A Star Trek fan in Canada has been forced to turn over his personalized license plate after people complained its message, ASIMIL8, was insulting to indigenous people.
The distance between expectation and reality makes fools of us all, but it made the well-heeled attendees of an exclusive music festival in the Bahamas look particularly moronic late Thursday night. For tickets that started at $1,200 and went as high as $250,000, the young and rich signed up for passage to the doomed…
My name is Thomas Dambo, I’m a Danish artist who works with recycled materials. Over the last 3 years I made 25 big recycled sculptures around the world. Recently I made 6 hidden giants in my hometown of Copenhagen.
Show Full Text
The sculptures are found in some of my favorite places around the city, places where people don’t go to often, because it’s off the beaten track. The sculptures can only be found by using a treasure map, or a poem engraved into a stone near each sculpture. These give hints on how to find the different giants.
I’ve made all the sculptures from recycled wood. Mainly from 600 old pallets, an old wooden shed, a fence and what ever else I was able to scavenge. Every sculpture was made with the help from local volunteers, and each of the sculptures was named after one of the volunteers.
I hope my art will inspire people to see the big potential in recycling and taking better care of our planet.
Florence Schechter is the sort of person who gets a good idea, starts a project, and sees if it its sticks. “I like just going for things and seeing if they work,” she says. “I get upset if I’ve got a good idea and I can’t actually put it into action.” This outlook is what led her, after realizing that the world lacks a museum dedicated to vaginas, to start planning to rectify that omission.
There is a chain of events that led to this particular good idea. Schechter studied biochemistry but realized she likes talking about science more than doing science. After college, she started a YouTube channel so she could keep talking about science. (She also has started a science film company, Collab Lab, and does science-themed stand-up comedy.) One of her videos is about animal penises—she’s interested in mating behavior in the animal world—and as a follow-up she wanted to make one about vaginas.
When she looked for information about animal vaginas, however, it was hard to find. A friend had recently visited the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and Schechter thought, well, if there’s a penis museum in the world, maybe there’s a vagina museum that could provide some information about animal vaginas.
“And there wasn’t,” she says. So she decided to start one.
In her vision, a full-scale vagina museum should have permanent galleries dedicated to science (in particular, the anatomy of the vagina and its companion organs) and health, to domestic violence and female-genital mutilation, and to the vagina as portrayed in art and other cultural media. It should host events—comedy nights, dance classes, confidence workshops, and plays—and it should have programs for community outreach, in addition to offering support for charities working on vagina-relevant issues. Ultimately, the idea is to have a physical space where people can come to learn about and talk about vaginas and an institution that can be a force for good for all things vagina-related.
To start, Schechter is raising money and testing some of her initial concepts. In May, the Vagina Museum will present its first comedy night at a converted warehouse event space in London, and Schechter is starting work on what she hopes will be the museum’s first travelling exhibit, which will focus on basic anatomy and health. The Eve Appeal, a gynecological cancer research charity, conducted a survey of British women and found that only half of young British woman could locate a vagina on a diagram; the first job of the Vagina Museum may be simply to educate people with vaginas (regardless of gender identity) about their own bodies.
Creating a museum from scratch is a monumental task and can take years. The penis museum in Iceland began casually, as a collection of animal penises that grew over decades, until its owner decided to display his specimens more formally. Schechter has never worked in a museum, let alone started one. “I read loads of guides from the association of museums, and they basically said, if you’re thinking about starting a museum … don’t?” she says. “But it’s something I really want to do. It’s really difficult to dissuade me. I’m quite stubborn.” She has been soliciting advice from friends in the science communications community and plans to grow slowly, while learning more about what concepts work and don't work. To begin with, she imagines the audience for the museum will be young feminists, but thinks it could ultimately attract a wide audience. “The thing about vaginas,” she says, “is there’s just not a person in the world where it’s not relevant to them.”
There are people who don’t yet see the need for a Vagina Museum—a small minority of feminists, for example, are angry that such an institution would define women by their vaginas (in fact, Schechter is dedicated to making the project gender-inclusive and not defining people by anatomy), and predictably more conservative-minded people have questioned the need to make vaginas more visible in any way.
