Talk about a garage sale find! A New York family picked up a Chinese
bowl at a garage sale for $3 and found out that it's actually a 1,000-year-old
treasure worth $2.2 million:
The bowl — ceramic, 5 inches in diameter and with a saw-tooth
pattern etched around the outside — went to a London dealer, Giuseppe
Eskenazi, at Sotheby’s auction house in New York on Tuesday.
Sotheby’s said the bowl was from the Northern Song Dynasty, which
ruled China from 960 to 1127 and is known for its cultural and artistic
advances.
The auction house said the only other known bowl of similar size and
design has been in the collection of the British Museum for more than
60 years.
I know what I'll be doing this weekend: bowl huntin'! NBC News has the
story: Link
[Warning: auto-starting video]
High school drummers Nigel, Dylan, Matt, Elias, and Jordan won a school talent show with this routine. I don't doubt it a bit! They supposedly put the routine together in less than a week. -via Everlasting Blort
Once again the date is 3/14, known affectionately as Pi Day, a holiday in which to pay homage to the ratio of a circle to its diameter. To celebrate Pi Day, Brady Haran of Numberphile produced this video featuring Matt Parker measuring a big circle to calculate pi. With pies.
There are many traditional ways to celebrate Pi Day. You can:
The sale of Kinder Eggs has been illegal in the U.S. since 1938. We Americans learned of these wonderful chocolate eggs with toys inside them from European friends, and just had to be jealous, unless we traveled abroad. But that will change very soon with the introduction of Choco Treasures!
But first, a history lesson. In 1938, the FDA passed The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits “non-nutritive (inedible) object inside a candy.” Furthermore, the toys in Kinder and other such surprise eggs are also only safe for kids 3 and up, which violates the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s requirement that all candy-encased toys be safe for children of all ages.
But Choco Treasures are different. First off, each of the three different editions of Choco Treasure has its own collection of all ages toys, from the original chocolate eggs to sports balls to even a Spider-man-inspired egg, licensed from Marvel. Second, each egg features a specially-designed capsule that separates the two halves of the chocolate so even a small child can see the there’s something on the inside.
Choco Treasures should be in major retailers before Easter. Find out more about them at FoodBeast. Link -Thanks, Dominique!
Fifty years ago, a graphic artist named Harvey Ross Ball designed a smiley face on a yellow background to raise morale at his company. It was a hit, but neither Ball nor his company sought a copyright or a trademark.
In the early 1970s, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, owners of two Hallmark card shops in Philadelphia, came across the image in a button shop, noticed that it was incredibly popular, and simply appropriated it. They knew that Harvey Ball came up with the design in the 1960s but after adding the the slogan “Have a Happy Day” to the smile, the Brothers Spain were able to copyright the revised mark in 1971, and immediately began producing their own novelty items. By the end of the year they had sold more than 50 million buttons and countless other products, turning a profit while attempting to help return a nation’s optimism during the Vietnam War (or provide soldiers with ironic ornament for their helmets). Despite their acknowledgment of Harvey’s design, the brothers publicly took credit for icon in 1971 when they appeared on the television show “What’s My Line.”
In Europe, there is another claimant to the smiley. In 1972 French journalist Franklin Loufrani became the first person to register the mark for commercial use when he started using it to highlight the rare instances of good news in the newspaper France Soir. Subsequently, he trademarked the smile, dubbed simply “Smiley,” in over 100 countries and launched the Smiley Company by selling smiley T-shirt transfers.
That was a long time ago, but when Loufrani's company finally sought a U.S. trademark in 1997, they ran up against Walmart, who was using the symbol already. And what about Ball, the original designer? Find out all about the history of the smiley face at Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog. Link
We all know the periodic table of the elements from high school chemistry,
but have you ever wondered what the actual chemical elements look like?
Japanese chemist and photographer R. Tanaka is on a mission to photograph
the world's most photogenic elements and we dare say he succeeded with
flying colors.
Check out his website and
Flickr page
to see more wonderful images of the elements.
Six Scottie puppies named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Nigel, and Annalise get their goats milk in one circular dish. And this happens every time! A pup-etual motion machine? No, this one runs its course when the milk is all gone. -via reddit
Ze Frank is back with another of his "True Facts" videos, this one about the tarsier, which I have apparently been mispronouncing. As in previous videos in the series, the facts take a backseat to the pictures of the critters, to which Ze reacts the same way you do. Language just slightly NSFW. -via Viral Viral Videos
This
story underscores two things: the economic times we live in and the power
of pizza.
When a man wearing a black hoodie and a red bandana covering his face
entered a Papa John's Pizzaria in Helena, Montana, the clerk knew that
he was about to be robbed. But nobody expected what happened next:
The cashier started to comply, but then the intruder broke down crying,
saying he needed to rob the store for his wife and child.
“The clerk talked to him for a while,” McGee said, and
decided what the man really needed was some pizza, wings and soda —
to go.
Our little, er, large friend is just a baby, perhaps eight or nine months old. He fell into a well in Bundu, Jharkhand, India. The villagers went straight to work. After five hours of digging with heavy equipment, the baby elephant scrambled to safety. Hooray!
Fletcher had never seen snow before. He is surprised and puzzled, but immediately takes full advantage of the fun things you can do with snow. Taste it! Dig it! Throw it! Run in it! Jump in it! Find joy in it! -via reddit
P.S. The reddit thread makes it clear this was recorded in the UK, where they believe a couple of inches is a lot of snow and businesses shut down. Scandinavians puzzle over that, while Americans tell stories of how different states handle snow.
This magnificent building graces Huainan, China. The transparent violin contains a staircase that leads to an exhibition center in the piano. The Hefei University of Technology built it in 2007. It'd be a wonderful place to have a concert.
We almost never post full-length feature movies here, because even ten minutes seems long for a video, but this is extraordinary. Teenagers Jonason Pauley and Jesse Perrotta worked for two years to recreate the entire Toy Story movie as a live-action film using actual toys! They even got permission from Pixar for the production. I've only skipped around to see various parts, but those who've seen the whole thing say it gets better and better as you watch it. Read more about the project in a news story from the East Valley Tribune. Link -via Metafilter
Sir David Attenborough is a treasure, and not just to humans! The other side is illustrated by Rosemary Mosco of the comic Bird and Moon. Link -via Laughing Squid
