Would your dog go out of his/her way to help you if you really needed it? We'd all like to think so. This experiment involved 34 dogs of different breeds and how they reacted to seeing their humans in distress. The good news is that most of them wanted to help, or at least be with, their owners. One might suspect that some were just too dumb to know what to do. Others may be smart enough to realize it was a setup. At least that's what we'd like to think. After all, they are all good dogs. Read more about the experiment at the New York Times. -via Laughing Squid
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Cars straight from the factory have gone through a detailed finishing process that primes, paints, and seals the color in several layers and processes, sometimes with novelty additives. And companies have used more than 50,000 different colors. So what happens when you have your car repaired after a collision? The process of making the repair match the rest of the car is an art as well as a technology. Adalberto Gonzalez is an automotive artist, a color matcher at Alameda Collision Repair. His process entails a lot more than just grabbing a color off the shelf.
Gonzalez is making what's called a metamer, a color indistinguishable from a reference even if its physics and chemistry differ. It's not easy. Automotive colors are increasingly sophisticated and complicated. "Harlequins,” for example, show three different colors depending on what angle you’re looking from; new mattes compete with pearls and metallics. But in a deep, philosophical way, none of that matters, because the physics of how light interacts with a paint is less important than the biology and neuroscience of how the eye and brain turn that physics into an idea of color.
Gonzalez begins by consulting a wall-mounted computer touchscreen for basic recipes that replicate colors from the original equipment manufacturers. A given OEM paint might require a recipe of seven, eight, a dozen paints from an aftermarket company like AkzoNobel1 or PPG. (I should disclose here that my cousin's company supplies paint to Alameda Collision and put me onto Gonzalez.)
But even with a recipe in hand, Gonzalez will have to account for “field variance.” That’s a polite way of saying, how messed up is this car? Has it been parked outside for two years? Was it painted at the beginning of a new run, when the assembly line’s paint system might not have been cleaned properly and still contained a little bit of the last color? Is it “darker and dirtier?” A little redder? A little bluer?
You can see how easy it would be to mess this up. Read about car colors and how they are recreated at Wired. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Ed)
The TV series Breaking Bad ran for five seasons, and the climax of the entire story arc came in the third-to-last episode, "Ozymandias." That's the one where Walter White's precarious manufactured life as a drug lord came crashing down for good. The two episodes after were important as they tied up the loose ends, but no other episode of the series had as much impact. Five years later, the people behind the show explain how it came about.
Vince Gilligan (creator–executive producer): People give me credit personally for having some sort of master plan for where the series was going right from the earliest days. I did not. We truly did not. The only thing we knew for certain: We wanted the show to end as well it could. Not to say we wanted a happy ending necessarily, but we wanted an appropriate ending.
Melissa Bernstein (coexecutive producer): They wanted it to be an ending that they were proud of, that would stand the test of time. Vince would literally bang his head against the table. There was a lot of pacing going on and a lot of anxiety.
Moira Walley-Beckett (writer–coexecutive producer): It was clear to us in the writers’ room that at that point in the season all the chickens were coming home to roost. Every consequence for each of Walt’s choices was playing out with unbelievable force, brutality, cruelty, angst, terror—everything. And it was all gonna happen in that one episode. And had to happen.
Those folks are joined by stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Dean Norris, director Rian Johnson, and others in an oral history of "Ozymandias."
The latest episode of the video series Scatterbrained is all about bears, but not necessarily the bears that live in the woods (although they are represented, too). This is also about Gummi bears, which is actually a history of gummy candy. And the Chicago Bears. And the many fictional bears we know and love.
Tongue twisters are probably just a tiny bit younger than language itself, but possibly slightly older than the pun. English tongue twisters are not only jokes, they have been used to practice elocution for hundreds of years. Some of the tongue twisters we know today go back centuries, but others are contemporary enough to have a well-documented story.
7. SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS
Maybe the best-known one-word tongue twister, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious isn't short on complicated back story. Most people associate the mouthful of a nonsense word with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dancing with cartoons from the 1964 movie adaptation of P.L. Travers's book series Mary Poppins.
