This video contains spoilers, but it won't make much sense anyway if you haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War. How It Should Have Ended came up with multiple ways the plot could have been resolved without all that fighting and stuff. Of course, that would have left us with much less of a movie, and we wouldn't all be wondering about and waiting for the next installment. The real fun of this video begins afterward, when it spreads beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe into other pop culture worlds. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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In the US, the American Revolution is taught as a David and Goliath story of a small ragtag army of colonists taking on the British Empire and winning our freedom. That's not wrong, but we did have a lot of help. You have to wonder why the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were so interested in American independence. The answer is clearer when you pull the lens back to see the conflict on a global scale.
In a global context, the American Revolution was largely a war about trade and economic influence—not ideology. France and Spain, like Britain, were monarchies with even less fondness for democracy. The Dutch Republic was primarily interested in free trade. The leaders of all three countries wanted to increase their nations’ trade and economic authority, and to accomplish that, they were willing to go to war with their biggest competitor—Great Britain.
To the French, Spanish and Dutch governments, this was not a war about liberty: It was all about power and profit. If American colonists won their independence, that would cause harm to British interests and open new trade opportunities in North America and elsewhere for those who allied themselves with the colonists.
An exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, The American Revolution: A World War, looks at the American Revolution through the eyes of the other world powers of the time. Read an overview at Smithsonian.
Disney imagineers have been woking on animatronic stunt men. Watch them progress from a simple stick figure to full-on robotic acrobats. Disney doesn't need artificial stunt men when we already have real stunt men and CGI in movies, but these are for the theme parks. They are called Stuntronics. Principal R&D Imagineer Tony Dohi spoke about them.
“So what this is about is the realization we came to after seeing where our characters are going on screen,” says Dohi, “whether they be Star Wars characters, or Pixar characters, or Marvel characters or our own animation characters, is that they’re doing all these things that are really, really active. And so that becomes the expectation our park guests have that our characters are doing all these things on screen — but when it comes to our attractions, what are our animatronic figures doing? We realized we have kind of a disconnect here.”
So they came up with the concept of a stunt double for the ‘hero’ animatronic figures that could take their place within a show or scene to perform more aggressive maneuvering, much in the same way a double replaces a valuable and delicate actor in a dangerous scene.
Read more about the Stuntronics robots at TechCrunch. -via reddit
On February 4, 1929, Kate Jackson was attacked at her home in Wales and suffered a head wound. She died six days later. Whodunit? Was it her husband, who relied on her money, but didn't ask about its source? Was a someone connected to her adopted daughter, whose background was never revealed? Was it the former lover who paid Kate thousands of dollars in extortion money over the years? No, he was in prison, but it could have been someone connected to the union he embezzled the money from. Could it have been a jealous lover, another extortion victim, or maybe a wronged spouse? Who was it that wrote those threatening letters, like this one?
"Lest you forget. This is to tell you that we are watching you and we will get you. You husband-stealer. You robber of miner's money that would have fed starving children; you and that man of yours, I suppose he is somebody's husband, too. When we get you we will tar-and-feather you, and for every quid you have taken from us you will get another lump of tar and one more feather. We will show people you are as black outside as you are in. We don't mind doing quod [prison time] for you, you Picadilly Lily. We will get you yet."
The story of Kate Jackson's murder does not provide an answer, but her web of lies and deceit make for a fascinating story at Mental Floss.
So many annoying habits are things that drivers complain about, but also do themselves and they aren't even aware of it. Then there are some habits that you might not even realize are bothering the drivers around you. When driving, you should always be aware of your surroundings, that's a given, but you should also be aware of the problems you are causing for other drivers. The one that drives me up the wall the most is that one where someone pulls out in front of you and drives slowly, even when there was no one at all behind you. Why couldn't they wait a second and a half for you to pass? -via Digg
The 2,700 residents of Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France are proud of their tradition of taking in refugees from everywhere. It began in the 16th century, when converted Protestants came to the village to escape persecution from Catholics, and became known as a safe harbor for those not wanted elsewhere.
