Tell us how many pizzas you want and where to send them. After that, your pizza fate is in our hands. All orders are fulfilled through Dominos. How your pizza is crafted is completely random, thus the whole roulette thing. We then calculate your order total and include tax, tip, and delivery. ENJOY? Maybe you will, maybe you won't.
Photo: The Sneeze.
In addition, engineers working with the plasma noticed that their cell phones encountered high levels of radio frequency noise—static—while they were in the same room as the experiment. It turns out that the plasma ring emits distinct radio frequencies. "That's never been seen before. We think it's because of the piezo properties of the materials that we used in our experiments," Pereira says, referring to the materials' ability to be electrically polarized through mechanical stress—in this case, the flowing of water.
They've got no idea what it might be useful for, but have already filed a patent on the method for genereating the torus. Commercial proposal: a pretty random number generator to replace the lava lamps in Cloudflare's HQ.
When the USA decided to retroactively extend the term of copyright, it deprived itself of free, open access to important cultural treasures that new creators could build upon as creators have done since time immemorial. (more…)
The 15 Second Horror Film Challenge is an annual competition run by a nonprofit (you have until Oct 2018 to get your entries in for next year). This year's top twenty has some entries that literally made the hair on my neck stand up, especially Luma Films' Good Night, which is an especially good take on a recurring horror theme. More of my favorites below. (via JWZ) (more…)
When Washington State legalized recreational marijuana three years ago, it created a licensing regime that was supposed to protect and encourage small growers, but the data shows that marijuana growing has consolidated into a few large suppliers, even as the price per gram has fallen -- and that the industry's embrace of exotic derivatives like edibles and concentrates is capital-intensive and inaccessible to small, independent providers. (more…)
More than a dozen major US airports are now covered in facial-recognition cameras, installed by the DHS to scan people departing on international flights without the legally mandated federal review process. (more…)
Britain is one of the most unequal countries in the world, thanks to the Tory-in-sheep's-clothing policies of Tony Blair, and the naked banker-coddling and brutal austerity of the real Tories who followed on from Blair. (more…)
If you get a spam email, simply forward it to sp@mnesty.com, and Spamnesty will strip your email address, pretend it's a real person and reply to the email. Just remember to strip out any personal information from the body of the email, as it will be used so the reply looks more legitimate. That way, the spammer will start talking to a bot, and hopefully waste some time there instead of spending it on a real victim. Meanwhile, Spamnesty will send you an email with a link to the conversation, so you can watch it unfold live!
The conversations are indeed posted live, and some are quite funny. It's fascinating how obvious it is when a spammer switches from their own bot to giving a human response, and satisfying to see them fooled.
Have you met Lenny?
Derek DeBrosse, a lawyer specializing in defending gun owners who get in trouble, has interesting advice for those who bear arms: don't carry a pink gun, and definitely don't carry a gun with the Punisher logo on it. Why? Because "the jury is going to see it."
Kind of obvious, when you think about it.
Erica Garner, the daughter of police brutality victim Eric Garner, died early Saturday aged 27. Inspired to activism by her father's killing, she suffered a massive heart attack on Christmas Eve and fell into a coma. ABC News:
Garner's official Twitter account, run by her family and friends since she became ill, asked that she be remembered as a mother, daughter, sister and aunt with a heart "bigger than the world."
Eric Garner was choked to death by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who had attempted an illegal chokehold while arresting Garner for selling untaxed cigarettes. Pantaleo was not charged with a crime despite the death being ruled a homicide, and video of the attack being recorded by a bystander. The NYPD settled the family's lawsuit for $5.9m to avoid a civil trial.
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/947119016296046592
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/947112573899563009
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/947156400958005254
https://twitter.com/NYCMayor/status/947150195162263552
Photo: The Root
Sometimes I think I've reached the end of the internet, you know, that I've simply "seen it all." Then a video of a humans dressed as sheep -- hunchbacked and bleating, no less -- pops up and I know there's plenty in this world left to surprise me.
