What's up with the thesaurus? Redditor Shanethe13 looked up banana, for what reason I do not know, and found the pronunciation given by Thesaurus.com to be a little strange. Other redditors found more intriguing pronunciations (click the speaker to hear them).
Jaguars are the largest native cat in the Western Hemisphere. They once flourished, but now are endangered thanks to centuries of hunting and habitat loss. The only protected jaguar reservation is in Belize, where they are thriving and drawing tourists, but those cats are separated from other jaguar populations that live (and are declining) in other countries. Jaguar expert Alan Rabinowitz, the CEO of conservation organization Panthera, has a plan to open up pathways to connect various jaguar populations.
Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative aims to connect 90 distinct jaguar populations across the Americas. It stems from an unexpected discovery. For 60 years, biologists had thought there were eight distinct subspecies of jaguar, including the Peruvian jaguar, Central American jaguar and Goldman’s jaguar. But when the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland, part of the National Institutes of Health, analyzed jaguar DNA from blood and tissue samples collected throughout the Americas, researchers determined that no jaguar group had split off into a true subspecies. From Mexico’s deserts to the dry Pampas of northern Argentina, jaguars had been breeding with each other, wandering great distances to do so, even swimming across the Panama Canal. “The results were so shocking that we thought it was a mistake,” Rabinowitz says.
Panthera has identified 182 potential jaguar corridors covering nearly a million square miles, spanning 18 nations and two continents. So far, Mexico, Central America and Colombia have signed on to the initiative. Negotiating agreements with the rest of South America is next. Creating this jaguar genetic highway will be easier in some places than others. From the Amazon north, the continent is an emerald matrix of jaguar habitats that can be easily linked. But parts of Central America are utterly deforested. And a link in Colombia crosses one of Latin America’s most dangerous drug routes.
An extensive article at Smithsonian tells of the jaguar's life in the wild, how this plan came about, and how it might just work -if the many obstacles can be overcome. Link
If you wear a costume that illustrates an internet meme, you might find yourself explaining it over and over, but when someone "in the know" sees you and gives a thumbs up, it's all worth it! Still, this Old Spice Guy shown here will probably be recognized by everyone. Our own Jill Harness put together a list of the hottest meme Halloween costumes for this year in a list at Oddee. Link
A beautiful and trippy time-lapse video of the midnight sun in Iceland, filmed in June of 2011. From the vimeo description:
Iceland is a landscape photographers paradise and playground, and should be number 1 on every photographers must visit list. Iceland during the Midnight Sun is in sort of a permanent state of sunset. The sun never full sets and travels horizontally across the horizon throughout the night, as can be seen in the opening shot and at the :51 second mark in the video.
During the Arctic summer, sunset was at midnight and sunrise was at 3am. The Arctic summer sun provided 24 hours a day of light, with as much as 6 hours daily of "Golden light". Once the sun had set it wouldn't even get dark enough for the stars to come out, and they don't start to reappear until August.
The video game Gears of War meets Lego stop-motion animation in this video by Kooberz Studios. There's also a "making of" video if you're interested. Link -via I Am Bored
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, big-budget movies were classy affairs, full of artful scripts and classically trained actors. And boy, were they dull. Then came Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies. With Corman behind the camera, motorcycle gangs and mutant sea creatures filled the silver screen. And just like that, movies became a lot more fun.
Escape from Detroit
For someone who devoted his entire life to creating lurid films, you'd expect Roger Corman's biography to be the stuff of tabloid legend. But in reality, he was a straight-laced workaholic. Having produced more than 300 films and directed more than 50, Corman's mantra was simple: Make it fast, and make it cheap. And certainly, his dizzying pace and eye for the bottom line paid off. Today, Corman is hailed as one of the world's most prolific and successful filmmakers.
But Roger Corman didn't always want to be a director. Growing up in Detroit in the 1920s, he aspired to become an engineer like his father. Then, at age 14, his ambitions took a turn when his family moved to Los Angeles. Corman began attending Beverly Hills High, where Hollywood gossip was a natural part of the lunchroom chatter. Although the film world piqued his interest, Corman stuck to his plan. He dutifully went to Stanford and received a degree in engineering, which he didn't particularly want. Then he dutifully entered the Navy for three years, which he didn't particularly enjoy. Finally, in 1948, he set his sights on something he did want -to make his mark in Hollywood.
