If you, like many people, have a fear of the open ocean and the many, many alien creatures it contains, prepare to be validated in the video above, which shows one squid's attempt to feed before another, angrier squid attacks.
The video, which was recorded by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), shows a long pole or line that can be seen dangling food in front of the camera. Then from from one side a small white squid speeds into view to eat it, but no sooner does the first squid wrap its tentacles around the bait, than a bigger squid envelopes the smaller squid out of nowhere, dragging it into the depths to be devoured.
The video, which was posted to CSIRO's Facebook page Monday, was captured by CSIRO’s deep sea research vessel, Investigator. Various types of squid are known cannibals, but it’s still shocking to see their aggressiveness and speed in the open water.
CSIRO did not immediately identify the variety of squid on display in the video, but it can be assumed that it's the bloodthirsty kind.
I don't give a shit about discussing the politics behind this. I just think the title of this article is hilarious.
The US military launched a missile attack on a Syrian airbase last night, and the President of the United States announced it by uncharacteristically invoking God three times in his three-minute speech. The baby known as Cold War II was conceived long ago. But last night, President Trump helped give birth.…
When Google determines that a search is worth a fact-check notice, that data will be placed at the very top of those search results. It will always tell users what the claim is, who claimed it, and what a fact-checking organization determined about that claim.
The trick is, you won't find these results unless you specifically type in an oft-repeated claim, as opposed to a question. If you search for the phrase "how many undocumented immigrants are in the United States," normal search results appear with a mix of answers and data points. Searching specifically for "34 million undocumented immigrants" will bring up a fact-check box that credits President Donald Trump with that claim, along with a direct link to Politifact's "pants on fire" fact-check rating.
I am a tad disappointed that Japan hasn't given us giant military robots yet.
The battle to end all bot battles is coming this August.
In 2015, a team of American engineers created the MegaBots Mk. II, a 15ft tall, 5,400kg, paintball cannon-armed mech of nightmarish proportions. Which is impressive and all, but the question was: why? The answer came in the form of a fight-to-the-death challenge issued to Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industries, which had built its own 13-foot tall mech called Kuratas, complete with touchscreen UI, Kinect-based interface, and twin BB gatling guns (customers could even order one for a cool $1.35 million).
One successful $500,000 Kickstarter campaign later—launched to get the Mk. II combat-ready—the battle to end all robot battles is finally happening, albeit a year later than originally planned. This August, the revamped MegaBots Mk. III will battle Kuratas at an as yet undisclosed location. The delay to the original duel was due to problems with the venue, according to MegaBots, so the location is being kept a secret for now.
MegaBots has been documenting the construction of the Mk. III over on its YouTube channel, and while the finished bot won't be be shown until May (somewhere in San Francisco), what's been teased is terrifying indeed. The Mk. III stands 16ft tall, weighs 10,000kg, and will sport an arsenal that includes a over-sized chainsaw and ripsaw. A recent video shows the skeleton of Mk. III picking up a car and waving it around in what appears to be a horrifying first-look at our apocalyptic future.
Uber has devised a "clever and sophisticated" scheme in which it manipulates navigation data used to determine "upfront" rider fare prices while secretly short-changing the driver, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit against the ride-hailing app.
When a rider uses Uber's app to hail a ride, the fare the app immediately shows to the passenger is based on a slower and longer route compared to the one displayed to the driver. The software displays a quicker, shorter route for the driver. But the rider pays the higher fee, and the driver's commission is paid from the cheaper, faster route, according to the lawsuit.
"Specifically, the Uber Defendants deliberately manipulated the navigation data used in determining the fare amount paid by its users and the amount reported and paid to its drivers," according to the suit filed in federal court in Los Angeles. Lawyers representing a Los Angeles driver for Uber, Sophano Van, said the programming was "shocking, "methodical," and "extensive."
Tattoo artist Mike Boyd inspires himself from early 20th century cubist painters to create fantastic and unique tattoos that will turn a part of your body into something you could find in an art gallery. For those interested, Mike works at The Circle tattoo shop located in Soho, London.
Wow. That is a huge move. And obviously excellent PR.
Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year’s worth of access to the company’s cloud storage service, Evidence.com.
In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to “Axon” to reflect the company’s flagship body camera product.
Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally—the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016.
There was nothing remarkable about the faux colonial escritoire, or writing desk, made from pressed wood and veneer, that Patrick Lyon bought in 2002 during a furniture purge at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. But several years later, during a move, he noticed some seemingly fragmentary scribbles in red ink on the underside of one of its drawers. They were short poetic fragments, some signed clearly, others cryptically: MICHAEL STIPE, G. Lee PHILLIPS, J. McK. “95”, t.g.
GINGER VODKA LAVENDER TEA LIFE IS GOOD BEYOND THIS MICHAEL STIPE
Lyon thought them interesting, but didn’t get around to investigating further until 2016. He had been considering retiring the aging, battered desk, and told his girlfriend, Cristin O’Brien, a police detective, about the markings. She consulted her brother, Param Anand Singh (who changed his name after converting to Sikhism), to help uncover the social history of the desk.
Leon Theremin’s Ashes Blown from the speakers Broken conductors G. Lee PHILLIPS
Singh, himself a poet, recognized Stipe as the lead singer of R.E.M., and speculated that the fragments might be song lyrics. “G. Lee PHILLIPS,” he reasoned, could be Grant-Lee Phillips, the singer-songwriter from the band Grant Lee Buffalo. With a little digging on the internet, he found that R.E.M. and Grant Lee Buffalo had played two shows together in 1995 in Landover, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. On Stipe’s Wikipedia page, Singh found a reference to filmmaker Jim McKay, the “J. McK” on the drawer. His sister found a handwriting sample from Stipe online and compared it to the text. And a search for lines lifted directly from the drawer led them to a book called the haiku year. The poems didn’t fit the precise form of traditional Japanese haiku, but they shared its brevity and interesting juxtapositions. It turns out Singh had stumbled upon an artifact of the first night of a literary phenomenon. “I barely got to sleep the night that we figured out where the drawer had come from,” he says.
Stale smoky sweatshirt covers the lampshade like a finished party J. McK. “95”
Last May, Singh posted a blog on the online literary magazine Real Pants to ask for readers’ help to connect him with the haiku authors so he could return what belongs to them. Days before he published the essay, the desk was blown from the back of Lyon’s pick-up truck and destroyed. But the drawer survived.
A collector immediately reached out to Singh about buying the drawer, but he wasn’t seeking reward or payment. “I felt like to sell the thing would be to cash in the magic,” he says. “I just didn’t want to be on that side of the moment.” In his essay, Singh wrote of imagining the poetry itself “exerting an inherent attractive power to reunite the poem with the poet.”
The essay soon was passed on to filmmaker Tom Gilroy (the drawer’s “t.g.”), who forwarded it to Stipe and McKay. “It was like a great detective novel poem,” McKay says. “The way the twists and epiphanies kept coming and coming.”
The radio landscape colors the room like fog t.g.
In 1995, Gilroy and a group of friends that frequently collaborated on creative projects had gathered at the Four Seasons and made a promise to write one haiku a day for a year and mail them to each other. They sealed their promise by inscribing their inaugural haiku on a piece of furniture. “I’ve been writing on the bottom of hotel room drawers for a very long time,” says Stipe.
Gilroy recalls, “The truth is we were so blasted that we were lying on our backs on the floor with the lights out. If we were lying on our stomachs you’d be writing an article about a guy who found a bathmat with haiku written on it.”
The friends dispersed, and kept their vow. Scrawled on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of discarded envelopes, and torn matchbook covers, these intimate poetic missives passed between friends, and eventually grew into a book project that was published in 1998.
the haiku year (Soft Skull Press) was an instant hit—fueled by the notoriety of its contributors: Stipe and Phillips, Gilroy and McKay, as well as novelist Douglas Martin, actress Anna Grace, and activist Rick Roth. The project spawned community haiku-writing circles and spin-offs, inspired authors such as Ellis Avery to produce their own collections, and further elevated a form of classical Japanese poetry in the mainstream pop vocabulary. The book even won a Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults award from the Young Adult Library Services Association in 2001.
