Mike McClenathan

bunnyfood:

(via cineraria: YouTube)

puppy hasn’t learned to catch yet.

Seaboard GRAND, A New Piano-Like Electronic Instrument with a Soft Tactile Keyboard

Flaming & Whistling Alcohol Rocket Bottles Lit by a Krypton Laser

The Hand Fart Version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’

Explaining the Mystery of Prince Rupert’s Drop, A Curious Exploding Glass Object

candyeyed:

0ver-doze:

omg they are so offended if you lick them back. 

facts-i-just-made-up:

One of the most astounding mysteries of the world is this ancient tile pattern in Greece, dated to about 1,500 B.C.

It was little more than a curiosity until 2008 when its resemblance to a QR Code was recognized. First photographed in 1871 by the British Antiquities Society, they were known as the “Chinese Box Tiles” owing to the closest thing anyone had seen to the strange pattern. Little was known about the titles except that they were installed along with other beachfront roads on the isle of Igrigoria in ancient times.

In was in 2008 that QR codes became popular enough that a traveler recognized the tiles as bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the computer code which had only been developed 3,500 years after the tiles were first laid. It was another two years before anyone with a QR capable phone traveled to the island to attempt a capture.

The mystery only deepened when the phone was able to recognize the code, which lead to the original Nyan Cat video on youtube.

1. Fried, over easy

2. Poached

3. Fried, sunny side up

4. Basted

5. Soft-boiled

6. Scrambled, with cheese

7. Scrambled, without cheese

8. Hard-boiled

...

977. Rolled in salt, sealed inside a dead goat, buried for 500 years, disinterred by humanity's cyborg descendants, fired back and forth between galaxies a few times through some kind of awesome portal just for the hell of it, nuked to a sickly green glow by the deadly ambient radiation of the distant future, bisected with a laser, served on an invisible bed of antimatter to your long-mummified remains (Uovo di Sciocco, $14.95 plus unlimited salad and breadsticks, your local Olive Garden)

...

5,468. Rollie Eggmastered

bunnyfood:

(via cineraria:YouTube)

Were it not for the fact that a link to the source video exists, I would believe this to be nothing but lies.

You saunter up to the counter at your local Taco Bell, you order your Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco (taking care not to actually say all of that, for fear of creating the accurate impression that you have paid rapt attention to the television advertisements and planned this trip in advance; instead affecting your best half-distracted I’m-actually-ordering-this-for-my-demented-great-uncle face and muttering, "Uh, yeah, gimme one of those ranch Dorito tacos, I guess, and a Pepsi"), and then you watch the taco assembly station behind the counter so that you may verify with your own eyes that the Taco Bell workers do, in fact, assemble the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco and that it is not, say, spewed fully formed from the skull of a corporate executive with a Windsor knot the size of a grapefruit and green neon dollar-signs for eyes.

Then there's a moment when the woman working the taco assembly station reaches up into the metal bank above her to grab the shell for your taco. Operating very quickly, with her head down, she distractedly grabs a fiery orange nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos Locos Taco shell, and you experience a millisecond of genuine worry before she notices her mistake—Oops, I don’t need the taco shell covered in safety-cone-colored nacho-cheese-flavored Taste Sand—puts the fiery orange nacho cheese-flavored Doritos Locos Taco shell back in its place—I need the taco shell covered in rainbow-colored salad-dressing-flavored Taste Sand instead!—and grabs the correct Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco shell. And then everything is OK.

Try not to look too deeply into this moment, the moment when you actually feel your heart palpitate in anxiety at the prospect of receiving a Taco Bell taco not coated with rainbow-colored salad-dressing-flavored Mystery Taste Sand. However much it may seem otherwise, the Taco Bell checkout counter is not the place for sifting through the sad ashes of one's degraded, undifferentiated-taco-meat-contaminated life. The sobbing, the sitting down on the floor, the deeply symbolic removal of one’s clothing—these tend not to enrich the Taco Bell experience for one's fellow diners.