But, for the most part, the response she has gotten has been positive. In one feminist Facebook group, someone tagged their friend on a post about the Vagina Museum and wrote,“she stole our idea!” Schechter figures they must have thought up the idea over drinks or while hanging one day, and just never acted on it. “It was so validating to know that other people have had this idea,” she says. However out-there it might sound to some, the world needs, wants, demands a museum dedicated to the vagina.
In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
“Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!”
Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,” according to Katherine Grier’s Pets in America, being relatively easy to keep.
By the 1700s, a golden era of squirrel ownership was in full swing. Squirrels were sold in markets and found in the homes of wealthy urban families, and portraits of well-to-do children holding a reserved, polite upper-class squirrel attached to a gold chain leash were proudly displayed (some of which are currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Most pet squirrels were American Grey Squirrels, though Red Squirrels and Flying Squirrels also were around, enchanting the country with their devil-may-care attitudes and fluffy bodies.
By the 19th century, a canon of squirrel-care literature emerged for the enthusiast. In the 1851 book Domestic pets: their habits and management, Jane Loudon writes more about squirrels as pets than rabbits, and devotes an entire chapter to the “beautiful little creature, very agile and graceful in its movements.” Squirrels “may be taught to jump from one hand to the other to search for a hidden nut, and it soon knows its name, and the persons who feed it.” Loudin also waxes on their habits, like jumping around a room and peeping out from wooden eaves, writing that “an instance is recorded of no less than seventeen lumps of sugar being found in the cornice of a drawing-room in which a squirrel had been kept, besides innumerable nuts, pieces of biscuit.” Loudon’s advice: when your squirrel is not running around the room, provide it with a tin-lined cage that has a running wheel.
Leisure Hour Monthly, meanwhile, in 1859, advised to feed it “a fig or a date now and then,” and that you should start your squirrel-raising adventure with those procured “directly from the nest, when possible.” The unnamed author’s own pet squirrels, Dick and Peter, had the freedom of his bedroom and plenty of nuts to store away. “Let your pet squirrels crack their own nuts, my young squirrel fanciers,” the author wrote.
While many people captured their pet squirrels from the wild in the 1800s, squirrels were also sold in pet shops, a then-burgeoning industry that today constitutes a $70 billion business. One home manual from 1883, for example, explained that any squirrel could be bought from your local bird breeder. But not unlike some shops today, these pet stores could have dark side; Grier writes that shop owners "faced the possibility that they sold animals to customers who would neglect or abuse them, or that their trade in a particular species could endanger its future in the wild."
Keeping pet squirrels has a downside for humans too, which eventually became clear: despite their owners’ best attempts at taming them, they’re still wild animals. As time wore on, squirrels were increasingly viewed as pests; by the 1910s squirrels became so despised in California that the state issued a widespread public attack on the once-adored creatures. From the 1920s through the 1970s many states slowly adopted wildlife conservation and exotic pet laws, which prohibited keeping squirrels at home. Today, experts and enthusiasts alike warn that squirrels don’t always make ideal pets, mainly because of their finicky diet, space requirements, and scratchy claws.
None of this, of course, will deter the most determined squirrel owner. Fans of Bob Ross might remember his pet squirrel named Peapod, and some squirrels owners are rekindling the obsession by making their pets Instagram-famous. Still, wild squirrels surely agree—it’s probably best we’re now mostly leaving them to the forest.
An all-out war between two of Hollywood’s most terrifying extraterrestrials doesn’t seem quite as scary when you add Mr. Potato Head to the battle. One of them is going to get torn to shreds, but that just means you’re halfway to some delicious brunch-time hash browns.
I ran to the corner store this morning for an energy drink, I returned with five bags of Rap Snacks brand potato chips. That’s snackologist life. One minute you’re thirsty, the next you’re eating chips out of a bag with Fetty Wap’s face on it.
This is our Deluxe Sundial. This Sundial comes fully assembled complete with a mason jar to allow full control of the Sundial. You are able to manipulate the Sundial on any of its Axises to get the best results and adjust for Daylights Savings Time!
by Cecilia D'Anastasio on Kotaku, shared by Rob Bricken to io9
Today, cyberpunk card game Netrunner released a murder mystery expansion, Terminal Directive. It’s a novel twist on an already-fantastic game, and its first story-based campaign. The obvious question: How does a narrative of cyberwarfare unravel through a card game that requires shuffling decks? The answer is, slowly,…
In 1992, a group of archaeologists found something extraordinary buried below a sound berm next to the San Diego freeway in Southern California. They had been called in during a freeway renovation to do some excavation because the fossil-laced earth of the California coast often yields scientific treasures. After digging about three meters below the construction area, Center for American Paleolithic Research archaeologist Steve Holen was deep into a pristine layer of soil that hadn't been disturbed for millennia. There, he found what appeared to be an abandoned campsite, where humans had left stone tools and hammered mastodon bones behind. This wasn't too unusual; it's fairly well-established that humans were hunting mastodons in the Americas as early as 15,000 years ago.