Though popular interest in haiku has faded, every once in a while, a reader surprises Gilroy by referring to the book. “Now that surprise has been replaced by ‘of course,’” he says. The book inspired O’Brien, who does not usually write poetry, to take up a year-long haiku challenge, and start a haiku-themed fundraiser for the Child Advocacy Center in Watertown, New York.
“I’d thought of that night many times, about how it started the haiku journey. But I’d never once ever wondered what happened to the drawer,” says Gilroy. “I started crying. Of course. It was supposed to be found by a guy who would figure out what it was and return it to us. When those things happen you just have to give up to the awe.”
On a rainy Saturday morning in late 2016, Singh and Lyon made the five-hour drive from their town near Syracuse to Renssealerville, New York, to deliver the worn wooden drawer to Gilroy. “It was one of those merciful moments when the universe offers some unwarranted pleasantness,” says Singh. They talked about Brexit, filmmaking, bands, fame, Athens, Baltimore, Bernie, gun control, and upstate New York, and walked through the woods, past the ruins of an old mill. Gilroy gave them a box of objects printed with haiku—a bundle of broadsides, a screenprinted bandana and dishtowel, and a hardcover copy of the haiku year signed by all of its contributors. And though Gilroy quietly suggested—more than once—that Singh could keep the drawer if it had some talismanic poetic value to him, the discoverer seemed intent on the idea that, says Gilroy, “the journey should end with us and not him."
The world just hasn't been the same since Mitch's passing, but at least we are able to be continually blessed with his insight, wisdom, and unique brand of humor.
If you love action figures and medieval insanity (and who doesn't?), you need to make room in your display cabinets for these incredible recreations of figures from the paintings of 15th century artist Hieronymus Bosch. A famous late Medieval painter, Bosch's work focused entirely on Christian themes, often depicting heaven and hell in imaginatively lurid detail.
These delightfully demonic figurines are the creation of Parastone, a company in the Netherlands that specializes in 3-D recreations of classic paintings. They sell their wares in museum stores and Amazon. Bosch's work is perfect for them, not only because he hails from the place where they work, but also because his paintings are full of tiny details. Every person and beast in a Bosch canvas is so well-rendered that their diminutive contortions hold up to intense scrutiny. Most of these characters are taken from Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, but there are a few from elsewhere. (There's a great interactive tour of The Garden of Earthly Delights here, complete with helpful commentary on many of the images.)
In the United States, the most popular last name is Smith. As per the 2010 census, about 0.8 percent of Americans have it. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen. The estimate for how many people answer to it? Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s population. The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent.
In the U.S., an immigrant country, last names are hugely important. They can indicate where you’re from, right down to the village; the profession of a relative deep in your past; how long it’s been since your ancestors emigrated; your religion; your social status.
Nguyen doesn’t indicate much more than that you are Vietnamese. Someone with the last name Nguyen is going to have basically no luck tracing their heritage back beyond a generation or two, will not be able to use search engines to find out much of anything about themselves.
This difference illustrates something very weird about last names: they’re a surprisingly recent creation in most of the world, and there remain many places where they just aren’t very important. Vietnam is one of those.
The existence of last names in Vietnam dates to 111 BC, the beginning of a lengthy thousand-year occupation of the country by the Han Dynasty in China. (There were a few short-lived attempts at independence before the Vietnamese kicked the Chinese out in 939 AD.) Before this time, nobody really knows how the Vietnamese handled names, due to lack of written records. In fact even the name “Vietnam” comes from the Chinese; “viet” is the Vietnamese version of the word the Chinese used to describe the people southeast of Yunnan Province.
It is likely that the Vietnamese, prior to Chinese domination, did not use last names, (or family names, which we should call them, given that in Vietnam and many other places, this name does not come last). This does not make them unusual at all. Prior to the 18th century, much of the world did not use family names. More common would be what’s called a “patronymic” name, meaning your full name would literally translate as something like “Steve son of Bob.” Patronymic names refer only to the generation immediately before and remain common in much of the world, especially in Scandinavia and the Middle East. (Keep an eye out for “surnames” ending in “-sson” or including “Ben” or “Ibn.” Those are patronymic names.)
