmarried people are systematically discriminated against. They pay more for health and car insurance than married people do. They don’t get the same kind of tax breaks. Co-op boards, mortgage brokers, and landlords often pass them over. So do the employers with the power to promote them. “Single-ism—stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single—is largely unrecognized and unchallenged,” says activist Bella DePaulo, the author of Singled Out.

There are justifications for every one of these, but that doesn't mean much to individuals who don't like being lumped into a group. But the differences swing both ways, depending on a person's circumstances. I personally know people who choose to cohabit instead of marrying because of economic reasons. Low income people can lose Medicaid and other benefits if they marry, and elderly widows can lose pensions by remarrying. And we've all heard stories of married women being passed over for promotions because they might get pregnant. So is there really any way to achieve equity between those who are married and those who aren't? Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Cleaver)

And the more she lies about the fake boyfriend, the more it beeps. This Twaggie was illustrated from a Tweet by @SEAempire. See more Twaggies at GoComics. Link

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Aw, how cute, a dog with a kitten in its arms. Uh-oh, better watch what you dangle in front of a kitten! And now we know where the phrase, "Cat got your tongue?" came from! But Murkin the dog still loves kittens. -via The Daily What

Science has progressed to the point that we know how cats purr. In house cats, purrs are produced by vibrations of folds in the larynx. This was difficult to determine, as cats tend to stop purring when examined by a scientist, and cats that are restrained or unconscious do not purr. Such research is much more difficult for those studying lions and tigers.

But the details of who can purr and who can’t is not so simple. In a review of purring in cats, G. Peters tabulated that 20 of 36 species of cat have been said to purr, including lions, leopards, and other big cats. (As for the other 16, Peters wrote, there is not yet enough information to know whether they purr or not.) The question is whether the noises made by the big cats within the genus Panthera are true purrs — a sound created by moving air modulated by vocal folds as in smaller cats — or are actually different noises that only vaguely sound like purrs.  The “rolling, gurgling growl” female big cats emit while in heat may be a kind of purr, or it may be something else entirely. And, Peters says, big cats might have the ability to purr but simply don’t. Somebody is going to have to make careful, close-up acoustic recordings of these purr-like sounds to better understand how they correspond to purrs of smaller cats, although I imagine finding volunteers for taping tigers in heat is a difficult task.

How much more frightening would it be to try looking down the throat of an actively purring big cat? Still, there is some research on the subject.

In 1989 anatomist M.H. Hast published a study on the larynges of big cats and found that lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards had “a large pad of fibro-elastic tissue” near the forward portion of their paired vocal folds. (The exception was the snow leopard, a big cat that has never been heard to roar.) These expansions, in addition to the ability of these cats to lower the larynx thanks to the flexibility of the hyoid bone and its attachments, allowed lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars to better transfer the energy required to make loud, low-frequency roars.

So it is possible that the biological differences that allows some big cats to roar has left them unable to purr. Read more about purr research at Laelaps. Link

(Image credit: Brian Switek)

You might think video game designers are constantly trying to design characters that are hard to duplicate in real life. And every time, creative cosplayers find a way to do it. Take a look at the Shiva Sisters, Styria and Nix, from the game Final Fantasy XIII. See more pictures and some details of how they did it at Unreality magazine. Link

These sleeping positions may be awkward to us, but cats are liquid, so they settle in just fine anywhere. The real reason you should check out this collection of cat pictures is because they are both funny and adorable. Link