McDonald's Sweden is taking bees seriously. They have installed beehives on top of some of their outlets, and planted flowers to replace grass around the buildings. For World Bee Day (which was May 20), they commissioned a tiny McDonald's restaurant, which is just a fancy decor around a real beehive.
From the outside, the model is a replica of a McDonald's restaurant, with drive-thru windows, outdoor seating, and the golden arches presiding above it all. But instead of a counter and a tables, the interior is filled with frames where bees can build their wax. It's being billed as "the world's smallest McDonald's," but according to NORD DDB, it's still big enough to house thousands of bees.
The McDonald's beehive was auctioned off after World Bee Day to benefit Ronald McDonald House. Let's hope the new owner uses it as intended, and reaps a sweet harvest.
How would you like to live in a South Pacific island paradise, picking coconuts and making babies with your three wives? That idea appealed to William Marsters, who settled on the then-uninhabited Palmerston Island in 1863, eighty years after it was discovered by explorer James Cook. Palmerston is a nine-day boat ride from the nearest store, and is completely populated by Marsters' descendants. Fifty years ago, that was as many as 300 people, but only 62 now remain on the island.
Palmerston Island is the true real-life representation of slow living. There is not a single shop or grocery store there. To make a living, people engage in fishing and harvesting coconuts and in their free time, they make jewelry, play volleyball, or swim. However, they do have electricity and even the Internet, but only for a couple of hours a day. Some lucky few even have mobile phones and there’s even a satellite TV. But no one is selling anything there – money is only used to buy supplies from the outside world. There are only two toilets on the island and inhabitants collect rainwater for drinking. Life there really seems idyllic – especially on Sundays when the church bell rings to summon people for a service after which no work or play is allowed as the island slowly descends into a balmy evening.
To be honest, 62 people and only two toilets sounds far from paradise. Palmerston wants people from the outside to movie in to work the land and add fresh DNA to their community. Read more about Palmerston Island at Bored Panda.
This is a long compilation of clips from old VHS tapes, so you don't have to watch it all at once. But once you start, you won't want to stop! Most of these bloopers and outtakes are from local news broadcasts. but every once in a while, you'll see a familiar face from national news, which is a real treat. And those hairstyles! Oh yes, there are some animals. -Thanks, CW!
The Japanese called him Yasuke. The records are scarce, so it's not clear what his original name was, or where he was originally from. Yasuke had been a slave and a child soldier, and was eventually hired as a valet and bodyguard by Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano. They arrived in Japan in 1579, where feudal warlord Nobunaga Oda noticed him -as did everyone else.
Oda had never seen an African before. And like the locals in Japan's then-capital of Kyoto, he was awed by Yasuke's height, build and skin tone, according to Thomas Lockley, the author of "African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan."
"When Yasuke got to Kyoto (with Jesuit missionaries), there was a massive riot. People wanted to see him and be in his presence," says Lockley, who spent nine years researching and writing the book, which was published last month.
Oda believed Yasuke to be either a guardian demon or "Daikokuten," a god of prosperity usually represented by black statues in temples. He tried to rub the pigment from Yasuke's skin, believing it was black ink. Once convinced Yasuke was real, he immediately threw a feast in his honor, says Lockley.
Already a trained warrior, Yasuke soon learned Japanese martial arts and the language. He fought with Oda as a samurai in 1581 and 1582. Read about the life of the African samurai at CNN. -via Metafilter
Linda Hamilton stars as Sarah Connor in the sixth Terminator film, called Terminator: Dark Fate. This story in this movie takes place after Terminator 2, and the other movies set afterward (3, 4, and Genisys) have been relegated to "alternative timelines." The first teaser trailer doesn't explain much of anything, but it gives us a taste of what the movie will be like. Terminator: Dark Fate will be in theaters November first. -via Boing Boing
The audacity of President Kennedy's 1962 pledge to send Americans to the moon before the decade was over is almost forgotten today. To go to the moon, we would have to revolutionize computer technology, built rockets no one had built before, and send astronauts into an environment we knew nothing about. But we did it, in an event often called the biggest accomplishment of the 20th century. Fifty years later, it's hard to recall what those days were really like. Each step of the space program's progress got publicity, but the American people weren't really on board with it until the moon landing drew near- they were more concerned with Vietnam and the unrest surrounding the Civil Rights movement. Most people thought the moon shot wasn't worth the money. A senator polled the American Astronomical Society and found only about a third of the astronomers thought the moon mission had "great scientific value." But what about President Kennedy? Not long after Kennedy gave his famous speech at Rice University, he held a cabinet meeting that included NASA officials to work out the budgeting and schedule for such a mission.