This absolutely splendid "human-sheep shepherding" was performed by Toronto's Les Moutons, which is a special troupe within the CORPUS dance project.
Its description is as follows:
Reality meets fantasy in this wordless live installation that recreates a bucolic country scene in a typical urban setting. Travel to a strange & hilarious universe as CORPUS takes you through a carefully studied, surrealistic overview of sheep behaviour. Meet Julie, Marie-louise, Bernadette and César, 3 healthy ewes and a young ram. Routine activities include: shearing, feeding, milking and many more... This truly innovative performance twists reality in surprising ways and takes audience interaction to new heights!
To take a closer look at this mutton madness AND to see an awesome "sheep shearing," watch this performance of Les Moutons: https://youtu.be/CC2Qd3isCuA (reddit)
I'm so utterly charmed by these intricately-cut paper dresses by Ukranian artist Eugenia Zoloto (and, really, all her work). She has a few of these kirigami pretties up for sale on Etsy, starting at $250.
photos via Eugenia Zoloto
I replaced .@realDonaldTrump with his Disney animatronic figure and honestly, it's an improvement pic.twitter.com/o0G12K22bH
— Born Miserable (@bornmiserable) December 29, 2017
Twitter user @bornmiserable is putting their photoshopping skills to good use.
The $77 Pizzacraft PC0601 Pizzeria Pronto Stovetop Pizza Oven is a clever design: it's a stovetop oven that has a large thermal mass (thanks to a cordierite pizza stone) and other good thermal properties, allowing it to hit 600F in 10 minutes of pre-heating on your gas burner; it gets top marks in Wired's pizza gadget guide, too.
The web blew up at the same time as the Reagan/Clinton/Bush financial bombs were detonating, leading to a huge private equity bubble in which super-wealthy Americans used debt financing and other forms of financial engineering to buy out successful companies, then hollowed them out, selling off their real-estate and plant, loading them up with debt, and raiding their reserve funds. (more…)
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani campaigned for re-election last year on a reform platform, and in the wake of his successful campaign, the police in the Iranian capital of Tehran have notified women that failures to adhere to the country's brutal religious dress-code will be treated as civil offenses and punished with fines, not jail sentences. (more…)
The early days of the Chinese national internet strategy were dominated by the 50-Cent Army, so-called because they were reputed to be paid 0.5 RMB for ever patriotic message they posted to social media; but as the volume of quackspeak astroturfing rose, the army's composition changed to patriotic government employees putting in extra time off the clock to support their country. (more…)
Until the GOP tax plan came along, rich people who donated to religious schools only get partial tax write-offs for their gifts, because the constitutional principle of separation of church and state obliged them to use special scholarship funds that were not under direct state control. (more…)
Eight of Trump's 17 cabinet secretaries do not release any information about their travel schedules -- a standard practice under the Obama and GW Bush administrations; 4 others only release incomplete, "sporadic" information; Treasury only started releasing Munichin's schedule in November and six departments illegally withhold details on who their cabinet secretaries meet with (two released some information after being sued). (more…)
Swatting is the practice of tricking police SWAT teams into storming your victim's home by phoning in fake hostage situations; it's especially prominent among cybercriminals, gamers and was a favored tactic of Gamergater trolls. (more…)
Google has long maintained that it must keep the workings of its search and ad-placement algorithms a secret, lest they provide a roadmap to the kinds of bad actors who'd like tweak the results and give their bad ideas (or sleazy products) pride of placement on its pages. (more…)
I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.
