Connections and bonds are still made even if people are miles apart. For Ali Jaffe and her grandmother Roslyn, it’s through cooking together via Facetime. Ali is learning her grandmother’s recipes, and is also hearing different family stories through her grandmother.  Check out their cooking sessions through The Daily. 

(via The New York Times) 

image via The New York Times

The Ivy League schools (Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia universities, and the University of Pennsylvania) are now offering free online courses. If you’re interested to get a feel on how Ivy League schools handle their courses, maybe this is the right opportunity. It’s also another way to pass time if you’re at home during the pandemic. Check out Quartz’ full list of all courses offered!

image via wikimedia commons

With the ongoing pandemic, a lot of people are staying at home. One of the things people at home have done to alleviate their boredom is to bake bread. So many people have been baking that flour and yeast have flown off grocery shelves. So if you’re looking for a yeast alternative other than the ones sold at supermarkets, maybe this piece by Eater can help you understand what yeast really is, and where else you can find the staple baking ingredient. 

image via wikimedia commons

Insider takes us behind the scenes into some of its huge live-action remakes. From “The Jungle Book” to the “Lion King” watch as Disney shares clips of different virtual production methods they’ve used in their movies. I’m mostly there for the stunt actors in neon green suits. 

Add The Broad Museum to your list of potential sources of entertainment this quarantine season. The museum has announced an initiative to bring art to your home through various activities via their social media channels and their website. One of the museum’s first digital shows is  "The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away," the acclaimed infinity mirror rooms by contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. You can see the fascinating exhibition on The Broad Museum's IGTV.

image via Hypebeast

A gallery in Guatemala City has jumped into the viral meme trend “nature is healing”. The meme usually features fake photos about animals suddenly emerging in cities. The gallery, Proyectos Ultravioleta Photoshopped animals into their installations in a new exhibition, The Gardeners. Hyperallergic has the details: 

“We’ve witnessed the return of swans to Venice, dolphins in Sardinia, mountain goats in North Wales, and now the unimaginable: ostriches, pandas, and even penguins, amongst other animal friends in our space in Guatemala!!” reads the caption of the gallery’s Instagram post, where the images were first shared.

Proyectos Ultravioleta closed its doors about three weeks ago, after the first case of the coronavirus was confirmed in Guatemala. Stefan Benchoam, one of the gallery’s co-founders, told Hyperallergic the meme idea came as the team brainstormed how to rethink its programming for an online-only platform.

“Suddenly we saw a saturation of the digital space. The question for us was, how can we add to this?” he said. “We didn’t just want to add more noise, we wanted to make people smile a little bit.”

image via Hyperallergic

The British Museum’s decorated ostrich eggs have been reexamined by experts to understand where they came from and how the eggs’ elaborate designs were created. The eggs date back five millenia, all the way to the early bronze age. The Guardian has the details: 

Until now, most academic study of the eggs has been stylistic, focusing on their designs. An international team of archaeologists, led by experts from the universities of Bristol and Durham, set out to discover more about how cultures across a broad swathe of the Mediterranean, north Africa and the Middle East secured their eggs, and how the highly prized items were made.

Even in areas where ostriches lived at the time, however, such as in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa, the eggs excavated by archaeologists had sometimes been sourced from distant regions, their isotope analysis found. “This was a really unexpected discovery – that just because you could source an ostrich egg locally doesn’t mean you necessarily did.

“This opened up new questions such as: in antiquity, was there some prestige value in an egg that was laid in a different climactic zone?”

The team’s microscopic and isotope analysis also suggested that, contrary to their supposition that some later eggs in particular might have been sourced from captive birds, almost all of the specimens were probably collected opportunistically from wild birds, which can be extremely dangerous.

image via The Guardian

Have you ever looked up the meaning of your name? Do people gravitate away or towards you because of your name? Some might argue that it’s just a name, nothing more, nothing less, but there is a theory called nominative determinism. It’s the theory that people gravitate toward professions that sound like their names, as Carlyn Beccia details: 

nominative determinism — the theory that people gravitate toward professions that sound like their names. Even the father of modern psychology, Dr. Sigmond Freud’s surname means “joy” in German. Now you know why he connected all our motivations with sex.

Psychologists have theorized that nominative determinism is a form of implicit egotism — the unconscious drive for humans to gravitate towards anything similar to ourselves. Researchers found that people are more likely to choose professions and residences that resemble their names.

I may be trapped by my ego too. My name is CarLYN and I live in the town of LYNNfield. Coincidence? (Although I should have become a car salesman then and not an author/illustrator.)

So yeah, don’t name your kid “Dick,” or you might end up with a future pornstar.

image via wikimedia commons

League Of Legends fans (those who have access to ESPN), rejoice! ESPN will broadcast the League of Legends Championship Series Spring Split Playoffs live on ESPN2 or the ESPN app. This move isn’t surprising, as esports is one of the few live programming options left, as Engadget details: 

You can expect follow-up matches at the same time on April 11th, April 12th and April 18th. The final match for the North American championship is due on April 19th, although there isn’t a set time for it at this stage.

The network has a growing presence in esports coverage, and isn’t new to League of Legends coverage. Until now, though, you had to subscribe to ESPN+ if you wanted to watch pro LoL games live. This theoretically brings the series to a wider audience. 

