Jakob Grosse-Ophoff is an artist in Rostock, Germany who uses a variety of media, including paint, but has become famous on the internet for his kinetic sculptures. These mixed media pieces amuse audiences while simultaneously commenting about human societies.
I'm especially taken with the broadly-named Humanity, which pokes fun at our tendency to destroy ourselves needlessly. Like most of Grosse-Ophoff's sculptures, the human form is rendered in roughly-hewn wood. I take this choice to present a timelessness to the human condition.
Music is much more than just sound. The proof of that is in the time Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf, experienced Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra and broadcast on radio. It was in February of 1924. She placed her hand lightly on the speaker, and was so moved that she wrote a letter to the symphony to describe what she felt. Her words are beyond poetic, and will make you want to listen to that symphony again, maybe with your own hands on the speakers. The letter is also a heartfelt thank you to the musicians who made that joyful experience possible.
Now we all get to experience what Keller felt, as Gillian Anderson reads that letter as part of the Letters Live! series. Anderson's comment about Keller being disappointed with her own voice saddened me. Every time I've heard Keller speak, I was impressed at how well she learned to do so, even thought speaking wasn't necessary for her to communicate. -via Laughing Squid
Many species of birds perform elaborate mating dances to impress females. Some species have dedicated places where they gather to perform such dances, so that many females watch as the males compete for their attention. These "arenas" are called leks. You might be surprised to learn that some dinosaurs also did mating dances, and they sometimes gathered in their own, much larger leks.
The world's largest dinosaur lek yet discovered is just west of Denver, Colorado, at a place called Dinosaur Ridge. The plateau is full of fossils, and by state law it is forbidden to walk on them. So when paleontologists identified some claw scratches from 100 million years ago on the sloping side of Dinosaur Ridge, they turned to drone imagery to investigate the rest of the site. By studying the aerial photographs, they found 35 more scratches made by moving dinosaurs. They could even tell what kind of movement produce those scratches, such as a back kick or a turn. Read about the ancient dinosaur dance floor on Dinosaur Ridge at Smithsonian.
What? An Honest Trailer for TheNaked Gun? How did I miss the movie at my local theater? I'm not losing it; this movie doesn't open until August first. It appears that Screen Junkies has really arrived, because the producers of The Naked Gun approached them about making an Honest Trailer ahead of time.
The Naked Gun is the fourth movie in The Naked Gun franchise, which are all sequels of the 1982 TV series Police Squad! It is the first to be made without Leslie Nielsen playing the main character Lieutenant Frank Drebin. Instead, Liam Neeson plays his son, Frank Drebin Jr. If you've never thought of Neeson as a comedic actor, well, no one thought of Leslie Nielsen as a comedic actor until he starred in Airplane! either. The Naked Gun appears to be a collection of rapid-fire dumb jokes like the earlier Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker films, ensuring that you have to watch it twice to catch them all. Does Screen Junkies like the movie? Considering how they got early access, you can foresee that they do.
The premise of Zillow Gone Wild is that there will always be eccentrically-designed homes for sale. That's why it keeps browsing for gems like this 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home in central Tennessee.
No, it's not a leftover from the Cold War or the Y2K scare. In fact, this bunker complex was built this year.
Kate Wagner at McMansion Hell has found a house that she couldn't help but deconstruct. It isn't a McMansion in the style she normally focuses on (although the interior certainly is), but once it was brought to her attention, the architectural choices demanded examination. The windows don't align in any shape or fashion, and no two of them match. The mishmash of sidings defies logic, as if the aim was farmhouse white trimmed in black but then some other stuff went on sale. The gravel yard is a little strange. But the overarching conundrum is how the designer's avoidance of any roof slope led to the weird mass above the balcony and the abundance of odd cornices. I am curious as to how rain drains off this building.
The asking price for this home is $539,500. The interior is strikingly monochromatic, if you can call gray a color, but the exterior lights up a neon blue at night. Once again, Wagner's takedown of this house caused me to look up a few architectural terms, but you'll get a kick out of it.
More people use the QWERTY keyboard today than ever before, whether you learned to type with ten fingers on a typewriter, two thumbs on an iPhone, or even if you type in anagrams on a bluetooth keyboard like I do. It's what we are all used to. But it's not the best layout, nor is it even mediocre. An efficient keyboard layout would group the most used letter keys together, and have vowels on one side, so that you'd be alternating your hands for most words. The problem is that learning a new keyboard layout is a lot of work.
So why do our keyboards start with QWERTY? For a long time, no one knew, because the Remington Company that produced it never told us. But we eventually figured it out, and the revelation is like finding out you've spent decades doing more work that you needed to. Half as Interesting is glad to explain that. The video is seven minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Damn Interesting
To be honest, we still don't know exactly when and where the wheel was invented. But the oldest archaeological evidence of a wheel used for transportation was uncovered in Budakalász, Hungary, at the edge of the Carpathian Basin. A bunch of miniature carts with wheels were found in a cemetery of an ancient mining community dated to 3900 BC. If these models were depictions of full-sized carts, they would have been quite useful in hauling copper ore out of the Carpathian Mountains.
