The score is based on the Greek Liturgy and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Mass ever written without words. You can find ticket info right here and tour info right over here. And you can listen to some of the music right here.
(Funny or Die link)
Peter Weller, who played Robocop in the movie Robocop, lends his support to a statue of Robocop in Detroit. -via The Daily What
It was invented in 1853 by the Scottish Gaelic scholar Iain Òg Ìle, known in English as John Francis Campell. Perhaps unsurprisingly he was also the Secretary to the Lighthouse Commission at the time. It was adapted and improved in 1879 by Sir George Gabriel Stokes (pictured left) a Cambridge University based physicist and mathematician known for his work in fluid dynamics, mathematical physics and, importantly, optics. As president of the Royal Society and Commission he also investigated the causes of railway disasters during that period.
Campbell’s idea was straightforward but brilliant. A glass sphere would be placed in to a wooden bowl. The sun would burn a trace on the bowl as it the earth circled it - the above is a picture of the original now housed at the Science Museum in London. It worked and would measure the amount of sunshine in a single day with some accuracy. The downside, obviously, was the number of bowls which would have to be used to collect a significant amount of data – a year’s worth for example.
Buckles, who served as a U.S. Army ambulance driver in Europe during what became known as the "Great War," rose to the rank of corporal before the war ended. He came to prominence in recent years, in part because of the work of DeJonge, a Michigan portrait photographer who had undertaken a project to document the last surviving veterans of that war.
As the years continued, all but Buckles had passed away, leaving him the "last man standing" among U.S. troops who were called "The Doughboys."
Corn Pops, Puffed Wheat, and Puffed Rice
* Whole grains are steam cooked in a pressure cooker (or cannon) until the pressure builds to about 200 pounds per square inch (psi), or about 13.6 times the actual atmospheric pressure (at sea level).
* When the grains have been properly cooked, the pressure inside the pressure cooker is released all at once, just like when popcorn pops. There's even a loud POP! when the pressure is released.
* The sudden drop in pressure causes the moisture in the grains to flash into steam, puffing up the grains just like popcorn.
* The puffed grains are baked dry, and in the case of puffed-wheat cereals like Kellogg's Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp, lots of sweeteners are added to make them more appealing to kids.
"Extruded" Gun-Puffed Cereals Made From Dough
How do they make Kix, Trix, Cheerios, Alpha Bits, Cocoa Puffs, and other "extruded gun-puffed" cereals?
* Various combinations of corn, oat, wheat, and rice flours are mixed with sugar, water, coloring, flavoring, and other ingredients to make a sweet dough, which is fed into a machine called a foaming extruder.
* The extruder forms the dough into the desired shape just like you might have done if you played with Play-Doh when you were a kid: To create a star shape, you squeeze, or extrude, the dough through a star-shaped hole. If you want a round shape, you squeeze the dough through a round hole. If you're making Cheerios, you punch a hole in the middle to get a donut shape, and if you're making Alpha-Bits, you use letter-shaped holes.
* As the extruded dough emerges from the hole in the proper shape, rotating blades cut it into individual cereal pieces.
* The freshly extruded dough pieces have too high a moisture content to be suitable for gun-puffing, so they are dried until their moisture content drops from as high as 24% down to a more desirable 9% to 12%. (Unpopped popcorn kernels, by comparison, have a moisture content of 13.5% to 14%.)
* The dried pieces are fed into a gun puffer. The puffed cereal is then toasted dry.
RICE KRISPIES
If you've ever watched cookies bake in an oven, you know that the dough puffs as it cooks. Rice Krispies are made the same way, in a process that's known as "oven-puffing."
* First, the rice is pressure cooked at a low 15-18 psi (vs. the 200 psi used in the gun-puffing process) with water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients.
* The cooked rice is then dried to reduce the moisture content from 28% to 17%; then it is "bumped," or fed through rollers to flatten the grains slightly and create small cracks in the rice, which will aid puffing.
* The cooked, bumped rice is dried a second time to bring the moisture content from 17% down to around 10%, which is ideal for oven-puffing. The grains are then fed into a rotating oven and baked at 550°-650°F for about 90 seconds to give them their distinctive puffy appearance and crunchy texture.
* So what causes the famous Snap! Crackle! Pop! sound? The walls of the puffed Rice Krispies kernels are so thin and brittle that many of them collapse when they come into contact with milk.
CORN FLAKES AND BRAN FLAKES
Looking into a bowl of Corn Flakes or Raisin Bran, it's easy to imagine all those flakes started out as one single sheet of cereal that was crumbled into a thousand individual flakes. But that's not how they're made.
* It turns out that it's much easier to make each flake separately. In the case of corn flakes, kernels of corn are processed to remove the hard outer shell and the germ, the part of the kernel that would have grown into a corn stalk if the kernel had been planted as a seed. What's left after the shell and the germ are removed? Chunks of starch, each of which will become an individual corn flake.
* The chunks are cooked in a solution of water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients until the hard, white starch has become soft, translucent, and a light golden brown in color.
* The cooked corn is fed into "de-lumping" equipment to break up any clumps; then it's dried in a hot-air dryer and fed through giant rollers to flatten the chunks of corn into flakes.
* The flakes are toasted until they reach the proper golden color and have a moisture content of 1.5 to 3 percent.
* Bran flakes are made pretty much the same way, except that whole grains, not chunks, are used to make the flakes. Flaked cereals can also be made from rice or from dough.
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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute's newest book, Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.
(vimeo link)
A curious little fish encounters a baited hook in his explorations. Animation by Character Matters Animation Studios. -via the Presurfer
Ted Burden, the centre's founder, said: "We explained to him that if foxes were meant to be 72 storeys off the ground, they would have evolved wings.
"We think he got the message and, as we released him back on to the streets of Bermondsey shortly after midnight on Sunday, he glanced at the Shard and then trotted off in the other direction."
