Ken is going to show us how to set a roof truss when you are by yourself. What could possibly go wrong? Well, first off, he's setting trusses alone. If there was any day to call your idiot brother-in-law, this would be the day, even if just to have someone available to call the paramedics. Also, he's not wearing a hard hat, and he turned his back on the unsecured truss.
Luckily, the paramedics were not needed in this incident -or else the video would not have been uploaded. And the garage was eventually completed, and not by one man alone. -via Boing Boing
Tom Scott has ended his tour of America and is back in Europe, finding places with interesting stories to tell us about. The picturesque town of Staufen, Germany, is one such place. A geothermal drilling operation in 2007 has caused the ground to swell up under the downtown area, and the buildings are cracking.
When the foundation underneath has moved, there's not a lot you can do for the buildings on top. Those buildings stood firm for hundreds of years, but in the last ten, they are crumbling. The problem is explained in depth in this article from the journal Geothermal Energy. -via reddit
In 1895, Joseph Demerath came up with a way to manufacture marshmallows in mass quantities, which made them affordable outside the upper class for the first time. This kicked off a marshmallow craze that lasted for the next twenty years or so -that is, if it ever went away. The Bunte Brothers were the first food producer to give away booklets of recipes to market marshmallows, and the custom spread to other marshmallow manufacturers who thought up hundreds of ways to use them in everyday cooking -including using them on sweet potatoes. Why this particular recipe became so popular involves an explanation of how sweet potatoes were prepared before marshmallows were available, which you'll find at Atlas Obscura.
Raleigh, North Carolina, was the site of the first Flat Earth International Conference a couple of weeks ago. A few hundred people traveled from all over to meet with like-minded people who reject the notion that the Earth is a ball hurling through space. They believe what they see -and the things they choose to read and watch on the internet. They see the Earth as a flat disc, with the Antarctic as an icy barrier that keeps us from falling off the edge.
BBC News spoke to several people at the conference about their reasons for attending. The next Flat Earth International Conference will be in Denver in November of 2018. -via Laughing Squid
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
"Turkey makes you sleepy" is a commonly accepted, although false belief that usually crops up most commonly during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
This is one I bought into for many years. I even had a girl tell me that eating some turkey before I go to bed would help cure my insomnia. We hear these "commonly accepted" theories, beliefs, or myths and because most of us are trusting or we hear them from "reliable sources," we swallow them (no pun intended). No real harm is done, just that we absorb a little more false data into our lives and our knowledge. Nowadays, we call it "fake news."
Okay, the story is that turkey makes you sleepy because it contains tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid, a protein which is very necessary to human bodies. And true, tryptophan, in certain amounts, can make you sleepy or drowsy. But the fact is that chicken and ground beef each contain almost as much tryptophan as turkey. Cheese and pork actually contain significantly more.
So why does turkey "seem" to make us sleep, especially during the holidays?
In this video experiment, Cut handed a baby to quite a few people who had never held an infant before. Watch their faces, and the awkward way they hold the child. Most found it a surprising experience. They all had different reactions when it was over. One contains NSFW language.
This is also an illustration on how different the world is with reliable birth control. Once upon a time, it would be difficult to find an adult who had never held a baby, because people had many siblings over quite an age range before they ever dealt with their own children. -via Tastefully Offensive
Dog pictures! They've been around a long time. The oldest art that depicts dogs has been dated to between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Some of the dogs in the rock carvings appear to be on leashes, and could indicate that dogs were part of a hunting culture of the Arabian Peninsula in the pre-Neolithic era.
The hunting scene comes from Shuwaymis, a hilly region of northwestern Saudi Arabia where seasonal rains once formed rivers and supported pockets of dense vegetation. For the past 3 years, Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany—in partnership with the Saudi Commission for Tourism & National Heritage—has helped catalog more than 1400 rock art panels containing nearly 7000 animals and humans at Shuwaymis and Jubbah, a more open vista about 200 kilometers north that was once dotted with lakes.