What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same. (more…)
UK Etsy seller Retromend (who specialise in vintage VW-related gifts) sell this Stranger Things-themed Upside Down doormat (coir fibers with rubber backing) for £20/USD27. (via Geeky Merch)
A friend asked me to follow the flow, and write this hashtag #metoo. Cavafi, the Greek poet who lived all his life by the sea and wrote about everything but the sea, before dying he said: Let me too say something about the sea. (more…)
Jay Malsky knew he'd never get close enough to Donald Trump to heckle him in person, so he did the next best thing, chanting "LOCK HIM UP, LOCK HIM UP" when the Trumpbot took the stage at Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents. (more…)
Zephyr Teachout's (previously) 2014 book Corruption in America is an incredibly important, timely book about the way that American policy and politics have been distorted by money, something that's gotten steadily worse as it is supercharged by (and supercharges) wealth inequality. (more…)
Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics. (more…)
Mr Bopposov, who is a cattle farmer, likes to make art out of the dung from his animals to attract visitors during the long Siberian winter. It is not the first time that he has created art to mark the Chinese New Year.
This appears to be an old photo doing the festive rounds again; I can find copies from at least 2013. The photo is credited to Narrya Bopposova (with an 'a') and appears to have been published by RIA Novosti, a now-defunct Russian news agency. [via]
Marvel is launching a website that allows visitors to create their own comics using the company's pantheon of famous characters. They insist, however, that certain topics not be addressed: social issues, death, farts, and so forth. You wonder: if the trap is so obvious, why walk into it?
Here are some highlights from the very long list of no-no’s:
“Content that could frighten or upset young children or the parents of young children.”
Prescription drugs or over-the-counter medication, vitamins, and dietary supplements.
Contraceptives
“Suggestive or revealing images,” including “bare midriffs”
“Sensationalism,” which is not defined but elucidated with the examples “killer bees, gossip, aliens, scandal, etc.”
“Obscenity, bad or offensive language” or “proxies for bad or offensive language.” E.g. no “X@#%!”
“Noises related to bodily functions.”
No politics, including “alternative lifestyle advocacies”
Death
“Misleading language”
“A copy or parody of current or past Marvel advertising creative”
Any “controversial topics,” including “social issues”
Double entendres
Any amusement parks that aren’t Disney amusement parks
Any movie studios that aren’t “affiliated with Marvel”
Guns
I can't wait to play with this.
https://twitter.com/alexdecampi/status/946554968504438798
The web came of age with no-holds-barred finance capitalism, so it's hard to decide which of the last twenty years' worth of changes are the result of the tech industry, or of financialization, or a toxic mix of both. (more…)
Church Clarity set out to report the policies and structure of America's churches, a project doomed to anger Christians. It results in "three explosive insights," which are fairly easy to guess: evangelical churches are universally hostile to LBGTQ people, 93% are led by white pastors, and 99% by men.
“Part of the reason we chose to release this now is because the New Year is a time when people decide to reengage with religion by attending church,” said Church Clarity’s co-founder Tim Schraeder. “As people of faith commit to new resolutions, we wanted to set them up for success by helping them make the most informed decision.”
Church Clarity’s leaders added that their decision to analyze race and gender in addition to sexuality also hints at the organization’s expanding mission. In the future, they plan to also report on race and gender inclusion among church leadership. So this is not the first time Church Clarity has created a stir, and neither will it be the last.
The trailer-trash myth took off after World War II, when soldiers coming back from the war were faced with a housing shortage. Much of the travel-trailer and mobile-home industry got its jumpstart at that time. Confronting the housing situation, a lot of returning servicemen chose to move into RVs and mobile homes, at least for the short-term. It’s unfortunate that our veterans were also then associated with this notion of being “trailer trash.” In the ’40s, people living in “regular” homes also looked upon those in RVs and mobile homes as “trailer trash” because they had to go to the outhouse or the campground wash facilities just to use the toilet. We have hundreds of postcards in our trailer-themed collection just about outhouses.
Trailers are stigmatized because the poor can afford them, and when the first generation of Tiny House dwellers start selling up in earnest, Tiny Houses will be stigmatized too.
This quiet genius from "SardineWhiskers" returns the sinister potential to Nintendo's love of midcentury charm. Make musak grim again!
