The lawyers at VELCRO® Brand would prefer you not to use their company's name. What? Not say the brand name? I think the point they are getting to is that you shouldn't use their trademark name when referring to the same product made by companies other than VELCRO®, although they aren't that clear about it. The actual product should be referred to as "&$# hoop and loop." The company wants to protect their trademark even though they lost the patent 40 years ago.

(YouTube link)

The singing lawyers make for a funny video, but as for using the brand names as a generic term, that genie left the bottle long ago. Just ask Crock-Pot®, Xerox®, Thermos®, or any of the other brands that became nouns. People are not going to say "&$# hoop and loop," but thanks to this video, they may be more aware of the brand, and that's the real point. -via Metafilter

Amazon began as an online book store. It expanded to sell everything, services as well as goods. Then it opened its own brick-and-mortar bookstores, eleven of them so far. Then this summer, Amazon bought Whole Foods, which has 400 physical locations. These same things happened with another retailer that started out over 100 years ago: Sears, Roebuck & Company.

From its founding in the late 19th century to its world-famous catalog, the history of Sears, Roebuck & Company is well known. Less storied is its magnificently successful transition from a mailing company to a brick-and-mortar giant. Like Amazon among its online-shopping rivals, Sears was not the country’s first mail-order retailer, but it became the largest of its kind. Like Amazon, it started with a single product category—watches, rather than books. But, like Amazon, the company grew to include a range of products, including guns, gramophones, cars, and even groceries.

From the start, Sears’s genius was to market itself to consumers as an everything store, with an unrivaled range of products, often sold for minuscule profits. The company’s feel for consumer demand was so uncanny, and its operations so efficient, that it became, for many of its diehard customers, not just the best retail option, but the only one worth considering.

The steps -and missteps- that Sears took along the way to where it is now mirror what Amazon is going through. Read a comparison of the two companies in two different centuries at the Atlantic. -via Digg

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

If you like shrews, especially if you like them parboiled, you’ll want to devour a study published not long ago in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Called “Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton,” it explains how and why one of its authors—either Brian D. Crandall or Peter W. Stahl; we are not told which—ate and excreted a 90 millimeter long (excluding the tail, which added another 24 millimeters) northern short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda).

A few years ago, we posted a video that Richard Dunn made when he was stranded overnight at an empty airport. The Charlotte Douglas International Airport wasn't totally empty when Mahshid Mazooji was stranded there overnight on a recent trip, so she enlisted the help of fellow passengers and airport staff in making a video that cheered everyone up. It will cheer you up, too!

(YouTube link)

Mazooji's brother Death__BySnuSnu posted this at reddit. Commenters verified that the Charlotte airport has the second-best dancers in any U.S. airport, bested only by the staff at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.  

It's a military rank that is pronounce "kernel" like  a unit of corn, but is spelled "colonel," which doesn't have any other pronunciation in English. How did we get one from the other? Which came first, the spelling or the pronunciation? The answer is: they both evolved over time. See, the military term "colonel" was borrowed from the French language, which had borrowed it from Italian. But each country spelled it differently, and then each country changed it differently. Linguist Arika Okrent explains the military term "colonel" and its complicated evolution that left us with the crazy spelling at Mental Floss.  

Well, I guess that's one way to fight crime and change hearts and minds. Or at least take over hearts and minds. If you know someone who led a life of crime and had a sudden transformation into a mild-mannered, upstanding citizen, he may be harboring a secret within himself. This horror is only found in a world where superheroes, aliens, and zombies collides. Or in our world, when you recall the many posts we've done about parasites that turn their hosts into zombies that do the parasite's bidding. This is the latest comic from Ethan Vincent at Oppressive-Silence. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A tiny terrier pays no attention to the fact that these lion cubs are several times his size. What matters is intimidating them from the start, so they know who's boss. Jack Russells are born with a Napoleon complex, and use it to the fullest extent.  

(YouTube link)

The cubs probably just want to play, but they know better than to mess with a yapping ball of fury, no matter how small it is. -via reddit

Digg is going all out for the new Star Trek series Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered last night with one episode on CBS-TV and another on the streaming service CBS All Access. Here's a roundup of reviews. They gushed about the artistry of the opening credits, which you can see here. And since there are people -mostly young people- who haven't seen much Star Trek over the past fifty years, they have a viewer's guide to catching up on all 600 hours of Star Trek in TV and film (or at least the hours worth watching). Here's the order list:

Star Trek: The Original Series
The Animated Series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Territory
The Next Generation Seasons 1-7
Star Trek: Generations
Deep Space Nine Seasons 1-5
Voyager Seasons 1-2
Star Trek: First Contact
Deep Space Nine Seasons 6-7
Star Trek: Insurrection
Voyager Seasons 3-7
Star Trek: Nemesis
Enterprise
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Star Trek: Beyond

The reasoning behind the viewing order is explained in this post.

With the movie Tomb Raider set to hit theaters next year, people are thinking about the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The new film is not a remake, but a reboot based on the 2013 video game. But comparisons are inevitable. With that in mind, let's learn some trivia about the Angelina Jolie movie that set the standard for video game movies.

10. As in the game when Lara is breaking things the butler hides his face.

The first film managed to adapt a lot of things from the video game, a fact that many fans were enthusiastic to see. Everything down to Lara’s most signature moves were copied and put into the movie, much to people’s delight.

