For every TV show that makes it onto broadcast (or streaming), there are countless others that went into development but were never aired. Some even had episodes ready to go before the plug was pulled. Commando Nanny sounds like it may have just as well been forgotten even without all the mishaps, since the trope of "family hires funny maid/nanny/butler who shakes things up" trope has been used a million times already. Others just sound like a bad idea from the beginning.
There are plenty of weird TV shows that we never got to see, and almost as many reasons for giving up on them. Read about 21, er, make that 20 of them in a Cracked pictofacts list.
Do you get frustrated when you can’t defeat the AI player in chess? It seems that your opponents are always one step ahead of you. While we make mistakes, computers can master games; they're able to run enough simulations to anticipate every move of the player. That’s how they’re able to defeat a normal player, and why some of us groan in frustration. Popular Science details the history of how machines are able to beat humans at their own games. Check the full piece here.
In November, NASA will mark twenty years of continuous occupation of the International Space Station with the anniversary of Expedition 1. Since then, there has always been someone orbiting the earth on the ISS. From the YouTube link:
"What if we built a bridge, between and above all nations, to jointly discover the galaxy's great unknowns?" Join us this fall as we prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station. As a global endeavor, 240 people from 19 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory, which has hosted more than 2,800 research investigations from scientists in over 100 nations.
In celebration of the anniversary, NASA has been posting space station news of 20 years ago at their website. Although there doesn't seem to be a tag to load all the historical posts at once, there are links to the left to read more. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A post shared by 이강빈 (@leekangbin91) on Sep 2, 2019 at 6:33pm PDT
Lee Kang Bin is a food artist in Korea. He focuses primarily on colorful lattes, but also works with pastries. I'm struck by his departure from the often monochromatic use of latte art into a world of color. He imitates great artists with works you will recognize, but also makes original images of flowers.
If you’re tired of the quality smartphones come in nowadays, or would just like the idea of building gadgets on your own, the Zero Terminal project might catch your interest! The project is a Raspberry Pi Zero connected to a 5.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a 1,200mAh battery. It has a USB port, a microSD slot for the operating system, a mini-USB port, and a power switch. Input Magazine has more details:
New in the latest iteration of Zero Terminal are 40-pin sockets that can be used to connect additional I/O connections, like extra USB ports or HDMI video out. In the video above showing off the device, the creator of the Zero Terminal connected a slide-out keyboard. The modularity allows for all kinds of possibilities.
You can't run some powerful operating systems like Windows on the Raspberry Pi Zero, of course – it has a very small 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM. But slap a radio on there and you can get a little mobile computer for completing basic computing tasks. Even from the Raspberry Pi OS, you could use the terminal to connect to services like Twitter and send out messages and then disconnect the radio to dip off the grid. If you really wanted to make this a powerful pocket computer you could use a Raspberry Pi 4, which features a quad-core ARM processor and supports up to 8GB of RAM.
Camping was once a way for people to experience life without the modern marvels of technology. That’s still an option today, but some prefer unfolding their portable ovens and making sure that their phones remain charged. With the rise of glamping and festivals, people are now packing more than just their traditional camping gear, as The Guardian details:
“People are making things a bit more bespoke,” said Mike Attwooll, product buyer at the camp shop Attwoolls. “You go out for the day and back to your base at night and it’s like home.”
Ten years ago electrical hook-ups were unusual, but now they are the norm, he said, as campers look to plug in phones and run equipment they would previously have left behind. He had recently seen photos of someone holding a film night in their tent using a mini-projector, he said.
James Warner Smith of the website Cool Camping said technology had brought modern campers a whole range of choices. “Some guys have developed a folding pizza oven that you can take with you. It does rotisserie chicken too,” he said. “There’s a no-electricity coffee maker, and there are quite few stoves that have USB ports in them so you can charge your phone while you are cooking.”
It’s a little closer to every cyberpunk fan’s dream. The construction for what looks like a massive Gundam model was finished July 29, 2020. The giant now stands at the Gundam Factory in Yokohama, outside of Tokyo, Japan. The Gundam robot stands 18 meters (59 feet) tall and weighs 25 metric tons (approx. 55,000 pounds).
A post shared by TRT Deutsch (@trtdeutsch) on Jul 22, 2020 at 11:15am PDT
Dornob tells us about a new movie theater arrangement in Paris designed to be a bit safer than getting packed into a crowded hall. The Bassin de la Villette, an artificial lake in Paris connected to the Seine by a canal, hosted an outdoor viewing of a movie on July 18.