The president was being as clear as he possibly could. It was fine to fly to the Moon, but the point of such urgency—the tripling of NASA’s budget in just two years—was to reach the Moon before the Russians. It didn’t seem clear to the people in the White House cabinet room that day, but the only reason they were there at all was that Kennedy needed to beat the Russians. Not because he needed to fly to the Moon.
“Otherwise, we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”
Prominent scientists and even former president Eisenhower bemoaned the NASA spending that could have been used for something else. Despite the lack of enthusiasm for the moon mission, NASA accomplished the impossible anyway. Oh, there's a lot more about the Apollo 11 mission that will probably be new to you in an excerpt from the forthcoming book ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman, at Smithsonian.
The remains of the Clotilda—the last vessel to transport enslaved Africans to America’s shores—have been discovered in a remote arm of Alabama’s Mobile River https://t.co/ZYNB4xkH2L
The last American slave ship was the highly illegal Clotilda. Mobile, Alabama, businessman Timothy Meaher commissioned the ship to bring in 110 enslaved people from Africa in 1860 to show that it could be done, even though importing slaves had been illegal for 50 years. After its mission, the ship was burned to the waterline to hide the evidence. In January of 2018, the Clotilda became a nationwide story when a reporter thought he found the wreck, but it turned out not to be the notorious slave ship. However, that story led to funding through AHC and National Geographic Society and Search, Inc. to look further. Because the Clotilda was both custom-built and insured, there are documents that describe its uniqueness. An area of the Mobile River that had never been dredged was scanned, and many shipwrecks were found.
Most were easily eliminated: wrong size, metal hull, wrong type of wood. But one vessel, labeled Target 5, stood out from the rest. It "matched everything on record about Clotilda," says Delgado, including its design and dimensions, the type of wood and metal used in its construction, and evidence that it had burned.
Samples of wood recovered from Target 5 are white oak and southern yellow pine from the Gulf coast. The archaeologists also found the remains of a centerboard of the correct size.
Metal fasteners from its hull are made of hand-forged pig iron, the same type known to have been used on Clotilda. And there’s evidence that the hull was originally sheathed with copper, as was then common practice for oceangoing merchant vessels.
No nameplate or other inscribed artifacts conclusively identified the wreck, Delgado says, "but looking at the various pieces of evidence, you can reach a point beyond reasonable doubt."
This picture was taken around 1922. My first guess was a loudspeaker of some kind, perhaps used to address large crowds. I was wrong.
The answer is in the full caption at Weird Universe. The gadget was found in a book called Illustrated World, published in 1922-1923. You don't see such machines much these days, because the whole idea seems futile.
If you didn't study the history of England in school, what you know may be a mishmash of stories instead of a comprehensible timeline. The people of England are descended from the original Celts and an array of invaders who came in waves over the centuries, plus the more recent influx of people from various parts of the British Empire. Suibhne puts those events in order for us, but stops short of the Norman conquest. We can assume that there will be a part two. Check out Suibhne's animated histories of other parts of the world, too. The actual video is only about four minutes long, after a minute-long intro and before an ad at the end. -via Laughing Squid
The new issue of Vanity Fair has The Rise of Skywalker as its cover story. What can you say about a movie with a carefully-guarded plot, familiar characters, and six months to go before the premiere? Besides going over the history of Star Wars movies and showcasing a series of images by Annie Leibovitz, there are some fascinating on-set stories.
“It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.
And without giving away the plot, there are some interesting tidbits about the new film.
* The Knights of Ren will return. * Keri Russell plays scoundrel Zorri Bliss, who looks like a feminine Boba Fett. * The bond between Rey and Kylo Ren is more profound than previously shown. * Billie Lourd will appear in scenes with her mother, Carrie Fisher.