But when Holen's colleagues used several techniques to discover the age of the bones, the numbers sounded crazy. Test after test showed that the bones had been buried more than 100,000 years ago. The result flew in the face of everything we think we know about the spread of humanity across the globe. It took 24 years before Holen and his fellow researchers were certain enough to publish their findings in Nature. Now, based on a reliable dating method using Uranium decay rates and years of repeated tests, the researchers say that an unknown type of early human lived in California roughly 130,000 years ago. If true, it completely changes the story of how humans reached the Americas.
Enlarge / Your first view of the teetering Finch house doesn't really do justice to its cluttered, circuitous insides.
The average big-budget video game story is a sprawling power fantasy quest focused on saving the kingdom/world/galaxy, told in fits and starts amid dozens of hours of often repetitive puzzles and challenges.
As far as narrative is concerned, video games as a whole usually focus on the epic end of the scale. So it's nice to come across a game like What Remains of Edith Finch, which tells a much more human and focused story that can be completed in a single evening. In an industry glutted with sprawling epics, Edith Finch is the equivalent of a tightly written short story collection packed with interesting ideas.
Stately Finch manor
As the game begins, the titular Edith Finch makes her return to Washington state's Orcas Island as a 17-year-old. She revisits the childhood home she hasn't seen since departing in a hurry one night years ago. Words from a journal Edith is writing flutter across the screen (and your speakers) as you explore the house, slowly filling in the story of an ostensible Finch family curse that Edith herself is just learning the true extent of.
Armed with a key bequeathed by her recently departed mother, Edith can now get into the rooms of her departed siblings, aunts, and uncles going back three generations. Those rooms were sealed when each family member passed on, a physical reminder of the metaphorical wall that separates Edith from the full knowledge of her past.
Night Trap is notorious for being one of the few games that brought about the creation of the ESRB. While its content is pretty damn vanilla and very PG rated, apparently its depiction of violence against women was so realistic and encompassing that it was corrupting our youth into repeating it. Clearly that never happened, but history is funny like that.
Regardless of the past, Screaming Villains is actually publishing a re-release of the cult classic by way of a remaster for PS4 and Xbox One. Dubbed Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition, it looks like very little is being touched apart from the interface. This is more of an archival piece, which I can definitely get behind.
At last, 5G wireless is here... sort of. As promised, AT&T has launched its pre-standard 5G network, starting with certain parts of Austin. So long as you have a Galaxy S8 or S8 Plus, you can get speeds that should leave LTE in the dust. Expect...
There are all sorts of luck-related legends surrounding smoking. Some people turn one cigarette upside down in each new pack they buy, making it “lucky.” Others believe that lighting three or more cigarettes on the same match will bring on bad luck. And then there’s the notion that using a white lighter is supremely unlucky, a superstition that has managed to thrive among smokers of all kinds despite being, well, pretty silly.
Even in 2017, it's not uncommon to encounter smokers who not only won’t purchase white lighters, but won’t use them to light things even if they belong to someone else. Some people don’t even like being in the room when one is being used. But how did this legend get started in the first place?
The most common origin story behind this myth is actually tied up with another popular urban legend. The so-called “27 Club” includes young artists and musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix—who all died at the age of 27. A number of superstitions revolve around the 27 Club, one of which being that those musicians, as well as a later addition to the club, Kurt Cobain, had white lighters on them when they died. They didn’t.
As told in a comprehensive debunking of the white lighter/27 Club legend on Snopes, the main reason this legend doesn’t hold water is that white disposable lighters largely didn’t exist at of the time of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison’s deaths. While disposable lighters weren’t unheard of, the lighter the legend is most associated with, the white Bic lighter, would not even be released until 1973. The Snopes article goes on to note that other than references to the myth itself, there is no mention anywhere of white lighters being present when these musicians died. In the case of Cobain, whose death was accompanied by a number of released photos from the scene, there were a couple of lighters, but neither of them was white.
