Imagine driving down the road and seeing a zebra crossing floating in the air. Maybe that would make you pay attention to the road! Or at least, that's the idea. This Trompe-l'œil illusion was painted on a crosswalk in Ísafjörður, Iceland, for the specific purpose of grabbing the attention of distracted drivers. And it's pretty cool looking, too.
Tokyo grew fast in the 1960s, and personal space was at a premium. Architect Kisho Kurokawa designed a unique building as a vision of the future- capsule apartments. It's called Nakagin Capsule Tower.
From the outside, the tower looks like a stack of laundry machines. It is comprised of two concrete cores, 11 and 13 stories high, onto which are attached “removeable” cubes. Each cube, measuring 107 square feet, was prefabricated in a factory and then attached to the cores using 4 high-tension bolts. These capsule rooms, as they are called, are furnished with basic appliances and a bathroom the size of an airplane lavatory.
The building was built in 1972 in just 30 days. Kurokawa envisioned this building as the dawn of a new age.
The capsules were designed to last 25 years and then be replaced. But 25 years later, the cost of replacing them had become prohibitively expensive. Kurokawa died in 2007. So what happened to the building? The building became run down, and the resident investors planned to tear it down. But that also became prohibitively expensive. And there are people still living there today. Photographer Noritaka Minami occasionally visited Nakagin Capsule Tower over the last ten years, photographing the exterior and interior. Take a look inside the capsule apartments at National Geographic. -via Boing Boing
The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street was based on a memoir by stockbroker Jordan Belfort. But it was a comedy. And it worked. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, and Margot Robbie, it became Martin Scorsese's highest-grossing film ever.
I had to look up "microbladed eyebrows" to find out what it is. It's tattooing. If you remember an earlier comic, Ash had this planned. But most of us don't even think about eyebrows until we see someone who doesn't have any, and it can take a minute to figure out what's wrong. They turn out to be really important in making us look human. This is the latest comic from Megacynics.
How does one celebrate Halloween in Japan? The holiday wasn't a thing until a critical number of American ex-pats made it so, and they dressed up in costumes and did what the Japanese do -ride the commuter trains. In the 1990s, trains became a place for partying on Halloween, and even in the days leading up to October 31st, much to the annoyance of officials and regular commuters.
Year after year, the Halloween trains continued to get more and more rowdy. At the turn of the century, I remember hearing English-teacher friends say that if their school found out they rode the Halloween train, they’d lose their jobs.
Everything seemed to reach fever pitch in 2009 when protesters appeared at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo carrying signs that read, “Stupid Gaijin, Get out of Japan!” and “We Japanese Don’t Need Halloween!”
This was after police had to patrol train station platforms on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line the year before, holding up English language warning signs for the Halloweeners.
Things have changed. This year, the train company in Osaka is sponsoring public Halloween party trains, one for adults and another for children. Maybe it's a case of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." At least that way, the party trains can be separated from the everyday commuters. Read the history of Japan's Halloween trains at Kotaku.
The tech blog Slashdot is celebrating it's 20th anniversary. That's a lot of tech headlines. Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) contributed to the celebration by teaching an open-source neural network to write Slashdot headlines. She fed 162,000 or so existing headlines into the network. It learned pretty well, but what it generated was either hilarious or ominous. First, the funny.
Sexual Security To Allow Australia Vista Releases Denial of the Mumble Microsoft Announces Mac OS X Released Apple Finally Launches Microsoft Steve Jobs To Be Good Mac OS X Accused of the Business Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US Supreme Court Can Be Lingeries
And then, the ominous.
Microsoft To Develop Programming Law Mars Rover Set for Alien China Apple Considering Debut in People Processors U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System IBM Moves to The Matrix Apple Settles The Future of Star Wars
Just substitute "Skynet" for a noun in some of these headlines, and you'll be convinced that artificial intelligence has our number and can't wait to take over. But a couple of them make perfect sense.
New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems I Wants To Control of the Net
Have you seen the dancing mummy on your local weather report? He's a CGI mummy doing the twist, and he's the star of a very popular Halloween graphic that appears to be used at least once a year in every television market. What wasn't included in the graphics package was a warning that this mummy has a supernatural power. He makes every meteorologist who looks at him start dancing. Badly.
News Be Funny made a compilation of clips using this same graphic at dozens of TV stations. Maybe your local weather forecaster is in there! -via Tastefully Offensive
Tom Scott has been cranking out his geography videos from California. On the heels of the musical road in Lancaster, http://www.neatorama.com/2017/10/16/Why-Californias-Musical-Road-Sounds-Terrible/ he tackles questions about sea level. How is sea level defined and determined? Why is sea level different in different places? How do land areas exist below sea level?
Grace Spelman moved to a new apartment with her cat Pierogi. Pierogi has found plenty of wonderful new places to hide while Grace gets things organized. Can you find her in these pictures? The one above is pretty easy. This one is not.
Did you find Pierogi? Spelman posted 26 photographs and one video of Pierogi trying to hide, in varying degrees of success. You'll enjoy finding her in each one. -via Metafilter
Many cities have outrageous rent, and then you have to pay for a parking space. But what if you could live the parking space by itself? Behold a house called Tikki (which means stick) that covers a space of a little more than 8' x 16'. It has three floors with a workspace, a living space, and a greenhouse o top.