Starting about 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers entered—or perhaps returned to—the region. What appear to be the oldest images are thought to date to this time and depict curvy women. Then about 7000 to 8000 years ago, people here became herders, based on livestock bones found at Jubbah; that’s likely when pictures of cattle, sheep, and goats began to dominate the images. In between—carved on top of the women and under the livestock—are the early hunting dogs: 156 at Shuwaymis and 193 at Jubbah. All are medium-sized, with pricked up ears, short snouts, and curled tails—hallmarks of domestic canines. In some scenes, the dogs face off against wild donkeys. In others, they bite the necks and bellies of ibexes and gazelles. And in many, they are tethered to a human armed with a bow and arrow.
The image above shows the rocks with color enhancements to highlight the carvings. Archaeologist Paul Tacon cautions that the leashes in the images could be symbolic instead of a realistic representation, but if the animals were real, why wouldn't the leashes be? Read more about the rock carvings at Science magazine. -via Gizmodo
For a hundred years or so, there was only one known photograph of William Bonney, also known as Billy the Kid. Two years ago, a second one surfaced of the outlaw playing croquet at a wedding. Frank Abrams, an attorney in North Carolina, saw that story and thought about a tintype he'd purchased for $10 at a flea market a few years earlier. It showed five cowboys posing as a group. Looking through other pictures of the Old West, Abrams was shocked to see a resemblance between the man at the right end of the group and Pat Garrett, the lawman who ultimately killed Billy the Kid. That made him wonder if the man appearing second from the left might be Billy himself.
Believing that his tintype photo might show the foes in happier times, Abrams spent months consulting with forensic analysts and professors, who confirmed that the photo likely depicts Billy the Kid and Garrett, according to Kim Vallez of Albuquerque’s KQRE News. A handwriting expert in Texas also matched a signature on the image to ten known samples of Garrett’s handwriting, reports Terry Tang of the Associated Press.
The 2015 image of Billy the Kid was valued at $5 million. Experts believe that the new picture with Garrett could fetch even more money. Read about the newly-discovered photograph of Billy the Kid, and about the relationship between him and Pat Garrett at Smithsonian.
She wanted to say something nice about him, but it may be that she would have been better off saying nothing at all. I looked up "Pareto optimal" and went to Wikipedia.
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a state of allocation of resources from which it is impossible to reallocate so as to make any one individual or preference criterion better off without making at least one individual or preference criterion worse off.
So what she is saying is that he is the best he can be, considering what he has to work with. Not exactly high praise. She may as well have said, "Your feet don't smell too bad when you take a bath," except that he would have understood that easily. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Jean-Baptiste Chandelier is a professional paraglider and videographer. This video shows him flying in places one shouldn't go and performing stunts one shouldn't attempt -at least without extensive training, legal permits, a safety crew, and some prudent Photoshoppery.
It's a beautiful video, and will make you feel uplifted for a while. And in case you missed the many ad placements, Chandelier is sponsored by Adidas. The song is "My Silver Lining" by First Aid Kit. -via reddit
While the 2005 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was more faithful to Roald Dahl's book of the same name, it is the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory that people recall fondly. The story is the same, but Gene Wilder gave the Wonka character charm and affection not found in Dahl's version. If Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a part of your childhood, you'll want to learn more about the production.
7. The actor playing Grandpa George was nearly blind.
The actor had lost much of his sight thanks to an exposure to poison gas in World War I, so he was instructed to look for a red dot that would indicate where he was supposed to look when speaking.
6. The chocolate river was made from water, chocolate, and cream.
There was 150,000 gallons of this concoction used and by the end of the film it was starting to smell terrible because the cream had spoiled.