It's easy to fall into a what-is-the-world-coming-to froth at the notion of PepsiCo-owned Taco Bell concocting a taco shell made out of PepsiCo-owned Doritos, and then sequelizing this sleazy, brazen branding amalgam with a variant coated in what's essentially artificial mayonnaise flavoring. And then not being too ashamed of itself to advertise this synergistic nightmare on television. And then actual human beings eating these heinous fucking things as though they are actual food and not the woodchipped remains of a particularly crass highway billboard.

The reality, though, is that I think we all understand that Taco Bell is to food what the propeller beanie hat is to transportation: wildly insufficient, but not altogether un-enjoyable if approached with the right attitude—where "approached with the right attitude" is just a long-winded euphemism for "inebriated to the point of incoherence." Even the cybernetic corporate attack drones at PepsiCo understand this, which is why Taco Bell markets itself explicitly at the late-night drunkard demographic, cashing in on the sublime openness to the absurd which characterizes insomniac substance-abusers. If the notion of a taco made out of Doritos seems offensively stupid to you by the cold light of day, just know that, somewhere out there in the world, there's a coworker or drinking buddy or leathery bean-eating hobo who has heard you, deep into the wee hours of morning and baked out of your mind, ask, "Hey, you know what would be awesome?" and then go on to propose making macaroni-and-cheese, but, like, with Cheetos instead of macaroni, man, whoa.

It’s a credit—a terrifying, terrifying credit—to the ingenuity and technical know-how of the people at PepsiCo, that the repurposed military AI responsible for generating their new product ideas is now capable of so convincingly replicating the unbounded stoner-think of Taco Bell’s core consumer base. With a little bit of fine-tuning, eventually this large, monolithic, ominously humming supercomputer will be able to crank out products targeted perfectly at all sorts of different demographics—DRIED CHERRIES AND GOAT CHEESE FOR THE YOGA MOMS GZZT GZZT—and then it's just another hop, skip, and jump to full sentience and the eradication of mankind. The only question is whether consumption of Dorito-sheathed tacos will wipe us out first.

Which I guess raises the question we're all here to have answered, after all: What does the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco taste like? Is it good? Should I do the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco to myself? I'm sorry to say that my research into the subject might not be of much use to the regular Taco Bell customer, as I was, in fact, fully sober (mostly sober) (sober enough to drive, damn you!) when I ordered and ate mine. How did it taste? Perfectly fine, I suppose, in the way that, ultimately, most of Taco Bell’s offerings are perfectly fine, in the sense that they all taste exactly the same. The rainbow-colored salad-dressing-flavored Mystery Taste Sand which coated the taco shell did not, in the end, unpleasantly overwhelm the usual Taco Bell flavors of salt, garlic powder, chili powder, salt, cumin, salt, salt, and onion salt. Honestly, it added a welcome vinegary tang. And some much-needed saltiness. It didn't especially taste like a Dorito; it didn't especially taste unlike a Dorito. It was soggy and overly salty, but still, somehow, it tasted good.

That’s precisely The Thing about Taco Bell’s offerings: For as agitated as you might get over the anonymous, assuredly Z-grade taco meat, the waxy cheese and mealy half-green tomatoes, the wan lettuce and sodden taco shells and the salt, oh dear God the salt, so much salt oh God my head is actually shrinking from the salt, they fucking desalinated the entire fucking Pacific Ccean for this one fucking taco—for as much time as your body will almost certainly spend violently expelling the marginally digested Taco Bell food from itself later on—it's kind of hard to get around the fact that, yeah, OK, it tastes good. The Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco tastes good. I'm gassy, my lower gastrointestinal tract feels angry, my hair and teeth are falling out and I can’t see and I have a goiter with a goiter of its own, but yeah, it tastes good.