Screen Junkies continues its series of Honest Trailers for past summer blockbusters with Braveheart, the 1995 hit starring Mel Gibson. The story was supposedly based on the life of the 13th-century Scottish warrior William Wallace, but any shred of historical accuracy was sacrificed for action, drama, and the elements of every other Mel Gibson movie. And in case you haven't seen Braveheart -or heard about it- this Honest Trailer contains spoilers.
It's been 50 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and for many of those years, we've heard people express disbelief that it ever happened. Sure, it was incredible that NASA accomplished the feat, and only seven years after President Kennedy set the goal, but when you think about it, creating a hoax would have been just as difficult, if not more. Who was the first person to publicly accuse NASA of creating a fake moon landing? It appears to have been Bill Kaysing, who self-published the book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1972.
Now, if Kaysing was just some random guy shouting in the wind, it’s unlikely anyone would have listened to him. Every conspiracy theory origin story needs at least some shred of credibility from the person starting it to get the fire going. For Kaysing’s assertions about the moon landings, this comes in the form of the fact that for a brief period he worked for Rocketdyne, a company that made rockets for the Apollo program. Not an engineer or having any similar technical expertise whatsoever, Kaysing’s background was primarily in writing, earning an English degree from the University of Redlands, after which he naturally got a job making furniture.
As for the writing gig he landed with Rocketdyne, his job was initially as a technical writer starting in 1956 and he eventually worked his way up to head of technical publications. He finally quit in 1963, deciding he’d had enough of working for the man.
After quitting, to quote him, “the rat race”, in 1963 Kaysing traveled the country in a trailer with his family, earning his living writing books on a variety of topics from motorcycles to farming.
The book wasn't a bestseller, but might have been if anyone were to actually read it as a comedy. Kaysing has the three Apollo 11 astronauts hanging out in strip clubs in Las Vegas when they were supposed to be in space, until they were taken to Area 51 to fake the lunar landing broadcast. Find out where Kaysing got his ideas and read some of the bizarre evidence he presented at Today I Found Out.
CodeBullet has been experimenting with artificial intelligence. Can he teach a neural network to race cars around a virtual track? There's honestly not a lot of "teaching" going on here, but some sort of natural selection. The cars that go the furthest before crashing get to reproduce, and what do you know, their progeny does even better! From the video description:
Teaching a neural network to drive a car. It's a simple network with a fixed number of hidden nodes (no NEAT), and no bias. Yet it manages to drive the cars fast and safe after just a few generations. Population is 650. The network evolves through random mutation (no cross-breeding). Fitness evaluation is currently done manually as explained in the video.
So, if you are set on getting a self-driving car, you might want to wait until version 4.0 comes out. -via reddit
Several islands in the Bahamas are home to the same species of iguana, the endangered Allen Cays rock iguana. The species only came to Allen Cay in the 1990s, but for some reason, the iguanas on Allen Cay are enormous, compared to their cousins on U Cay, Leaf Cay, and the other islands they inhabit. Biology professor John Iverson wanted to find out why they became so big in a relatively short span of time. It had to be something special about the environment of Allen Cay.
He puzzled over how this tiny island could have turned its resident iguanas into Goliaths. In certain ways, it’s just like the other islands the subspecies inhabits. All are essentially predator-free (save for herons that will occasionally snatch a baby iguana). And all of the islands grow similar shrubs, grasses, and flowers for the plant-loving reptiles to eat.
At the same time, Allen Cay boasts far fewer white sand beaches than its neighbors. Instead, most of its surface is heavily pockmarked due to the honeycomb limestone that covers it. “There are holes everywhere. Some folks call it razor rock because the holes are like razors,” says Iverson. The cavities make the island treacherous for human visitors, but ideal for nesting seabirds. That’s why Allen Cay attracts a dense colony of brown and white Audubon’s shearwaters. Until recently, the island was also overrun with house mice that had been introduced by humans.
Iverson began to suspect that these so-called vegetarian iguanas might be supplementing their diets with seabirds and mice. The scenario seemed to add up: If you take animals that eat plant matter and give them animal protein, they’ll grow faster, he reasoned.
Kevin Parry made a stop-motion video by slicing thin layers off various produce to show us what they're like inside. Yeah, you've seen the insides before, when you eat them, but this is super cool. That part goes by pretty fast, then he shows us how it was done, which is cool, too! -via Boing Boing
