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2020/08/27

Neatorama

Neatorama

5 Gorgeous and Famous Comets Spotted on Earth in the Last 34 Years

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:51 PM PDT

Whether we've seen the beauty of a comet in motion through a telescope or shooting in the night skies, it's definitely a magnificent visual worth witnessing. Its tail of gas and dust discharge that shines brilliantly as it is moved by solar winds and sunlight pressure from the sun is worth a photo for all the world to see. And the history and schedule in which it returns can prepare us to snap our own little photos for our picture collage.

Click her for the full article

Humpback Whales Are Being Threatened

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

For over 30 years, Paul Knapp Jr. has been taking travelers out into the Carribean Sea to let them hear the songs of the humpback whales. He has guided some 4,000 people on these listening trips. Science and tech journalist Dyllan Furness is one of these people, and he writes about his experience over at Outside Online.

After 20 minutes, we reached Knapp's most reliable listening location, an indistinctive stretch of open water just west of a peninsula. Knapp cut the engine, plugged a hydrophone into a pair of boat speakers, and dropped the device into the water. "OK," he said as the cable ran through his fingers, falling to 50 feet below the surface. "Let's see if we hear anything."
Within seconds, a chorus of cetacean song filled the air—humpbacks emanating a series of elevated chirps and bellows and downward-spiraling moans. I'd listened to countless whale recordings in preparation for the trip, but they failed to convey how haunting the songs are in person. Knapp fell silent for a few minutes before rattling off guesses at the whales' numbers and distance from us—two or three of them, maybe three or four miles away.

Furness is lucky enough to have been able to listen to the humpback whales in person. But perhaps there will be no more humpback whale songs to listen to in the future, and that is because of human-made noise, as well as seismic blasts, which affect zooplanktons (a main food source for whales).

More about this story over at Outside Online.

(Image Credit: NOAA/ Wikimedia Commons)

It’s The Snyder Cut Trailer!

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

Ever since the release of Justice League in 2017, people have been asking for the director's cut, which is commonly known as the Snyder Cut. On May 20 of this year, Snyder himself confirmed that it will be released.

Just recently, the official trailer of Zack Snyder's Justice League was released, and fans are looking forward to the film, which will be shown sometime next year. The trailer features some muted scenes from the film, overlaid with the song Hallelujah.

(Video Credit: IGN/ YouTube)

Meet the Deadliest Marine Corps Recruit

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

Pfc. Austin Ferrell will most likely graduate from basic training in the US Marine Corps on September 4. He's already broken marksmanship records. Every marine is supposed to be a rifleman and Ferrell has already proven that he can deliver the lead on target with remarkable precision. The Marine Corps Times reports:

The new Marine scored 248 out of a possible 250 on Table 1 of the Marine Corps Rifle Qualification and followed it by a perfect 100 on Table 2, earning him the recruit record at Parris Island, South Carolina, under the modern scoring system.
Table 2, which consists of close range fire at multiple targets and moving targets, was added to Marine Corps rifle qualifications in 2005.

After a perfect score at 200 yards, Ferrell missed at 300, causing a loss of two points. But he once again scored perfectly at 500 yards. He was so good that some instructors were skeptical that his performance was real:

"I was told by the recruits in the pits that were doing my target that all of the drill instructors were over there talking to make sure I wasn't cheating … because they couldn't believe it either," Ferrell added.

Appropriately, Ferrell hopes to become a sniper.

-via Super Punch | Photo: Cpl. Shane Manson/USMC

A Brief History of the Mason Jar

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

With so many people staying at home, gardening is bigger than ever this year. Now that harvest season is here, more people are trying their hand at home canning, so much so that manufacturers are having a hard time supplying enough mason jars. Luckily, I have plenty. If you're waiting on a shipment, you might wonder where they originally came from, and why they are named mason jars. That name comes from the inventor, John Landis Mason.

In 1858, a 26-year-old Mason patented threaded screw-top jars "such as are intended to be air and water-tight." The earliest mason jars were made from transparent aqua glass, and are often referred to by collectors as "Crowleytown Jars," as many believe they were first produced in the New Jersey village of Crowleytown. Unfortunately for Mason, he neglected to patent the rest of his invention—the rubber ring on the underside of the flat metal lids that is critical to the airtight seal, and made wax unnecessary—until 1868, a full decade later. By this point, mason jars were being manufactured widely. Mason tried to regain control of his invention, but after various court cases and failed business partnerships he was edged out. He died in 1902, allegedly penniless.

