Think the Easter bunny is the most iconic fictional rabbit? It has a lot of competition. Far from being the ultimate in non-theratening cuddly fluffiness, rabbits in movies are usually terrifying. Watch this and see what I mean. It is not for children.
Yeah, there are a few benign cinematic rabbits, like Harvey and Thumper, but the vast majority of them are murderous demons you don't want to confront, ever.
National Hockey League teams keep two goaltenders ready, plus an emergency backup goalie in case both of the pros become injured. The emergency goalie is often from a recreational league, and it's an honor for them to be selected to sit on the bench. They rarely get to play, and when they do, they aren't expected to shine. That wasn't the case for the Chicago Blackhawks last night.
“I am an accounting professional with experience in financial services. I have expertise in fund accounting and financial reporting.”
That’s the first sentence on the LinkedIn page of Scott Foster, a 36-year-old accountant (duh) who works in Chicago and played college hockey more than a decade ago. Tonight, he played his first competitive game since finishing his career at Western Michigan University in 2006—for the Chicago Blackhawks, who picked him up as their emergency goaltender today, and then found themselves actually having to play him in the third period of tonight’s game against the Jets.
Foster stole the show by blocking seven goals and preserving the Blackhawk's 6-2 lead over the Winnipeg Jets during the third period. It was a night he'll never forget. A good time was had by all. -via Metafilter
Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, the Slow Mo Guys, have a segment from the latest episode of their YouTube series The Super Slow Show in which they pander to us with a "montage of lovely, fluffy, soft, 4K kittens." I'm down with that.
If you want to rationalize the time you take to watch this video, I guess you could term it educational. Call it a study of how kittens move as they learn how to be graceful cats. But you and I know the real pull is the raw joy of watching kittens play. -via Tastefully Offensive
Britton Hayes was on a photo safari at the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania during spring break. The group stopped to watch three cheetah brothers. Then this happened.
"One of the cheetahs hopped onto the hood and was sniffing around, so we were all focused on the cheetah on the hood that was looking around," said Hayes. "While we were all watching the cheetah in the front, one of the brothers had flanked around the back and hopped in back of the vehicle to try and sniff us and make sure that we weren't a threat."
Hayes credits his guide for helping him through the ordeal."Alex (my guide) kept me calm and made sure I never made eye contact nor startled the cheetah," Hayes said, "allowing the animal to see that it could trust us."
Peter Heistein caught the brief scene on video. Notice the cheetah looking right into the camera and licking his lips in the still frame above. Hayes didn't tell his mother, KOMO news anchor Elisa Jaffe, until he got home. -via Laughing Squid
Have you ever wondered about the effects of a nuclear bomb going off in your city? Of course you have, unless you were born after the end of the Cold War. And even if you were, you may have thought about it at one time or another. A new simulator from the Outrider Foundation lets you pull up a map by city name or ZIP code, select a bomb, and it shows you how far the fireball, radiation, shock wave, and heat would reach, and how many people would be killed. There are four bombs: the 15-kiloton Little Boy from World War II, the 150-kiloton North Korean Hwasong-14, the 300-kiloton W-87 from the US military, and the 50,000-kiloton Tsar Bomba. You can even specify whether the bomb detonates on the surface or in the air. Dropping Little Boy over my town would kill everyone in the city limits. The image above shows the effects of Tsar Bomba on New York City. -via Digg
Victorian era etiquette was rigorous, and the rules and rituals one had to follow after a death in the family were particularly strict, even though they were only enforced by social pressure. A widow was expected to grieve for two and a half years, with her activities, dress, and demeanor proscribed in every detail. That included wearing black crape, a stiff, heavily-dyed type of silk, with a veil to hide her tears. These requirements made some fabric and clothing manufacturers rich, but they weren't so great for the widows who had to wear the veils. They were hot, heavy, scratchy, restricted one's vision, and were full of toxic chemicals.
By the 1880s, medical journals had begun a discussion about the health effects of heavy crape veils. The New York Medical Journal decried “the irritation to the respiratory tract caused by minute particles of poisonous crape,” while a syndicated column from the North-Western Lancet declared the mourning veil “a veritable instrument of torture” in hot weather, staining the face and filling the lungs with toxic particles. Doctors speaking of poisonous fabric were not being hyperbolic: Many of the substances used to color and treat crape were seriously toxic, and as the 19th century progressed, the dyes in use only became more dangerous.
Read about Victorian mourning veils and the dangers they posed at Racked. -via Digg
Glacier National Park in Montana has several webcams set up in important places. One is focused on a cottonwood tree that black bears use as a den, so that we can see them as they slowly emerge from winter hibernation. One webcam is focused on a large hole that bears occasionally stick their heads out of. Another webcam is further back, so you can see how far up the tree that hole is. The images refresh every minute or so. If you don't see a bear when you check it, the park's Twitter feed will have sightings.
Yawn! Do you ever struggle to get out of bed? This black bear has been sluggishly poking its head since March 23rd. You can watch it emerge from hibernation live on our new temporary webcam here: https://t.co/vrfiP1oa4v pic.twitter.com/40LnBfT6dC
— GlacierNationalPark (@GlacierNPS) March 29, 2018
-via Metafilter
When you go for a job interview, you start out with the attitude that you need to impress the people at that company. Are you good enough to get this job? But then you realize that you are also finding out about the business and the people you'll be working with, and if you go to enough interviews, you'll run into at least one that's completely bonkers.