If you have access to ESPN, maybe you can add this to your ‘to-watch’ list.

image via Engadget

This collection of detailed paintings might seem to accurately portray (to some extent) our society's current state, and they actually might just be appropriate for today’s situation. Hanging by a String is a collection by Vicki Ling. Ling portrays fragile objects being balanced by a string. The series explores the “feeling of insecurity brought forth from the potential catastrophes of modern life,” as Plain magazine details: 

The oeuvres are composed of fragile objects interacting with string in an impossible way, directly challenging the balance and harmony of the overall scene. Biscuits, fruit, jars and porcelain dangle gently on a piece of red string, a visual device which Ling repeatedly uses to represent the tension of modern life. Each composition is enveloped in a sense of foreboding, as if any sudden movement could cause it to come crashing down. A fitting metaphor for the current reality we’re living

Vicki is a visual artist and illustrator whose work has circled the globe in selected exhibitions and publications. She is currently based in Chicago.

image via Plain magazine

Here’s a stunning dessert that will only take you thirty minutes to make. And it also doesn’t need a lot of tedious effort! Twitter user Tsunewaak (@tsunekawa_) shares their recipe for a rainbow milk gelatin cake. The multi-colored pattern on the cake does look intimidating, but creating it is simple, as SoraNews24 details the recipe:

it’s actually very simple to make, with only a handful of required ingredients:

● Kanten (a.k.a. agar powder, available at any Asian market)

● Water

● Granulated sugar

● Milk

● Shaved ice syrup (or fruit juice)

Step 1: In a pot, combine 4 grams (0.14 ounces) of agar powder, 150 milliliters (5.07 ounces) of water, and 60 grams (2.12 ounces) of granulated sugar. Heat the pot on the stove until the contents come to a boil, then turn off the heat.

Step 2: Stir 300 milliliters (10.14 ounces) of milk into the mixture. Place the mixture in the refrigerator to chill/harden into gelatin.

Step 3: In a separate pot, Repeat Step 1.

Step 4: Stir an additional 300 milliliters (10.14 ounces) of water into the second pot, plus 20 milliliters (0.68 ounces) of shaved ice syrup, the more brightly colored the better. Once again, put the mixture in the fridge to cool and solidify.

Step 5 (optional): Repeat Steps 3 and 4 for any additional colors you want to use.

Step 6: Once everything is nicely chilled (which should take about 30 minutes or so), take the mixtures out of the fridge. Cut the colorful syrup gelatin into small cubes and arrange them on top of the white milk gelatin, which will serve as the base.

image via SoraNews24

The Internet recommends you play games to combat boredom during the quarantine. Maybe its Animal Crossing New Horizons, or any other mainstream game. There is no harm in playing those games, but how about something big and dumb. A big and dumb game is a game that will take hours to finish and you can play it while ignoring the narrative. The New York Magazine has some recommendations if you’re interested: 

My big, dumb game of choice for the pandemic is called Borderlands 3. I was sent a free copy when it came out last fall. I installed it and for six months stared at it in my Xbox menu, telling myself, “One day …” It’s an open-world, first-person shooter with some of the worst writing I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing in a video game. It’s perfect. I don’t know what is actually happening in the game anymore, but I get to shoot bad guys and drive a car, and it’s colorful and it should take me at least a couple of dozen hours to see through. There are long, overwritten stretches during which I have a window to check my phone and respond to texts. The game also causes my Xbox to crash completely (the hardware fully shuts down) if I even try to play online with others, which feels like a sign: My big, dumb game is protecting me. (I feel obligated to add that the company that developed this particular game, along with its CEO, has been the subject of various unflattering reports over the past year.)

image via The New York Magazine

If you’ve watched an episode of BBC’s Sherlock, you’d know that fake houses exist. I’m not going to tell you which episode I'm talking about, because I might potentially spoil it. Let’s just say one of the characters stumbles upon a fake house. That’s it. Anyway, there are a lot of fake houses around the world, each with their own significance. Watch the video to see more fake houses! 

This is what boredom does. Hot Guys of Tech is an anonymously created website and Twitter account  that, as its name suggests, ranks the hottest men in Silicon Valley. The list aims to find the biggest heartthrobs in Silicon Valley. Some of the people in the list are bachelors, as Forbes details: 

Hot Guys’ criteria seem determinedly hard to pin down. The website only offers this by way of explanation: “We scour the industry to find the biggest heart throbs in Silicon Valley. Set your target on these boys.” Its Twitter bio is more direct, calling its roll nothing less than “The Definitive List of Silicon Valley’s Biggest Heart Throbs.” A little more specifically, Hot Guys contains quite a few VCs and investors, as well as several tech executives and founders. Some are bachelors, but not all listees are single.

Soon after Hot Guys’ launch yesterday, Silicon Valley seemed to accept the ranking as its latest measure of status and celebritydom in good humor.

Do you agree with the rankings on the list? 

image via Forbes

Brendan Leonard presents a new design for a multitool. We’ve seen the detail and design in Swiss knives, and Leonard takes it a step further. In an illustration posted to Outside, he includes the most important tools one needs, such as a phone charger, hot sauce, and a Swiss knife. A multitool within a multitool. What do you think of this new design ? 

image via Outside