If you want to discourage your teenager from texting while driving, make him or her drive a car with a manual transmission. A driver who has to work the gearshift constantly must stay focused. Seattle's NBC News affiliate describes how one local family uses this approach:

Riley's parents took notice of all those messages about the risks of using a phone while driving - too many sad stories. And while they trust their son, they're not taking any chances. 

Riley has a smart phone, but when he gets in the car, it goes into a compartment. Blue Tooth?  That might come later. But the car forces Riley to keep one hand on the wheel, and the other on the stick, especially in city traffic. 

Link -via Jalopnik

(Photo: cmonville)

A vehicle at an impound lot in Kansas City had a surprise inside, but no one knew for almost a month. When an inspector went around to mark cars for auction on Monday, the puppy jumped up on the dashboard! Since the car was locked, lot employees called the police, who freed the puppy.  

What is known is that the 1990 Chevy Suburban was towed because it was abandoned April 8 on an eastbound ramp to I-70 from Van Brunt Boulevard and was blocking traffic, Rotert said. Police got the call at 10:08 p.m. and it was towed to the city tow lot at 10:45 p.m. Neither police nor the tow truck driver saw a dog, nor did tow lot employees.

The doors on the car were locked. Typically, when a car arrives at the tow lot with locked doors, employees take pictures of the outside of the vehicle and keep the doors locked. Rotert said they do not try to break into locked cars.

The dog was taken to a veterinarian, who estimated the emaciated pup was 12 weeks old, although the female, now named Kia, was the size of an 8-week-old. She had apparently survived on fast food scraps and cigars, but no one knows if she had anything to drink. The owner of the car came by the lot on May 1st, but did not have a car key and never mentioned a puppy. Kia is expected to recover and will be sent to a foster home before adoption. Link  -via Arbroath

(Image credit: The KC Pet Project)

If you give a kid your iPhone, she will ask you to use your camera. When you say okay, she will take dozens and dozens of pictures of other people's feet. Some will be her brother's feet.

Those feet will remind her of her feet and she will take dozens and dozens of pictures of her own feet.

Taking pictures of her own feet will remind her that she doesn't like wearing shoes and she will ask to take off her shoes. You will tell her no, but she will sit on the ground and take them off anyway. Your iPhone will be left laying in the dirt as you struggle to get the kids shoes back on.

Putting the shoes back on will remind the kid of feet and she will ask you to play with your iPhone.

(YouTube link)

Like many people, I watched Star Trek: TNG for years and never noticed how Riker sits down. And stands up. Jonathan Frakes is a tall guy with long legs, and was compelled to wear a jumpsuit uniform, so this might have been the easiest way he found to deal with chairs. Or it could be totally for style. But why did it take so long for anyone to notice? -via Metafilter

Approximately 40 bald eagles swarmed a Nissan truck parked in Unalaska, Alaska--the site of Japanese air raid during World War II. Guys, stop. They've been our allies for decades.

Coincidentally, there were bags of fish in the back of the truck.

Link -via Jalopnik

(Photo: KUCB)

Muscular dystrophy gives Nick Torrance added challenges at Pickney Community High School in Pickney, Michigan. But opening his locker is no longer one of them, thanks to the mechanical ingenuity of fellow students Micah Stuhldreher and Wyatt Smrcka. Nick can now wave his hand over a sensor on his wheelchair whenever he needs to open or close his locker:

They were told to tear off a locker door and figure out a way to open and close it. They originally installed a relay inside the locker, but it took up too much space, so they switched to a computer.

They originally used a key fob to activate the robotic device, which opened the locker, but they said Torrance wasn’t strong enough to press the button. So they switched to a sensor.

The two students won a $1,500 minigrant from the Society of American Military Engineers so other devices can be made.

Both plan to pursue robotics as a career.

Link -via DVICE

(Photo: Gillis Benedict/Daily Press & Argus)

Paraceratherium was a rhinoceros that lived around 20 million years ago. Standing tall with a longer neck, it doesn't much resemble a modern rhinoceros. The 15-20 ton giant is the subject of a new book by paleontologist Donald Prothero called Rhinoceros Giants. But it's not just about Paraceratherium. It's also a book about paleontologists finding evidence of Paraceratherium.

For more than the first half of the book, in fact, Paraceratherium only appears as scattered fragments that puzzled and inspired successive generations of paleontologists. Prothero recounts the lives of fossil mammal researchers such as Walter Granger, Henry Guy Ellcock Pilgrim, Clive Forster Cooper, and Zhou Ming-Zhen, among others, in detail before diving into the geological particulars of where Paraceratherium bones are found and where the giant fit in the wider rhino family tree. While a giant rhino without a horn might look odd compared to living species, Prothero points out that Paraceratherium belonged to a major and totally-extinct group of rhinos, and that most fossil rhinos don’t show any evidence of horns at all. Modern rhinos might look prehistoric, but they’re actually quite different from their varied predecessors.

