Sweden has the odd PhD tradition of Lutherishly nailing your thesis to a wall a few weeks before your defense, so here is my PhD student Vidya Somashekarappa nailing her thesis into the designated thesis nailing wall (officially required btw). pic.twitter.com/2s8DiwCy1l

— Asad Sayeed @asayeed@zirk.us (@asayeed) April 3, 2024

Sweden is historically a Lutheran nation, so the tradition of nailing statements to buildings is strong. At Umeå University, when doctoral students complete their theses, they nail a copy to the wall of the library in a ceremony called spikning or "thesis spiking." The library's website says that this procedure "is no longer mandatory," implying that, at some point, it was a formal requirement. Still, many students choose to participate in this ritual.

Yesterday I drove through Atlanta as the construction season is starting to ramp up, so I am very impressed with this pavement replacement project in Switzerland. They simply erect a bridge over a section of the road so that cars can drive right across while work is going on underneath! The crew carves up the old pavement, repairs and prepares the sub-pavement, lays new asphalt, steamrolls it smooth, and cleans up the mess, before moving the bridge to a new repair section. Here's a machine translation of the YouTube description:

The mobile ASTRA Bridge construction site bridge has been in use again on the A1 in the direction of Zurich since the beginning of April 2024. The decking work under the ASTRA Bridge is progressing according to plan. While work is going on under the bridge, traffic above is moving in two lanes at 60 km/h.

You have to wonder how long it takes to move the bridge, because they probably do have to divert traffic for that part- or do they? Here's another video from the Swiss Federal Roads Office showing how the ASTRA Bridge is erected.



So yes, they close lanes to put the bridge up, but even so, it is a minimal closure compared to the weeks that lanes are closed in the US while miles of highway are repaved at a time.  -via Boing Boing

We tend to take it for granted that blue jeans were invented by Levi Strauss, who made work pants for the miners of the California Gold Rush. It's true that Strauss designed tough work pants with rivets, but the blue denim they were made of had already been worn by working class people in Italy for at least a couple of hundred years! We know this because of ten paintings by an unidentified Renaissance painter known only as the “Master of the Blue Jeans.” This painter depicted a family of working class people clad in denim, with a white weft and blue warp, the same as the jeans we wear today. The warp threads were dyed with indigo, which brought the price of blue fabric down considerably after it began to be imported from India.

The Master of the Blue Jeans is the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Cenesso in Paris opening May 16. Read up on the history of blue denim and see two of the paintings from the mysterious Master of the Blue Jeans at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Galerie Canesso)

Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid

La plus grande baguette du monde - record battu ! Elle mesure 140,53m et a été confectionnée à Suresnes @villedesuresnes pic.twitter.com/2uHY9g5Npn

— Colas Aura (@ColasAura) May 5, 2024

Charles De Gaulle once said of his homeland:

My mind assures me that France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of disintegration in­herent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by the others, as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.

De Gaulle rose to international attention at the moment of France's greatest humiliation. She needed De Gaulle and men like him to restore France to her natural station in the world.

Five years ago, bakers in Italy produced a baguette--that icon of French cuisine--that was longer than any other in the world. Now, The Globe and Mail reports, France has regained its title as the creator of the world's longest baguette. On Sunday, bakers at Suresnes baked one that was 140.53 meters (or approximiately 71 Charles De Gaulles laid end to end) long.

-via Dave Barry

Bob Knetzger of Boing Boing reports that, last year, Mattel teamed up with the National Federation of the Blind to produce a Hot Wheels toy car designed specifically for the visually impaired. The die cast car is covered with the raised bumps of Braille text to read "Hot Wheels Twin Mill."

This name is a reference to a concept car that was pioneered as a Hot Wheels design in 1969 before it was turned into a real car.

Mattel makes two of the Hot Wheels Braille Racer, both of which can be hunted on eBay by collectors eager for a rare piece.

This viral video of a provenance unknown to me shows a woman giving a preschool-age girl an unforgettable ride on a highly convincing roller coaster simulator. Sure, it just looks like an upturned chair, but when paired with a first-person point of view video of a ride, it's good enough to persuade the tyke that she's really at Six Flags.

-via TYWKIWDBI

The most common words to grace a cake are "Happy Birthday." Most people can spell "happy," but when it comes to "birthday," the danger of a brain fart increases. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks has seen so many cases of bizarre spellings of that one word that she had to split a compilation into two posts, and the misspellings run the gamut of missing letters to completely different words to incoherent jumbles.

 

Having once worked in a supermarket, I know how this happens. Someone buys a blank cake and requests an inscription in icing. The bakery/deli department has as few people on duty as possible, and half of them are new, and the other half have avoided ever learning how to use icing. So a request goes out to the entire store for someone who's done it before, or is at least willing to try. Bob in the loading dock sees a chance to spend a few minutes in the air conditioning with no heavy lifting, and volunteers. And if any volunteer sees a misspelling, it is way easier to pretend not to see it than to fix it. The customer? They have a ready-made submission to Cake Wrecks.

