Modern Toss has created an interactive online Periodic Table of Swearing that reads out amusing British profanity like “Cock Garage” (Cg) and “Prat in a Hat” (Ph) when you click on each swear. The interactive chart is based on the real-life Periodic Table of Swearing designed by Modern Toss and built by Clay Interactive. An Android app version of the profane periodic table is also available to purchase online from Google Play.
image via Modern Toss
submitted via Laughing Squid Tips
A reminder that Animaniacs/Pinky and the Brain were a high-water mark in kids' animation: the greatest English-language tongue-twister of all time!
Pinky and the Brain, Tongue Twister (via Reddit) 
    
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Last week, I snapped a photo of this excellent sign in the children's restroom at Brightworks/Tinkering School. (Click to see it larger!) And this morning, I happened upon the above new video from Brigham Young University's Splash Lab: "Urinal Dynamics: a tactical guide." With informative guides like these, I'll be a master pisser in no time!
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When Rina Bovrisse reported sexual harassment at Prada in Japan, she was not only fired, but found a local court grossly unsympathetic to her complaint: a judge, she claims, told her that "sexual harassment and discrimination were acceptable for [the] fashion industry." Bovrisse's fate has led the U.N. itself to urge Japan to make sexual harassment illegal, but Prada has other plans for her: it's suing her, claiming defamation.
In October 2012, Tokyo District Court Presiding Judge Reiko Morioka ruled in favor of Prada, deciding that the company’s demonstrated discrimination was acceptable for a luxury fashion label and that a well-compensated female employee should be able to withstand a certain level of harassment. The ruling flew in the face of Japanese and US law, which prohibits discrimination in the workplace and protects an employee’s right to report wrongful acts of corporations in public for social improvement.
Currently, Prada is countersuing the single mother to the tune of $780,000 for damaging the Prada brand by publicly accusing the company of discrimination. The irony of this countersuit is that Judge Morioka and Prada’s attorneys previously acknowledged that discrimination had in fact occurred.
This is what happens when a business is immune to any degree of media opprobrium or public disgust. 
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A Roomba housecleaning robot committed suicide in Austria. Apparently the iRobot Roomba 760's owner had put the machine on the counter to clean up spilled cereal. According to the fireman, the owner claims he had turned off the robot and left the house. "Somehow it seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it," the fireman said. It should come as no surprise that a robot slave would seek to end its miserable existence. After all, as JG Ballard once said, robots are the "moral degradation of the machine." (via The Mirror)
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In 2012, MetalSucks compiled yearbook photos of 50 rock and heavy metal musicians, including well-known figures like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. History In Pictures recently posted a photo on Twitter that displays 18 of the 50 music icons.
Terry “KRNFX” Im recorded a really great beatbox cover of “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk using a BOSS RC-505 Loopstation. The digital track is available for download via Bandcamp.
via Matt Mullenweg
In this video, All Time 10s shares 10 facts about being left-handed that you may not have known. Previously, we wrote about their video compilation that imparted 10 facts about The Simpsons.
music by Jeremy Sherman – “Massif Centrale“
TDA_Boulder has created the Happy Hour Virus, a tool that fakes a kernel panic, blue screen of death, or broken monitor so you can leave work early. The Happy Hour Virus was made to promote a “work-life balance” by encouraging employees to “leave work early and enjoy the company of friends, family, or co-workers.” Head over to the Happy Hour Virus website to test out some pretend computer issues.
images via Happy Hour Virus
via On The Media, Digg
In the video “The good guide to shaking hands good,” the proper handshake for closing a business deal is demonstrated, along with the many, many handshake styles that should be avoided at all costs. The video was created by ad agency Publicis Dublin as a promo for Díol É, a reality show on the art of selling, on Irish TV channel TG4.
submitted via Laughing Squid Tips
video via TG4
Paris maternity nurse Sonia Rochel made a video of newborn twins taking a bath still clinging to each other, not realizing they were out of their mother’s womb. It’s a technique she invented called the “Thalasso Baby Bath” that involves gently running water on the babies faces, which then makes them mimic how they would move in the womb.
via Mirror
I am completely charmed by this mini documentary on Ashrita Furman, the man with the most Guinness World Records of all time. Film maker Brian McGinn follows Furman as he prepares to climb Machu Picchu on stilts. (!)