The good news is that, even if you are offered the job, you can always say no. Check out a list of reader-submitted horror stories about job interviews from their past at Cracked.
The Name of the Year Tournament is a little late getting launched, so it can't called itself March Madness, but the excitement is there as it is every year. The full-size, readable 2018 bracket is here. The number one seeds are Salami Blessing, La Royce Lobster-Gaines, Dr. Narwhals Mating, and Makenlove Petit-Fard. Can those names of real people fend of the likes of Forbes Thor Kiddoo, Darthvader Williamson, Fabulous Flournoy, or Beau Titsworth? Voting will begin soon at the tournament's blog. -via Metafilter
The Fermi Paradox asks the question of why we haven't found extraterrestrial life, considering the billions of planets in the universe. There are plenty of possible reasons, but the idea is that the rest of the intelligent species of the galaxy just don't want to be around us is as good as any. Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to exterminating us yet. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
For some reason, we had to learn the difference between Roman columns in elementdary school. It may have been so that the school could check off "architecture" in our curriculum, but the lesson was disconnected to anything else in world history, so it didn't mean much. The real reason that columns were so important is that they held the building up, which would be important if we ever bothered to learn more about architecture. But now that we're older and know more, we get the fascinating tale of why Corinthian columns were made in the same pattern for thousands of years, from the Greeks and Romans all the way up to today.
The legend is a good tale, but the history we know for real is quite interesting, too. -via Laughing Squid
Disney Dan has a series of videos he's made over the past several years that trace the evolution of costumed Disney characters. Mickey Mouse was making public appearances decades before Disneyland opened, and he is the first character to get a deep dive into the costume. You'll learn some stories you haven't heard before, like how the first Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland were borrowed from the Ice Capades because Walt didn't have any cast members or costumes.
My kids were excited to meet Mickey in 2002 at Walt Disney World. If we'd waited a couple of years, he could have spoken to them, but by then my daughters would have been older and not as thrilled. Disney Dan has 14 videos in the series so far, covering Donald Duck, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Dumbo, and more. Eventually, he'll get around to doing costume videos on the Disney Princesses. -via Metafilter
The newest Steven Spielberg movie, Ready Player One, opens nationwide today. In honor of the occasion, we can indulge in some a Spielberg's greatest past work. A set piece is "a scene or sequence of scenes whose execution requires serious logistical planning and considerable expenditure of money." They can often stand alone without the rest of the film, but they cannot be taken out of a film without damaging the whole. For example:
7. Melting Nazis, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
More than a decade before Spielberg The Grownup Filmmaker plunged audiences into the full horror of the Holocaust, Spielberg The Ageless Adolescent tackled history’s darkest chapter from a more boyish, innocently rousing vantage. Raiders Of The Lost Ark is all about sticking it to Hitler—a kind of fantasy score-settling that culminates in the film’s karmic, cathartic Grand Guignol climax. Tied to a nearby post, Ford’s Dr. Jones and Marion Crane (Karen Allen) avert their eyes as the Nazi bad guys pry open the titular artifact and get some supernatural comeuppance. The ethereal effects look primitive by today’s standards, but there’s a timeless (and, sadly, rather timely) thrill to watching these Third Reich scoundrels go from solid to liquid for their sins. It was neither the first nor the last time Spielberg would push the limits of the PG rating; everyone tends to attribute the introduction of PG-13 to the heart-ripping violence in his second Indiana Jones movie. But with Raiders, Spielberg traumatized all ages for a greater good. Remember, the next best thing to clocking a real Nazi is melting off the face of a fake one.
The AV Club looks at 25 such set pieces, arranged in chronological order, maybe because it would be too hard to rank them. Oh yeah, the videos are there, too. Scrolling through them is like watching all your favorite movies again.
(Image credit: Jimmy Hasse)
Robbie Barrat is testing the limits of machine learning. He gave a neural network lessons in art, and asked it to paint landscapes (digitally, of course). More recently, he turned his attention to classical nudes. He fed thousands of nude portraits into a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to see what would result.
Generative adversarial networks are defined as a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, which uses two different neural networks, one called the "generator" and one the "discriminator."
"The generator tries to come up with paintings that fool the discriminator, and the discriminator tries to learn how to tell the difference between real paintings from the dataset and fake paintings the generator feeds it," Barrat told me. "They both get better and better at their jobs over time, so the longer the GAN is trained, the more realistic the outputs will be."
Sometimes, Barrat explained, the GAN will fall into what's called a "local minima," which means the generator and discriminator have found a way to keep trying to fool each other without actually getting better at the task at hand.
Here are some AI generated nude portraits I've been working on
— Robbie Barrat (@DrBeef_) March 27, 2018
Usually the machine just paints people as blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out - I think it's really surreal. I wonder if that's how machines see us... pic.twitter.com/tYgzCHGfse
The two neural networks may be quite pleased with themselves, but their nudes are so abstract that they'll never flag a moderator. The one in the middle right of this Tweet looks like Olaf from Frozen. However, people have asked if they could buy a print. Read about the algorithmically-generated art at CNET and see more digital paintings in Barrat's Twitter feed. -via Boing Boing
Now that the home version of The Last Jedi is out, we get to see a lot of the extra features -at least the shorter ones. This one is labeled "bloopers and outtakes," but while there are some bloopers, most of it is just silliness on the set.
The real gem here is finding out how many times General Leia got to slap Poe. Funny how she took so long to get it right.
