The days of early aviation were crazy, man. F. Gerald Phillips was a Hollywood stunt pilot. He recalled that one time he took off before a landing gear wheel was bolted to his plane. Phillips was carrying a cameraman to film an aerial stunt, so there were plenty of guysy aviators around. First, he lined up with another plane, and wing walker Al Johnson walked over to Phillips' plane.

He climbed through the rigging to the step at the side of my cockpit. Leaning in, he shouted over the engine noise, “Hi, Jerry. Cruise around close to the field. They’ll bring up a wheel. I’ll get it and put it on for you.” It was almost casual.

Bob Lloyd, another motion-picture pilot, took off with Ivan Unger, a wheel, and 20 feet of rope. Ivan, in his early 20s, was a professional wingwalker and parachute jumper, short in stature but long on courage. He had flown with me on many a Sunday show, hanging by his feet from the wing skid or landing gear.

At 1,500 feet and 70 mph Al made an extremely difficult job look easy. Grasping the short strut on top of the upper wing, he nimbly hoisted himself up and assumed a crouching position to await the rendezvous with Bob, Ivan, and the wheel. Soon they approached from behind, slightly above and to my left, and Ivan began lowering the rope, the wheel dangling at its end.

It wasn't an easy task. They dropped the first wheel, and the second wheel wouldn't fit. Then the engine died. That's when they had to get creative. You can read Phillips' entire account of the air emergency at Air & Space magazine. -via Metafilter

Need to win back trust? There's a smile for that!

A new study by researchers from Queen's University in Belfast showed that smiling can win back trust after someone has been uncooperative or untrustworthy. But not just any smile - it has to be a specific kind of smile called the affiliation smile.

From Pictojam:

“Facial expressions are very important in building social relationships and not all smiles are an expression of joy – there is much more behind a smile,” said Rychlowska, “We found that when a person smiled after being uncooperative or untrustworthy, they were viewed as being happy and therefore they appeared untrustworthy and unwilling to change their behaviour. However, when an affiliation smile was used, this was perceived as an attempt to make amends, restoring higher levels of trust than the other two smiles.”

Find out what kind of smile you'd need to win back another person's trust.

Image: Magdalena Rychlowska et al./Cognition and Emotion

Have you ever heard of the Koreshan Unity? It was another of the many religious sects born in New York in the 19th century, so you will be forgiven for not finding it familiar. Due to the overabundance of fringe groups and communes in New York, the Koreshan Unity moved to Chicago and then ultimately to Florida, where the group grew to around 200 members in their heyday.

It all started with science. Well, ostensibly. Cyrus Teed, an eccentric medical doctor and alchemist from Utica, New York, often experimented with dangerous levels of electric current. During one late night in his laboratory in 1869, Teed was knocked unconscious by his own experimental attempt to turn lead into gold and had a vision –or as he called it, “The Illumination”. A beautiful woman appeared and imparted to Teed the truths of the universe: the secret of immortality, that God was both male and female, and that we live on the inside of the Earth’s crust. The angel told him he was the seventh prophet in a line that included Adam and, most recently, Jesus and that he had been sent to redeem humanity.

The Koreshans settled in a southwest Florida swamp near Ft. Myers and spent years building a rather nice village in Estero, which ultimately became the property of the state of Florida and is now a state park. Read about the Koreshan Unity and their settlement that is now a well-preserved historical site at Messy Nessy Chic.   

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by YBS (@brodiemoss)

Brodie Moss is an adventurer who enjoys kayaking on the open ocean. He's Australian, and is thus unafraid of any snake smaller than a telephone pole.

There really is nothing to worry about. The snake is trying to mate with him, not eat him. So it's okay.

-via Dave Barry

It's not just a clever gimmick. At Kuma no Te -- Bear Paw -- in Osaka, Japan, customers are never required to have face-to-face or skin-to-skin contact with an employee. For people who find such sensory stimulation unpleasant, that's a strong selling point. Sora News 24 explains:

As it turns out, this style of service, where customers collect their orders from a hole in the wall, is ideal for staff as well. And for those wanting to work but unable to, due to mental health challenges and sensitivities connected to face-to-face contact, contactless services like these can open up all sorts of new opportunities for employment. [...]