“The people in the 27 Club certainly accelerated their own demise by their excesses, but as Aristotle said is necessary for any tragedy, the punishment is out of all proportion to the wrongdoing (if any),” says Dr. Adam Davis of the Missouri Folklore Society, who, despite never having heard of it before himself, looked into the white lighter legend at Atlas Obscura's request. “So at the core of the folk-belief, attached to furtive and not altogether wholesome pleasure, is a hint of carpe diem.” In other words, the white lighter legend, just like that of the 27 Club, holds a sort of mystique that makes the taboo behavior of smoking more romantic.
Another, more banal origin to the myth goes that in the early days of Bic lighters, they only came in two colors, white and black, and that the white versions more clearly showed evidence of illicit use. So when marijuana smokers would use white lighters to pack down their bowls, the lighter would get stained with ash and resin, which the cops could then use to bust them. Thus the lighters became bad luck.
Problem is, Bic lighters seem to have come in more than just two colors even in their earliest days—certainly a yellow version, which closely resembled the color in the company's classic logo, as seen in this 40th anniversary press release Bic put out in 2013.
Whether or not there is any truth to the folklore surrounding the white lighter is not really the point, of course, because to those who believe the legend, it simply is true. References to the myth can be found inweed forums across the internet, and some businesses, such as the marijuana-based subscription box service Pufferbox, avoid including them. “Smoking is ritualized behavior,” says Davis. “Ask somebody older about the prohibition against lighting ‘three on a match.’ Inexplicable prohibitions are part of the process by which we mark things as significant.”
In the end, if the accepted reasoning behind the white lighter legend is all folklore, why did white lighters get singled out at all? “Why white? Why not?” says Davis. “Same reason a white panel van without commercial markings draws grim jokes about serial killers—it’s a reminder that the ordinary, the innocuous, the unremarkable —these are the conduits and vectors of harm.”
Get to running, sexy promiscuous teens. Consider this fair warning, a chance for a head start. Jason's going on the prowl next month.
Developers Gun Media and Illfonic just took to Twitter to reveal that their highly-anticipated Friday the 13th game will release on May 26. The launch will be simultaneous on all platforms -- PC, PS4, and Xbox One. According to the description of the video that's embedded above, it'll be available digitally for $40.
Friday the 13th originally had its sights set on a Halloween-ish date in 2016, but that was pushed back in October of last year. The delay came with a silver lining, though; the developers announced a story campaign was being added to the game. Up until then, it was asymmetrical multiplayer only. It seems as if the plan is still for it to launch with just multiplayer, with the campaign being added in the months to come.
If Friday the 13th couldn't release near Halloween, early summer seems like a fine consolation choice. School's getting out, kids are free to run around doing whatever they please. This should make them think twice about enrolling at a summer camp.
When you watch this video of a loose tire in Turkey’s Adana province bounce out of nowhere, roll through the entrance of a pharmacy, find its way into a back office and slam right into one of the men seated there, you realize one thing: that wheel knew exactly what it was doing. Look at the focus and precision here.…
by Andrew Liszewski on Sploid, shared by Hudson Hongo to Gizmodo
Michelangelo’s David is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but would the artist have been as adept with a chisel were he working on a tiny copper penny instead of a giant slab of marble? Using a magnifying scope, artist Shaun Hughes managed to skillfully turn Lincoln’s head into a remarkably detailed skull.
AUSTIN, Texas—TV pilots ain't what they used to be, as the Netflix model takes much of the weight off a first episode's shoulders. Series can take their time revealing characters, unfolding plots, or even having much of the plot take place in a single episode.
Weirdly, the first hour-long episode of Starz' new American Gods series feels like a relic of that older era—in all of the best ways. This is TV built to stun, with equal parts momentum and cautious pauses, and it won't embarrass fans of its source material. The Neil Gaiman novel of the same name has no shortage of mystery, intrigue, and surprise in its first few dozen pages. Starz' take on the book manages to follow its every major plot thread to a satisfying degree, all while setting into motion a solid framework for how we should expect the modern-fantasy epic to unravel.
