Peter Olds is an engineer with Olds Engineering (a family business) in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia. He invented an innovative type of materials elevator that relies on a simple screw, a completely new type of technology that harnesses old-fashioned physics. Read more about the Olds Elevator here, after you watch Tom Scott introduce it to us. -via Metafilter

When you think of German Expressionism and decadence in the 1920s, you think of Berlin. But Hamburg had its own art scene, in which you would find the dance performances of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, known for their avant garde costumes as much as their dancing.

Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt were a wife and husband partnership briefly famous in Germany during the early 1920s for their wild, expressionist dance performances consisting of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, leaping in mostly diagonal-spiraling patterns” across the stage. Shulz believed “art should be…an expression of struggle” and used dance to express “the violent struggle of a female body to achieve central, dominant control of the performance space and its emptiness.”

In his book, Empire of Ecstasy—Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, author Karl Toepfer notes that “Husband-wife dance pairs are quite rare on the stage; in the case of Schulz and Holdt the concept of marriage entailed a peculiarly deep implication in that it also referred to a haunting marriage of dance and costume.”

Shulz and Holt's relationship was short, tempestuous, and violently cut short in 1924. We might not know about them at all if their costumes had not been preserved in a museum. Read about Shulz and Holt, their performances, and their costumes at Dangerous Minds. -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Minya Diez-Dührkoop)

In the 1950s and '60s, the Volkswagen Beetle sold like hotcakes. It was so cheap, simple to repair, and fuel efficient that people didn't care that it was developed by Nazis. Not that the company ever promoted that fact. Donut Media playfully tells us the story of the Beetle, or Bug, from Hitler to the newer turbo models. It's only nine minutes; the last three minutes of this video is an ad. -via Boing Boing

Look at these balls. Your eyes tell you that they are different colors, but a closer look will show that the balls are all the same color: brown. But they all have different colored stripes, and anyone who carefully shops for clothing will tell you that stripes make all the difference in the world. This is a Munker illusion from David Novick, engineering professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. He explains how a Munker illusion works here. You can see the balls without their stripes in another image, or just watch this animation of the balls changing from stripes to no stripes.    

OK, here it is... designed by @NovickProf, animation by @thehardmenpath. pic.twitter.com/T7N3H6V1pK

— thehardme (@thehardmenpath) June 16, 2019

-via TYWKIWDBI

Here's a point of view you probably never considered. YouTuber The Fish Whisperer strapped a GoPro onto a red eared slider turtle and let him go do his turtle stuff in the pond. It went rather well, although there was that one part when the camera caused the turtle to lose his balance, but it turned out alright. -via reddit

Alberto Gaston de Bassini was a renowned Italian opera singer who settled in New York City in 1896. He sang at the Metropolitan Opera House and gave music lessons. He also collected cats. De Bassini took in all kinds of strays, despite protests from his wife and daughter, and eventually had at least 35 cats, according to his unhappy neighbors. In 1902, a complaint brought a health inspector to de Bassini's home, and he was given a citation over the cats. De Bassini was indignant, and insisted on taking the matter to court, so as to find out which neighbor complained. The local newspapers covered his arraignment, where the opera star declared he would go to the electric chair to defend his cats.

De Bassini explained that when the butcher came at noon to deliver meat for his own six or seven cats, other starving cats in the neighborhood would show up to see if they could share in the bounty. “The butcher wagon it stop. Then it go away. After it go away I look out the back window and I see pussy there, pussy there and there. I see pussy everywhere.” He said the cats knew it was safe to gather in his yard because he did not kick or otherwise hurt them.

De Bassini continued, “It is impossible for me to witness animal suffering. I could not see those cats starve. To feed them is kind, to see them not feed it is very brutal.”

He told another reporter, “What to ze cat I must say? Oh! It is so ridiculous. I must shake my finger, so, and say to ze cat, ‘I do not like you, Mr. Cat, for because it is ze law.’ It is ridiculous.”

Read about the cat-collecting opera star and the case against him at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company  

On another note, you really need to see the cat picture in this week's link dump at Strange Company.