Charlie Stross's keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg is entitled "Dude, you broke the Future!" and it's an excellent, Strossian look at the future we're barelling towards, best understood by a critical examination of the past we've just gone through. (more…)
Softbank's bid to buy Uber shares based on a valuation 30% lower than the company rated in its last round has been largely successful, with about 15-20% of shares changing hands at that price. (more…)
The Republican tax plan -- more than a 1,000 pages covered in last-minute scribbled annotations and pastebombs, passed without any substantial debate or analysis -- is a fucking mess. (more…)
Extreme housing prices in California -- driven by a combination of speculation, favorable legal/tax positions for landlords, foreclosures after the 2008 crisis, and an unwillingness to build public housing -- has created vast homeless encampments, but there's a less visible side to the crisis: working people in "good jobs" who have to live in their cars. (more…)
Trump won the election by welding together a coalition of racist rich people who wanted tax breaks and racist poor people who'd been living in Fox-induced terror for decades and believed the world was ending and thought that Trump would at least make brown people and liberals as miserable as they were on the way to total collapse. (more…)
When a billionaire Koch heir announces that he's taking a break from suing ex-fiancees to give back their engagement rings and playing tennis at Mar-a-Largo in order to produce designer shirts covered in money-bags, it's worth asking: did capitalism turn this guy into a useless asshole, or does capitalism find the useless assholes and shower them with money? (more…)
If you want to just shut yer mouth and let them think it, go to page 1933.
If you want to engage the dangerous mix of political obsession and ignorance, go to page 1789.
Posted by one Noah Nicholls to YouTube with the title "I was in a wedding and smashed my face," this video depicts the perfect ceremony. [via Reddit]
Britain's largest supermarket chain has refunded customers who said the Tesco turkeys tasted like they were soaked in bleach or were rotten.
https://twitter.com/Kirsten_Shore/status/945461819681968129
Among them was events manager Kirsten Shore, from Stafford. The 29-year-old was hosting eight guests alongside husband Dan. Her mother had bought and prepared the turkey which was kept in the fridge until it was cooked. She said it wrecked the meal, which had cost £250, and made guests sick. She took to Twitter to contact Tesco. Image caption Events manger Kirsten was one of a number of people to take to Twitter to complain about Tesco turkeys
She said: "I took a mouthful of turkey and spat it out. It tasted of bleach and everyone else realised the reason everything was a bit funny was because the gravy was made from the giblets.
Despite the official certification of Doug Jones' victory, a quick booting from the courts, pleas from fellow Republicans, and the sheer implausibility of his voter-fraud claims, Roy Moore continues to deny that he lost this month's special Senate election. Though losing by some 20,000 votes after teen sex assault allegations came his way, all that matters is God's truth.
“I have stood for truth about God and the Constitution for the people of Alabama. I have no regrets. To God be the glory,” the accused child predator said.
“Election fraud experts from across the country have agreed that this was a fraudulent election,” he claimed, offering no specifics.
“I’ve had to fight not only the Democrats but also the Republican Senate Leadership fund and more than $50 million in opposition spending from the Washington establishment.”
The obvious falseness of Roy Moore's denials on this matter should tell you a lot about Roy Moore's denials on other matters.
By crocheting over a piece of PVC pipe, Redditor Rancor_Emperor's (aka Sean) sister was able to crochet up a purple sweater for her brother's corn snake, Spaghetti. She gifted the long tube to the pet reptile on Christmas.
“She asked me how long he was, and I was like, ‘Well, he’s about 39 inches last time I measured him.’”Sean posted a photo of Spaghetti in the sweater on Reddit and it blew up, capturing over 152K upvotes. Rescue Snake Gets Special Crocheted Sweater For Christmas...When Sean first showed Spaghetti the sweater, he happily wriggled his way inside of it, according to Sean.
...“Right before he sticks his head out through the end, he kind of parks it in there and waits,” Sean said. “Then after a minute or two, he’ll poke his head out and he’ll sit there and look around for a while.”