But according to songwriters Barney Young and Gloria Parker, they'd used the word first (or a slight variation on it, supercalafajalistickespeealadojus) in their song, which was also known as "The Super Song." So when Disney came out with their song, written by Robert and Richard Sherman, Young and Parker took them to court for copyright infringement. The Shermans claimed they'd learned the funny word at camp as children in the '30s. Young and Parker said Young had made up the word as a kid in 1921 and the pair had sent their song to Disney in 1951. They sued for $12 million.
Read how that lawsuit turned out and the origins of other tongue twisters at Mental Floss.
In the 1991 movie Hook, Peter Pan goes back to Neverland as an adult. The movie features a star-studded cast that includes Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, and Magggie Smith, and they were all directed by Steven Spielberg. Despite all that, it was a financial disappointment and was critically panned. Even Spielberg wasn't pleased with the finished product. However, many GenX and older Millennial viewers loved the movie as children. This Honest Trailer may be a warning for them not to bother re-watching Hook. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We often think of the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first animated feature film. That's not quite so. While the Disney movie was a breakthrough, the small print says that it is the first animated feature film produced "in America" or "the first full-length cel animated feature film." The very first feature-length animation was El Apóstol, an Argentine stop-motion animation from filmmaker Quirino Cristiani, which was a big hit in theaters in 1917! Cristiani also beat Walt Disney to the punch for a feature-length animated film with sound, with his movie Peludópolis.
Peludópolis premièred in mid-September 1931 at the Cine Renacimiento in Buenos Aires. It was a glorious day for Cristiani. To start, General Provisional himself—President General Uriburu—attended the première and congratulated Cristiani directly on the “great work of satire and a noteworthy acclamation of the Argentine armed forces.” On top of that, Cristiani’s 70-year-old father Luigi was also at the event and proudly watched his youngest son receive the president’s compliments afterwards. Furthermore, most of the critics’ reviews of Peludópolis praised it as stellar. Several publications independently assessed the film with statements along the lines of “What more could we want?”
But Peludópolis made relatively little money—so little that in spite of the film’s warm critical reception, Cristiani’s studio lost an impressive 25,000 pesos (about $1.65 million in modern dollars). The disparity may well be attributable to how chaotic the political scene was in Argentina.
Yes, both El Apóstol and Peludópolis were political satires, and both are lost films, having been destroyed in separate fires. But they were a small part of Cristiani’s body of work as an animation pioneer in the early 20th century. Read about the fascinating life and work of Quirino Cristiani at Damn Interesting.
Not sure of source but oh my god????? pic.twitter.com/7z87zRoUzO
— Kirsten Howard (@emotionalpedant) July 30, 2018
Be sure the sound is on when you watch this Twitter video. We don't know who edited it, but they deserve a salute. You can see the rest of the original video here. -via Digg
Mike Wilson and Megan Hanneman went to the Humane Society to adopt a third cat. They met and fell in love with a polydactyl cat named Bronson, who weighed 33 pounds! All the shelter knew was that Bronson's original owner had passed away.
Since he was all the way up to 33 pounds and only three years old, they suspected it was an elderly person who may have been feeding him table scraps or something. We went in to meet him and instantly fell in love. I remember my cheeks hurting from smiling for so long.
Bronson was so affectionate and sweet and was happily kneading his cat bed when we first petted him. All of a sudden, we noticed that he was a polydactyl cat with extra fingers and had very pronounced thumbs! Even more adorably, his paws oddly resembled our home state of Michigan. He was the sweetest cat we had ever met and he seemed so happy to be home and have a big space of his own.
Bronson is on a diet of only 375 calories a day, with the goal of losing a pound a month until he is deemed healthy. He's already lost 1.6 pounds. Read Bronson's story at Bored Panda, and follow his weight-loss process at Instagram.
In 1949, Hong Kong was a British colony, China was a newly communist nation, and all of Asia was recovering from World War II. Two million island inhabitants were trying to accommodate floods of refugees from the mainland. Michael Rogge went to Hong Kong as a young man and took 16mm home movies of what he saw over his six years there. He added commentary 60-odd years later. There are plenty more of these vintage personal movies at Rogge's YouTube channel. -via Digg
When is the optimum time to leave a baseball game? I'm not much of a sports fan, and have never been to a professional baseball game, so it seems to me a bit strange that anyone would pay for tickets and then leave before the game is over, but apparently people do.