The entire idea of a family name was unknown to most of the world unless you were conquered by a place that used them. Those conquerors included the Romans, the Normans, the Chinese, and later the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the Americans. It was the Chinese who gave Vietnam family names.
The Chinese have had family names for thousands of years, sometimes indicating occupation, social status, or membership of a minority group. Well before the time of China’s occupation of Vietnam, the Chinese had a sophisticated system of family names for a pretty basic reason: taxes. “Under the Chinese colonial rulership, the Chinese typically will designate a family name to keep tax records,” says Stephen O’Harrow, the chairman of Indo-Pacific Languages and head of the Vietnamese department the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. “They used a limited number of family names for the people under their jurisdiction.”
Basically, the Chinese (and later the Romans and Normans) conquered all these places with all these people, and they needed some way to keep track of them so they could be taxed. But most of these places didn’t have family names, which made them a real pain to monitor. How can you be sure that you’re taxing the right Dũng, when there are a dozen of them in the same village and they’re referred to as “Uncle Dũng” and “Brother Dũng”?
So the Chinese just started handing out last names to people. They assigned these surnames pretty much randomly, but the original pool of last names largely came from Chinese last names, or Vietnamese derivations of them. Nguyen, for example, came from the Chinese Ruan. “My guess is, senior Chinese administrators used their own personal names to designate people under their own aegis,” says O’Harrow. This kind of thing happened a lot; the tendency of the imperialist to just bestow his name on the people he conquered can be seen everywhere from the Philippines (which has tons of Spanish last names) to the U.S. (where black Americans often have the names of the owners of slave ancestors) to the Indian state of Goa (Portuguese).
Ruan itself might come from an ancient Chinese state of the same name, or maybe from the ancient lute-like instrument also called a ruan. Who knows? Either way, it seems likely that some mid-level Chinese bureaucrat, in seeking to figure out who actually lived in his newly conquered Vietnamese territory, simply decided that everyone living there would also be named Ruan—which became Nguyen.
Oh right, let’s take a minute to discuss the pronunciation of Nguyen. If you search, you’ll find dozens of extremely confident declarations about the correct way to say the name. These are not wrong, necessarily, but a central problem is that, well, there isn’t really one correct way to say Nguyen. Vietnam has a few different dialects, with the biggest division between them being geographical, namely north-south. Southern Vietnamese tend to clip some of their sounds, so Nguyen would be pronounced something like “Win” or “Wen.” Northern Vietnamese would keep it, giving a pronunciation more like “N’Win” or “Nuh’Win,” all done as best you can in one syllable.
This has all been further complicated by the Vietnamese diaspora. In the interest of easier assimilation, Western given names are pretty popular—you may know a Katie Nguyen or a Charles Nguyen—but Nguyen, with a spelling that would immediately confuse Westerners, remains difficult. That “Ng” beginning is not a sound that Westerners are use to as an opener to a word. So there is a tendency to kind of let pronunciation slide, creating a whole new range of acceptable ways to say Nguyen. (After all, if someone named Katie Nguyen says it’s fine for you to pronounce it “NEW-yen,” who are we to argue?) But the key is that pronunciation of Nguyen varies pretty widely.
Back to taxes and bureaucrats. None of that explains why Nguyen is such a popular family name in Vietnam. After all, there were tons of those mid-level bureaucrats handing out family names. Why did this one become so popular?
Though last names in Vietnam are, thanks to that early period under Chinese control, much older than they are in most parts of the world, the Vietnamese never seemed to much care about them. They just never became a fundamental way that Vietnamese people referred to each other or thought about themselves.
“Vietnamese has no pronouns, like he or she or you or they,” says O’Harrow. Instead, the usual way to refer to somebody else is with something O’Harrow calls a “fictive kinship term.” Essentially, you refer to someone by their given name, and add some kind of family-based modifier which indicates the relationship between the speaker and listener. If you’re talking to our good friend Dũng, and he’s about the same age as you, you might call him Anh Dũng, meaning “Brother Dung.” To indicate age or gender differences or respect, you might substitute something like “aunt,” “grandmother,” or “child” in for “Anh.”