People giving parenting tips often come across as guilt-tripping, with the subtext being "You're doing it wrong." Reading this list, it occurs to me that encouragement, reassurance, and advice is much better given when people simply talk about their own experiences instead of telling you what you should do. We're all just doing the best we know how as we go along. Buzzfeed complied a list of reader-submitted observations about raising children and how it changes you (or most people, because there are always exceptions). They are spot-on yet hard to properly convey to someone who hasn't specifically asked about it.
1. That as your children grow, you'll miss the person they were.
"Where is that 3-year-old who crawled onto my lap to read books and covered the driveway with chalk art? Where is the 10-year-old who quietly drew for hours every night? Where is the goofy 14-year-old who told me hilarious stories about his day, every day? They're gone, forever." —Jessica Margolin
3. That for the most part, raising a child simply involves a lot of really boring tasks.
"Those moments of exhilaration or despair are real, but few and far between. There's no such thing as 'quality time', only 'quantity time' in which those extraordinary moments sometimes occur. I don't care about anyone who would 'take a bullet for their children' because we would all do that. What I care a lot about are the parents who simply show up every day. And the next day. And the next. Tying shoelaces, singing the f[*****]g 'Little Green Frog' song 50 times, keeping a running mental account of food intake to decide if the next meal should be heavy on the protein or fats or fiber, and smiling when their kids walk in the room even when they would kill for five minutes alone. Yep, these are the people who deserve an award for perseverance." —Imogen Moore
As to #1, the only thing you can do is to appreciate the new person your child continually becomes. And believe it or not, you'll eventually miss #3 ...a little. There are 24 of these observations in a list at Buzzfeed.
Sherlock Holmes, Jean Valjean, and the FBI can all trace their roots back to one Frenchman who turned a life of crime into a life of fighting crime.
SPLIT PERSONALITY
In 1809 a 34-year-old petty criminal named Eugène François Vidocq (pronounced vee-DOCK) was doing yet another stint in a French prison, this time for forgery. In and out of jail since he was a teenager, there were basically two Eugène Vidocqs: One was a hard-drinking brawler and womanizer who was quick to challenge any man to a duel. The other was a charismatic family man who had a knack for gaining people’s trust…so he could scam them. It was that persona that Vidocq used in prison to win the confidence of some of Paris’s most notorious criminals. And then he ratted out their plans to the city’s police chief, Jean Henry.
Why did the crook suddenly turn informant? For one, Vidocq was facing a long prison term and possibly the guillotine. But he was also growing tired of living life as a fugitive. He’d tried to go legit before, and this time he wanted it to stick. So after he proved his worth to Henry, in 1811 the chief arranged for Vidocq to “escape” prison, something he’d done for real many times before. After that, Vidocq became an undercover spy, working the streets of Paris. He burrowed into the city’s criminal underworld, often in disguise, and brought back what he learned to Chief Henry. The information he obtained put dozens of his former accomplices in prison …and sent more than a few to the guillotine. And he was just getting started.
In case you just can't wait for the Winter Games because you love watching people slip and fall, here's a Japanese game show that will fill that desire. Slippery Stairs takes the agony of maneuvering a world covered with ice and puts it relatively safely on TV. Contestants must climb a series of stairs that are not only lubricated, but slightly angled. At least they are wearing helmets.
The competition starts out looking like a normal, albeit slow, race, but quickly escalates into a human demolition derby. At about three minutes in, it begins to resemble bowling, with these guys as the pins. See, it doesn't matter that you're ahead of the pack when one false move can send you back to the beginning. The best you can do when that happens is to take everyone else with you. And even if you make it to the top, you will still look ridiculous doing it. -via reddit
Every year, New York City takes some restored antique trains out of the transit museum and puts them into service for a look back at the history of the Metro. This year, eight vintage trains will be running on Sundays from November 26 to December 24, for the same price as regular subway rides. These subway cars were built in the 1930s through the '70s, and have been restored complete with ceiling fans, vintage maps, and advertisements from back in the day. Subway riders get into the spirit and show up in period clothing, and often are willing to pose for pictures with the trains and riders.