The jars' history continues with the Ball brothers and the rise and fall of home canning through different eras, at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Northwestern University Libraries)

10 Epic Sign Language Interpreters at Metal Shows

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT



Sign language interpreters are an integral part of press conferences, speeches, and concerts. Even metal concerts. The best ones know their work intimately and also really get into the music, as you can see. Some song lyrics are NSFW. -via Digg

The Zero-Armed Bandit Game

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

Alan Bellows of Damn Interesting is offering up a browser game that may drive you crazy. The object is to diffuse a bomb by flipping levers in a certain order, but there are 28 levers and if you make one wrong move, the whole building explodes. I don't know what happens if you win, because I've blown up the building every time so far.

The occasion for the game launch is to commemorate an article published exactly five years ago about an incident that occurred exactly 40 years ago. In August of 1980, a mysterious machine appeared in the back area of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It was a metal box with 28 toggle switches on its face. A nearby note explained that it was a bomb. The writer demanded three million dollars to be delivered in an extremely convoluted way, or the bomb would be detonated. Examination proved the device to be quite complex, and unable to be moved safely. Before long, authorities involved included the bomb squad from the local sheriff's office, plus "FBI Special Agents, the local Fire Chief, the state Fire Marshal, a military bomb disposal squad, representatives from the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, and scientists from both the Naval Surface Warfare Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory." As far as the delivery of the ransom, well, the very complexity of the instructions caused that operation to go awry. The Zero-Armed Bandit is a fascinating true story that would make a good movie.

Do You Know How To Breathe Well?

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 10:25 PM PDT

Aimee Hartley believed that she knew how to breathe. After all, that's what she has been doing all her life. Aside from that, she was also a yoga teacher, and yoga is a practice which involves breathing exercises.

But then she took a lesson with a breathing coach, who told her where she was going wrong. He pointed out she wasn't taking the air into her lower lungs but was, she says, an "upper chest breather. He then taught me this conscious breathing and I felt my lower belly open, and I felt myself breathing a lot better after just one session. So I then became fascinated by how we breathe."

Now, Hartley is a Transformational Breath Coach, passing on to people what she had learned about breathwork.

These are exercises that promise to help us become better breathers, which, it is claimed by practitioners, can transform our physical and mental health by improving immune function, sleep, digestion and respiratory conditions, and reducing blood pressure and anxiety (or transporting you to a higher realm of consciousness, if that is your thing).
There is little high-quality research to back up many of these claims, although it has become widely accepted that diaphragmatic breathing (engaging the large muscle between the chest and abdomen to take bigger, deeper lungfuls of air) can reduce feelings of stress and anxiety – and the NHS recommends this for stress relief. 

So how do we breathe well? See the steps over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: alfcermed/ Pixabay)

Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:28 PM PDT

In normal times, we are amused at the phenomenon in which people have a nagging question in their everyday lives which they try to solve in the geekiest manner possible. We call that "overthinking." In 2020, people have more time to indulge in those personal missions. Ethan Rosenthal is a physicist and a data scientist in New York City, so he's had plenty of time to think about his favorite sandwich, made with peanut butter and bananas.  

I start a peanut butter and banana sandwich by spreading peanut butter on two slices of bread. I then slice circular slices of the banana, starting at the end of the banana, and place each slice on one of the pieces of bread until I have a single layer of banana slices. Every time I do this, the former condensed matter physicist in me starts to twitch his eye. You see, I have this urge, this desire, this need to maximize the packing fraction of the banana slices. That is, I want to maximize the coverage of the banana slices on the bread. Just as bowl-form food is perfect because you get every ingredient in every bite, each bite of my sandwich should yield the same golden ratio of bread, peanut butter, and banana.

If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I'm not a sociopath. If life were simple, then the banana slices would be perfect circles of equal diameter, and we could coast along looking up optimal configurations on packomania. But alas, life is not simple. We're in the middle of a global pandemic, and banana slices are elliptical with varying size.

So, how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches? It's really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and "slice" the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread "box" into a 2D nesting algorithm.

Read how he did exactly that, in excruciating detail, in a study of the optimal way to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich. You could say it's bananas.  -via Metafilter

Spot the Bodypainting

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:25 PM PDT

 

There's a nude model in this photo. Do you see her?