The end of Mythbusters wasn't the end of fun for Adam Savage. He's getting a new show ready, called Savage Builds. So what would you build if you have unlimited resources? An Iron Man suit would be at the top of the list for a lot of folks, so he went and did it. It flies, too! -via Digg

In the movie Sergeant York, a yet-to-be-conscripted Alvin York is shown very intoxicated, on his horse. That seems to be the safe way to get home- after all, the horse knows the way, and horses are very good at not crashing into things. But in the modern world, would that be considered "drunk driving"? It all depends on where you are, and what the local law says. Almost everywhere, it is against the law to operate a vehicle while your faculties are impaired by alcohol or other drugs.       

With that caveat out of the way, for the easy answer- if the horse is pulling a cart, then almost universally yes the horse / buggy combo counts as vehicle. This is because in most regions almost anything with wheels on the road is considered a vehicle outside of some exceptions like wheel chairs, or in a few regions where a motor is explicitly required for something to be defined as a vehicle.

Thus, with exceptions like Montana whose definition of “vehicle” explicitly notes “except devices moved by animal power”, if you’re riding or driving a horse that is pulling some sort of cart on a road, you can potentially be cited for driving under the influence. For example, in December of 2009 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, police pulled over a 22 year old Amish man, Elmer Stoltzfoos, who was operating a horse drawn buggy on a public roadway while drunk. Although, “operating” is perhaps too strong of a word as Stoltzfoos was actually slumped over asleep in the buggy at the time, with the horse seemingly knowing the way home and taking him there along the road. When Stoltzfoos was subjected to a breathalyzer test, he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.18, slightly over twice the legal limit.

But what if the horse was just a horse, with no wheels? Again, the laws vary from place to place, and even identical laws have been interpreted differently, depending on the case. Read about some of those laws and the cases they were applied to at Today I Found Out.

Half as Interesting tries to answer the question, "What is the fastest manmade object?" As you can figure, first they have to clarify the parameters of the question, defining the terms and such. But that leads us to a truly bizarre story of an experiment that is still somewhat classified. I really want to know if we have a 1957 manhole cover orbiting the earth, or possibly some other heavenly body.

With the 50th anniversary of the first moon mission approaching, NASA wants you to experience the event as it happened in 1969. They've set up an interactive website that incorporates mission control film footage, footage from Apollo 11, TV transmissions, commentary and documents, 2,000 photographs, and 11,000 hours of mission control audio recordings to bring you the immersive experience as it happened in 1969. Honestly, you could lose days at a time listening, watching, and reading therough the available archives.

The Apollo 11 launch was on July 16, 1969, so that's the day the 50th anniversary commemoration actually begins. If you click "now" before that date, you will be taken to the correct current time, but until July 17, you'll be taken to that time on July 16, 1969. Or you can start the experience at one minute to launch. Between July 16 and 25, you'll be able to sync the website to what was happening exactly 50 years ago to the day.

-via Metafilter

It's a year away, but you may want to make plans now to attend Burning Cat. It's not another Burning Man, but a game convention for people who want to have fun. It's the brainchild of Matthew Inman, the comic artist behind the Oatmeal and the game Exploding Kittens.

At this event things will happen. You will play games. You will learn things. People will talk. A large man will be dressed as a cat. You do not have to talk to this man. A cat might explode. We suggest you avoid this cat.

One thing this convention will have in common with Burning Man is the giant cat that will burn down at the end of the festivities. Burning Cat will be held May 16 and 17, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. -Thanks, Carol Anne!



If you've been wondering why Inman hasn't posted any comics at The Oatmeal lately, he has a blog post explaining his work on the movie The Secret Life Of Pets 2, and his upcoming projects.  

When you think of the most memorable movie quotes, you probably think of something from Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, The Princess Bride, Star Wars, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Big memorable movies give us great lines that everyone knows. But those are all from the 20th century. It's 2019 now, and we have almost twenty years of movies that have been made into memes, puns, and cultural references shared by fans. Thrillist has compiled a ranked list of 100 memorable quotes from movies of the 21st century. Depending on your age, they may be as memorable as the older movie quotes, or they may be completely new to you.

