Shrek 2 was a sequel that actually deserved to follow in the footsteps of the original. The 2004 movie was deeper than many viewers realized at the time, and still had plenty of fart jokes. What do Screen Junkies think of Shrek 2? Find out in this Honest Trailer made as part of their Summer Blockbuster series, where they look back at the biggest summer movies of past years. There won't be one for 2020, so we may as well wallow in nostalgia, if you can call 2004 nostalgic.
A hummingbird helmet is a helmet with a hummingbird feeder attached to attract hummingbirds to your face. Think of it as similar to a Bear Vest, which is a vest made of beefsteaks to attract bears.
Spencer Staley goes all-out with a total of seven feeders hanging from rods extending from a helmet.
I really don't see why, with proper supports, it wouldn't be possible to build a helmet with ten times as many supports. I mean, humans went to the Moon and invented Twitter. A hummingbird helmet with seventy feeders is within our potential.
-via Born in Space
Rainbow lightning, which is the name of my next Queensrÿche cover band, was spotted by the BBC's Weather Watchers over the past weekend. Why did these two meteorological phenomena appear together? The BBC explains:
Firstly, there was a lot of energy within the atmosphere so when the thunderstorms developed there was plenty of electrical charge which produced a lot of lightning. The storms were also quite localised so there were sunny spells between the showers. And lastly, the timing was spot on. As the sun was setting, the angle of the sun was just right with the thunderstorm to form rainbows.
So: sorcery.
-via Aaron Starmer | Photo: CREEZ1993
Entrepreneurs from Mexico developed a method of making cacti into vegan leather- and you won’t even notice it isn’t real leather! When Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez realized that environmental pollution is a serious problem, they were inspired to create vegan leather. The faux-leather is called “Desserto” and is made from cactus, as BoredPanda detailed:
Why cactus, you ask? The answer is simple—this plant doesn’t need much water to grow, it’s super resilient and strong and it can handle low temperatures without dying. Besides, it’s México so there’s plenty of cacti there.
The vegan leather these guys create is called “Desserto” and it’s the world’s first environmentally friendly organic material made out of Nopal cactus.
image via BoredPanda
Photographers post wallpaper-worthy photos all the time. We save them because we can’t take photos as beautiful as theirs, and there’s no harm in admitting that. I do it all the time. However, this particular photo of a sunset from landscape photographer Gaurav Agrawal did the unexpected. The photo often made android phones crash when set as wallpaper, PetaPixel details:
Unfortunately, when it came time to export and share the photo after a few edits in Adobe Lightroom, he picked the ProPhoto RGB color space; that, it seems, was the root of the problem.
The color space attached to the photo is unreadable by a large number of Android phones, mostly those by Google and Samsung. When set as the wallpaper on the standard version of Android 10, sRGB is required, and the disparity sent these phones into an infinite re-boot loop. The issue is referred to as a “soft-brick,” because it was often only fixable by performing a factory reset and losing any data that wasn’t backed up.
This fact was discovered and shared widely on Twitter, causing the photo to go viral and inadvertently leading to thousands of phones being bricked as some Android users couldn’t resist the temptation to try using the photo themselves.
Agrawal tells the BBC that he’s sad about what happened. Since he’s an iPhone user (and always uses a photo of his wife as his phone background) he had no idea that choosing the wrong color space could cause such a kerfuffle.
“I didn’t do anything intentionally. I’m sad that people ended up having issues.” says Agrawal. “I hoped my photograph would have gone ‘viral’ for a good reason, but maybe that’s for another time… I’m going to use another format from now on.”
image via PetaPixel
In the Israeli town of Safed lies a historical cemetery containing the graves of Jewish holy men among the 40,000 burials. Safed became the center of Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, several hundred years ago. The cemetery is undergoing some work: an effort to GPS-map the Hebrew epitaphs of Kaballah leaders from the 15th-17th centuries.
With no money available to renovate it, the cemetery has been neglected for years. No one knew the number of the graves, and the records went missing decades ago. In the early 1990s the Safed municipality decided to renovate it by cleaning old graves and roads, building a staircase, and painting selected gravestones blue. When the excavations began, they were in for a shock: Under the paths leading to the famous graves were thousands of other graves, buried under the dirt because of the rains and the sediment flowing down the mountainside.
The renovation efforts expose a conundrum. Some believe the buried tombstones must be unearthed and documented for posterity. Since the inscribed markers are mostly limestone, that act in itself exposes them to weathering and destruction. The paint used in the 1990s identifies some graves, but also may have damaged them. Therefore, others believe this sacred burial site should be left as is so the dead can rest in peace. Read about Safed cemetery at Atlas Obscura.
International marketing can be spectacularly profitable if done right. However, language and cultural differences must be smoothed out before a product is rolled out in a different country. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes there's a magnificently embarrassing screwup that people will talk about for years. Auto companies have been particularly egregious about this. But it's not always a matter of translating English to other languages. Sometimes it goes the other way.
To be fair, a lot of these mistranslation events are fairly old, but they continue to happen in the 21st century. How hard would it be to vet these things with a few native speakers before releasing an entire marketing campaign? See all 15 stories in a pictofacts post at Cracked.
Territorial animals are terrifying creatures. They don’t care how small or big you are. If you dare enter their territory, they will torment you until you go away. This red-wing blackbird, aptly nicknamed “Dive Bomber Dave” does just that when he sees people walk by the tree which he claims as his own.