Rising from the Ocean Floor
Corman's career began at the bottom. He started in the film business as an entry-level reader for 20th Century Fox, wading through the worst scripts at the studio. The job was thankless, but the incompetent writing inspired Corman to give screenwriting a try. He moved to Paris to focus on his craft and eventually sold a script to Allied Artists Pictures. However, the resulting film was so awful that Corman vowed never to let a studio meddle with his work again. From that point on, Roger Corman was determined to make his own movies.
This artwork by Grégoire Guillemin contains lots of pop culture icons. How many do you recognize? I didn't count, but most of them are familiar enough. Some are for sale. See larger images at Guillemin's gallery (which contains just a couple of spoilers). http://www.behance.net/gallery/Famous-Capsules/1680846 -via Buzzfeed
It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Can you make up something interesting?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck -you're going to need it!
Update: the pictured item is a "beer growler." It's a container used to carry draft beer home before the use of bottles. See a picture of them being filled at the What Is It? blog. Red Neptune was the first commenter who knew the answer, but did not select a shirt. The funniest answer? Oscar the Grouch's starter home, you know, when he was little. Cristal was the first of several to suggest this one, so she wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
We knew the Occupy Wall Street movement was widespread when we saw it had reached the Arctic tundra, but now it has been confirmed on the other end of the world as well! The protests have officially reached all seven continents. Link -via The Daily What
Hey, you would have done the same thing in that situation -if you were prepared! The good news is that the system worked as it was designed to. The bad news is that the neighbors probably didn't make it. -via the Presurfer
Lewis Hine took this family photo in 1909. The caption at Shorpy reads:
January 22, 1909. Tifton, Georgia. "Family working in the Tifton Cotton Mill. Mrs. A.J. Young works in mill and at home. Nell (oldest girl) alternates in mill with mother. Mammy (next girl) runs 2 sides. Mary (next) runs 1½ sides. Elic (oldest boy) works regularly. Eddie (next girl) helps in mill, sticks on bobbins. Four smallest children not working yet. The mother said she earns $4.50 a week and all the children earn $4.50 a week. Husband died and left her with 11 children. Two of them went off and got married. The family left the farm two years ago to work in the mill." Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.
Not long after the photo was taken, the seven youngest children were sent to an orphanage. Historian Joe Manning wondered what happened to the family. He did the research and reconstructed the story of Catherine Young, her children, and their descendants. It's a fascinating read, which includes the history of Georgia's cotton mills and evolving child labor laws. Link -via Metafilter
For the third year, the Dance Your PhD competition has gathered videos of graduate students interpreting their doctoral dissertations in dance form. All 53 entries for 2011 are posted at ScienceNOW. The video shown here, by Anderson Mills, is called "Human-Based Percussion and Self-Similarity Detection in Electroacoustic Music." The dissertation is about teaching a computer (representated here by a "robot") to recognize rhythm in human music. Link -via Boing Boing
Have you ever watched a police lineup on TV and wondered how real-life detectives manage to find so many similar-looking potential perps in a hurry? Sometimes they round up police officers or department employees, or friends of friends. But in New York, they sometimes call Robert Weston, police lineup casting director. It's an odd job, but somebody's got to do it.
Mr. Weston says he is always on call; his Bluetooth earpiece comes off in public only when he goes to the barber for his weekly $16 trim. His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some 100 potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life.
He often complains about how people hound him for the chance to make a few dollars through lineup work.
“I can’t even play basketball on the courts or sit here and drink a beer,” Mr. Weston said on a recent afternoon. “People are always asking me if there is a lineup.”
Fillers are paid $10 for a local lineup in the Bronx. For each lineup that Mr. Weston fills in the Bronx, he receives $10; he gets more if he sits in as a filler or if his services are required in another borough.
Read how he builds a lineup at the New York Times. Link -via Breakfast Links
It's not a case of "if you've seen one, you've seen them all," but rather a case of "if you like this kind of movie, the odds are good that you've watched all three of these films." In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you'll be given movie quotes from Zoolander, Anchorman, or Blades of Glory. The challenge is to remember which film each is from. Let us know how you do on his one! Link
