Artist James Curran brought us charming animated gifs from his visits to New York City and Los Angeles. Since then, he's spent a month in Tokyo and rendered his daily adventures in 30 new gifs!
His series of Tokyo Gifs can also be found individually at Curran's website and Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
Until the advent of synthetic fabrics, we spent a lot of time trying to keep moths out of our woolen clothing. Textile artist Max Alexander has turned the tables and creates knitted sculptures of moths out of wool! After a friend suggested she knit moths, Alexander started studying the different species of the insects and became fascinated with the diversity of their colors and markings. Three years later, she has knitted 35 different species and has more in progress.
Paying careful attention to detail, Alexander strives to make her knitted moths readily identifiable. "Once I choose a moth, I study as many different pictures and or specimens as I can find. Then I sketch out a pattern for the wings on graph paper and start knitting. I often have to adjust it as I go to keep the shapes as accurate as possible," she explains. Once a sculpture is finished, Alexander mounts and frames the work just like a scientific specimen. "I like to think they'd look at home in a natural history museum," she adds.
See more of Alexander's work at her website and Instagram. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Max Alexandar)
The need for real world beta-testing has been perfectly illustrated in Australia, where Volvo is testing self-driving cars. It turns out that the algorithm that detects moving obstacles like pedestrians and deer wasn't quite designed for animals that hop into view. Like kangaroos.
The marsupial’s unique movements appear to cause problems for the vehicle’s animal detection system, which identifies large animals by using the ground as a reference point to their distance from the car.
“We’ve noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight, when it’s in the air it actually looks like it’s further away, then it lands and it looks closer,” Volvo Australia’s technical manager David Pickett told ABC Australia.
In general, kangaroos are a serious problem for drivers in Australia. They cause more accidents in the country than all other animals combined and reportedly account for nine out of 10 animal-related collisions.
The system Volvo is using was successful in avoiding other large wildlife, like deer, elk, and caribou. Volvo assures the unexpected problem caused by kangaroos is simply part of the process of perfecting its self-driving technology and shouldn’t delay the launch of autonomous cars in Australia.
Meanwhile, it's back to the drawing board for the animal-detecting software. Volvo hopes to start selling their autonomous vehicles by 2021.
(Image credit: Orderinchaos)
From the end of World War II through the 1980s, Americans were convinced that all Russians were enemies, that they were ready to rain nuclear havoc on the U.S. at a moment's notice. That may have even been true. They were certainly rivals, in nuclear armament, ideology, sports, and even the race to the moon. There have been quite a few Russian villains in the movies, with include spies who wanted to foment a war between the two nations, but they also include sports rivals. Check them all out in a list at TVOM. As scary as they were, none could hold a candle to Stalin.
Mugging is not as profitable as it used to be. Come to think of it, you don't even hear the word "mugging" much anymore. There are more people with a financial sob story than there are people with money. Even if this fellow had a positive net worth, he probably wouldn't have any cash in his pockets. Credit cards and phones are more traceable than they've ever been. The upshot is that we're all in this together, or at least the vast majority. He probably should give the guy a hug. This is the latest from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
KentuckyFriedIdiot said, "Daughter wanted to go to Disneyworld, but since it's too expensive we did the next best thing" which meant a roller coaster in a plastic tub powered by Daddy, while watching a POV video of a coaster ride. Genius!
If she were any bigger, he might have had trouble pulling this off. As it was, I felt like I was riding right along with her. -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image source: Tammi Kippes Sauer)
Tammi Sauer celebrated her 22nd anniversary by posting some pictures of her 1995 wedding on Facebook. She received some good-natured ribbing about the '90s fashions, particularly the bridesmaids' dresses, made from a Simplicity pattern. Sauer even apologized for the dresses. One of the bridesmaids, Heidi Bruce Mann, replied,
What do you mean sorry about the dresses? I wear mine all the time.
Mann had taken four photos of herself in the dress doing things like watering the garden, doing laundry, and shopping!
What's the most amazing part of the story: 1. That Mann still had the dress 22 years later, 2. that it still fit, or 3. that she staged a photoshoot just for a reply to a Facebook post? You can read more on this story at Buzzfeed.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
On December 1, 1955, a small, unassuming-looking African-American woman named Rosa Parks boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She sat down amongst several white passengers, along with three other African-Americans, in the middle of the bus.
At a later stop, after Parks had settled into her seat, a white passenger boarded the full bus. By the then-current Montgomery laws, the black passengers were legally obligated to leave their seats and give them over to standing white passengers.
It seemed a routine situation as the white passenger made his way down the aisle. The bus driver, James F. Blake, left the driver's seat and moved imposingly up to the four black passengers. His intention was to get the black passengers to move to the back of the bus- basically, it was standard operating procedure. His words, as recalled by Rosa Parks, were: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."
While the other three black passengers obeyed Blake and moved on, Rosa Parks steadfastly refused to budge. Blake eventually contacted the local police and signed a warrant for her arrest.