Thus Chambon-sur-Lignon, linked to Protestant aid networks in the United States and Switzerland, was ready for the victims of fascism. First came refugees from the Spanish Civil War, then the Jews, especially children, in World War II. When the Nazis took over in 1942, the practice of taking in refugees—legal before then—went underground. Residents also helped refugees escape to (neutral) Switzerland. In all, people in and around Chambon saved the lives of some 3,200 Jews. Local archives have not yielded one instance of neighbor denouncing neighbor—a solidarity known as le miracle de silence. In 1990, the State of Israel designated the plateau communities as “Righteous Among the Nations” for their role during the Holocaust, a supreme honor usually bestowed on an individual and given to just one other collectivity, a town in the Netherlands.
Even today, generosity and openness continue in Chambon-sur-Lignon. Although the residents don't make a big deal out of it, they sponsor refugees from Syria, Kosovo, Chechnya, Congo, Libya, and other places. Read about Chambon-sur-Lignon at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Pensées de Pascal)
The disappearing trick blew this cat's mind. She's not going to give up until she finds out where that hooman went! At first, you assume that the cat is trying to figure out the illusion, but after she keeps it up, you think maybe she's genuinely worried about his absence. Meanwhile, these dogs don't care at all. -via Laughing Squid
A lunar eclipse on July 27 is guaranteed to be memorable, and eclipse fever is already taking hold -just not in North America. As you can see from this map, the eclipse will be visible to most people in the world, with the US, Canada, and Mexico particularly excluded. Of course, we'll be able to livestream it.
If that’s enough to get you excited, (or if you’re in any other part of the world), the eclipse is certainly noteworthy. At about 105 minutes duration, it’s the longest lunar eclipse of the century. The cause is the same reason that lunar eclipses don’t occur every full moon: The moon’s orbital plane moves up and down. This time around, the moon will pass near the darkest part of Earth’s shadow—if you imagine the shadow as a big circle, the moon’s path will nearly cut the circle in half.
Read more about the upcoming lunar eclipse at Gizmodo.
Former NASA engineer Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) was asked to charge a very powerful battery for an electric Volkswagen. He decided to make lemonade- a really serious lemon-powered battery, using 1232 lemons. After having as much fun with that many lemons as they could think of, he and William Osman got down to business. Lemons were not the only creative idea he had for charging the huge car battery. The Volkswagen supercar ended up winning the Pike's Peak Challenge, and set a world record, too! -via The Kid Should See This
Sam Houston was a Tennessee congressman, then Tennessee governor, then president of Texas (twice), then a Texas senator, then Texas governor. His retirement was due to the Civil War, because he expressed a serious foreboding about the United States splitting apart.
Houston, a bafflingly complex man, owned slaves but fought against reviving the slave trade (the importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1807) and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the way for slavery to expand north and west. He also supported the Compromise of 1850, admitting California as a free state. Houston backed the measure “because it was good for the Union,” says Robert Wooster, professor of history at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. Plus, the compromise contained provisions allowing Texas to “pay off its public debts,” even though the 1850 agreement — and Houston’s opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act — proved unpopular among most Southerners.
On Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. Houston’s prickly relationship with slavery, love for Texas and loyalty to the Union crashed into one another. “Houston saw Lincoln not as a radical, but as a moderate,” Wooster says, and he took seriously Lincoln’s campaign promise not to interfere with slavery where already in practice, believing Lincoln’s election was not a legitimate cause for secession. Furthermore, Houston foresaw the grisly horrors an internecine conflict would visit upon Texas. “He basically argued that Fire-Eaters [pro-slavery Southern secessionists] were leading the South down a path of destruction,” Howell adds.
After all the battles Houston won as a war hero, and all the offices he won, Houston's political end came about when he tried to keep Texas in the Union. Read the story of Houston's approach to the Civil War at Ozy.