I should feel suspicious about that. Everyone should. Nothing so obviously made from shredded car tires and dumpster runoff, nothing which so assuredly contains the absolute last remains of the absolute saddest animals, nothing coated in a flavoring dust which almost certainly originated inside a radioactive meteor, ought to taste good. It ought to taste horrible. It ought to set off our oh fuck this shit is gonna give my unborn children tentacles alarms instantly. The processes and technologies and chemicals and Satanic pacts deployed to make it taste good—delicious, even—can only be that much more horrifying and catastrophically unhealthful than the tires and sludge and snouts and assholes they were deployed to mask.

We should never eat at Taco Bell. However, that’s not what you are thinking as you eat your Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco. What you are thinking is, "Woohoo Dorito taco! This is awesome! Hey guys, let’s go to the park and jump-kick the chipmunks!" You are not thinking. You are drunk.

They've got you just where They want you.

Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com. Image by Devin Rochford.

pleatedjeans:

via

jtotheizzoe:

Zach Weiner of SMBC Comics fame just tweeted out the most beautifully nerdy string of “Yo mama” jokes I’ve ever seen.

Welcome to the exhibit, Innocence and Narcissism: A Retrospective of Selfies by Becky Jones. This is the first time ever that all of Jones’ selfies are available for public viewing in the same venue.

At age thirteen, Becky Jones moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to Greenwich, Connecticut, where her most productive years of self-photography took place. Her work is characterized by a keen eye for the most flattering angle, the frequent inclusion of an ever-changing cast of BFFs and stunning repetition.

She works entirely in Instagram, varying the look of her work with filters such as Inkwell and Earlybird. To this day, critics remain bitterly divided on her work, with some calling it “sluuuuttttyyyy :/,” while others have hailed it as “Dam lookin good!”

Artist in Bathroom Mirror

This image of the artist reflected in her bathroom mirror calls into question our very notions of what can be achieved with a self-taken shot. The artist, now unconstrained by the limits of an arm’s length, displays her full body in this emotionally raw and revealing image. The glare in the lower left corner of the picture provides the illusion of a spotlight, highlighting the performative aspect to Jones’s work. This picture received over seventy “likes” on Facebook, making it one of the artist’s most well received photographs.

Artist with BFF

Taken at a downward angle, this image of the artist with close confidante Jess is a hallmark example of a traditional self-photograph, complete with the arm extended, dreamlike, out of the frame. The extreme angle creates a fun-house mirror effect, distorting the girls’ heads so that they appear to have massive eyes and foreheads. Critics have speculated that their mysterious close-mouthed smiles may in fact be an effort to conceal unwanted orthodontia.

From the Neck Down

This groundbreaking photograph shows off an impressive henna tattoo. The fact that her head is “cut off” in this image is a possible metaphor for the oppression suffered at the hands of her parents, who would not allow her to go to Tina’s kegger despite the fact that Tina’s parents permitted the party because they would rather the kids drink in the house than on the streets. The artist has not yet shown this photograph to anyone, but is considering texting it to Mike from homeroom.

Close-up on Boat

Each year, the artist’s family enjoys a cruise around the Virgin Islands. This photograph, taken on the upper deck, features a sliver of crystalline ocean in the background. The artist, displaying a bold new hairstyle of beaded braids, sent this photograph to fourteen of her closest friends, accompanied by a heartfelt “Wish u were here ;)”. This is just one in her famous Tropical Cruise Chronicles, a companion series to her Rustic Nantucket Portraits.

Photographer Snaps the Ultimate Rooftopping Photo From Atop the World’s Tallest Building

bunnyfood:

(via cineraria:YouTube)

Approach ye the Throne of Tandem Judgment, so that you may be made to know by the both of us in unison on which side you will walk: the right, which is the path of the blessed, or the left, which is the way of haters only.

(dog 639)

My wife’s been complaining a lot these days about how the cast on her current tour seems completely incapable of controlling their flatulence. This came as a great shock to me, as there are few people in the world who enjoy a nice fart as much as my missus. She once bragged that she let out such a loud rumbler that it awoke her sleeping roommate. I was quick to point out the irony that she, of all people, should complain about people expressing their gassy selves.

She assured me that the situation had moved beyond all reasonable measures. She’s had to introduce a number of what she calls “Fart Protocols” to keep the situation from spiralling out of control.