Blake was later to recall: "I wasn't trying to do anything to that Parks woman except my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn't move back. I had my orders."
This incident is rightfully considered one of the linchpin moments in the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The Rosa Parks incident sparked a year-long bus boycott in the city of Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott ended one year later, after the federal court system finally declared the segregation of public buses to be unconstitutional.
(Image credit: rmhermen)
But there is more to the story than is generally known.
A photograph has been found in the National Archives, labeled "Jaluit Atoll," that appears to show Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan at a dock with several Japanese people. They are in the distance, but investigators says the image is consistant with known photos of the two.
Earhart was last heard from on July 2, 1937, as she attempted to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe. She was declared dead two years later after the U.S. concluded she had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and her remains were never found.
But investigators believe they have found evidence Earhart and Noonan were blown off course but survived the ordeal. The investigative team behind the History special believes the photo may have been taken by someone who was spying for the U.S. on Japanese military activity in the Pacific.
Les Kinney, a retired government investigator who has spent 15 years looking for Earhart clues, said the photo "clearly indicates that Earhart was captured by the Japanese."
Read what we know so far about the picture at NBC News. The story contains a much larger version of the photo, and a video with details of the image.-via Digg
In 2005, a mummy like no other was found in northern Peru. The young woman of the Moche culture was wrapped in 20 layers of cloth, among which sumptuous jewelry was concealed. Buried about 400 AD, she is now called the Señora of Cao, after a nearby town. She must have been some kind of aristocrat. Señora of Cao now resides at the Complejo Arqueológico El Brujo (the El Brujo Archaeological Complex). Museum curators wanted to preserve her body as it is now, and also see what she looked like in life.
To solve the mystery of what she looked like, investigators first had to produce digital images of her mummy. In similar cases, such as King Tut and Ötzi the Iceman, bodies have been scanned with a stationary medical CT machine. But the Señora had her pictures taken with state-of-the-art, hand-held laser scanners designed by FARO, a 3D technology company. The devices were originally created for industrial applications, but they’re now proving useful in forensic investigations and in cultural heritage projects like this one.
After the scanned data were entered into a computer, forensic experts began to rebuild the Señora’s face.
Read more about the restoration of the Señora of Cao at National Geographic.
(Image credit: Fundación Augusto N. Wiese)
You might think that fashion trends are weird now, but our clothing has gone through many cycles of weirdness for various reasons -beauty, comfort, utility, yeah sure, but mostly fashion is for distinguishing class and rank among people. It's good to be rich, powerful, and/or trendy, and it's even better to show off those things to everyone who sees you through your attire. John Green tells us how those various trends manifested themselves in history in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
Winters, California, is a small suburb of Sacramento with a population of around 7,000 people. Downtown parking caused some folks to grumble, but no new spaces came about to address the problem. But a parking meter did. One parking meter. The only one in town.
In the early morning of April 1, 2015 someone decided to install an old—yet still functioning—parking meter in the downtown area. This was the first parking meter to ever appear in this town of 7,000 people. A Sacramento television station dispatched a film crew to record this April Fool’s prank.
The locals quickly figured out they could ignore the meter and were soon going about their business as usual. The police department had been instructed to ignore the meter. They have never written a ticket. It is rumored that the police don’t even have an ordinance addressing parking meters.
Occasionally, a parent will drop in a dime and turn the red handle—just to show their young ones how it works. Out-of-towners have been seen feeding the meter and then walking away grumbling.
The meter was removed once, but Winters residents demanded that it be returned. The good news is that the $100 or so the parking meter brings in every year helps to buy Fourth of July fireworks for the town. This item is from the 18 Quirkiest Local Landmarks in Small-Town America at Atlas Obscura. Your town may be there!
(Image credit: Atlas Obscura member Bruce Ferrari)
Grant Snider gives us a charming series of sketches using watercolor shapes and imagination to illustrate the things we enjoy in the summertime. How to turn a watermelon into a sunset is just the beginning. Other simple shapes show us what he can make of picnics, fireflies, ice cream, swimming pools, and more. See them all at Incidental Comics.
If a movie turns out to be disappointing, but the music is awesome, it's pretty much worth it to go to the theater, right? Maybe for us, but for the film producers, that's some cold comfort. For example, I never knew until today that Seal's "Kiss From A Rose" was from the soundtrack of the 1995 movie Batman Forever (I was working in country music at the time). If you leave the theater humming a song but wouldn't recommend the movie to anyone, maybe you should just get the song, or even the soundtrack album, and forget the story. Check out other fairly recent films that sunk while their soundtracks went on to greatness at TVOM.
When Lewis Carroll first wrote Alice's Adventure in Wonderland in 1864, it was a personal book in his own handwriting with illustrations he drew himself. He knew a children's book needed pictures, as he says himself on the first page.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and where is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
You can see those illustrations in scans of the original manuscript at Flashbak. The pages with no illustrations aren't there, but you should know the story well enough to fill in the blanks if you want to read it in Carroll's handwriting. -Thanks, Walter Mosley!
