Adventure Time
King of the Hill
The Smurfs
Redditor TanBurn imagined Link from The Legend of Zelda as a character in several cartoons, including Family Guy, The Simpsons, Archer, The Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack and Bob's Burgers. You can view them all at the gallery link below. It's dangerous to go alone, so bring a few cartoon pals with you on your journey.
Discussion Thread and Gallery -via Nerd Approved
Rhiannon at Cakecrumbs loves science and baking. One would have to, to devote the time, skill, and artistry necessary to this Jupiter cake she made. Icing the atmosphere alone took eight hours! But that's not the extent of the realism. The inside of the cake is also as accurate as we know about Jupiter.
When my sister asked me what I was making and I said Jupiter, she said to me, “I didn’t even know Jupiter had layers.” It’s amazing how much we can forget after learning it in primary school. So here’s a rehashing for those of you who’ve also forgotten. Our knowledge is mostly theoretical of course, but the gas giants are thought to have a core comprised mostly of rock and ice. This is surrounded by a layer liquid metallic hydrogen, and the outer layer is composed of molecular hydrogen. *cake is totally not to scale
In cake speak, this translates to a core made of mudcake, surrounded by almond butter cake, surrounded by a tinted vanilla Madeira sponge. There’s a crumb coat of vanilla buttercream underneath the fondant.
Read more about the making of Jupiter, and see more pictures at her blog. Link -via Bad Astronomy
If being in an abandoned psychiatric hospital isn't scary enough, this one may drive you into madness. Herbert Baglione, a Brazilian street artist, added images of souls trapped in a hospital in Parma, Italy. He calls the project "1,000 Shadows." You can view more photos of it at the link.
Link -via Junkculture | Artist's Website
If you read old science fiction tales about Martian invasions and trips to the moon, you may think that you're reading obsolete works. But Frank Herbert, the late author of the Dune series, wrote that the genre reaches into something fundamentally timeless:
Science fiction, because it ventures into no man's lands, tends to meet some of the requirements posed by Jung in his explorations of archetypes, myth structures and self-understanding. It may be that the primary attraction of science fiction is that it helps us understand what it means to be human.
Which science fiction authors currently writing today do you think will still be widely read 100 years from now?
The following is from the magazine The Annals of Improbable Research.
Compiled by R.G. Briskett, AIR staff
Yawning has induced tremendous enthusiasm among scientists. These particular scientists are small in number, partly because funding for yawn experiments is rather limited. Despite the dearth of laboratories, equipment, professorships, or prize money dedicated to the subject, yawning can be of great appeal to an experimentalist. A yawn is rather mysterious-- a gaping, black hole that invites anyone -- anyone of a certain sensibility, that is -- to come, take a look, and take a poke at teasing out some of its secrets.
Here are a few of the many experiments that have been documented.
Yawning in Church and in School
Joseph E. Moore of the Jesup Psychological Laboratory at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee conducted several key experiments more than a half-century ago:
“Some Psychological Aspects of Yawning,” J.E. Moore, Journal of General Psychology, vol. 27, 1942, pp. 289-94. Moore’s key findings are revelatory:
In this investigation trained yawners apparently stimulated college students in assemblies and libraries to yawn as well as church goers in both the morning and evening services.
The phonograph record stimulated some of the blind subjects but few of the graduate nurses to yawn.
Motion pictures of a girl yawning seemed to initiate the yawning reflex in several students taking general psychology.
Yawning at Temple
Ronald Baenninger is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a former engineer, and is now editor-in-chief of the research journal Aggressive Behavior. Professor Baenninger has conducted a number of yawning experiments. Much of this yawning occurred in Temple students. One of Baenninger’s most basic experiments reflects an engineer’s appreciation of proper measurement. Because later experiments would depend on having students observe,
record, and report their own yawns, he performed a calibration. This gave him a gauge that was useful in later experiments. Details can be found in:
“Self-Report as a Valid Measure of Yawning in the Laboratory,” Monica Greco and Ronald Baenninger, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, vol. 27, no. 1, January 1989, pp. 75-6. The basic assessment technique was simple:
30 undergraduate students were assigned to 1 of 2 groups that recorded their own yawns either in complete privacy or videotaped through a 2-way mirror.
