A medical case from 1844 involved a young man who swallowed his teeth. He had made himself a partial denture for his missing front teeth, but his dentist boss told him he should never sleep with them in. Vanity won out, and the young man ended up ingesting his denture while sleeping, which killed him. But not immediately. Unable to swallow, he went to the Edinburgh surgeon James Syme, who couldn't dislodge the dentures from his esophagus.
Mr S. now recommended his removal to the hospital, and when there introduced a probang with threads passed through the bulb, the other ends being retained in the hand, trusting that if the bulb could be carried beyond the foreign body, it might be entangled by them, and thus removed. Nothing, however, was detected, and it was believed that it had found its way into the stomach,—an opinion which was rendered the more probable by the fact, that the difficult deglutition was by no means so great as previously.
He no longer had trouble swallowing, in other words.
I have always been fascinated by the natural world; a love instilled in me at a young age, and documenting what I discover has become my main motivation for creating my work. I am influenced by my love of botanical illustrations, the natural sciences and childhood memories of museum visits where I would be mesmerised by the variety of exhibits and the way they were displayed.
Visionary engineer Douglas Engelbart had a lot of ideas for computers. He presented some of his ideas to a crowd of a thousand engineers in December of 1968, back when computers were fed with punch cards and did little besides crunching numbers. He talked about networks of computer communicating with each other, word processing, cut and paste, saving files, and other new ideas that we take for granted today.
It wasn’t just the software that was revolutionary. Engelbart had also invented a new tracking device with the help of Bill English, an engineer on his team. As the small device rolled, a dot on the screen rolled along with it. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” Engelbart remarked. “Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it.”
Engelbart called his program the oN-Line System, or NLS. His larger goal, beyond any of the specific functions he’d introduced, was for people to collaborate. Toward the end of his presentation, he alluded to an “experimental network” that would allow different users to collaborate from as far away as Harvard and Stanford. He was describing the ARPANET, a program that was just starting to burgeon at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) under the U.S. Department of Defense.
Engelbart expected his presentation to attract hundreds of engineers eager to join him in this new wave of computing. He had, after all, introduced word processing, document sharing, version control and hyperlinks, and he’d integrated text, graphics and video conferencing. He’d even foreshadowed the internet. He thought the audience members would line up afterwards to ask how they could join his network and help develop his ideas.
Instead, they gave him a standing ovation and then filed out of the auditorium.
The engineers were impressed, but since Engelbart's ideas were decades ahead (there weren't even personal computers at the time), they didn't understand how any of it related to their own work. Engelbart also suffered when thinking too far ahead, in that he had trouble communicating his ideas all through his life; otherwise, his name would be as well-known as Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. Read about Douglas Engelbart and his innovations at Smithsonian magazine. -via Digg
Jamie Price, the VFX supervisor on the new movie Downsizing, talks about how movies use tricks to make people look tiny, beginning in 1935 with the movie The Bride of Frankenstein. Back then, it wasn't a matter of putting it all on a computer. There have been many different techniques used between then and now.
You might be surprised at how many of your favorite movies did this, and you didn't even think about the work that went into the effect. That's the mark of a good special effect. Making it look effortless is a big part of the magic. -via Tastefully Offensive
Jesse is a photographer in China. When his wife became pregnant, his mother offered to move in and help the family. Jesse's dad came, too.
The soon-to-be grandad also brought his alcoholism and beer belly with him and Jesse thought that perhaps a group weight loss programme might help him regain his passion for life.
First, they started powerwalking and eventually, that became jogging. Before too long, they all started going to the gym. Alongside all of this, they tracked their results by measuring their every-changing bodies every 10 days.
Blackbeard and his pirates stole the ship The Queen Anne's Revenge in 1717 and wrecked it in South Carolina in 1718, but it was only found in 1996. Historians and conservators studying the wreckage have recovered most of the ship's 27 cannons. Inside one of the cannons was a wad of garbage that turned out to be small bits of paper. And some had readable text! So what were these pirates reading i their spare time?
Work by conservationists from North Carolina’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources shows that Blackbeard and his crew got a kick out of reading “voyage narratives”—a popular form of literature in the late 17th and early 18th century that chronicled the true accounts of maritime expeditions. Specifically, Blackbeard kept a copy of Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711, detailing the British naval officer’s participation in a global expedition aboard the ships Duke and Dutchess.
Now we know there were books aboard Blackbeard's fleet, and that indicates that at least some of the crew were literate ...all from a few scraps of waterlogged trash. Read more about the find at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)
It's that time year again. Even if you manage to stay away from cold and flu germs, your overworked heating system is drying out the air in your home and making your sinuses act up, like vengeful little children. Yeah, you probably have a cold, with the added problems of super dry air. Your body is rebelling against you, making it impossible to rest and recover. This lovely scenario is brought to you by Jake Like Onions.