Our process was highly unscientific. We thought (and argued) through what moments had lodged themselves into our brains and stuck there. Not every entry on this list has become a meme, though some certainly earn their spots because of that. Others we included simply because they astonished us, one way or another: They are perfect punchlines, gut-dropping reveals, and brilliantly written axioms. Some are so silly we've developed a deep affection for them. (Ever hear the one about sand from Star Wars?) They've made us cry, laugh, and clutch our hands to our hearts. Also, we have to acknowledge our inherent limitations: We're an American site with English-speaking readers, writers, and editors. There is a virtually limitless amount of excellent filmmaking and screenwriting happening across the world, from Mexico to Nigeria to Russia to India to Korea and everywhere in between, so consider "greatest" as modified with "mostly American, English-speaking, Western cinema."

One more note before we get going: We decided to include only one quote from each movie. So while we probably could have filled this list with lines from Mean Girls and Anchorman, we had to make some tough choices.

Check out all 100 quotes, each with the story behind it and a link to video if available.   

(Image credit: Jordan Hoffman/Thrillist)

Miranda McDonald is a photographer who went on tour with a musical act for two months. While she was gone, she enlisted her friend Josell Mariano to take care of her cat, Jade. Mariano got along great with Jade, and when McDonald arrived home, she found that Mariano had shot a series of portraits of Jade!

Mariano, who’s both an actor and a photographer, is very familiar with being in front of and behind the camera. “I used a 6Dmk2 with an f/2.8 24-70LII, and an f/1.4 50mm. Lighting is an Einstein strobe with a 24-inch beauty dish,” he said. His skills aside, Jade also did quite a nice job posing for the lens. “Jade was a better model than I thought but was still super wiggly,” Mariano added. “She was distracted by treats and her favorite toy (which is a broken string on a stick).”

You can read the story at Bored Panda, and see the portraits at Jade's own Instagram page.

You've heard wild pigs referred to as razorbacks, which implies that their spinal ridges are sharp enough to cut. That idea is taken to the limit in the Swedish legendary creature called Gloson. This supernatural sow is associated with the "year walk," a ritual wherein someone takes a hike as a quest for revelation around the new year. Gloson is huge, with white skin, burning red eyes, and a real razorback with saw blades. Gloson will charge at a person walking, run between their legs, and cut them in half vertically!  

Descriptions of Gloson are usually filled with all kinds of horror motifs. One account says: “Gloson was horrible. It had one hundred eyes over its body, shining like vile fire”. Usually, she (remember, it is a sow) is said to be a pig in the form of a horrible sow with a back in the shape of a razor-sharp saw. Sometimes she appears accompanied by several piglets. A common motif in the legends is that Gloson runs at the year walker at full speed, and seeks to come between the year walker’s legs and cleave the walker in two with her razor sharp back. But in some records it is said that she could also carry a year walker far away on her back. How long the ride took varies, roughly from 7 weeks to 3 years, with the result that the rider could become bewildered, insane or even die from exhaustion. Sometimes the motifs are combined so that the one who is carried away on her back will be massacred by the saw during the hard ride.

Read more about the terrifying Swedish ghost pig at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

It appears that someone from Starfleet has traveled through a wormhole, gone back in time, and left evidence of a stay on Mars. Several marks such as the one pictured above, were photographed at Hellas Planitia, a place on the red planet, and NASA felt obliged to come up with a more likely story.  

Long ago, there were large crescent-shaped (barchan) dunes that moved across this area, and at some point, there was an eruption. The lava flowed out over the plain and around the dunes, but not over them. The lava solidified, but these dunes still stuck up like islands. However, they were still just dunes, and the wind continued to blow. Eventually, the sand piles that were the dunes migrated away, leaving these “footprints” in the lava plain. These are also called “dune casts” and record the presence of dunes that were surrounded by lava.

Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo: and you’d be right, but it’s only a coincidence.

You can open and/or download several versions of the images at the University of Arizona's site for the high resolution imaging science experiment, or HiRise.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)