The whole world uses the same basic calendar for communication and trade reasons, but there are still cultural differences that go way back. The four seasons are delineated by the solstices and the equinoxes, but you still hear local jokes about five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and mud. The Japanese calendar divides the four main seasons into 72 much more detailed units called ko, each about five days long. If you want to be in tune with nature, each of these ko describe what the world around us will be doing as the weather, plants, and animals go through their annual cycles.
According to the very detailed calendar, the first cherry blossoms will appear March 26–30, frogs begin to sing May 5–9, and praying mantises hatch June 6–10. Keeping up with such things sounds quite pleasant, as long as the world acts normally. Those who follow traditional ko are the first to notice how climate change is affecting the calendar. As a casual gardener, I am well aware of which flowers should bloom each month, and they've been alarmingly off schedule this year.
Read how the Japanese micro-seasons came about and see a list of all 72 of them at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Toshihiro Matsui)
In the past few days, we've had posts about bears eating garbage, and about European visitors to Yellowstone. So it only makes sense that Tom Scott would head to Yellowstone to find out how to keep bears from eating garbage. At the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, Tom learns how some bears escape euthanasia after helping themselves to picnic baskets or garbage. If they go to live here, they are put to work testing bear-resistant coolers and trash receptacles. We no longer actually say "bear-proof" because we don't want to overpromise.
The bears at the center are encouraged to continue getting into containers to eat human food, so they can never be released back into the wild, lest they teach other bears how to do it. But as far as trash-eating bears go, these are the lucky ones. While Tom got a great video, he now has to explain the business loss of a GoPro camera in some unusual circumstances.
This weekend saw a horde of fictional characters out in full regalia at Montreal Comiccon, and Geeks Are Sexy was there as usual to capture the magic. Folks went all out, like the Valkyrie shown above. Stay out of her way- that wingspan must be about eight feet!
Who knew Rocket Raccoon had a dog? That's not Cosmo the Spacedog, but more like Rocket's "Mini-Me." They're both pretty hairy, so you have to wonder how warm it was in Montreal this weekend. Check out the gallery of cosplay portraits at Geeks Are Sexy, where you'll see characters from TV, movies, comic books, anime, cartoons, and folklore. Click any of the images to bring up a full-size version. If you don't know the character, it will be revealed when you hover your cursor. A good time was had by all.
Let's face it- the only reason in the world to spend a ridiculous amount of money on clothing is so that everyone around you will know that you have enough money to waste it any way you want. Or enough power to get them free. Last month, Balenciaga staged their 52nd couture show during Paris Fashion Week. One of the more astonishing overpriced creations unveiled was a pair of jeans that retail for $27,000.
Ah, but these are no ordinary jeans. They aren't even jeans at all. These are regular cotton and linen pants, hand-painted in trompe l'oeil fashion to resemble worn and faded denim. Each pair represents more than 100 hours of labor, and you can't even throw them in the washer. Let's break this down. Consider that the materials and company overhead could cost as much as $2,000 (a very generous estimate), that means that the artist, or more likely a team of artists, should have earned around $200 an hour to paint the pants and still give the company a $5,000 profit per pair. Nice work if you can get it, but is it believable? And do they have them in stock in a variety of sizes, or would you have to commission them? Read more about Balenciaga's trompe l'oeil jeans and other new fashions at Highsnobiety. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Balenciaga)
Have you ever wondered why bubblegum is pink? Why #2 pencils are yellow? Why blue jeans are blue? It is often the story that many brands of the same product end up the same color because new brands want to be recognized as much as the first popular version, riding on their coattails, so to speak. But someone somewhere had to decide what color that original version would be. And there's a story behind each of those decisions. That's just commercials products. Some universal objects have logical reasons for their color. When it works in one place, it works everywhere. Let's learn some of those stories behind universal colors from Weird History.
Rob Worling is an extreme ice skater who likes to push winter sports to their limits and beyond. It's not enough for him to just play hockey in the winter and tennis in the summer. He has to combine them by setting up a tennis court on an ice rink. I find it amusing, but also compelling because I can see it thriving as a competitive sport.
Worling's other adventures on ice include playing ice basketball, ice football, and ice soccer. The last of these adapted sports looks particularly demanding because of the need to dribble the ball and skate simultaneously without falling over.
-via @Figensport
Why do teeth decay? In our modern, enlightened times, we know that tooth decay is caused by acids created by bacteria that live in the mouth. But in Ancient and Medieval Europe, dentistry attributed tooth decay to worms that resided inside teeth and ate at them from the inside out.
Geraldine Gnych, a British scholar who holds a doctorate in history from Swansea University, wrote a blog post in 2017 describing the myth of tooth worms. The idea dates back to at least the First Century A.D. in the Roman Empire. Treatments included the use of henbane, a poison, in order to kill the worms. In small amounts, henbane acts as a sedative to ease the pain in the tooth without—hopefully—killing the patient.
Pictured above is a replica of an Eighteenth Century sculpture from France fancifully illustrating the tooth worms at work.
-via Museum of Curiosities | Photo: Michael Kowalski
We've read plenty of stories of the people aboard the Titanic when it sank on April 15, 1912. Let's have a perspective on that night from another ship, the Carpathia. The Carpathia was a much smaller ship traveling east to Liverpool that night. It had only one radio operator, Harold Cottam, and he was in the process of shutting down radio operations for the night -it was after midnight- but decided to go ahead and relay some messages from Cape Cod piling up for the Titanic. In reply, he got a distress signal. The "unsinkable" Titanic had struck an iceberg and was sinking.