One of the most magical places on Earth* is hiring. Weeki Wachee in Spring Hill, Florida is auditioning for new full-time mermaids.
Weeki Wachee Springs State Park is an attraction in Hernando County located near the intersection of State Road 50 and U.S. Highway 19. The attraction that opened in 1947 features performers dressed as mermaids and an underwater theater.Weeki Wachee Springs State Park will hold auditions Jan. 13 for what it hopes will be several new additions to its world-famous mermaid squad. Currently, the squad has 17 performing mermaids and three princes.
The Weeki Wachee mermaids perform underwater year-round in 72-degree spring water from the head of the Weeki Wachee river. The mermaid show debuted on Oct. 13, 1947, in the theater built of limestone and submerged six feet below the spring’s surface.
The park expects at least 50 women to come for the first, and most physically demanding, part of the audition...
On the first audition day, aspiring mermaids must complete a timed, 300-yard endurance swim, where they swim both with and against the water’s current. If they finish that successfully, candidates must tread water for 10 to 15 minutes...
Candidates will perform underwater ballet moves, like flips, a few feet below water in the park’s submerged mermaid tank that faces a 400-seat auditorium. The underwater audition shows how "comfortable" or "panicky" a candidate looks behind the glass...
Then, after the new mermaids are chosen, they must go under a year's worth of training. From getting SCUBA certified to mastering the underwater routines, the up-and-coming water nymphs are faced with some real physical challenges.
A feature in The Penny Hoarder describes these challenges:
...the Ferris wheel is the most difficult move. For this move, the women drop their hoses, grab each other’s tails and create something like a Ferris wheel as they swim in a loop.“It’s only about 20 or 25 seconds,” Madden [a mermaid] explains. “But you know you’re going to be the one who messes it all up.”
And because this is a natural spring, there’s a current, which can move up to 5 mph. The mermaids have to exert additional energy to stay in place.
Also consider the water temperature: a brisk 74 degrees year round. Some mermaids emerge from the water shaking uncontrollably after a show. They’re whisked away into the “hot room” so their body temperatures can stabilize.
But even through the difficult physical work, each mermaid said they love their job, especially the sisterhood bonds they’ve formed.
The bad news? Weeki Wachee's mermaids are paid a paltry $10/hour and must commit to working four days a week. Yikes.
*In my opinion Always wanted to be a mermaid? Weeki Wachee auditions set for Jan. 13 and Under the Sea: These Women Actually Make a Living as Mermaids in Florida
photo by Daniel Oines
An unidentified Wisconsin man truly had a bad hair day.
He's accused a barber of making him look like Larry from The Three Stooges, as well as taking scissors to his ear.
The Wisconsin State Journal reports:
A 22-year-old man went to Ruby’s Salon, 627 State St., on Friday to get the sides of his head shaved and an inch cut off the top, said Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain.Stylist Khaled A. Shabani, 46, began to twist the customer’s ear after telling the man he was fidgeting and moving his head, DeSpain said.
Then, Shabani snipped the man’s ear with a scissors.
“While it is not a crime to give someone a bad haircut, you will get arrested for intentionally snipping their ear with a scissors,” DeSpain said.
With the shortest possible attachment, the clipper was run down the middle of the customer’s head by Shabani, “leaving him looking a bit like Larry from the ‘Three Stooges,’” DeSpain said
"Larry" left to have his entire head shaved at another salon and the angry barber was ticketed for non-criminal disorderly conduct.
With the price tag at just $29, it's pretty safe to assume many people got Google Home Mini as gifts this holiday season. The always-listening, voice-activated "smart speakers" are just waiting for a command. That command starts with either "Ok Google" or "Hey Google."
It's easy enough for most of us to operate but what about for non-native English speakers? What about for people who don't keep up with the latest technology?