With face-to-face contact being a stress trigger for a number of their clients, Mental Health came up with the brilliant idea of setting up a cafe where staff don’t have to see or be seen by customers. And the problem of skin-to-skin contact was also solved with fluffy bear gloves, which staff use to hand out drinks and sweets through the small opening in the wall.

Photo: PR Times

McDonald's inability to serve ice cream has long been the subject of jokes, since their ice cream machines are almost always out of order, so you may as well not order a McFlurry. When you do, odds are that the answer will come back through the drive-through speaker, "Machine's broken." We have all become used to it, so it came as a surprise to learn that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into why these machines are constantly broken. The short answer that's been around for years is that cleaning the machine is so complicated, workers often just skip it. There's more to it than that.

The mystery surrounding the machines has been long documented. They’re notoriously hard to clean, and when their nightly automated maintenance fails, the franchise must wait for a repair technician. There have been some fixes for this. The startup Kytch launched a device that alerts owners to breakdowns, providing them with a clear message for what went wrong. Currently, the machines themselves, produced by Taylor Commercial Foodservice LLC, offer messages that are as clear as a McFlurry with messages like “ERROR: XSndhUIF LHPR>45F 1HR LPROD too VISC.” What a joy it must be to read that message while working a backed-up McDonald’s drive-thru during a global pandemic.

It's possible to be a little too high-tech, I guess. But somehow, Dairy Queen and other fast food outlets manage to serve ice cream all day long. The real question is what can, or will, the FTC, or McDonald's, do about it? Read more at the A.V. Club.

Ok. That's a wrap! (for today, ofc)
Let me introduce Zangief. 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/uw6J2FZ09N

— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

What would Street Fighter characters look like if they were real life humans? And we're not talking about the 1984 movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme - we're talking about the classic Capcom video games.

Well, wonder no more: Twitter user @Siberian_644 used Google AI to turn various Street Fighter characters into 'real humans'. View the gallery over at Infinite1UP - here's Street Fighter Characters Turned Into Photorealistic 'Real Humans' by Google AI

I can't stop staring at Zangief ...

Blanka!! (finally AI recognize his face) pic.twitter.com/8cFds6faNI

— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 31, 2021

... or at Blanka!

Does it sound like a suspiciously too Irish thing to do? The technique was actually pioneered by the ancient Romans. Trails paved with layers of wool erode slower than other materials and are more environmentally friendly than synthetics. The Irish Times talked to Bryan Fennell, a recreation official in northern (lower-case n) Ireland:

The process involves a layer of fleeces being placed under four layers of stone.

“Over the last few years, walking has exploded as a sport in Ireland,” explained Mr Fennell. He said some walkers instinctively avoid muddy areas and spread out over blanket bog, not realising the damage they do as a result.

“What we want to do is create defined tracks,” he added. [...]

“The beauty of this technique is that you can shear sheep on the side of a hill and put the fleece directly into the track because the wool needs no treatment.”

-via Marilyn Terrell | Photo: Bryan Fennell

Ella Hawkins uses cookies as an art medium, which is great, except you would feel awful about eating them! These cookies are inspired by vintage Tiffany Studios lamps. She decorated them with stained glass made from gel food coloring and vodka. The "lead" in between is royal icing. Check out each cookie next to the Tiffany lamp from which its design comes. Click to the right to see them all.



See more of Hawkins' lovely art cookies here.

-via Everlasting Blort

“Generally speaking That looks like a pretty good call. Hey, Pop, how’s the economy going today? I guess I’ll have to move.” pic.twitter.com/HZeLIb5huS

— The Neural Yorker (@NeuralYorker) August 24, 2021

Cartoons in The New Yorker are iconic enough that you easily recognize one outside of the magazine. Even as the jokes are crowdsourced, the same style endures. Could an algorithm learn the style well enough to produce New Yorker cartoons? Introducing: The Neural Yorker.

Paying on their ubiquity and familiarity, comics artist Ilan Manouach and AI engineer Ioannis Siglidis developed the Neural Yorker, an artificial intelligence (AI) engine that posts computer-generated cartoons on Twitter. The project consists of image-and-caption combinations produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a deep-learning-based model. The network is trained using a database of punchlines and images of cartoons found online and then “learns” to create new gags in the New Yorker‘s iconic style, with hilarious (and sometimes unsettling) results.

