Getting on an elevator with your boss can be stressful, but it's much worse when your boss has the power of life and death over you. You just want to fade into the background, but this stormtrooper named TK-FNG is the only one there besides Darth Vader. And to make things worse, Vader has the hiccups. Can he keep his cool all the way to his floor? This would have been much easier back in the day when stormtroopers were clones who didn't have the time nor the background to develop human emotions and anxieties.
You also have to wonder what the implications of a case of hiccups would be for a guy who uses an artificial beathing apparatus. But you can't just ask him.
This Star Wars short film is brought to you by AFK. Peter Haynes created this video as part of his For The Empire series, in which TK-FNG is a recurring character. You can see all the episodes here.
Aaron Cohen has been running Jason Kottke's blog while he's on vacation. Cohen also owns an ice cream shop. Here he presents us with an example of confusing design. The image is of a freezer knob. If you wanted to make the freezer colder, would you turn the knob clockwise or counterclockwise? The arrow is pointing to the right (clockwise). Does that mean that you should turn the knob in this direction to make the freezer colder, or does it mean that these smaller numbers on the right are where you should set the knob for a colder temperature? In other words, which is colder, a setting of 1 or a setting of 6? I have the same knob on my refrigerator, and since both ideas occurred to me, I just left it sitting where it's always been.
It's like when someone asks you to turn the air conditioning up. Do they mean to make the A/C work harder to make the room cooler, or do they mean turn the thermostat up, which would be warmer? In that case, you can just ask them what they mean. Let us know your opinion in the poll, and maybe some HVAC pro will set us straight in the comments.
There are two kinds of people in this world- those who never listen to the lyrics of their favorite songs, and those who know all the lyrics but misinterpret what they mean. That's why "The One I Love" by R.E.M. is on many wedding playlists despite it being about an abusive relationship, and why Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." is used as a patriotic anthem despite it being a complaint about a guy's awful life. A song is always more than its title, but that's the thing people remember. Do you know what Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is about? No, because the title has nothing to do with the lyrics, as far as we can tell.
The meaning of some songs is misinterpreted because the word "love" stands out, so it must be a love song. Or there's a rumor about a hidden meaning that's completely untrue. Or it's such a dance bop that it couldn't possibly say anything deep or philosophical. Sometimes one misheard lyric gives the song an entirely new, but unintentional, meaning. And there are even cases where the singer and the liner notes disagree over what the lyrics really are. Read up on nine popular songs for which the lyrics are either ignored or misinterpreted at Mental Floss. You can also listen to the article in video form.
Ryan Gosling memorably sang the song "I'm just Ken" from the movie Barbie at the Oscar awards ceremony earlier this month. Viewers loved it. Sadly, Gosling did not win for Best Supporting Actor, but he did rule the internet for a few days afterward. The performance sparked a sense of deja vu for The Kiffness (previously at Neatorama) because it reminded him of the singing bulldog that went viral five years ago. Therefore, he couldn't resist editing together a mashup of the two. So who does it better- Walter Geoffrey's French bulldog or the movie star? Neither are professional singers, and that's okay, but personally, I can't help but be drawn to the bulldog's performance. It's just so emotional! -via Geeks Are Sexy
A woman in the UK spotted what she thought was an abandoned baby hedgehog. She carefully scooped it up, put it in a box with a dish of food and a hot water bottle, and hoped it would survive the night. In the morning, she took the box to the Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve and Wildlife Hospital in Cheshire. There, staff identified the hedgehog as a bobble. When I first saw the headline of this story, I had to read it because I didn't know what kind of animal a bobble is.
A "bobble" is a puffy decoration for a hat, what Americans would call a pom-pom or a topknot. The staff at the wildlife hospital had a good laugh and said that the woman did the right thing. Hedgehogs aren't normally seen out in the daytime, and if this had been a hedgehog, it was surely in distress. They suggested naming this species "hedgebobble." It looks more like a tribble to me. -via Metafilter
We know that the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago causes massive changes in earth's condition that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Or do we? More recent research leads to a possible second culprit, the Deccan Traps, a system of volcanos now in western India. Their activity a few million years before the asteroid showed up caused massive climate change, carbon dioxide poisoning, and acid rain, which may have been the death knell of the dinosaurs and a lot of other species. If this was the case, then the Chicxulub impact could have been just the cherry on top of the mass extinction event that began earlier. We don't yet know, because dating scarce fossils and geological evidence is hard, especially when you are trying to measure a timeline many millions of years ago, not to mention estimating populations of species based on what we know. Scientists have their opinions, and can argue about it for days. Kurzgesagt explains the Deccan Traps and how it would have impacted life on earth before the asteroid showed up.