For Redditor Ben Actis' thick-accented octogenarian grandmother, it was a matter of barking "Hey Googoo," and excessively tapping on it. At one point, she actually gets it to tell her the weather and Google Assistant's female voice scares her a little.
How anatomically correct are animal emoji? Great question, people! And one that the folks at National Geographic News pondered. So they interviewed a bunch of biologists -- who, as one might have predicted, had pretty dim, if hilarious, views on the matter:
For instance, Anne Hilborn, a researcher studying cheetahs at Virginia Tech University, takes particular umbrage with the way Microsoft has given their version of a zebra emoji pink ears and nostrils. “Seriously? Even when zebras die of diseases that have them bleed from their orifices, their nostrils aren’t pink,” says Hilborn. Similarly, Hilborn says all the lion emojis are terrible representations. However, she deemed Samsung’s version the most egregious, with what appears to be “an explosion of shaving cream below the nose."
But, good news: Bird emoji seem to check out. Mostly! Caterpillars, bats, and leopards, not so much.
Old-school pagers are still in use today -- even though they're wildly insecure. The messages aren't encrypted, so each pager receives every message in its region, and simply discards all the ones that aren't meant for it.
The artist Brannon Dorsey leveraged this insecurity to create "Holypager", an art installation that receives all the messages being sent in Chicago, anonymizes them, then displays them on three pagers in an art gallery -- while also printing them on a huge scroll of receipt paper.
While creating this artwork, Dorsey has discovered that a substantial percentage of pager messages today are medical, with doctors and hospitals trading info about patients. This, as Dorsey notes, makes it all the more bonkers that such sensitive material is being transmitted in the open:
Given the severity of the HIPPA Privacy Act, one would assume that appropriate measures would be taken to prevent this information from being publicly accessible to the general public. This project serves as a reminder that as the complexity and proliferation of digital systems increase the cultural and technological literacy needed to understand the safe and appropriate use of these systems often do not.
A video about the project shows what it looks like in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KjYzzQ-iUU
Image used with permission of Brannon Dorsey
(Via Hackaday)
Foster Kamer has advice for people who want a better web in 2018: ditch Facebook and find cool stuff by checking bookmarks, visiting your favorite sites by typing their URLs in your browser bar, or searching for them on your favorite search-engine. (more…)
Fortunately for local shoppers, a manager at a Harris Teeter store in Charleston spotted a man squirting "a bottle of liquid with a bad odor like feces on the produce."
A police report suggested Hang was a contractor and was angry because he thought the store owed him money. A federal grand jury indicted Hang earlier this month on charges of attempting to tamper with a consumer product and tainting a consumer product to cause commercial harm.
And you were complaining about the Asparagus water.
Moore's attorney wrote in the wide-ranging complaint that he believed there were irregularities during the election, including that voters may have been brought in from other states. He attached a statement from a poll worker that she had noticed licenses from Georgia and North Carolina as people signed in to vote.
The complaint also noted the higher-than-expected turnout in the race, particularly in Jefferson County, and said Moore's numbers were suspiciously lower than straight-ticket Republican voting in about 20 Jefferson County precincts. The complaint asked for a fraud investigation and eventually a new election.
Moore lost by 20,000 votes. He's claiming they shipped in tens of thousands of out-of-state voters, got them all fraudulently balloted, and that none of them have since revealed the plot or how it was accomplished. It's an insane lawsuit, tailored exclusively to needs outside the courtroom: like a SLAPP, but instead of trying to deny public participation, it exists only to reinforce a media narrative.
