In Buddhism, the word "buddha" means "enlightened one." Then there's the Buddha, a man named Siddhartha Gautama who was the founder and sacred embodiment of the religion. We honestly don't know many facts about his life, because no written records existed until centuries after his lifetime. We don't even know when that lifetime was, although it was said to be somewhere around the sixth century BCE. But we do know that he was born in the village of Lumbini in Nepal, near the Indian border.

Lumbini with its many Buddhist temples and monasteries thrives economically because of tourism, but suffers from avid tourists taking anything that's not nailed down as a souvenir. At the same time, archaeologists are sifting through Lumbini's past to research the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama and separate the facts from the magical and sometimes contradictory legends that have grown around him. Read what has been discovered so far at Smithsonian magazine.

When I read how this animated sequence was made, I was impressed. But is the finished product any good? Yeah, it's the story of a miniature man who must save his miniature puppy from an evil Roomba. Now for the technical stuff. Wren from Corridor Digital acted out the part wearing motion capture equipment that digitized his moves. Then our hero's figure was rendered in plastic parts for every necessary movement by a 3D printer and assembled for each frame! Finally, each figure was photographed individually to create the film. They printed up more than 2,000 parts for this sequence, and the assembly and frame-by-frame photography took a lot of time. But they proved it could be done. Then they sold off those parts as an assemble-it-yourself Wren action figure. Since they sold out, they decided they could make more. If you're interested in the process of producing this type of animation, there's a 23-minute behind the scenes video. -via The Awesomer

You may or may not have heard the term squircle before, but if you are in the design business, you certainly already know that a squircle is a shape between a square and a circle. But that doesn't mean it's a circle with rounded corners. Oh no! In the graphic above, the figures are a square, a rounded square, a squircle, and a circle. The difference between a rounded square and a squircle is that a squircle doesn't have any straight lines, whereas a rounded circle retains the straight sides of a square. Which you prefer is up to you, but plenty of people find it more pleasant to see continuous curves of a squircle.

One place you've seen squircles are in dishes, because a squircle-shaped plate can hold more food than a round one, without the sharp edges of a square plate. They've also been associated with Apple products. But what I see when I saw examples of squircles are cathode-ray TV screens. Commenters at Metafilter point out that this shape is also known as a superellipse, in case you want to explore its mathematiucal formula.

(Image source: Webflow)

When we go to another country, we often get recommendations for vaccinations that will protect us from diseases we don't worry about at home. It would be the same for time travelers, depending on what era of history they are going to. For example, I might be able to travel to a time where smallpox was rampant, but my children would not, since they never got the smallpox vaccine. In the 21st century, we don't worry about the plague or leprosy because they are treatable, but going to the past means you also go back to when we didn't have antibiotics, so you'd better take some.

Modern medical science is a wonderful thing, but keep in mind that we still don't know everything. If you travel to the future, you may find yourself in the middle of a sigma flu epidemic, and you are the only one in town who hasn't had a sigma flu shot -because you've never heard of sigma flu. Hank Green gives us some perspective on that one aspect of time travel that science fiction writers never think of. There's a 30-second skippable promotional ad at 4:22.

Britain has an awful lot of stone circles, but Stonehenge stands head and shoulders above them all, not just for its size, but for its mysterious origins. Other British circles are constructed with local stones, while Stonehenge has several different kinds of stones, the nearest coming from 14 miles away. Recently, a thorough analysis of the Altar Stone has been completed, and its origin has been located in the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. That means that some Neolithic team transported that stone at least 465 miles! They don't yet know how the 13,000-pound stone was delivered to Salisbury, but there are theories.

The Alter Stone could be an entry in a multi-cultural collaboration to build Stonehenge. The fact that some stones were as close as 14 miles, and others came from Wales, and the Alter Stone from Scotland, hint that different communities contributed their most impressive stones. Read about the Alter Stone and the latest in what Stonehenge might mean at Smithsonian.

One of the great things about having children or pets is that they give you an excuse to play with toys and build things. Making videos for YouTube is another great excuse. Half-Asleep Chris takes full advantage of this situation to have fun building forts for his two cats Ralph and Bella. For this video, he build ten forts from ten different materials, and then recorded the cats' reactions to see which they liked the best. The result is that we get to vicariously enjoy watching the construction of the forts plus cats.

The forts are made from all kinds of supplies you might never have thought of, like cardboard tubes, toilet paper rolls, and camouflage netting. One wasn't quite interesting enough, so he added glow sticks so it would be visible in the dark! You know what? If you don't have kids, or cats, or pets of any kind, who is going to tell you that you can't make your own fort inside your house? Your significant other will understand. This might even be worthing getting a cat for. For Chris, it was a project that meant he had to buy a lot of toys, which are tax deductible, I'm sure. -via Laughing Squid

Airports are huge, and provide many services for millions of people every day. You could spend quite a bit of time in one if you had to, and many of us have spent more time there than we wanted to. You may be familiar with the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who actually lived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for 18 years, and inspired the subject of two movies. But he is far from the only person who lived for an extended period at an airport. There are those people who are stateless, or refugees, or have nowhere to go. There have been some who stayed until they could come up with the money to fly out. Some were stranded for various screwups during the Covid lockdown. One went there to wait for a date to show up and she didn't. And a few people have lived at an airport for years on end because they preferred being there to being at their regular home! Cracked has a list of the stories of 14 people who lived at an airport for periods ranging from 13 days to decades for reasons ranging from bureaucratic to psychotic.