“Are there any stupid people here that don’t need a little paint?” pic.twitter.com/Q0vkdfSvfU

— The Neural Yorker (@NeuralYorker) August 9, 2021

The comics are not conventionally as funny as the real New Yorker cartoons, but their very weirdness may provoke giggles. And when they come a little too close to human experiences, those giggles can become a sense of dread. Read about The Neural Yorker project at Hyperallergic, and follow its Twitter account to see what it comes up with next. -via Damn Interesting

We know that medieval art can be really weird. It's one thing to find a random jousting snail or an ugly baby Jesus, but when those things happen over and over, you start to wonder what caused those trends. Some of these can be explained by the religious culture of the time, while others are recurring jokes, which we might even call memes. So it's only fitting that they have become memes all over again in the 21st century!

The finalists for the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have been selected! See the best of the best submissions that caught wild animals at the wrong moment, or just comically being themselves. The kangaroo practicing his stagecraft above is from Lea Scadden. The jump for joy below is from Roland Kranitz.



See all the finalists here. Once you've decided which one you like best, vote for the People's Choice Award here. The winners of this year's competition will be announced on October 22.

-via Bored Panda

See also: The Funniest Animals From the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

There’s hope for humans surviving on Mars! A workaround was found by experts. In theory, the areas near Martian caves should be shielded from some of the radiation that penetrates the planet’s surface. Unlike our planet, Mars’ surface doesn’t have a thick atmosphere that prevents UV radiation and ionizing radiation from space from reaching the surface. The Martian caves could serve as a potential shield from the harmful waves: 

However, images of the planet from orbit have shown what appear to be entrances to caves, and the insides of these caverns could be protected from those harmful rays. Daniel Viúdez-Moreiras at Spain’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology has now calculated how much UV radiation would still make it into different types of caves at various locations on Mars.

He found that in many cases the levels of UV radiation inside the caves would be around 2 per cent of the levels on the surface. Those radiation levels are low enough to be relatively safe, but still high enough to sustain organisms that require light to produce energy via photosynthesis.

It isn’t clear whether ionising radiation – which is potentially even more dangerous than UV – would be blocked out in the same way, but it is likely, according to Viúdez-Moreiras. “Ionising radiation doesn’t present exactly the same behaviour as UV radiation,” he says. “However, it is expected that ionising radiation will also be strongly attenuated in pit craters and cave skylights.”

The consequences of this are twofold: caves may be safe locations for human explorers to hide from the extreme conditions at the Martian surface, and they may also be some of the best places to search for signs of life on the Red Planet. No lander or rover has ever visited a cave on Mars, but doing so would be the best way to figure out whether they really are habitable, says Viúdez-Moreiras.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona

Corporations, ugh. Universal Music Group (UMG) has blocked the video of British filmmaker Philip Bloom, claiming copyright to his shots of the Moon. Bloom filmed the Moon during sunset in Greece. When he uploaded his video on the Internet, he was sent a  copyright infringement claim by UMG, with the notice that his footage matched 30 seconds of video owned by the company. What in the world? Does UMG own the Moon now? PetaPixel has the details: 

Bloom says he’s baffled by the fact that a simple shot of the Moon could be flagged for copyright infringement.

“It’s utterly ludicrous, I mean it’s a shot of the moon!” he says. “I hadn’t realized they owned the licensing rights to it. I dare not upload a sunset shot as they’ve probably bought the sun too!

“It doesn’t affect me in any way other than it being annoying and ridiculous, but it does raise questions about the AI being used on Facebook… unless they actually have bought the moon? If so I bet that wasn’t cheap!”

Update on 8/27/21: Philip Bloom says that after the publication of this story, UMB has released the claims on his video along with several others.

Image via PetaPixel 

In grade school, you probably mixed vinegar and baking soda to make a papier-mâché volcano erupt. Cool when you're six, but lame afterward. The guy from The Action Lab has an alternative that is more realistic. Using amonium dichromate produces heat and ash like a real volcano, and actually builds a volcanic cone and crater out of its own spent material. The weird thing is that amonium dichromate becomes safer as it erupts! The experiment is only three minutes long, the rest is an ad. Oh yeah, in case you haven't figured it out, the "cooler" in the title refers to desirability, not temperature. -via Digg