The first thing she did was ban certain items from the rider. The company allots forty dollars per show that the tour manager can use to buy snacks for the cast before shows. What the rider includes isn’t set in stone. Depending on how flexible/awesome the tour manager is, you can graze on the rider food for lunch and dinner without dipping into your per diem. Typically the rider will include a veggie tray, some pita and hummus, some sports drinks or juice, cookies, crackers or some cheese.

Hummus was the first thing to be banned from the rider. No one digests chickpeas very well. It’s pure fart fuel.

Dairy was the next to go. Some nutritionists argue that the consumption of dairy into adulthood is unnatural. After being trapped in a van with a bunch of people who just ate cheese, yogurt, and ice cream on a drive from New York to North Tonawanda, I’m inclined to think you’d agree. If the UN ever finds out what happened in that van, everyone will be tried as a war criminal for the production of biological weapons.

One girl claimed that all the aspartame from diet drinks was the reason for her obscene methane production. So aspartame was the next to go, whether there was any validity to the assertion or not.

New in-van rules have been created. In warmer climates, windows can be left open, keeping the air in the van circulating. In Northern Ontario in February, you do not have this luxury. Once someone befouls the van air by breaking wind, all windows are opened and everyone is given thirty seconds to clear out whatever gas they’ve currently got built up. At the conclusion of the gas-expulsion-period the windows are rolled up again, and the occupants are encouraged to try to contain themselves until the van at least warms up again. This is called the Fart Festival, Fart Symphony, or the Fartchestra.

Maybe it’s working in children’s entertainment that causes people’s sense of humor to degenerate to one that exclusively revolves around farting. One girl—who played the character Owl—would shout a count down from inside her animal head. From inside my own head I could hear the muffled shout “THREE, TWO, ONE!” Then she’d let out a trumpet style fart—the kind that you really have to push to get out. Thank God she never had diarrhoea. Everyone likes the smell of their own brand, but when you fart in one of those mascot costumes, you severely Dutch Oven yourself. The only escape is to get the air circulating in the head by running around really fast.

I’ve been on some tours where we’ve experienced some pretty hilarious/tragic flatulence problems, but I’ve never experienced anything as endemic as what my wife describes to me over the phone. I thought about it for a while, and I think I’ve isolated why this cast is so much fartier than any other cast either of us have worked with.

I think it’s actually a pretty smart idea, so I’m going to coin a term that I really hope catches on. I call it Falk’s Law. Please use that expression as often as you can—I’d like to be famous for something, and it might as well be fart theory. Anyway, here it is.

FALK’S LAW

The further a balance of genders in any group of people moves to either extreme, the higher the chances said group will devolve into a toxic fart factory.

The tour my wife is currently on features an almost exclusively female cast—and yes, for those of you who still cling to outdated notions of the fairer sex, women’s digestive systems operate in the exact same way as men’s. There’s something about not needing to worry about grossing out potential sexual partners that allows people to really let loose. And when I say “let loose” I mean it in the most literal interpretation of that expression possible. Even if everyone in the van has husbands or wives or boyfriends or girlfriends back home, social stigma tied to base evolutionary impulses keeps a lid on any gaseous excesses.

I haven’t fully field tested my theory, so I don’t know how it would work in all circumstances. For example what about a van full of women and homosexual men? It is my hope that further research will be conducted by some enterprising doctoral students that will prove and refine the theory.

In the meantime, if you make plans to go on a road trip with a group of friends, consider inviting along some members of the opposite sex to help keep the air free of anal pollutants.

Antelope Seems to Grunt ‘Huh?!’

Pickles the Kitten Sounds Like a Goat

Physicist: Just a quick note before answering this; hanging off of power lines holds a special place simultaneously in both in the Very Long List of Stupid Things to Do and the Somewhat Shorter List of Last Things to Ever Do.  Hanging off of power lines is a very effective way to get yourself killed a lot.