 

How about this one?

Jörg Düsterwald, a German artist, is a master of bodypainting. He carefully covers his models with realistic paint and hides them in plain sight.

 

Düsterwald's whole Instagram portfolio is a wonder to browse. He does a lot more than camouflage images. His use of bodypainting covers a wide variety of artistic effects.

 

But it's his fairy-like hidden model images that I find the most striking.

-via Oddity Central

The International Garden Photographer of the Year Macro Awards

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:25 PM PDT



The International Garden Photographer of the Year has several competitions every year focusing on garden, plant, flower and botanical photography. Their main competition is open for entries until October 31. Other contests are held throughout the year, and recently they announced the winners of their macrophotography competition. First Place went to Bruno Militelli of São Paulo, Brazil. The picture of a rainbow lily above taken by Ecaterina Leonte was selected as a finalist. The tiny frog below was taken by Barbora Polivkova and won a commendation.



See all the stunning winners and finalists at the competition's website.  -via Kottke

"The Thief" -- A Sculpture of an Art Thief That Hangs from the Outside Wall of a Museum

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:08 PM PDT

If you visit the Olomouc Museum of Art in Czechia, be sure to check out an installation mounted on the outside of the building. It's a sculpture by David Černý of a thief attempting to escape from the museum with stolen artwork. Atlas Obscura fills us in on this funny work of art:

 The robber has a famed sculpture of Karel Nepraš in his bag, a tribute to the late Czech sculptor. The statue moves along the ledge once every hour. The voice used for the statue is that of well-known Czech singer David Koller, who is Černý's friend. 

The sculpture moves occasionally and can shout at passersby.

Photo: Michal Maňas

It’s A Smart Lock That Looks Like A Regular Lock

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:08 PM PDT

Want to open your door without using keys but don't want it to be obvious? If your answer was yes to that question, then you might consider having this smart lock called Level Lock that looks like a regular lock.

Some smart locks, like August, Kwikset and others, have distinctive hardware that's visible from the outside. Billed as an "invisible smart lock," Level Lock was designed with discretion in mind, according to a statement from Level Home. The lock itself looks like a key lock, but in fact can open by the touch of a finger, a vocal command or with a programmable keycard. You can also give others access to your home through the Level app, and approved guests can gain entry using their phone as a key.
The stainless steel deadbolt hides a CR2 battery within it, which can hold a charge for up to one year, according to the statement. Level Lock's accompanying app, HomeKit, can connect with both iOS and Android devices.

Unlike other smart locks, such as August, which costs $150, this smart lock is more expensive, costing $329.

I wonder if the accompanying app will remind you when the battery's low. I also wonder what will happen if the battery runs out.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Level Home/ Engadget)

This Dad Just Won A Competition For Recreating The McDonald’s Menu

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:08 PM PDT

Jamie Rust had nothing to do during the lockdown, and so he just decided to improve upon what he likes to do: BBQ. And so, when he, along with some mates, took on the Restaurant Challenge by Altons BBQ World, Rust gave it his best shot. The contest was simple: "replicate classic dishes from some of the biggest chains around, such as KFC, Nando's and Pizza Express."

… he didn't hold back, forking out £60 ($78) on the ingredients to make his own Big Mac, fries, Filet-O-Fish and apple pie.
In preparation, the dad-of one said he went down to his local branch which supplied him with the packaging so it looked a touch more authentic.
He said: "I cooked 99 percent of the whole menu, made my own Maccies uniform, and even made a custom Lego toy that looked like me with a set of tongs and a BBQ.
"The Sausage and Egg McMuffin and Chicken Legend were identical! Everything else was better than Maccies because of the fresh ingredients and seasoning."

Rust won with a score of 9.9/10. But the battle does not end here, as there's still the second round, where he hopes to step things up a gear.

The McDonald's menu took him 18 hours to make.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: LADbible/@bro.n.slo)

What Does The Queen Eat?

Posted: 26 Aug 2020 08:08 PM PDT

What does Queen Elizabeth II eat? How many meals does she have in a day? What is her "guilty pleasure"? What kind of food does she like? What kind of food does she hate? How does she act when she doesn't like the food? The Queen's former chef, Darren McGrady answers all of these questions in this article over at Independent.

(Image Credit: NASA/ Bill Ingalls/ Wikimedia Commons)
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