When we think about how the wheel came about, we think of ancient people moving large items by sticking logs underneath to use as rollers. It wasn't an everyday occurrence, though, and was only used for object too big or heavy to be lifted by a team of men or dragged by draft animals. Still, rollers would be a help for miners hauling heavy copper ore. But how did rollers become wheels? Or more precisely, how did rollers become the wheel-and-axle used in the miners' carts? It probably wasn't one very smart miner who came up with the idea himself, but an evolution of sorts that went through several stages, each consisting of design, use, and incremental improvement. In other words, trial and error. Read how that process may have gone all those years ago at the Conversation. -via kottke
Drunken Master II was a 1994 Hong Kong film that was released in the US in 2000 under the name The Legend of Drunken Master (and that's when you say, "Oh yeah, I've seen that!"). The action/comedy starring Jackie Chan was critically acclaimed and made a ton of money for its time and genre.
The clip above is the over-the-top final fight scene. Is it fighting, or dancing, or a Buster Keaton comedy scene? Maybe it's more like Popeye, with alcohol standing in for spinach. Chan choreographed and directed this particular scene. He said that it took four months to film the fight scene, and a day's work might result in three seconds of finished film. There was no CGI, so yeah, he really did that stuff with the hot coals- more than once! Roger Ebert said, "It may not be possible to film a better fight scene."
In checking this post, I came across a couple of facts about Jackie Chan that are worth passing along. His father was a spy for the Kuomintang who later fled the communists, changed his name, and settled in Hong Kong. When Chan learned this as an adult, he changed his Chinese name to Fang Shilong (房仕龍), which would have been his name if history had not intervened. Chan has two Guinness World Records: Most stunts by a living actor and the most credits in a single movie. -via Metafilter
Propstore is gearing up for their Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction coming in September. The item that's been headlining the sale so far is the whip, belt, and whip holster that Indiana Jones wore in the 1989 movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The set comes with call sheets from a day of movie filming as well. Want it? It's estimated to sell for somewhere between $250,000 and half a million. If you are more of The Lord of the Rings type, you might want to bid on Sauron’s helmet from The Fellowship of the Ring. But neither of those are the biggest item in the auction.
That would be the lightsaber hilt used by David Prowse and his stunt double Bob Anderson in the Star Wars movies The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It's the prop Darth Vader used to battle Luke Skywalker. Yes, the one that cut Luke's hand off. The lightsaber hilt was fashioned from "a vintage British press camera flash handle" that was highly modified for looks. In use on set, it was fitted with a long wooden rod that was later fleshed out by the special effects team. It will cost you. The estimated selling price for the lightsaber is one to three million. Read about the prop and see pictures at Gizmodo.
In early 1942, the United States has just entered into World War II by way of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. President Franklin Roosevelt was ready to entertain any ideas for winning the war, no matter how crazy, from dazzle camouflage to building a nuclear weapon. One of the craziest ideas came from a Pennsylvania dentist who thought the military should deliver tiny incendiary bombs to the buildings of Tokyo by flying bats. Roosevelt approved the idea, and the Army Air Force granted Lytle $2 million to give up his oral surgery practice and make bat bombs happen. Lytle assembled a motley crew of misfits, just like in a movie, to design and test the bat bombs. The first step was to design bombs that were small enough for a bat to carry. Then they had to catch a bunch of bats. Sure, it was a crazy idea, but even stranger was the fact that somehow it worked. -via Kuriositas
David "DTJAAAAM" Ngo is a professional cosplay photographer who travels the world capturing images of the world's best costumes worn by enthusiastic performers.
At Colossalcon, he snapped photos of Macho Magnus, a cosplay merging the late "Macho Man" Randy Savage and the Transformer Ultra Magnus. Ohhhh yeahhh!
A black cat named Pepper is not a professional scientist, but he has contributed more to science than most cats. Pepper is a talented mouser. He belongs to Dr. John Lednicky, a virologist at the University of Florida's College of Public Health and Health Professions. Last year, Pepper dutifully brought a dead mouse to share with his human, and Lednicky took it to his lab for testing. The mouse was carrying a jeilongvirus, the first ever found in the US.
Now Pepper has done it again when he brought home a dead shrew. Lednicky again took it to the lab, and found the shrew infected with a previously-unidentified strain of orthoreovirus. Pepper was not listed as an author of the science paper, and was only acknowledged as "a pet cat." He deserves more recognition for his contributions. You can read about the virus-finding cat at the University of Florida Health site. -via Boing Boing
CTV News reports that police officers in a town in southeastern Wisconsin pulled over a car and performed a search of the vehicle and its occupants. Inside, they found a gun, drug paraphenalia, and, most curiously, a bag labeled "definitely not a bag full of drugs."
There were drugs inside.
The driver and passenger were arrested on various charges, including being a felon in possession of a firearm and possession of drugs.
I see from the photo that police also found a dice bag. It's appalling that carrying one could be considered a crime in the home state of the late Gary Gygax.
In 1952, a flying saucer was seen streaking by near Flatwoods, West Virginia. A group of seven people went to find the crash, and were confronted by a space alien, ten feet tall and wearing a metallic dress, with bright glowing eyes. They didn't stick around long enough to find out any more about it. Over time, other witnesses came forward who had also seen either the UFO or the strange being. Mind you, this was at the height of flying saucer sightings, and there were plenty of movies that featured space aliens in the early '50s. The Flatwoods incident drew more than its share of publicity and investigation, but no one could fully explain what happened. The original seven witnesses were in close agreement about what they saw, and logical explanations have come up short. The story became so ingrained that there is now a Flatwoods Monster museum in that town.