The last name, in Vietnam, is there, but just isn’t that important. And when it’s not that important, you might as well change it if a new last name might help you in some way. This may or may not be a continuation of the way names were used before the Chinese came—we really don’t know—but ever since, Vietnamese people have tended to take on the last name of whoever was in power at the time. It was seen as a way to show loyalty, a notion which required the relatively frequent changing of names with the succession of rulers. After all, you wouldn’t want to be sporting the last name of the previous emperor.
“This tradition of showing loyalty to a leader by taking the family name is probably the origin of why there are so many Nguyens in Vietnam,” says O’Harrow. Guess what the last ruling family in Vietnam was? Yep, the Nguyễn Dynasty, which ruled from 1802 to 1945. It’s likely that there were plenty of people with the last name Nguyen before then, as there were never all that many last names in Vietnam to begin with, but that percentage surely shot up during the dynasty’s reign.
Even this tendency to take on the last name of the ruler is not totally unique to Vietnam. The same thing happened in Korea with the name Park, originally the name of King Hyeokgeose Park, the founder of the thousand-year dynasty of one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Theoretically, all the Parks in Korea trace their ancestry back to that king, but after a peasant revolution in 1894, many peasants adopted the last name Park as a symbol of the abolishment of the caste system.
For Vietnamese-Americans, which number over 1.5 million, having the last name Nguyen is a complicated subject. “It's a signifier for being Vietnamese, but when 40 percent of the Vietnamese population is Nguyen, it doesn't really mean that much,” says Kevin Nguyen, a friend of mine who works as the digital deputy editor of GQ. “If I have kids, I don't really care if their name is Nguyen, because it doesn't really attach them to anything besides, maybe, 'non-white.'"
Kevin can’t really trace back his history using 23andMe or Ancestry.com or any of those sites, either. For one thing, 23andMe has such a tiny number of Asian DNA samples that it basically can’t get any information beyond “Asian,” which is not very helpful. “Even if I wanted to sign up for an ancestry-lineage type site, I don’t think it would get very far, because there’s just so little to go on with my last name, and there are no records of anyone past my grandparents in Vietnam,” says Nguyen. “I’d be interested, but I just don’t think there’d be a way to learn much more.”
But that tendency to trace one’s name has baggage attached to it that not all Americans will have considered. My own last name doesn’t seem to have existed before my great-grandfather came to the U.S. in the early 20th century; searches stop abruptly at the ship’s manifest.
“It's funny, when people are really specific or proud of their last name or heritage, it's almost a form of privilege,” says Nguyen. “Like sure, everyone cares about their last name, until you're persecuted and that line is broken.” Nguyen as a last name is a signifier of that persecution, from trying not to be seen as an enemy of the royal dynasty all the way back to the actions of a probably disinterested Chinese bureaucrat.
The first teaser trailer for Andy Muscietti’s It opens with the ultimate loss of innocence, when raincoat-clad Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) chases a paper boat right into the clutches of a certain sewer-dwelling clown. It only gets darker from there.
Well well, this is easily one of the more unexpected, ridiculous marketing ploys I've seen over the last few years. Though, my gut tells me this isn't the first time a company's tried to prey on the marketplace by catering the presentation of its food to the hornier consumers of the world. Their about page says it all...
Around 10 years ago, the Royal Canadian Mint, which produces both coins for regular use as currency and some designed especially for collectors, produced a very large coin, nearly two feet in diameter and over an inch thick, with a legal value of one million Canadian dollars.
The coin, like some others produced by the mint, was made of pure gold—at least 99.999 percent pure, the highest of any bullion coin in the world. It wasn't meant to be spent so much as to be looked at, and at 221 pounds, it's not exactly pocket change.
Since 2010, the coin has been on display at the Bode Museum in Berlin until, early Monday morning, it went missing. Thieves—likely more than one for reasons that should be apparent—snuck in through a window and made off with the prize around 3:30 a.m., apparently with the assistance of a ladder later found near some railroad tracks, according to the Associated Press.