“The city is not designed because of humans–it’s designed because of cars,” says architect Marco Casagrande, principal at the Helsinki-based Casagrande Laboratory, which designed the new tiny house. “All the streets in cityscapes are based on car dimensions. This I found a little bit strange. We have all this talk about the density of cars getting less and less in cities, and at the same time, we are talking about people moving into cities . . . but we don’t have space to build. Nobody has been questioning car parking spaces. They are everywhere. So this talk about no land to build in cities is nonsense: It’s everywhere, but it’s just for cars.”
It's an intriguing design, but how many of these would you have to put together to make plumbing and electricity worth installing? And how far apart would they have to be to be usable? Read more about the Tikki house at Fast Company. -via Digg
A year ago, Saturday Night Live needed a Halloween sketch built around guest host Tom Hanks. They started working on ideas on Monday, and by dress rehearsal time on Saturday, the sketch was still being altered, edited, and fine-tuned. At first, it was going to be about dancing. Lady Gaga could have been in it. Tom Hanks had lots of dialogue. None of that happened. The end result was "Haunted Elevator" with Hanks as David S. Pumpkins. SNL writers Bobby Moynihan, Mikey Day, and Streeter Seidell tell how the character came about.
MD: One line we almost kept, which I think is a good encapsulation of David Pumpkins, is, “He’s not part of the known Halloween universe, but he’s acting like he is.”
SS: It might have been just an exercise for us to figure out what it is, and then once we were comfortable with it, we could get rid of it.
MD: At that point, those lines were set to a beat. It was kind of like an early hip-hop rap.
BM: Eventually we realized it was just, “Nope, this guy’s weird and we’re all here onboard.”
SS: And he’s coming from a place of like, “Everyone gets it. Everyone knows who I am and what my deal is.”
BM: He made no sense, but it was supposed to be maddening, and then actually scare you.
The 1989 baseball movie Major League featured a half-dozen stars from the 1980s and '90s, and was quite a hit, although its two sequels were nothing to write home about. The Cleveland Indians owner sabotages the team in order to move it to Florida. The mediocre replacement players have to rise to the occasion, so you can see the ending coming a mile away. Those who remember Major League fondly will want to learn some trivia about it.
5. Charlie Sheen actually took steroids for this role.
He admitted this to Sports Illustrated and said that taking steroids was what allowed him to actually pitch an 85 mile an hour fastball.
4. The MLB salary minimum back then was a little over $60,000 a year.
This was double the average household income so it was a good paycheck for just being the minimum as Jake says it is.
National Geographic has ranked the top 25 cities in the United States for happiness. California towns hold eight of the top 25 slots, but the number one happiest town is Boulder, Colorado. Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins also made the list. Author Dan Buettner worked with Gallup to fashion an index to measure happiness rates.
Research indicates that the variabilities of place play an important role in whether locals feel happy. In happier places, according to Buettner, locals smile and laugh more often, socialize several hours a day, have access to green spaces, and feel that they are making purposeful progress toward achieving life goals. For our index, it tracked factors that are statistically associated with doing well and feeling well; these include feeling secure, taking vacations, and having enough money to cover basic needs.
October 23rd is always Mole Day, but only the hours between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM. According to the National Mole Day Foundation, it's a calendar holiday that celebrates Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 1023), a basic measuring unit in chemistry.
For a given molecule, one mole is a mass (in grams) whose number is equal to the molar mass of the molecule. For example, the water molecule has an molar mass of 18, therefore one mole of water weighs 18 grams. Similarly, a mole of neon has a molar mass of 20 grams. In general, one mole of any substance contains Avogadro's Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. This relationship was first discovered by Amadeo Avogadro (1776-1858) and he received credit for this after his death.
Ways to celebrate include learning about Avogadro and his experiments, measuring substances in chemistry class, telling mole jokes, and eating Mexican food: an entree with mole sauce and guacamole or something else made of avogadros. Me, I'm getting one of my mole-ars crowned.
If you want to discuss your Mole Day festivities, there's a Twitter account for the holiday.
Before planning her own wedding, Meg Keene thought about the nice, classy wedding her parents had in 1974. They had the ceremony at a cathedral in San Francisco with 300 guests, followed by a reception at a posh club with a five-tier cake. How much would it cost to recreate that wedding? Keene's parents paid around $2,000, which would be almost $10,000 today due to inflation. Could Keene do a nice wedding like that for $10,000? The answer is no.
Total 1974 cost: $2,095 What it should cost in 2017 dollars: $10,068 What it actually costs in 2017: $47,286 Increase: 370%
You read that right. That is a 370% increase in what it would cost to throw my parents’ wedding. Why? It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. Sometime between 1974 and today, people realized that weddings weren't necessarily a side business. And now there's a whole industry around weddings. An industry that, as Rebecca Mead writes in One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, has been “assiduous in working to establish the trappings of the lavish formal wedding as if they were compulsory rather than optional.” And wedding vendors aren’t out to get you; most are small business owners who are charging for the increase in time, attention, and ~perfection~ that couples and their parents have come to expect.
Granted, prices vary by area. Those in small towns can do it less expensively, of not as poshly. Keene also breaks down the cost of each component of the wedding: flowers, food, photography, wedding gown, cake, etc. Read about her project at Buzzfeed.
