US Coast Guard veteran Craig J. Gordnier transformed a 1999 Blue Bird school bus into a house on wheels. The transformation was a solo project that ran for 200 days. The result of his hard work was a surprisingly spacious and cozy home. It even comes with an espresso bar! Designboom has more details: 

craig began by raising the original roof by 20 inches, resulting in a maximum ceiling height of 8ft 6 inches. the interior is split into kitchen, living, and sleeping accommodation, with the bed located at the rear of the bus and the kitchen counter positioned at the front. 

partitioned off from the bed is a rainfall shower with skylight above. the bus also features a tiled hearth to match the shower, an artificial fireplace, an 11ft poured epoxy kitchen counter, a full espresso bar, a queen size pull out couch, and stainless steel appliances. everything is 100% powered by the sun thanks to solar panels on the roof.

the new home was designed and built by craig and he now lives and travels full time in the 1999 blue bird. to see more pictures of the transformation, and to follow craig on his journeys across the US, you can check out his instagram page here, where he posts to over 11k followers.

Image via Designboom 

It even feels like the fabric is sentient as it dances against these beautiful landscapes. London-based photographer Neal Grundy’s ongoing series, Transient Sculptures, consists of photos of shimmering fabrics dancing in front of different landscapes. His photos capture the movement of the fabrics in a single moment, as Plain Magazine details: 

In his ongoing series, Grundy employs his still skills in capturing a collection of shimmering fabrics dancing in front of a range of landscapes. His work is all the more beautiful given the lives of his ‘subjects’ that are lost outside of the moment the shutter snaps. His photographic sculptures capture the fabric in a single moment, its solid structure a mere illusion only recorded then and there by the camera. Shot during the UK’s Covid lockdown in early 2020, the series is backdropped by East Sussex’s coastal landscape. Discover more of his work on his website and on Instagram.

Image via Plain Magazine

On Sunday, a 14-year old girl became entangled on ski lift at the Bristol Mountain Ski Resort in Canandaigua, New York. For two minutes, she hung from her jacket, which was wrapped around the lift. The resort's ski patrol quickly brought out a tarp to catch her. She was, thankfully, uninjured and was able to walk away from the scene.

The incident could have had a far worse outcome. ABC News reports that chairlifts can, on rare occasions, be deadly:

Ski lift accidents are rare. According to the National Ski Areas Association, a person is five times more likely to die in an elevator and eight times more likely to die in a car than on a chairlift.

Still, rare does not mean never. In 2019, 17-year-old Connor Golembiewski died after a 20-foot fall off of a lift at a ski resort in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.

In an incident similar to this week's in 2018, a 5-year-old girl dangling from a chairlift was rescued after falling safely onto a tarp at Bear Mountain Ski Resort in Southern California.

-via Super Punch

The Sinai Peninsula in Egypt is the bridge between Africa and Asia. Around 4,000 years ago, the Sinai plateau called Serabit el-Khadim was a center for mining turquoise and other minerals, which drew laborers from neighboring nations who could not read Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1905, artifacts taken from a temple in Serabit el-Khadim included a small sphinx with strange markings, which have since been identified as an alphabet, and even translated.     

“For me, it’s worth all the gold in Egypt,” the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser said of this little sphinx when we viewed it at the British Museum in late 2018. She had come to London to be interviewed for a BBC documentary about the history of writing. In the high-ceilinged Egypt and Sudan study room lined with bookcases, separated from the crowds in the public galleries by locked doors and iron staircases, a curator brought the sphinx out of its basket and placed it on a table, where Goldwasser and I marveled at it. “Every word we read and write started with him and his friends.” She explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: “Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.” Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form.

The concept of an alphabet profoundly changed the way we communicate. By turning sounds into symbols, speech could be recorded and deciphered in different languages, and new words can be constructed without previous written context. The theory that the idea was developed by itinerant laborers working together to overcome their illiteracy in a foreign country is an intriguing idea, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: British Museum)

Multiple witnesses in Hawaii reported an unidentified flying object Tuesday night. It was bright blue, and described as being "larger than a telephone pole." Is it an advertising stunt gone wrong? Or God seeding the ocean with a new species of nudibranch? What does it look like to you? Check out the footage as broadcast by the local ABC affiliate. -via Geekologie

The Marigold, or ‘the ring of prosperity’, is a circular band with a floral design. What’s special about the Marigold is that it holds 12,638 diamonds with a total weight of more than 38 carats. Created by Harshit Bansal from Renani Jewels in India, the jewelry breaks the Guinness World Record for highest number of diamonds in a ring, as CNN details: 

The previous record -- 7,801 diamonds in a ring -- was also set in India by the Hyderabad-based jeweler Hallmark Jewellers.

Bansal told Guinness that he was first was inspired to break the diamond-studded record in 2018, while studying jewelry design in Surat, India. Two years later, his company completed the ring design on November 30, 2020.

Image via CNN 

Sorry guys, no photo-ops on this one. Meet the Denmark Strait cataract, the largest waterfall in the world. The gigantic waterfall is located between Greenland and Iceland, stretching over 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide and plunging 11,500 feet (3,505 meters) down from the Greenland Sea into the Irminger Sea, as How Stuff Works details: 

The most astonishing thing about the Denmark Strait cataract isn't, perhaps, how it got to be so tall and mighty, but that an undersea waterfall can exist at all. It's easy to picture an ocean as a giant bathtub that sloshes around with the tides, but seawater is actually very dynamic; waters of different temperatures and salinities — and, therefore, densities — are always interacting on large and small scales.