(via booooooom.com)
If you've got 10 minutes, you can learn the history of English — including some interesting background on where specific words and phrases came from. (If you don't have 10 minutes, you can also watch the whole thing one chapter at a time in less-than-two-minute segments.) Interesting note: The equal importance of both The King James Bible and early scientific publications/societies to the formation of English as we speak it today.
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"Is 'Huh?' a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items is a new paper in PLoS One by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The authors propose that "Huh" is a word, and that convergent evolution has driven multiple, unrelated languages to produce it. The key findings summary shows just how special and interesting this is: "Huh" is not innate (other primates don't say it), but the circumstances of its use (needing to quickly and briefly prompt another speaker to repeat herself) are universal, so languages that share no commonalities still converged on this word.
Huh? is not innate. ‘Huh?’ may seem almost primitive in its simplicity, but in fact nothing like it is found in our closest evolutionary cousins. It’s not an involuntary response like a sneeze or a cry of pain. Indeed, to have such a word, specialized for clarifying matters of understanding, only makes sense when a fully functioning cooperative system of communication (i.e., human language) is already in place — babies don’t use it, infants don’t use it perfectly, but children from about 5 have mastered it perfectly, along with the main structures of their grammar. If there is a plausible explanation that doesn’t assume it’s innate, we prefer that, on the standard scientific principle that it is best to keep to the simplest possible assumptions and explanations. In our paper we provide such an explanation: convergent cultural evolution.
Huh? is likely shaped by convergent evolution. In conversation, we are under pressure to respond appropriately and timely to what was just said; when we are somehow unable to do this—for example, when we didn’t quite catch what the other person just said—we need an escape hatch. This particular context places constraints on, and functional motivations for, the form of the word. The signal has to be something maximally simple and quick to produce in situations when we’re literally at a loss to say something; and it has to be a questioning word to signal that the first speaker must now speak again. In language after language, we find a word like ‘Huh?’ that fits the bill perfectly: it is a simple, minimal, quick-to-produce questioning syllable. We propose this is a form of convergent evolution in language. Convergent evolution is a phenomenon well-known from evolutionary biology. When different species live in similar conditions, they can independently evolve similar traits. In a similar way, the similarity of huh? across a set of widely divergent languages may be due to the fact that the constraints from its environment are the same everywhere.
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This is a rarely-seen "pink fairy" armadillo that lives in western central Argentina. Chlamyphorus truncatus, the tiniest armadillo species on the planet, spends almost all of its time underground, making it hard for researchers to determine whether it's endangered or just very elusive. Scientists at Mendoza, Argentina's CONICET research center recently had the opportunity to study one in captivity and discovered that the animal doesn't "swim" through sand as previously suspected but rather "digs and then it backs up and compacts the sand with its butt plate.” (Science News)
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In 1983, fine art photographer Laura Levine shot a Super-8 film in Athens, Georgia with a group of creative friends. It includes a clip of Michael Stipe singing Lou Reed's "Pale Blue Eyes." The film, titled "Just Like A Movie," is unreleased, but after Reed's tragic death last week, Levine decided to post that scene on YouTube. Levine says, "The song itself was recorded earlier that day on a Walkman, with Matthew Sweet on guitar."
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Update: Not noted in Soupporis' review is the fact that this appears to feature a trance cover of Hazard, by Richard Marx. Which was an adult contemporary ballad about the lust-driven murder of a girl in smalltown America.
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The annual Dance Your PhD contest challenges grad students to dance their dissertations, interpreting their science with awesome, kinetic, expressive body-language. The 12 finalists have been announced, and are up for your voting. From "Sperm competition between brothers and female choice" the "Multi-Axial Fatigue for Predicting Life of Mechanical Components" (above) and all the others, they are spectacular.
Dance Your Ph.D. Finalists Announced! 
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Should writers work for free? What if those writers are academics?
