The picture blog Scaffoldage uses the tagline "Skeletal Archiporn." It's another project from Shaun Usher of Letterheady and Letters of Note. Some of the scaffolds shown are almost works of art; others can frighten or even make you feel woozy. There is no text, but each image is linked to its source. The scaffold shown here was used during construction of the Water Cube built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. http://www.scaffoldage.com/ -via Metafilter
The Caribbean island of Montserrat once had its government and most of the island's services centered in the small town of Plymouth. The community was evacuated in 1995 due to volcanic activity. In 1997, an eruption buried Plymouth under several feet of ash, rock, and lava. It has been an exclusion zone ever since, and no residents have returned. See a collection of 40 pictures of what's left. Link (Image credit: Flickr user Nick Brooks)
An aquarium enthusiast who goes by the name Steveoutlaw on forums was poisoned while trying to rid his aquarium of an invasive colony of anemones. To kill it, he boiled the rocks from his fish tank, and accidently inhaled some fumes. He ended up in the hospital, a victim of palytoxin, the second deadliest poison found in the natural world.
Palytoxin is shrouded in legend. Hawaiian islanders tell of a cursed village in Maui, whose members defied a shark god that had been eating their fellow villagers. They dismembered and burned the god, before scattering his ashes in a tide pool near the town of Hana. Shortly after, a mysterious type of seaweed started growing in the pool. It became known as “limu-make-o-Hana” (deadly seaweed of Hana). If smeared on a spear’s point, it could instantly kill its victims.
The shark god may have been an elaborate fiction, but in 1961, Philip Helfrich and John Shupe actually found the legendary pool. Within it, they discovered a new species of zoanthid called Palythoa toxica. The limu-make-o-Hana was real, but it wasn’t seaweed – it was a type of colonial anemone. In 1971, Richard Moore and Paul Scheuer isolated the chemical responsible for the zoanthid’s lethal powers – palytoxin. Now, Jonathan Deeds from the US Food and Drug Administration has found that the poison is readily available in aquarium stores.
The problem is that the anemones that contain palytoxin are almost impossible to distinguish from species that don't. Read more about it at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link -via reddit
Have you ever wondered what astronauts do in their free time? Cady Coleman {wiki} is a scientist, flautist, and an astronaut, currently aboard the International Space Station. In this video, she gives us the short version of what it's like to play music in space. -via Geeks Are Sexy
This odd but appealing animated documentary was produced by Diego Maccione and Adam Gill for Al Jazeera. A rat narrates the history of New York hot dogs. Link -via Buzzfeed
A wedding ring is symbol of commitment and permanence. A tattoo is commitment and permanence in itself. Some couples are skipping the jewelry in favor of matching or complementary tattoos on the couple's ring fingers. And why not? You don't have to remove it to shower, work with machinery, or have an MRI. It can't be lost or stolen. It will never have to be resized or replaced. And you can design your own unique symbols! See a variety of wedding band tattoos in this list by Shaun Usher. Link
Dan Meth created this handy chart comparing the sizes of various sandworms. The next time you encounter one, it may help you to identify what type it is. Link -via Laughing Squid
You didn't really believe that Arnold Schwarzeneggar was going to retire after he left the governor's office, did you? This concept may be both a TV show and a movie, as well as a comic book. Link -via Buzzfeed
Is there something about a cute bunny rabbit that brings out the perverse side of toy designers? You'd think so by looking at these! The bunnies on this list are scary, bloody, or dead, and may be disturbing to some readers. To be fair, they are marketed to adults. Shown here are the Killer Bunny Slippers of Caerbannog, the most innocuous image of the lot. Link
Mental_floss is celebrating the migration of the site to a new, malware-free, high security server! And that means the return of Lunchtime Quizzes. Today's quiz features questions from the game Who Said What in the White House, in order to test your presidential prowess. Identify eleven quotes and pat yourself on the back if you beat my score of 45% (which is about average). Link
In 1976, three young men kidnapped a school bus full of children in Chowchillla, California. The 26 children and the driver were forced at gunpoint into a truck that was buried at a rock quarry. The bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys dug back through the hole through which they entered the underground chamber. It took them 16 hours to escape. Meanwhile, the kidnappers planned to demand $5 million in ransom, but the police phone lines were busy. Before the plan could be carried out, the victims had escaped. Richard Schoenfeld, James Schoenfeld, and Fred Woods received life sentences for the crime. They have served 35 years in prison. Some people believe that's enough, including their prosecutor David Minier.
Since then, each has been denied parole dozens of times. Supporters say their continued imprisonment makes a mockery of the idea of rehabilitation. Minier, now a retired judge, favors parole for all three kidnappers.
"Quite frankly, I am simply amazed that Richard Schoenfeld, given his record as a model prisoner, was not paroled years ago," Minier wrote the parole board in 2006.
At the Feb. 23 news conference in San Francisco, Dale Fore, one of the lead investigators in the case, said: "They were just dumb rich kids, and they paid a hell of a price for what they did."
After retiring from the Madera County Sheriff's Department, Fore worked as a private investigator for the Woods family's attorneys, tracking down kidnapping victims to see if any would write letters of support for parole. None has.
"I might not be the most popular guy when I get back home," Fore said. "But right is right. How much time do you want out of these guys?"
If you ask the people of Chowchilla, the answer is life without parole. On one hand, the crime as planned was horrific. On the other hand, no one was seriously hurt in the end. Many people convicted of murder receive lighter sentences. On the other hand, this crime could have ended as a mass murder. What do you think? Link -via Metafilter
Can you distinguish which man in this picture is Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and which is King George V of England? The two monarchs were cousins born only three years apart. Can't decide? George is on the right. -via TYWKIWDBI
New York University has advice for international students in dealing with US Americans. A handy guide is posted on their website.
Americans generally believe the ideal person is self-reliant. Most Americans see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community or other group. They dislike being dependent on other people, or having others depend on them. Some people define this trait as selfishness. Others see it as a healthy freedom from the constraints of family or social class.
How is this value manifested into behavior? In individualist cultures, such as the U.S., it is assumed that people need to be alone some of the time and prefer to take care of problems by themselves. Another expectation is that people are ready to "do business" very soon after meeting, without much time spent on preliminary conversation. Also people act competitively, are proud of their accomplishments and expect others to be proud of their own accomplishments.
Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren't born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links
Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London's harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