Dade Middle School in Dallas, Texas, came up with a program called "Breakfast with Dad" for the male students and their fathers on December 14. But they knew there were a lot of boys who didn't have a father present or able to attend. School administrators went to Facebook to ask for men from the community to volunteer for the event, where they would be paired with a boy for breakfast. The school said they needed at least 50 volunteers. You might be heartened to learn that 600 men showed up!
The school's request spread like wildfire, and come the day of the event, 600 men from Northern Texas showed up to lend a helping hand. The volunteers did everything from engaging the boys in casual conversation to teaching them how to tie their ties. Excuse us while we mop up our tears.
Anesthetics cause paralysis, block pain, and suppress consciousness, except when they don't. Anesthesiologists know a lot about the drugs they administer and what to expect from them, but they can't totally explain what those drugs do and what's happening you when you're under them. That's because we really don't understand human consciousness. And from the stories that crop up now and again, consciousness is a slippery thing.
One day in the nineteen-eighties, a woman went to the hospital for cancer surgery. The procedure was a success, and all of the cancer was removed. In the weeks afterward, though, she felt that something was wrong. She went back to her surgeon, who reassured her that the cancer was gone; she consulted a psychiatrist, who gave her pills for depression. Nothing helped—she grew certain that she was going to die. She met her surgeon a second time. When he told her, once again, that everything was fine, she suddenly blurted out, “The black stuff—you didn’t get the black stuff!” The surgeon’s eyes widened. He remembered that, during the operation, he had idly complained to a colleague about the black mold in his bathroom, which he could not remove no matter what he did. The cancer had been in the woman’s abdomen, and during the operation she had been under general anesthesia; even so, it seemed that the surgeon’s words had lodged in her mind. As soon as she discovered what had happened, her anxiety dissipated.
The last time I gave my tom cat a bath, I removed everything within a five-foot radius of the sink, and he still managed to damage things, namely my window screen and my arm. Can you imagine trying to bathe a mountain lion? Messi, a cougar in Russia, is getting his bath. I love the description:
The video consists of three parts: washing, rinsing and wringing.
It turns out he meant three videos. The rinsing is here, and the "wringing" is here. There's even another for the drying process, which Messi does himself. Don't try this at home. Not only is it dangerous, but you shouldn't have a wild animal as a pet in the first place. You can see more of Messi at his Instagram page, I Am Puma.
Always clear your browser history if there's a chance anyone else will be using your computer. You could be thoroughly embarrassed if anyone sees it. I took a peek after my husband used my computer once, and it almost bored me to tears. He had been comparing prices for tools and watching YouTube videos about the best way to reinforce concrete. I shudder to think what would be on my mother's computer. If anyone were to check my browser history, they would run away just looking at the size of it, but I can blame it all on my job. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Every home needs a Sarlacc that won't digest you over the course of a thousand years! This pillow is labeled as a "newborn/toddler pillow lounger," and I'm sure it's perfect for the child you want to raise right, but people without babies could easily find a use for it -like a pillow for your head while you are lying down watching a Star Wars movie. It's big, maybe you could curl up in it with a good science fiction book. It has four rows of teeth, and handles, so you can easily carry it and anything you want to feed it put into it. Get your Pit of Carkoon pillow from Etsy store BedHogShop. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Lily Hevesh puts the "art" in domino artist. Her chain reactions are big and innovative, but above all they look amazing. Enjoy a kaleidoscopic compilation of her best 2017 projects.
So what's in store for Hevesh5 this year? She's a professional, so her calendar is filling up with gigs in advertising, movies, and events, but she's also going to college. After all, she's 19 now. -via Boing Boing
Who's the real hero in your life? The one who has what you need, who opens up new worlds to you, and who encourages your kids to be the best they can be? Who fights against ignorance and illiteracy every day? Your librarian! And now she's clad in a superhero cape, as she should be. This Librarian Action Figure is based on real librarian Nancy Pearl of the Seattle Public Library. That's some honor. The action figure was first developed in 2003 for Archie McPhee, and had a button you pushed to raise her hand to "shh!" you, but that's apparently been dropped for the newer version. -via Madam Jujujive
The 1984 Chuck Norris movie Missing in Action was rushed into theaters just a couple of months before Rambo: First Blood Part II, because they had the same plot. It was non-stop action and violence as Norris, as Colonel James Braddock, tears up Vietnam to free POWs who were kept after the war's end. Critics didn't think much of it, but audiences loved it and the movie became Norris' most popular film. There are things you don't know about Missing in Action that we'll learn now.
9. Chuck Norris made this film in honor of his brother.
He made this film to honor his brother Weiland Norris who was killed in Vietnam in 1970. This film must have brought back some memories.
7. This was the first of a five-film contract for Norris.
He made a million dollars per film over the duration of his contract. That seems like very little at this point but back then that was a great deal.