Huck is pretty good at counting by twenties, for a 6-year-old. Still, he has some innocent ideas of what to do with a thousand dollars. He has to spend it in one day, so he hires a limousine the very first thing. After a trip to the toy store, he runs out of ideas, but the guys from Yes Theory explain VR to him. Then he remembers the candy store! You'll love the way this video ends. -via reddit
This critter got himself into a predicament, didn't he? A crab boat crew saw a fox stranded on an iceberg about seven kilometers off the coast of Labrador. Alan Russell of St. Lewis talked to the CBC about the fox on an ice shelf.
"We seen something on the ice. Wasn't sure what it was," Russell told CBC's Labrador Morning. "So we got up closer to it. It was a little fox, Arctic fox. And he wasn't very big. He was soaking wet, and the gulls was trying to pick at him."
The crew tried to pull him from the mushroom-shaped iceberg tip, but the skittish fox wouldn't let them close. So they used the boat to knock the ice pan down and fished the fox from the water with a net.
The crew put the fox in a bin with wood shavings, brought him to port, fed him for a couple of days, and then released him. See more pictures at CBC. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Alan Russell)
Remember the video called Super Fabulous Powers that mixed He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes? Of course you do. If you don't, refresh your memory here. After all this time, we finally get an action figure based on that video, which is Prince Adam with that goofy smile and a fabulous pink sword.
Anyway, laughing Prince Adam—who comes encased in an appropriately rainbow-glitter covered box—will be available only at Super7's pop-up event during Comic-Con 2018: a recreation of Hordak’s Lair from He-Man and She-Ra that’ll be outside of the convention on 8th Avenue in San Diego. It’s a lair worth braving for such a delightful reward.
Comic Con San Diego will be July 19-21. See the full figure at io9.
In this video from Monster Truck Ninja, digitally-animated Batman and Robin dance to the Batman theme. Then they are joined by all the other characters, including villains that Adam West never encountered! It takes a real bat fan to recognize them all. Just wait until you see Alfred twerking! -via Geeks Are Sexy
The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was the world's only remaining carnivorous marsupial when English settlers came to Tasmania. They were hunted to protect livestock; in fact, the government paid for every tiger killed up until 1909. The last known thylacine in the wild was shot in 1930, and the last one in a zoo died in 1936 -just two months after Australia designated it as a protected species.
But then something unexpected happened. Long after the accepted date of extinction, Tasmanians kept reporting that they’d seen the animal. There were hundreds of officially recorded sightings, plus many more that remained unofficial, spanning decades. Tigers were said to dart across roads, hopping “like a dog with sore feet,” or to follow people walking in the bush, yipping. A hotel housekeeper named Deb Flowers told me that, as a child, in the nineteen-sixties, she spent a day by the Arm River watching a whole den of striped animals with her grandfather, learning only later, in school, that they were considered extinct. In 1982, an experienced park ranger, doing surveys near the northwest coast, reported seeing a tiger in the beam of his flashlight; he even had time to count the stripes (there were twelve). “10 A.M. in the morning in broad daylight in short grass,” a man remembered, describing how he and his brother startled a tiger in the nineteen-eighties while hunting rabbits. “We were just sitting there with our guns down and our mouths open.” Once, two separate carloads of people, eight witnesses in all, said that they’d got a close look at a tiger so reluctant to clear the road that they eventually had to drive around it. Another man recalled the time, in 1996, when his wife came home white-faced and wide-eyed. “I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen,” she said.
“Did you see a murder?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “I’ve seen a tiger.”
The Tasmanian tiger became a legend, as there have been plenty of sightings with no evidence, just like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. But the thylacine is different in that the species was once very real. Other species have been found after we considered them extinct, so why not the Tasmanian tiger? Read the history of the thylacine, and the search for survivors, at the New Yorker. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Bene Rohlmann)
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