9. Angelina Jolie did her own bungee ballet.

She didn’t do all her own stunts but she did happen to do the bungee ballet. Unfortunately she landed wrong on a chandelier and hurt herself badly enough that they had to postpone filming for a short while.

Read the rest of the trivia list about Lara Croft: Tomb Raider at TVOM.  

As we said in the last SMBC comic posted here, looking too deeply into your favorite childhood fairy tales can ruin the charm. Sure, culture has evolved since the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty was released in 1957, but even that version was cleaned up from the original. The truth is that most fairy tales were horror stories underneath. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Henry Ford did not care for dealing with the European countries that controlled the rubber trade, but the Ford Motor Company needed rubber for tires. So he decided to grow his own rubber trees in South America. Ford secured 10,000 square kilometers of land in the Amazon rainforest, and in 1928 shipped in a team of managers, their families, and everything they needed to settle in Brazil. The company built a town called Fordlândia. It was modeled after a utopian vision of small town America, complete with separate neighborhoods for the Americans and the Brazilian workers.

He was very particular about Fordlândia operating like a real mid-Western American town, ensuring that his resident Brazilian workers lived in the American-style housing, complete with white picket fences, and even insisting that they ate American-style food– an unfamiliar diet of oatmeal, canned peaches and brown rice.

Ford wasn’t a fan of the Jazz Age either, and saw the town as an opportunity to recreate America as he had always imagined it. A strict set of rules imposed by the managers. No alcohol, no tobacco, no women inside workers houses, not even football was allowed within the town. Inspectors came to the workers housing to check they were living according to their American standards that had been forced upon them.

As you might guess, Fordlândia had its problems from the beginning. The company town only lasted six years, and Ford never even went there. Read about the short life of Fordlândia, and see plenty of pictures as it was then, and as it is now, at Messy Messy Chic.

Disney has teamed up with the Japanese company Kuraudia Co. to create a line of wedding dresses fashioned after Disney Princesses. These aren't just vaguely reminiscent of the princesses' fashions; they would be recognized by anyone. The dresses are available to rent for $3,600. That's a lot of money for a dress that you'll only wear once -because you have to give it back. But you only get married once, so you may as well blow the budget and get married as a character from an animated children's movie. See all nine dresses at the Disney Japan site, and larger images at Geekologie.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

Calculus involves the study of limits. By the time they were done arguing about who had invented it, Isaac Newton and G. W. Leibniz had probably both reached their limit as well.

Science has seen a number of simultaneous discoveries. Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry independently discovered electromagnetic induction. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both hit upon the idea of natural selection. None of these coincidences, however, snowballed into an argument as ugly as the one that developed between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of calculus.

THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM

Newton didn’t like to publish. He was one of the most innovative thinkers of his day, making breakthroughs in physics and mathematics that inspired vast new fields of study, but he never felt his work was quite ready to go to the printer- he always wanted to make changes or write another draft. Because of his hesitation, he didn’t get any of his work on calculus into print until 1704. Leibniz, a leading philosopher and mathematician, beat him to the punch by publishing a brief summary in the Leipzig periodical Acta Eruditorum in October 1684.

However, Newton had planted a few clues about his pioneering work in calculus. Starting in 1676, he circulated unfinished papers privately among his friends that hinted at calculus concepts. Two letters about calculus topics even went to Leibniz that year. But his first public hint was in his greatest work published in his lifetime, Principia Mathematica (1687), when Newton tossed in a theorem about differentiation, one of the basic operations of calculus.

(Image source: Omar Kooheji‏)

In this age of global travel and communication, there are a lot more people traveling than learning new languages. But even if you speak quite a bit of a second or third language, that does not qualify you as an expert translator.

(Image credit:  Braun Film & Video‏)

That doesn't stop people from trying. Sometimes it's funny; sometimes it's too accurate for description.

(Image source: timmyvee)

Machine translators have opened up a new world for those who need a quick translation, but they aren't perfect, as you can see from a mega-list (140 and growing!) of submitted translation fails at Bored Panda.  -via Metafilter

Artists gave us renderings of what dinosaurs looked like by imagining flesh on the skeletal fossils that we have. We all know what a T-rex, a stegosaurus, and a triceratops is supposed to look like. Or we did, until better fossils came along, and threw a wrench into all that art with feathers. Suddenly, Jurassic Park was no longer accurate. But could it have ever really been accurate? Artist C.M. Kosemen is among three authors of the book All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. It tells about the assumptions scientists and illustrators make about extinct species when they imagine what the creatures looked like.

Most serious paleoart bases itself on the detailed findings of paleontologists, who can work for weeks or even years compiling the most accurate descriptions of ancient life they can, based on fossil remains. But Kosemen says that many dinosaur illustrations should take more cues from animals living today. Our world is full of unique animals that have squat fatty bodies, with all kinds of soft tissue features that are unlikely to have survived in fossils, such as pouches, wattles, or skin flaps. “There could even be forms that no one has imagined,” says Kosemen. “For example there could plant-eating dinosaurs that had pangolin or armadillo-like armor that wasn’t preserved in the fossil. There could also be dinosaurs with porcupine-type quills.”

To illustrate the point, Kosemen drew contemporary animals using the same techniques that dinosaur artists use. Believe it or not, the image above shows an elephant, a zebra, and a rhino drawn using only their skeletons as a reference. So you can imagine how extinct species might have been quite different from what we've seen in art. Kosemen explains how some of the artists' dinosaur assumptions came about at Atlas Obscura. We also get to see more of Kosemen's recreations.

(Image credit: C.M. Kosemen)