A cold-press juice company called Juicero was one of the top-funded hardware startups in Silicon Valley last year. It promised a $400 countertop juice-pressing appliance that squeezes healthy beverages out of proprietary bags, delivered to a person’s doorstep on a subscription basis for $5 to $8 apiece.
But now that the hardware has hit the market, some investors have been disappointed after figuring out that Juicero owners can squeeze juice from the proprietary juice bags by hand, without the $400 appliance.
Bloomberg reporters found that a little elbow grease yielded as much juice as the machine produced. They were “able to wring 7.5 ounces of juice in a minute and a half. The machine yielded 8 ounces in about two minutes.”
Last December, India’s Supreme Court banned alcohol sales within 500 meters (about a third of a mile) of national and state highways. Meant to reduce drunk driving, the law bothered many of the country’s hotel, restaurant, and bar owners, who saw only two choices: move their establishments, or lose vital revenue.
The employees of Aiswarya Bar—located 150 meters from Highway 17, in Kerala—saw a third option. A few days before the law went into effect, they began building a small maze out of prefabricated concrete walls, leading from the building’s entrance to the street. When they finished, the distance from barstool to road had stretched three times its original length.
“We have constructed an extended way to reach the bar,” Aiswarya’s manager, Shiju P., told the Times of India. “Now it is 520 meters from the highway.”
“A walk before and after a drink will actually be good for health,” a neighboring vendor, who is considering a similar strategy, added.
According to the Times, this solution was acceptable to excise enforcers. Once you’ve bent space and time, regular old state laws are easy.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
This is the Brazilian three-banded armadillo, one of the few species that can actually turn into a ball for protection! Their defense is almost impenetrable: the legs and ears are tucked in and the tail interlocks with the head to completely seal the shell. They are so well-armored that contrary to most other armadillos they don’t even dig burrows. The only predators capable of killing a balled armadillo are jaguars and cougars!
Let’s face it: We could all use a little Trek to balance out our Wars. Sideshow has unveiled its first Star Trek: The Next Generation Master Series figure for Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and it’s time to set phasers to stunning.
Fans don’t like to let their favorites go, but now they don’t have to. We live in a world desperate to remake, reboot, and flat-out return to beloved franchises, hunting the closest thing to a sure audience there is. But the more beloved these continuations are, they harder they are to get right. Fans want them to…
That's stupid. Somebody is gonna be raking it in on eBay cuz of this.
You won't see these new packages on store shelves after April, according to Nintendo.
Nintendo has announced that it will cease production of the 30-game NES Classic Edition plug-and-play system by the end of the month, even though retailers have been unable to keep the system on store shelves for pretty much the entirety of its six-month run on the market so far.
Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability. We understand that it has been difficult for many consumers to find a system, and for that we apologize. We have paid close attention to consumer feedback, and we greatly appreciate the incredible level of consumer interest and support for this product.
The representative added that the NES Classic "wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product. However, due to high demand, we did add extra shipments to our original plans." The NES Classic controller will also be discontinued, according to the spokesperson.
Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were loaded with pornography, a Windows proxy server, VPN, VOIP and anti-virus software, the Tor browser, password hacking and e-mail spamming tools, and the open source packet analyzer Wireshark.
That's according to a new report (PDF) from the Ohio Office of the Inspector General, which concluded that the geeky inmates obtained the parts from an onsite computer skills and electronics recycling program. The agency's IT department, according to the report, initially was alerted to a connected device, using a contractor's stolen credentials, that had "exceeded a daily Internet usage threshold." The computers were operational for about four months. After a three-week search, they were discovered above a training room closet in an area off limits to unsupervised inmates. Ultimately, the authorities traced cable from a networking switch to find the devices that were assembled with discarded computers from an Ohio aircraft parts company and an Ohio school district.
by Kristen Lee on Foxtrot Alpha, shared by Justin T. Westbrook to Jalopnik
I’m still flabbergasted as I’m writing this. First, that this story involves a tank collector. And second, that he found gold bars in an old tank that totaled about $2.5 million dollars at today’s exchange rates.
At last, 5G wireless is here... sort of. As promised, AT&T has launched its pre-standard 5G network, starting with certain parts of Austin. So long as you have a Galaxy S8 or S8 Plus, you can get speeds that should leave LTE in the dust. Expect...