The new GOP tax plan slashes the taxes on real estate investment trusts (REITS) by a quarter, dropping the rate from 39.6% down to 29.6% -- a move that will put tens of millions of dollars in the pockets of investors in America's notorious private prisons. (more…)
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a database of ER visits, which Barry Petchesky has mined to produce a list of the most interesting things we stuck in our bodies, sorted by orifice. (more…)
The DNC continues to struggle to raise cash, holding only $6.3M in the bank on Dec 1, compared to the RNC's $40M. But the numbers are deceiving, because 50% of the country want the Democrats to control Congress in 2018 (compared with 39% who want the GOP to retain power) and individual Democrat candidates are having banner years fundraising, especially the progressive, "Sanders Democrats" who break with the party's coziness with the finance industry and big business. (more…)
If you're an oligarch in the former Soviet Union, chances are you owe your billions to corruption and even overt criminal activity, and your ability to hang onto that money is entirely contingent on the sufferance of the even-more-corrupt strongmen at the top, like Vladimir Putin -- one wrong move and you may find yourself stripped of your assets (or even assassinated in broad daylight). (more…)
Knowing Microsoft's longtime sales chief Steve Ballmer, I thought I knew what to expect from this early ad starring him. But the sheer maniacal force of it means I've already had enough internet for the day, and it's not even 7 am.
NASA uses hundreds of thousands of gallons of water during launches to suppress vibration during liftoff: "a curtain of water around the engines to dampen the loudness of the test and protect the core stage from noise damage". Here's the system being tested!
Water flowed during a test at Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About 450,000 gallons of water flowed at high speed from a holding tank through new and modified piping and valves, the flame trench, flame deflector nozzles and mobile launcher interface risers during a wet flow test at Launch Complex 39B. At peak flow, the water reached about 100 feet in the air above the pad surface. The test was a milestone to confirm and baseline the performance of the Ignition Overpressure/Sound Suppression system. During launch of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, the high-speed water flow will help protect the vehicle from the extreme acoustic and temperature environment during ignition and liftoff.
As a youngster in England, my mental image of the roadrunner (Geococcyx Californianus) was just as the cartoon roadrunner (Accellerati Incredibilis) depicted. Almost as large as a coyote. An enormous blue bird of a size and weight approaching that of an emu, or ostrich. After moving to New Mexico, then, there came the inevitable moment of wonder and correction, when I first saw a wee bird sprinting along, and it dawned on me that I beheld the true form of the roadrunner.
But my dream of seeing a huge flightless bird fleeing from a knife-and-fork-weilding wolf in a napkin was not dead, and is now 50% completed thanks to this clip from Brazil.
Previously:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m3aDCmjwo
Armstrong Zoom, a northeastern US ISP with about a million subscribers, has sent its customers warnings that they have been accused of copyright infringement, and that subsequent accusations would lead to having their network connections slowed to the point of uselessness, which could impair their ability to control their internet-connected thermostats. (more…)
Katsuobushi (aka bonito) is dried, fermented and smoked tuna and it's incredibly hard. It's so hard that it's possible to fashion a shiv out of it.
To do so, you'll need a mandoline, an adjustable wrench, a metal file, a vise to hold it in, an oven, a whetstone and some patience. YouTuber kiwami japan shows the way.
You'll not only get a dangerous weapon out of the deal but also a big bag of bonito flakes (which are great for making your food look like it's moving). (SoraNews24)
Starting in 1980, spurred by popularity of the Rubik's Cube, UK-based Tony Fisher started passionately collecting "twisty puzzles."
Over the years, he's become quite the collector and inventor. All his "transformations" are really impressive. In fact, in 2016, he became a Guinness World Record holder for "World's Largest Rubik's Cube."
Well, now he has fashioned a fully-functional Rubik's Cube out of ice.
This is my Rubik's Cube made from 95% ice and it is fully functional. All 8 corners and 12 edges are solid ice. The 6 centres are 50% ice and the core is plastic. The screws and springs are regular metal ones. The puzzle shown is a first attempt and works surprising well. I am thinking about making others with full ice centres and also fully coloured ones.This video doesn't show how he made it and you'll see that the video footage is reversed in the beginning, making the melting ice seemingly "build" the toy. He does, however, write that he'll be posting the construction video soon. (Daily Mail)
Previously: WATCH: World record smallest 7x7x7 Rubik's Cube