Organizers conducted a raffle for the audience. Winners got to watch the movie from boats. Losers still got to watch the movie, but from deck chairs onshore. Together, they watched Le Grand Bain, a 2018 French dramedy about a men's synchronized swimming team.
The YouTuber with the account name There I Ruined It did something you would never, ever think of. He did a bluegrass version of Michael Jackson's "Bad" and made it synch with the original video. As one commenter said, "This is both unforgivable, and amazing." The creator apologized in the YouTube description. -via reddit
Ben Sizemore was checking for invasive plants in the woods and spotted a camera trap aimed at a moss-covered log. Not one to pass up an opportunity, he posed in front of it and let the motion-sensor camera take a series of pictures. The owner of the camera, wildlife photographer Jeff Wirth, was completely delighted to find clear pictures of the most dangerous animal species: homo sapiens. Click on the right arrow to see the photo that Wirth was really trying for.
After posting the pictures on Twitter and Instagram, Sizemore made himself known to Wirth. Read the full story and see more of Wirth's camera trap images at Bored Panda.
The Eiffel Tower was the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world's fair in Paris. Although originally slated to be demolished after 20 years, it still stands, 131 years later, recognizable to folks around the globe. Strange to think it could have been something completely different.
Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was just one of 300 to 700 submitted pitches (estimates vary) vying to be Paris’ world’s fair centerpiece.
Yet the spire that was ultimately erected on the Champ de Mars was an order of magnitude less audacious than one of the most peculiar also-rans: a 1,000-foot-tall guillotine that would have commemorated France’s headless-horseman history, when at least 17,000 people were guillotined during the Reign of Terror, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Little is recorded of the ornamental, Godzilla-sized pillar with a blade — no contemporary illustrations, no manifesto behind its conception, no specs on the size of the cutting edge, only enough stray details to tease us with what might have been.
One can hardly imagine such a structure becoming a permanent part of the Paris skyline. The Eiffel Tower is just one of many iconic buildings that originated from world's fairs, and others were also in competition against some really strange alternatives. Read about the weirdest of those competitors at Ozy. -via Digg
The Weekly World News held a unique place in the supermarket tabloid display as the epitome of fake news. What it lacked in celebrities and color, it made up in sensationalism. The headlines were never believable, and rarely had much to do with the actual story, but they worked because they made you want to read more. For 28 years, the Weekly World News worked to outdo itself, because who doesn't want to know more about Bat Boy, aliens hobnobbing with politicians, and the still-alive Elvis? Strangely, but not surprisingly, the genesis of the tabloid was an attempt to make a buck off obsolete equipment.
Generoso Pope Jr. could be considered the father of the modern supermarket tabloid newspaper. With the aid of a $25,000 down payment reportedly borrowed from the mob, Pope purchased The New York Evening Enquirer (which later became The National Enquirer) in 1952. The lurid paper specialized in tawdry headlines like “Starving Mom Eats Own Child” before softening its content to gain retail space at grocery stores in the 1970s.
When rival tabloid The Star went to a color format, Pope was forced to follow suit. That left him with an unused black-and-white printing press, which he saw as an opportunity to return to the bizarre news of the early Enquirer. In the summer of 1979, a small staff supervised by editor Phil Bunton, stationed inside the Enquirer offices in Lantana, Florida, began work on what would become Weekly World News.
Mental Floss spoke with more than a dozen former editors, managers, and writers to piece together the story of how the Weekly World News became the king of fake news, which you can read here.
People tell us that the key to being more productive is doing more things while spending less time. A support trainer from a remote company named Zapier, says something different, however. For him, doing more things while spending less time quickly leads to burnout. With that in mind, he suggests another method to be more productive, and that is by doing tasks and looking for ways to improve yourself, one step at a time.
Check out his helpful advice over at Fast Company.
Phosphorus is one of the key ingredients in making life possible. But compared to other elements which life on Earth depends on — namely, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur — phosphorus is less abundant than these elements. And so, scientists were really surprised when they discovered a new type of star, one that is rich in the aforementioned element. Currently, scientists do not know exactly what type of stellar process paves the way to the creation of phosphorus, which is why they were so puzzled with this recent discovery.
What happened to these stars that made them so rich with phosphorus?
“The paper is all about exploring all possibilities and ruling out all of them,” said Masseron. “Basically, the answer is we don’t know.”
The “Outstanding Move” meme template is often used to praise an action for its ingenuity and uniqueness. Bored Panda compiles what they believe are the funniest outstanding move stories that can be found on the Internet.
Learn more about the real context of the image, and view Bored Panda’s compilation, over at the site. For now, here are two photos.