Having ascertained how much he could trust what his students would report about their own experiences, ProfessornBaenninger, together with his colleagues, threw himself into a full-bore examination of when, where, and why students yawn. The trio of Greco, Baenninger and Govern published its results in 1993:
When the woman sitting next to Steve Cullum on the airplane decided to use his arm as a pillow, he decided to turn lemon into lemonade by making the drooly experience into a little YouTube gold:
Minding my own business on a flight home, when I ended up in an extremely awkward situation. This lady was totally out of it. As soon as she sat down, she started falling asleep, and it only got worse as the flight continued. I tried lifting her up, shaking her, and startling her, but it seemed like nothing was going to work. So, I thought it would be fun to get some of it on video to share with family and friends. Then she finally moved... Only to find someone else for the last part of the flight. Ha!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Death and Taxes
Michael Carbonaro has been gone from home for 6 months. Watch Charlie, his cat, respond ecstatically upon seeing Michael return.
-via 22 Words
According to legend, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon traveled half the world looking for the Fountain of Youth. Little would he expect that such a thing may actually be gushing from a small green-tiled fountain on the sidewalk in a little town in Florida.
But before you rush to get a drink from the Fountain of Youth, you should know that the water is radioactive:
In Punta Gorda, a town on Charlotte Harbor, a blocky, green-tiled fountain abuts an empty lot near the harbor. A spigot juts out near the top to release water from the artesian well below. Each of the four sides features a picture of a ship, a tribute to Ponce de Leon.
On the side facing away from the street, a public health notice warns that the water "exceeds the maximum contaminant level for radioactivity."
The water from the well is also heavy in sulfates, which give it a distinctive smell of rotten eggs. This hasn't stopped the locals from drinking from it regularly.
"I drank out of that well every day," said Gussie Baker, a resident of Punta Gorda for all of her 78 years.
Jackie Snow of National Geographic has the fascinating story: Link
Mark Bryan paints lovely pictures, many of them with UFOs or aliens incorporated into pastoral settings. The encounter with Bambi has to be my favorite! See more of them at his website. Many are for sale. Link -via Boing Boing
If you've been around for a while, you probably know that all Mastercard credit cards start with 5, and all Visa cards start with 4. Beyond that, there's more math than you realized in credit card numbers. They are not randomly generated. For example, the last number is what's called a "check digit." It's there to make sure the other numbers are correct.
You don’t select this last digit, it is deterministic. The exact mathematic formula for its generation was invented by Hans Peter Luhn, an engineer at IBM in 1954. Originally patented, the algorithm is now in the public domain and a Worldwide standard ISO/IEC 7812-1
Obviously, with just a single check digit, not all errors can be detected (there’s a one in ten chance of a random number having the correct check digit), but the Luhn algorithm is clever in that it detects any single error (getting a single digit wrong), such as swapping the 9 with a 6 in the above example. It also detects almost all* pair-wise switching of two adjacent numbers. These errors are typical common errors people make when transcribing card numbers, so the check digit does a good thing.
An added side benefit is that, as discussed above, there is only a one in ten chance that a randomly generated number has the correct check digit. This provides a small amount of protection from hackers or poorly educated crooks who might attempt to randomly generate and guess credit card numbers.
See the formula for the check digit in action at DataGenetics, and more about how credit card numbers work. Link -Thanks, Nick!
While we speculate on what biological forms any extraterrestrials may take, several experts believe that we are more likely to encounter advanced forms that can reach out to us. Maybe even artificial intelligence. When any intelligent species reaches the point of space travel, it shouldn't be too long -on a cosmic scale- before they can build machines that are smart enough to both replicate and improve themselves. And travel through space.
“If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, then within 5 years, its successor is more intelligent than all humanity combined,” says Seth Shostak, SETI chief astronomer. “Once any society invents the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are at most only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of sentience to artificial intelligence,” he says.
ET machines would be infinitely more intelligent and durable than the biological intelligence that created them. Intelligent machines would be immortal, and would not need to exist in the carbon-friendly “Goldilocks Zones” current SETI searches focus on. An AI could self-direct its own evolution, each "upgrade" would be created with the sum total of its predecessor’s knowledge preloaded.
Read what other minds are thinking along these lines at The Daily Galaxy. Link -via mental_floss
This is what happens when Disco the parakeet (previously on Neatorama) tries to say "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Nobody expects a cheeseburger!