Baseball is probably the one major sporting event where there is no shame1 in leaving a little early. For starters, the games typically range from long to comically long. The average nine-inning Major League Baseball game in 2017 took three hours and five minutes, setting an all-time record. With a new rule to limit mound visits, the average 2018 game is hovering at an even three hours, which is still longer than “The Godfather” start to finish and would tie for the third longest mark in history.
And unlike the current marathon affairs in college football, baseball is not exactly packing the extra minutes with scoring and excitement — unless pitchers jogging in from the bullpen is exciting to you. Plus, the stakes are low. They play 162 of these things. Add it all up and you understand why lines of fans hit the exits to beat the traffic home.
Well, that explains why fans leave early, but it doesn't explain why they bought tickets in the first place. Anyway, FiveThirtyEight crunched the statistics and calculated the odds of missing anything exciting if you left during a particular inning. For example, "you should leave after the sixth inning if the leading team is ahead by four or more runs." Charts and graphs have this information for each inning under difference circumstances. If you bother to go to the game at all. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: One253sir)
The most famous mime ever was Marcel Marceau. Let's face it, he's the only mime you know by name. But the French performer had more on his resume than his stage act. During World War II, Marceau harnessed his acting talent to aid the French Resistance. Great Big Story lets us in on a bit of Marceau's wartime activities. -via Laughing Squid
While the term "robot" is less than a hundred years old, the urge to build a working artificial human has been around for as long as anyone can tell. Automatically animated replicas of human beings occurred in all parts of the world throughout history. These automata were powered by weights and pulleys, falling water, or hidden operators, and then later by clockwork springs which only needed to be wound up. For some engineers, the goal was to replicate, and therefore learn, how biological systems worked. For others, the invention of such machines was aimed at making human work easier. But the real value in ancient automata was their ability to impress and entertain people.
In the 600s, Chinese engineer Huang Kun, serving under Sui Yang Ti, described an outdoor mechanical puppet theater in the palace courtyards and gardens with 72 finely dressed figures that drifted on barges floating down a channel. To impress his guests, the emperor’s automata would stop to serve them wine. In Science and Civilization in China, Needham quotes Huang’s manual: “At each bend, where one of the emperor’s guests was seated, he was served with wine in the following way. The ‘Wine Boat’ stopped automatically when it reached the seat of a guest, and the cup-bearer stretched out its arm with the full cup. When the guest had drunk, the figure received it back and held it for the second one to fill again with wine. Then immediately the boat proceeded, only to repeat the same at the next stop. All these were performed by machinery set in the water.”
Mechanical robots have an extensive history, and many of those built hundreds of years ago are still around to amaze us. A fascinating article at Collectors Weekly takes us through the history of automata from around the world with plenty of pictures and videos.
Teaching your child to speak and understand two (or more) languages is a great way to give him a leg up in life. He or she will be able to communicate with more people, do well with a common college requirement, and may have a head start in employment. But how do you get started? Recent research shows that the conventional wisdom about bilingualism in kids ain't necessarily so.
Most books and articles aimed at families raising bilingual children claim that the best way to teach a child a language is OPOL, or the one-person, one-language method. According to this approach, one parent speaks one language (often the majority language) while the other speaks the minority language. For many reasons, this method is not ideal. In fact, when De Houwer analyzed a huge sample of bilingual children living in the Flemish part of Belgium, she found that only a part ended up speaking both languages. The success rate was especially high when both parents spoke the home language while the children learned the other language at school. Moreover, even if the parents spoke more than two languages, the children acquired only the ones that the parents actively used at home.
Studies show other surprises, too. Read the latest findings about raising multilingual kids at The Week.
We have a new animated music video from DoodleChaos, who brought us a Line Rider version of the classic Hall of the Mountain King and a Rube Goldberg version of Waltz of the Flowers. This time, he's got two (and sometimes three) riders on sleds illustrating Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. Not only is it clever, it might cool you off a bit to hear a song that's traditionally associated with Christmastime. -via Metafilter
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