See how people can can misspell "birthday" in ten ways here and eight more ways here.

Bernth, an Austrian guitarist who fills his YouTube channel with musical oddities, including using the worst rated guitar picks and amps and playing guitars made of LEGO pieces and an acoustic guitar that is partially submerged in water. Bernth also modifies extreme guitars, such as building one with an extremely long neck and another that has 24 strings.

Is it hard to play a 24-string guitar? Even that challenge was unsufficient for Berth, who most recently cobbled together guitars into a 109-string monstrosity that produces a lovely sound. It does, though, require a lot of coordination to play effectively.

-via The Awesomer

Welcome to Edgewood, BC
byu/robinnuber infunny

Redditor robinnuber make a promotional video for Edgewood, British Columbia. Despite the dry humor, it ends up being a place everyone wants to visit, or even live there. When you have a ribbon factory and more ostriches than people, you've got something to talk about. Edgewood has only a few hundred residents, but it has an extensive Wikipedia entry detailing the history of the town, with no mention of the population. That means that some Wikipedia member is pretty proud of their town. The reach of the internet means that commenters that are familiar with Edgewood came in to note that the general store and the gas station are, in fact, the same place. As if we couldn't tell.  

A noticeable detail is the can-and-string microphone. It makes this video look comically pre-industrial, but it's a genius idea. The phone slipped inside the can records the narrative while being protected from wind noise. -via reddit

The phrase "missionary position" refers to a sexual position in which heterosexual partners lie down facing each other, with the man on top. It has also been called the "English-American position" and it has long been considered the most vanilla sexual position of all, so much that it was endorsed by the Catholic church in the medieval period. But where did the "missionary" part come from?

Dr. Alfred Kinsey used the term in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He cited research that indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea made fun of missionaries for their sexual practices, and assumed that was where the term came from. When I first heard this story long ago, I couldn't believe that missionaries were trying to teach natives the "correct" to have sex -and that was a valid question. It turned out that Kinsey had interpreted the research wrong in several ways, and ended up coining the term himself without even realizing it. Read what Kinsey got wrong about the source of this term at Mental Floss.

Going to a wedding today. Instead of holding flowers, the bridesmaids have hatchets. They are not pagan as far as I know, but some of you might like it regardless. pic.twitter.com/MXKbV9QPDX

— sugar&ice Crystals (@WeirdCunning) May 4, 2024

Twitter user sugar&ice Crystals shares this story from a wedding. I like the idea of axes for bridesmaids.

It might also be an appropriate choice for the bride instead of a bouquet. Consider the tradition of the bride tossing the bouquet over her back to identify the next person to get married. Would axes be an improvement over flowers? Would the goal be to catch the axe or dodge it?

The best descriptions always come from the YouTube comments. One said that Trombone Nonsense was his favorite genre of music. Another said the trombone is perfect balance of beauty and comedy. But most lauded this video as a throwback to years ago when videos were clever and silly and original and didn't rely on effects.

Charis Dwire wrote this song, "Tug of War Duet", after her brother Nathan Dwire thought up the idea of trombones having a musical tug-of-war as if their slides had become entangled at the ends. It is performed here by Joseph Greene and Sam Robertson. You can download the sheet music here.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Trombone Nonsense, you should check out more videos: Cattle Call, Trombone Alpine Skiing, Flamethrower Trombone, Trombone Suicide, and This Is What Happens If You Sneeze Into a Trombone.

The Hugo Awards for great science fiction were named for Hugo Gernsback. He founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and went on to publish and edit several other magazines. Gernsback wrote extensively on technology, imagining the gadgets of the future, many that came to be in one way or another, and many that were possible, but that no one really wanted.

In the above image, Gernsback illustrated long distance medical care, in which the doctor can see and even feel a patient without making a house call. This was in 1925, before we even had television! Today we have telemedicine, in which a patient consults a doctor by internet, and also long-distance surgery in which a surgeon manipulates robotic instruments on a patient in another country. However, Gernsback also imagined devices to get more work out of employees, like a helmet that kept distractions away and an electric cage that would wake an office worker who started to doze off. You have to worry about the poor folks who worked on his magazines. Read about seven of Gernsback's weirdest visions of a technological future at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Science and Invention/Matt Novak)

Odin is a good boy. He's a Swiss shepherd who has learned to carry a camera as he zooms around and explores. This is an Insta360 camera, which gives the effect that Odin is a giant floating dog traipsing around the tiny globe wherever he is. And he's so happy doing it!

If you enjoyed that, there are plenty of videos of Odin and his 360 camera at TikTok. Odin has been to a lot of exotic places -and worn a lot of costumes- for his art. @odinswissshepherd -via Laughing Squid