He also has a TikTok account dedicated to him, apparently, and the account has over 120,000 followers.
Talk about being famous.
Via Laughing Squid
(Video Credit: Liberty Village/ Instagram)
The PS5 design is pretty fowl pic.twitter.com/VeoWeCnNBN
— Anthony (@kindekuma) June 11, 2020
Sony released the official console design of the PlayStation 5 a few days ago, and people are making fun of the upcoming video game console due to its rather unusual design. Shortly after the PS5’s reveal trailer, memes about it have surfaced in the Internet, with people comparing its design to that of routers and even to Seto Kaiba’s upturned collar. The design is just not appealing to the human eye.
Aaron Souppouris, however, argues that people will get over the PS5’s design after a time, just like how the people got over at the lunchbox look of the Gamecube and the George Foreman grill look of the PS3.
In a matter of months, the PlayStation 5 will be normal. We’ll all get used to the asymmetry, the ‘00s blue accents and the overflowing edges. And what we’ll be left with is a memorable piece of hardware. It’s a design that says something; it’s a statement. And even if that statement is (to my mind), “we don’t know what we’re doing,” statements endure far longer than precision.
In other words, the design won’t matter if it works and if it gives you great video game experiences. But it will surely leave an impression.
Given the huge number of PS4 users, the sure-to-be-cheaper discless version and the strong selection of titles on show yesterday, Sony can live with a few days of memes.
Check out Souppouris’s article over at Engadget.
(Image Credit: @kindekuma/Twitter)
— Unfinished Sentenc (@UnbeatenObj) June 11, 2020
(Image Credit: @UnbeatenOBbj/Twitter)
yes that’s me, i look way different and i’m way stupid during work https://t.co/7I7wr46Ta7
— sxtanxc🐍 (@sxdbxar) June 8, 2020
We all have embarrassing and painful moments in our lives. Some of us just get caught on camera, like this poor GrabFood rider in Singapore who got stuck in an elevator in a very weird position with his bicycle.
Despite his predicament, the rider still had managed to laugh, while another man, possibly the customer, came in to help him.
Twitter user @sxdbxar later on identified himself as the rider.
“Yes, that’s me, I look way different and I’m way different during work,” said the rider on his retweet.
This is both funny and wholesome at the same time, as the rider was a good sport.
(Video Credit: @yanmoneyy/ Twitter)
Researchers from Duke University have developed an AI tool that can create realistic images from blurry images, which is kinda cool but creepy at the same time.
Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, 'imagining' features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren't there in the first place.
While this may not be used to identify people, the researchers say that this method, called PULSE, could be used to create realistic faces that don’t exist in real life.
The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.
We’ve really come far in artificial intelligence.
More details about this one over at TechXplore.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Duke University/ TechXplore)
Animator William J. Crook tries to imitate how a match stick burns, using a twig and some colorful leaves. The result is a fun and surreal stop-motion video. Unfortunately, the fun is short-lived, as the video only lasts 23 seconds.
See the short animated clip over at The Awesomer.
(Image Credit: William Crook/ The Awesomer)
The "internet bench" at Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, UK, was installed in 2001 as a place you can get connected. There was no wifi at the time, so the bench's phone connections could be useful for that, but there were very few laptops, either. You can imagine that it wasn't a big success. But that wasn't really the point. Tom Scott explains.
Stewart Adams spent a large chunk of his life searching for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis. He failed in that endeavor, a regret he never really got over. But he did invent an effective treatment for arthritis, called ibuprofen, which is known in the US by the brand names Motrin and Advil. That ibuprofen is used for a wide variety of pain relief is Adams' greatest achievement.
Adams began his research by studying how aspirin worked, which no one else was doing at the time. He was interested in the drug’s anti-inflammatory properties and hoped to find something that mimicked those qualities but didn’t cause an allergic reaction, bleeding or stomach irritation like aspirin could.
Adams recruited Nicholson, a chemist, to help him test more than 600 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could reduce inflammation and that most people could tolerate. They narrowed down the field to five drugs. The first four went into clinical trials and all failed. The fifth, though, proved to be successful. They received a U.S. patent for ibuprofen in 1966. Three years later, it was approved as a prescription drug in England and soon became available around the world as an over-the-counter pain reliever.
Which brings us to that day in 1971, when Adams had to deliver an important speech at a pharmacological convention in Moscow. The problem was, he had spent the night before toasting ibuprofen's success with vodka. Read the story of Stewart Adams and the development of ibuprofen at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)
The outrageous characters of the Old West are often found to be the product of dime novels and less-than-rigorously researched newspaper articles written to thrill those back east. One such character is "Cattle Kate," born Ellen Watson. Her life was interesting enough without the extras heaped upon her, but those extras found a willing audience.
“Cattle Kate” Watson was one of early Wyoming’s most scandalous outlaws. She was a prostitute, a cattle thief, and a mean, aggressive Amazon who would beat you up as soon as look at you. She was, in short, a public menace. In 1889, her harassed neighbors finally had had enough, and resorted to classic rough frontier justice. Watson, along with her equally disreputable husband/pimp, were captured and strung up. No one mourned them.
It is a colorful story, one which made Watson one of the Old West’s most famous villains. There is just one problem: not one of the “historical facts” listed above is even close to being true.
Aside, unfortunately, for the lynching part.
What really happened was more of what we now call "shocking but not surprising." We touched on Cattle Kate's life in a previous article, but you can get the full story of the persecution of Ellen Watson at Strange Company.