(Image credit: Heeheemalu)

Joseph Hersher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) is known for making super elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions that perform everyday tasks. This one is quite elaborate, but there's no "everyday" about it. He got one of the larger LEGO Super Mario Kart sets (no doubt because of a sponsorship deal) and not only built the karts, but designed a track that replicates the odd effects of the game! Watch the racetrack move to thwart the drivers. Watch cars get smashed flat. Watch a turtle zig zag across the course. Watch a kart on a bridge leap-frog across another kart. First you have to watch to see what he came up with, then you have to watch again to figure out how he did it. The video is short, but it's packed full of delightful moments. And to think, Joseph's mother told him he'd never make a living from building ridiculous chain reaction devices. -via Boing Boing

The British Antarctic Survey has been conducting studies of the ice covering Antarctica for decades, and have now released the most accurate map yet showing what the bedrock is like underneath the ice. With 27 million cubic kilometers of ice removed, the continent is a lacy archipelago of islands with tall mountains, deep gorges, a massive continental shelf, and underwater channels. This new map is called Bedmap 3, since it is the third iteration of an iceless Antarctic map. It is the most accurate such map yet, made with twice as many data points as the previous map. The data points were acquired by "planes, satellites, ships and even dog-drawn sleds."

Scientists and surveyors have also determined the current thickness of the ice in different places, and in fact found the place where the Antarctic ice is the thickest. The image of the bedrock underneath will be useful in knowing where and how the ice will travel as it melts under warmer temperatures. Read more about Bedmap 3, how it was made, and how it may be used at the British Antarctic Survey. -via Real Clear Science

Any opportunity to own a home in California for less than a half a million dollars is quite rare indeed, but this one is special. Sure, it's away from the cities, but that means less light pollution for your astronomical observatory. You heard right, this two bedroom, two bath home on a half-acre is an observatory that comes with a 16-inch Meade telescope in a 10-foot rotating dome. There's also a workshop with a lathe and a milling machine, and plenty of extra parts. The yard has an antenna farm, and the sale could include a range of ham radio equipment. Oh yeah, it also is equipped for off-grid living, with solar panels and battery, but can use the grid for backup. Are you interested yet?

The listing includes a shed, a tractor, and a bunch of communication equipment. However, none of the pictures include a look at the living areas. I guess it takes a special kind of astronomy and/or ham radio enthusiast to appreciate this kind of home. The real estate listing refers to it as a "man-cave," while a commenter noted that this is a supervillain starter lair. Check out the listing for a few pictures and more details. -via Fark

It's hard to say whether the website Learn the World Map is a game, quiz, or just a learning opportunity, but it's fun, and will suck up quite a bit of your time. It made me feel good to know I can locate so many countries on a world map, and I did learn a few new things. Who knew that Northern Cyprus is its own country? But since I knew where the island of Cyprus is, I still found it. However, play on the main part of the website doesn't keep a running score, and it never ends as far as I know. Still, I will never forget where Liberia is now.

On the right side of the screen, you can go to "challenge" mode, and that's a different story altogether: find ten countries as fast as you can, and get a score at the end. But you can only do the challenge once a day. Try your hand at the map, and you'll either pat yourself on the back or else you'll learn where a few countries are. -via Nag on the Lake   

You've heard the advice about taking care of your household stuff: If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40. That's why every home has both. We've covered the history of duct tape; now it's time to learn how WD-40 came about. Do you know what's in that familiar blue spray can? No, you don't, because the exact formula is a well-guarded secret. Do you know what WD stands for? You might, or you mioght be able to figure it out with some thought, but if not, you'll learn it in this video. I was particularly surprised to learn that WD-40 only goes back as far as the 1950s. I guess I had assumed it was ancient. I already had plenty of respect for the product, but I also learned a few new uses that never occurred to me before, way beyond making things move that should. -via The Awesomer

An awful lot of our science fiction stories depend on the ability to use deadly weapons in space, but we never let things like physics and reality spoil a good story. Meanwhile, space scientists and engineers are always considering the effects of space on human activities. Would a gun, the kind with regular bullets, work in outer space? The answer is ...sort of, but there would be differences and consequences.

The Soviets used to take guns into space as a matter of course, but they weren't for space battles. They were armed because their capsules came back over land, and there was the possibility they could touch down in a wilderness area with dangerous wild animals. Targeting is better these days. Cosmonauts once shot a cannon in space, but it was in an unmanned space station that was de-orbiting. We don't really know whether that "experiment" yielded any important data. Read about the feasibility of discharging guns in space at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: brunurb)

In the 2000 movie American Psycho, Patrick Bateman and a few colleagues pull out their business cards and compare them. The scene sets up the characters as a collection of empty suits who are bent on one-upmanship regarding the most mundane details. The cards aren't particularly attractive to the audience, but it was a memorable scene. It hits different for typographers, printers, and designers.

Hoban Cards, "a tiny letterpress printing shop located in Chehalis, Washington," goes in deep to explain the four cards in that scene, plus another card featured in the film. The lines from the original novel use fictional fonts, and the descriptions don't match what we see onscreen. Plus each card has a list of flaws and design problems that belie the pride with which they are presented. If that scene has been bothering you for those reasons, you'll be glad to know you aren't the only one.

Hoban Cards has an extensive catalog, with examples printed for all kinds of fictional characters, and even more at Instagram.  -via Metafilter

Yes, the sharktopus is a ridiculous fantasy creature from the movies, but strange things can happen between two very different species in real life, too. Do you recall the picture of a weasel riding on the back of a flying woodpecker? That was ten years ago, before we blamed everything on artificial intelligence. Well, now we have a video of an octopus riding on the back of a shark!

This footage was captured in 2023 in the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, New Zealand. The scientists from the University of Auckland saw something unusual on a mako shark and launched a GoPro in the water and a drone overhead to investigate. They tracked the two animals for ten minutes. The sighting was quite a surprise, as octopuses rarely come close to the water's surface. And that's about as close to a sharktopus as we're going to get in real life. -via Damn Interesting