The Denmark Strait cataract is formed by the difference in temperature between the ultra-cold Arctic waters of the Greenland Sea meeting those of the slightly warmer Irminger Sea. Since the molecules in the cold water are less active and take up less space than in warm water, they are packed together more tightly, making colder water denser. That means that when water from the Greenland Sea meets the Irminger Sea water, it slides right down through it to the bottom of the ocean.

Image via How Stuff Works 

Magic Castle was a rejected game created by a small team of Japanese developers in 1998. The game never went anywhere after being rejected by seven major publishers, including Sony. Well, two decades later, Magic Castle can now be played thanks to the magic of emulators and one of the original members of the developer team: 

One of the team members, PIROWO, recently found the source code for the project—created on Net Yaroze—and decided to tie up its loose ends and release it to the public. This game looks cool as hell, not just for its isometric style, but for a number of very modern touches like a customisable UI and dynamic music.

Image via Kotaku

The 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption was not a hit in theaters, most likely because of the incomprehensible title and the lack of explosions. In the years since, it's become a favorite drama for the male half of the internet generation. Finally, Screen Junkies did an Honest Trailer for the movie by popular demand, although they had to reach to find anything bad to say about The Shawshank Redemption. They gave it their best shot anyway.

The aquarium becomes the goldfish's new home and new football field! A man from Guangdong, China, was able to train his five Ranchu goldfish to shoot a ball into a goal. Wow! Yang Tianxin trained his goldfish for a long time, and the results are worth his efforts. Now I will be waiting for the annual goldfish soccer event at sporting events, thank you very much. 

When we think of a coat of arms, we think of nobility, wealth, and power, passed along through generations. A family coat of arms should be a symbol to be proud of, at least until we learn that there were far more of these symbols than we ever realized, and someone had to make them up to begin with. And through modern eyes, they didn't put enough thought into some of them.

It seems that the immortal symbols of nobility don't all hold up to the same aesthetic scrutiny. The above heraldry is taken from the pages of Konrad Grunenberg's Wappenbuch (Book of Arms), a comprehensive collection of coats of arms commissioned as a gift to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in 1480. The book is a real Who's Who of the HRE, listing the arms of its nobles, important burghers but also foreign kings. It's also a collection of who could think up the goofiest symbols, like a fish with a trumpet for a nose ...

There is some speculation that Grunenberg's index is not altogether accurate, and many of the entries could have been made up of whole cloth, for political or comedic reasons. Who knows? It appears that his depictions all contain the same helmet, as if he had a medieval version of copy-paste and just drew pictures around them from someone's description. You can flip through the Wappenbuch yourself here. Or see the highlights, meaning the weirdest examples of coats of arms from the book at Cracked.

At a site near the Brazilian border, Uruguayan miners discovered this geode shaped like a heart. It's an inspiring find by Uruguay Minerals, a company which appears to specialize in decorative crystals. My Modern Met talked to a representative of the company:

“We were opening the mine to work normally,” Marcos Lorenzelli of Uruguay Minerals tells My Modern Met, “but the land was difficult to work and our employees said, ‘We have to find something really nice due to the hard work we are doing.’” Their patience was rewarded with this once-in-a-lifetime find.

Photo: Uruguay Minerals

The Incas ground peanuts into paste thousands of years ago, but who invented the modern incarnation of peanut butter? If you had to guess, you'd probably say George Washington Carver, but it was John Harvey Kellogg who filed the patent in 1895. Yes, the same guy who developed modern breakfast cereal at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.  

A Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg endorsed a plant-based diet and promoted peanut butter as a healthy alternative to meat, which he saw as a digestive irritant and, worse, a sinful sexual stimulant. His efforts and his elite clientele, which included Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth and Henry Ford, helped establish peanut butter as a delicacy. As early as 1896, Good Housekeeping encouraged women to make their own with a meat grinder, and suggested pairing the spread with bread. “The active brains of American inventors have found new economic uses for the peanut,” the Chicago Tribune rhapsodized in July 1897.

Kellogg's peanut butter had its problems, though, and the product went through changes as it became tastier and more amenable to mass production. Throughout the 20th century, peanut butter gained popularity as a protein alternative to expensive meat. Read the history of peanut butter, plus a look at the work George Washington Carver did to promote peanut crops at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: PeanutButter1046)

If you’re a gamer who spends a lot of time playing video games, then it’s a must that you sit on something that’s comfortable and really supports your body. In other words, a gaming chair.

But even if you’re not a gamer, you might also consider buying a gaming chair, as gaming chairs today have excellent ergonomic design. They are pretty expensive, however.

The Inventory asked various gamers what the best gaming chairs out there are. Check out their answers over at the site.

(Image Credit: Ella Don/ Unsplash)

In this rather solemn video, Ozzy Man decides to wrap up 2020 by reviewing nothing and just “let the fabric of life” unfurl itself and reveal to us the magical, the weird, and the amazing things that we can see in this lifetime.

(Image Credit: Ozzy Man Reviews/ YouTube)