Unless your glasses have thick, dark rims, you might want to skip buying sheets or bed covers with a busy pattern. Redditor hexafocal looked for his glasses for three hours before he found them -a task we all know is harder when you aren't wearing your glasses. He posted this image to the subreddit AccidentalCamouflage to show us how hard it was to find them. I had to enlarge the picture twice to find them, and I'm wearing my glasses! This is one reason I keep an older pair around for emergency use. To be fair, hexafocal would have found them faster if he'd remembered that he left them on the bed, then at least he could have felt around with his hands. If you decide to give up the hunt, here they are with the ever helpful red circle. Even then, you might need to put on your glasses to see them. -via Digg
I don't know a lot about figure skating, but 19-year-old Ilia Malinin of Reston, Virginia, is very good. They tell us that it is nigh impossible to jump in the air and spin around four times, but he does it over and over, six times in all in this routine that won him the world championship in figure skating Saturday night in Montreal. On top of that, this routine received the highest score ever in the sport. Malinin comes by his talent honestly, by having two champion skaters as parents and training since he was six. It still stings to see someone born in 2004 becoming the world champion of anything, but that's the way time works. Malinin's performance is only five minutes; the rest of the video is replays and everyone talking about how great it was. -via Digg
The nature of reality is explored in the movie The Matrix, which turns 25 years old this month. Do we really know what reality is, or are we forever doomed to think of reality as only what we experience? It's not a new question, as it was posited in a story related in Plato's Republic. Along with a setup in which peoples' experience is limited, both stories have characters who prefer their limited life to reality because it's more comforting.
Back in 1999, The Matrix seemed far fetched, but in the 25 years since then, we've seen the rise of the world wide web, and then social media, and then smart phones. Each development drew millions more people into the artificial world of the internet, until it that world became our major source of communication, social life, entertainment, news, and for some of us, even employment. There's no doubt that the internet has improved the lives of many millions of people, but it also seems to be replacing the world around us. As the reality of our screens take over our time, is the world of The Matrix slowly creeping up on us? Maybe not so slowly. Read about the question of experience vs. reality and how our modern world resembles The Matrix in an article reposted from The Wall Street Journal. -via Metafilter
Climate change has come to Washington, DC. The National Cherry Blossom Festival opened over the weekend and will run until April 14. However, the blossoms reached their peak on March 17th, the earliest on record, due to warm winter weather. The star of this year's festival is a tree named Stumpy, which has become a viral sensation. This tree has lost most of its branches, and the trunk has become hollowed out, yet it stubbornly blooms every year. This year is Stumpy's last hurrah, as it is one of 140 cherry trees to be cut down and made into mulch for a seawall reconstruction project. The mulch will be used to nourish the remaining trees, and Stumpy's branches will be rooted to produce new trees. When the seawall is completed, 277 new cherry trees will be planted.
Tourists visiting Washington for this year's cherry bloom are paying tribute to Stumpy. Continue reading to see some of them.
In the days of yore, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. Then in the 19th century, the lake in what would become Kings County in California was drained by agricultural farms as the fertile soil was used to grow nuts, cotton, tomatoes, and safflower. In its place was a small lake that reappeared during rainy times, but most of the acreage went to farmland. Then in 2023, winter storms dumped enough snow and water to resurrect Tulare Lake to more than 100,000 acres of water! Farmers found their fields underwater and orchards drowned. Tourists flocked in, but they couldn't swim in the lake because the water was laden with agricultural chemicals and had irrigation equipment in it.
This July, thousands of young, healthy athletes from all over the world will converge on Paris for the Summer Games, and the City of Love is getting ready to welcome them. Olympic organizers have ordered 300,000 condoms for 2024, to be distributed free to the athletes in the Olympic Village. We've come a long way from pretending that hookups didn't happen among the participating athletes. After all, back when the modern Olympics began in 1896, women didn't compete at all. But even before the free condom distributions began, on-site pharmacies stocked plenty of them at the Olympics for those who wanted them.
The first Olympic condom giveaway was in Calgary, Alberta, for the Winter Games in 1988. Organizers stocked 6,000 of them. The number has been raised exponentially since then. In 1992, they came in the colors of the Olympics rings at Albertville, France. There have been attempts to charge money for them, and vending machine have been tried over the years, but it's just easier to hand them out free. The 300,000 condoms for the 2024 games isn't even the record number, either. Read up on the history of condom giveaways at the Olympics at Mental Floss.
It's March Madness time, when college sports outshine everything else, so how about an Honest Ad for the NCAA? This video puts the sponsor message at the beginning, so you can skip to 1:12 to see the skit. Then Roger Horton does his thing exposing the seedy underbelly of the exploitation of the student athlete. The NCAA is the NPAA here, for obvious reasons. The controversy about "amateur athletes" in the Olympics was that some countries followed the rules while others didn't, and we eventually had to change the rules to make the competition more fair. For college athletics, the problem is that everyone in the business makes oodles of money, from coaches to administrators to TV networks to bookies to scalpers to hotels, everyone except for the college players who actually do the work to make the system worth watching. For them, college sports is like an unpaid internship, where their future is a gamble and they might or might not have time to actually earn a degree. This video contains NSFW language.
Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.
The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company
Warning: do not watch this video while you are enjoying a meal, because you won't be enjoying it so much. Sam O'Nella Academy (previously at Neatorama) runs down several dishes that are considered delicacies in various places or at various times in the past, but aren't allowed to be imported to the US or are else a really bad idea for one reason or another. Some have to be prepared just so or they are dangerous, others are infringing on species that we should be protecting, and some are just contrary to what we expect to eat. These include casu martzu, shark fin soup, ackee, bird's nest soup, and ortolan. The ones you've heard of may make you curious about the ones you haven't, or maybe you dread learning about them. This video contains a little NSFW language and some gross drawings.