OK, technically this isn't a shirt, but just a small piece of fabric, but with embroidery as amazing as Catherine Rosselle's, does it really matter? Of course, when her works are shown in galleries, it must be pretty important to keep people from trying to crush the bugs with their shoes.
Link Via The Mary Sue
In 1994, the internet was still in its infancy. A fairly new software company called Netscape set up a live webcam, trained on its fish tank. It was only the second live webcam feed on the internet. In the nineteen years since, the tank has grown from 40 gallons to 600 gallons, the cameras have been upgraded, and Netscape took it offline in 2008. Within a year, Lou Montulli, the Netscape employee who originally rigged up the Fishcam, rebuilt the webcam site and brought it back online. You can enjoy watching the fish yourself, in living color during the hours that the lights are on (9AM to 7:30PM PDT). Link -via Geekologie
You’ll need more than a map and a shovel to find these cultural gems. But trust us, it will be worth the effort.
From 1885 until the Russian Revolution in 1917, Saint Petersburg’s House of Fabergé created 50 Imperial Easter Eggs as special commissions for the Tsar’s family. These baubles weren’t just encrusted with the world’s most precious stones and metals; each shell opened to reveal a “surprise”—anything from a ruby pendant to a tiny bejeweled train with working mechanics.
When Communists seized control of Russia, they didn’t have much use for these decadent symbols. In 1927, Joseph Stalin’s young regime was dangerously low on cash, so the Soviets decided to hold what amounted to an extended high-end yard sale. Foreign collectors snapped up the Fabergé offerings, and today only 10 of the 50 original eggs still reside at the Kremlin. Of the remaining 40, 32 are in museums or private collections. But eight have vanished entirely. Estimates value the missing Imperial eggs at as much as $30 million apiece! Whether they’re lost or residing in private collections, these Easter eggs are definitely worth finding.
Just a few years into his career, 24-year-old Alfred Hitchcock was already wearing a lot of hats. On 1923’s hastily produced The White Shadow, Hitchcock served as writer, set designer, assistant director, and even editor. Unfortunately, he didn’t reap much reward for all that effort. The film about twin sisters, one of whom was good while the other was—brace yourself—evil, quietly bombed at the box office. Before long, all known copies had disappeared.
That is, until 2011. In a twist straight out of one of his own films, three of the movie’s six reels turned up in New Zealand. The reels had been nestled safely in the New Zealand Film Archive’s holdings since 1989.
How did the British film stock end up on the other side of the world? Blame nitrate. In movies’ early days, reels of nitrate film circled the globe as a picture played in one country after another. Because the reels were incredibly flammable, transporting them was risky and expensive. And because New Zealand was often the end of the theatrical line, studios usually destroyed a film’s reels there rather than shipping them home.
One projectionist, Jack Murtagh, couldn’t bear to trash the art, so he built up a formidable collection of terrible films—including half of The White Shadow—in his garden shed. When he passed away, his grandson donated most of the shed’s contents to the Film Archive, where the reels sat patiently for nearly 22 years.
Surprisingly, the first half of The White Shadow held up quite well during its stay in Murtagh’s shed, but the last three reels remain lost—as do several of Hitchcock’s other early projects. Today, any one of those films would fetch millions of dollars on the market.
Contrary to what your history teacher said, Abraham Lincoln’s finest speech didn’t begin with the phrase “four score.” Instead, it was a thunderous antislavery oration delivered to the first convention of the Illinois Republican Party on May 29, 1856. Schoolchildren don’t recite these words for a simple reason: Nobody wrote them down.
It’s not clear how the text of the speech became lost, but the traditional explanation is that the speech was too powerful. Instead of transcribing Lincoln’s fiery words, entranced journalists forgot to take notes. The Chicago Democrat reported, “Abraham Lincoln for an hour and a half held the assemblage spellbound by the power of his argument, the intense irony of his invective, the brilliancy of his eloquence. I shall not mar any of its fine proportions by attempting even a synopsis of it.”
Some modern scholars have a different theory; they speculate that the speech was suppressed, not lost. Lincoln’s words may have been such an intense rebuke of slavery that their publication had the potential to shake a fragile nation. The speech’s reputation only grew as Lincoln’s national stature skyrocketed. Several “firsthand accounts” of the speech have surfaced over the years, only to be debunked, leaving historians hungrier than ever for an accurate transcript.