Cottam and the first officer ran to wake Captain Arthur Rostron. The captain immediately ordered the Carpathia to change direction and head 58 miles to the northwest to aid the Titanic, at full speed. It would take four hours to get there. As the ship chugged along, the passengers slept and the crew prepared to take on survivors. Meanwhile, Rostron considered the dark night and the field of icebergs he was taking his ship toward. Read the story of the Carpathia, the ship that rescued 706 Titanic survivors, at Singular Discoveries. -via Strange Company
The question at reddit was "Americans of Reddit, what places in America should foreigners avoid at all cost?" You might expect that there would be a bunch of people telling visitors not to come to America at all due to the danger of gunshot wounds that you can't afford to have treated. But instead the commenters took it seriously, based on foreign visitors they have known who came to the US with the wrong ideas. They had already been warned about the guns and the cost of healthcare, but were completely uninformed about the dangers of Yellowstone, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon. They're not really saying don't come, but if you do you should be aware of what to expect, and it can be dangerous. Also, many visitors have no concept of how big the US really is. Read all the advice at the reddit thread, which includes warning tourists away from your hometown, or just the highlights that make the most sense for both foreign and domestic tourists at Digg.
(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)
Of all the meteorites that we have found, two-thirds of them have been recovered in Antarctica. As strange as that seems, those meteorites are pretty much restricted to one small area of Antarctica. When you first hear that, you might think that it has something to do with earth's rotation, or maybe a magnetic field that grabs these falling objects and steers them towards this area around the South Pole. That place is weird in many ways. But you'd be wrong. The operative phrase in the first sentence is "that we have found." It is Antarctica's unique environment that makes finding meteorites easier than anywhere else on earth, even though that continent has relatively few people looking for them. The vast majority of rocks falling from the sky will never be found, but those that are collected in Antarctica tell us an awful lot about outer space, according to this video from MinuteEarth.
...Lychon—a member of my own family!—slaughtered me, still in my youth. He threw me from the heights like a discus. I was twenty years old, so full of beauty, when the Moirai spun my fate and sent me as a delight to Hades."
— Roko Rumora (@rumorahasit) March 8, 2023
RIP my dudeđź’”
(Louvre Ma 2867, trans. Chaniotis) pic.twitter.com/xFDMYE7Eaq
A tombstone looted from ancient Greek city of Alexandria Troas, near Istanbul, is now in the Louvre. It is inscribed with the image of a rather short young man. The epitaph has only recently been translated into English, and we get the macabre story from the inscription. Poor Aphrodisios! He was only 20 years old, yet lost his wife and his life to the greed of Lychon, thrown like a Frisbee to his death. The discussion at Metafilter centers around who arranged (and paid) for this gravestone to be carved. If it was commissioned by Lychon, who was after all a relative, he wouldn't have included the part about the dirty adultress. It could have been Aphrodisios' parents, which would explain the description of Aphrodisios as "so full of beauty." All we have left is a mysterious glimpse into an ancient dysfunctional family.
Customs officials working a post between Hong Kong and mainland China were suspicious when a woman crossed the border. There was something off about her breasts. Their shape, at least as visible through her clothes, was unusual. When they conducted a search, the South China Morning Post reports, they found 5 live snakes concealed in her bra.
These were corn snakes, which originate in the United States. They're popular with reptile collectors in China. The woman kept the snakes in stockings (not just loose) in her bra. The South China Morning Post reports that the customs officials seized the snakes, but does not report on what happened to the woman.
-via Dave Barry
If someone says "classic American diner", a lot of us instantly form a shared mental image. Why? What goes into this motif? In this video from Architectural Digest, architect Michael Wyetzner traces the history of the American diner.
It begins with railroad dining cars, from which the "diner" gets its name. Many of the common design elements of the diner, such as the open kitchen, booth seating, and steel construction, originate from the necessities of rail travel. Some of these dining cars were parked offtrack, becoming the first proper diners.
After World War II, car travel overtook rail travel and diners adapted to the needs of people on the road. Many new diners were built with circular designs to maximize parking space. These geometric patterns matched up with images from the Space Race in a style that came to be called "Googie" after one particular diner.
Googie architecture culminated in the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. But the late 60s saw increased pessimism in American life and the end of this stylistic development. Buildings constructed in the Googie diner style thereafter were intended to have retro rather than futuristic aesthetics.
-via Kottke
American black bears once roamed the entire continent before it was settled by European immigrants. Due to conservation over the last hundred years, the bears have rebounded to about half the area they once inhabited. But weird things are happening to black bears lately. Their hibernation period is growing shorter, and some bears don't hibernate at all! This is especially true among "urban bears," those who hang around close to towns. The number of urban bears began to spike around 1990 in the Lake Tahoe area. A 2003 study tracked them, and found that bears that lived near towns went into hibernation a month later than more isolated wilderness bears, and awoke earlier in the spring. Five of the 38 bears did not hibernate at all.
There are two reasons for this. Urban bears have a year-round food supply in human garbage, so they don't get the nutritional cues to go sleep for a couple of months. Climate change is the other reason, as winters stay warmer longer and spring arrives earlier. One expert calculated that by mid-century, the average bear hibernation could be two to six weeks shorter than today. Read about how human activity has changed a bear's natural cycle at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Cephas)
Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It, has been using artificial intelligence to bring his weird ideas to life, so to speak. He sang this song himself, but then AI made his voice sound like Johnny Cash. The songs are an eclectic mix of songs the Man in Black would never consider performing: "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, "Wannabe" by The Spice Girls, and "Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus. They are all set to the tune of "Folsom Prison Blues." But the best part is the last verse, in which the ghost of Johnny Cash laments the use of artificial intelligence. It's an affront to his sense of propriety.
At the YouTube page, Ballard announced that there is now a live version of the There I Ruined It band, and they are going on the road beginning with a show in Dallas, date and venue to be announced later. -via Geeks Are Sexy