Police didn't say much about who they think pulled off the heist, or if they had surveillance footage or other evidence, but it's safe to assume that whoever took the coin didn't take it at face value. The gold alone, at current market rates, is worth $4.5 million.
Ross Marquand who plays Aaron on The Walking Dead is not only a good actor, he’s also a GREAT impersonator. Check him out as he impersonates a bunch of a-list actors in the roles of characters they never played. His Christopher Walken in The Sixth Sense impression is just perfect!
Please note that the video below might take a few seconds to load!
by Andrew Liszewski on Sploid, shared by Andrew Liszewski to Gizmodo
A night at a local pub isn’t complete without a few rounds of darts, but as your blood-alcohol level rises, your ability to hit the bullseye greatly diminishes. Unless you’re playing with Mark Rober’smotion-tracking dart board that automatically repositions itself so you’re guaranteed to hit the bullseye every time.
Everyone on the internet is laughing at the new Mass Effect game.
It’s the animations, you see. The facial animations. And the walking. And probably the dialogue too.
The internet is merciless. Hours after the embargo for early impressions and streaming lifted and Mass Effect Andromeda has been reduced to gifs and memes and jokes.
Because that’s how we communicate in 2017. Look at this lot.
It’s like she’s got food stuck to the roof of her mouth.
Expect the memes and gifs to come rolling across the internet next week when the full game is released. This lot is just from the first five hours.
Remember, this is final code Electronic Arts and Bioware has sent out to reviewers, streamers, YouTubers and other influencers. This is the game you’ll be getting on launch day.
It’s not a good pre-launch marketing campaign is it? As pointed out in the video below by xLetalis, the facial animation in the original Mass Effect was superior and that came out ten years ago. It’s not looking good for your flagship RPG series to have fallen so low.
It doesn’t take much in 2017 to have your entire existence reduced to a meme.
Unfortunately that’s exactly what’s happening to Mass Effect: Andromeda a week before release. Maybe the internet will get bored and move on, but I suspect there’s plenty of material to keep the jokes alive for a long time.
If you want to check out Mass Effect Andromeda for yourself, the trial is now live on EA Access.
Imagine yourself enjoying an idyllic day at the beach: You’ve been sitting out in the sun for hours and are starting to get a bit thirsty. Do you feel compelled to reach for a bottle of ice cold water from the cooler, or a sudden urge to shotgun the nearest bottle of Coppertone? If you answered the latter, I have some…
Cult movie fans, give praise. Starting today, Shudder is streaming the long-elusive unrated version of Ken Russell’s legendary 1971 The Devils, starring Oliver Reed as a priest who’s accused of witchcraft, and Vanessa Redgrave as the hunchbacked nun who’s dangerously obsessed with him.
I don't want to dig too hard on the author's efforts to present a naturally testy topic to address as parents with your kids, but dude, this is definitely on the outter end of the spectrum. Too many clowns and wackiness and an overriding wtf-theme almost retracts from whatever 'lessons' this book might otherwise get across to the ever hungry curiosities of kids. I'm the last one to tell anyone how to parent their kids. That being said, maybe keep this book off the regimen.
In the not-too distant future (April 14th, 2017 AD), a brand-new season of crowdfunded Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes will hit Netflix. Before then, however, 20 classic episodes of the show have been added to the streaming service globally bot...
Alarms and flashing lights have begun blaring in a hotel meeting room, much to the chagrin of CIA Senior Collection Analyst David Clopper. The officer, along with a team of his colleagues, is in the middle of demonstrating his department's training materials, and he has to account for these materials before leaving the room. In some cases, this might require picking up a few stacks of paper, or some pamphlets and flyers.
Clopper, on the other hand, has to pick up dozens of 10-sided dice, over 100 colored gems, and hundreds of custom-printed cards that describe hypothetical crises across the globe. That's nothing compared to the mess of cards on the other side of the room, which, moments ago, were being used to track and capture the elusive drug kingpin El Chapo.
Have you ever been using your iPhone and found yourself wishing it was heavier and more prone to viruses? Well, have we got a gadget for you. In the same way that Reese’s Peanut Butter cups brought together too disparate worlds, the Eye Smart iPhone Case crams a whole other phone on your phone.