Read more about this rhino and the book at Laelaps. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(YouTube link)

Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto appear together in an Audi ad. There are plenty of Star Trek references, of course, and even a bit of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" thrown in for good measure. Oh yeah, and there's a car, too.  -via @JohnFarrier

It's Teacher Appreciation Week. Cartoonist Jim Benton illustrates their work well. I offer my thanks to Mr. Walzer, my sixth grade history teacher, for showing me a new world.

In the comments, tell us about a teacher that helped you.

Link

So sweepy ... and soo cute! Watch Dexter the baby duck try to stay awake the best it could. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Laughing Squid

For a long time, I've suspected that much of the footage of the Battle of Hoth was digitally altered. Now physicist Rhett Allain gives me reason to have those doubts. He's crunched the numbers and determined that the AT-AT that Luke Skywalker allegedly destroyed was actually a model. How can Prof. Allain be sure? Because a real AT-AT would have taken longer to fall over:

According to this, how tall would the center of mass have to be in order to just take 3.5 seconds to fall over? It would just be about 9 meters tall. So, here are my options.

• The gravitational field on Hoth is not like Earth. I crunched the numbers (re-ran the calculation) and you would need g to be about twice the value of Earth’s in order to get a tip over time of 3.5 seconds (starting from 5 degrees). However, this would not agree with the falling Luke.
• The center of mass of the AT-AT is not where you think it is. This could be the case if the legs were super massive. Why would they be so massive? Who knows? (well, maybe George Lucas would know)
• The AT-AT is not 22.5 meters tall but instead like half that height. Of course, this wouldn’t agree with Luke’s fall time.
• The AT-AT didn’t actually tip over. Instead, it was an inside sabotage job by some disgruntled Storm Troopers. Wait, this wouldn’t explain the fall time.

So, you see there are some problems with this scene. I guess the only reasonable thing to do is to make a new version of The Empire Strikes Back. In this new version, the AT-AT would take another second to fall over. Sure, this might be a lot of work to redo the whole movie for just one scene – but think of all the new Star Wars Blu-ray sales.

The secrets are emerging.

Link

(Images: Lucasfilm, Rhett Allain)

You can experience elegance even on a simple park bench. Dutch designer Joost Goudriaan made this bench to look like an upholstered and padded Chesterfield sofa. 

Link | Designer's Website

Members of a women's club, the Parkham Women's Institute in North Devon, England, knew they were going to hear a talk about piracy at their meeting. So they wore pirate costumes, complete with eye patches and even a fake parrot. They were quite embarrassed when they arrived at the meeting and realized the speaker was Captain Colin Darch, who spoke of his experience as a hostage of a band of Somali pirates in 2008.

Captain Darch said he found the whole thing amusing and more like a scene from the Pirates of Penzance than anything like he had experienced while he being held hostage.

He said: “Of course I didn’t take offence or mind. It was more like the Pirates of Penzance.

“I must admit I quite enjoy giving talks to groups such as WIs. I am doing quite a few of them and it is a good way to flog my book.

“They were lovely ladies. They made me judge who was the best dressed which was a difficult choice. In the end I decided to choose the one with who had a fluffy parrot on her shoulder. Of course there weren’t any parrots near the real pirates.”

A good time was had by all. Link -via Arbroath

If you can discern anything at all from her obituary, Antonia Larroux had a non-stop sense of humor. Her paid obituary ran in the New York Times Friday and Saturday, although Larroux lived in Mississippi.

Waffle House lost a loyal customer on April 30, 2013. Antonia W. "Toni" Larroux died after a battle with multiple illnesses: lupus, rickets, scurvy, kidney disease and feline leukemia. She had previously conquered polio as a child contributing to her unusually petite ankles and the nickname "polio legs" given to her by her ex-husband, Jean F. Larroux, Jr. It should not be difficult to imagine the multiple reasons for their divorce 35+ years ago. Two children resulted from that marriage: Hayden Hoffman and Jean F. Larroux, III. Due to multiple, anonymous Mother's Day cards which arrived each May, the children suspect there were other siblings but that has never been verified.

But that's just the beginning. Read about Larroux's four oddly-nicknamed sisters, her overdue library books, and the "questionable choice" of a clergyman for her funeral. She must have been a delightful woman. Link -via Bits and Pieces

Los Angeles Times writer Hector Becerra picking strawberries. Photo: Al Seib

That clamshell of filled with sweet, ripe strawberries you just picked up at your local supermarket? That was picked by hand by migrant Mexican fieldworkers, who spent the daylight hours hunched over the strawberry fields in California.

It's hard work, but how hard exactly? Is it something that Americans can do? Los Angeles Times writer Hector Becerra found out by working a day in the strawberry fields: Link - Thanks Tiffany!