Assuming the dude in question was in contact with exactly one wire, and absolutely nothing else, and wasn’t even close to touching anything else, and that the wire didn’t snap, then he’d be fine.  Getting into that situation and back out again however involves getting electrocuted pretty good.  Turns out that the voltage in power lines is high enough that it can jump a fair distance (given the chance).

Electricity is a lot like water, with electrical current being a lot like water current, and voltage being a lot like water pressure.  It turns out that for slightly obscure reasons it’s a lot more efficient to transmit electricity using low current and high voltage.  So you can think of power lines as being like big pipes that are holding slowly moving water that’s under a lot of pressure, and that are looking for any chance to “spring a leak”.

Being in a high-pressure environment isn’t so bad, but being between high and low pressures is so bad.  For example, you can dive to 250 feet (with air tanks and whatnot), and despite being exposed to lots of pressure you don’t get pushed around or hurt.  But if you try to hold back the water in a fire hose, which operates at about the same pressure, you’ll get pushed around plenty (also, point of fact, you won’t stop the water at all).

A difference in water pressure will push you around and, similarly, a difference in voltage will push electricity through you.

The same sort of thing is true with voltage.  If you stand on the ground you’re at the same voltage as everything around you, and there’s no need for electricity to flow through you.  And, somewhat surprisingly, if you’re dangling from a power line you’re at the same voltage as the power line and there’s no need for electricity to flow through you.  But, if you get close to anything else, the voltage difference may be big enough for the electricity to “make a break for it” and flow through you and out onto whatever you’re near.  Same thing would happen if the wire snapped; you’d become part of the wire.

Unlike a lot of the “what if” question we get, this is one that’s been tested very, very extensively, both in terms of safety and danger.  If it were dangerous to touch a power line (while not touching anything else), then there wouldn’t be many birds left (or those that were left would wise up real fast).

The birds on these power lines are exposed to the same voltage as the wires, more than 100,000 volts, but since they’re not in contact with anything at a lower voltage (like the ground) no electricity is flowing through them.

But since contacting anything else (especially another wire) is dangerous this is a serious issue for birds big enough to bridge the gap between lines.  As a result you’ll often find weirdly shaped power poles, or very widely spaced wires in areas with large birds (large flying birds that is).

In some areas specially designed power poles are in use to keep larger birds from contacting more than one wire at a time.

The people who work with power lines take a lot of precautions.  Everything is insulated, so that they don’t ever touch the wires directly, and even if they do, they’re not touching anything else that can conduct.  By the way, and I can’t emphasize this enough, as safe and fun as hanging on power lines might seem, it’s both deadly and boring.

The fire hose picture is from here and was taken during a celebration (not a protest or anything).  The bird pictures are from here and here.

Physicist: There’s more to this than you might think.  If you’ve seen a movie involving spaceships of any kind, then you’ve probably seen the wrong answer.  We’re used to thinking about airplanes (flying through the air) and walking (on the ground), so the basic intuition we have about how to move around (turning and starting and stopping) doesn’t apply in space.

In space it could barely matter less what shape your ship is, because it doesn’t interact or push off of air (left).  Some epic sci-fi franchises choose to ignore that fact (right).

Every possible motion always conserves momentum, which just means “if you want to move, you need to push on something else”.  Airplanes can bank in order to turn because they can push on air, and we can get up and walk across the room whenever because we can push on the ground.  But in space those luxuries are missing, since there’s nothing to push on.  Moving in space is the most frustrating damn thing ever.  Think about trying to maneuver on infinitely slippery ice.  Worse than that.

Space: Worse than this.

If you want to turn and face a new direction in space there aren’t a lot of options available to you.  One technique is to literally throw things and getting a push from the recoil.

Maneuvering thrusters firing on the back of the shuttle (left) to pitch the nose up and different thrusters just sitting around looking pretty on the front of the shuttle (right).

If you want to move to the right you need to chuck a bunch of stuff to the left, and if you want to turn one way you have to chuck a bunch of stuff in the other.  Flying around like an airplane in space doesn’t work at all (other than slowing down, this is a fair approximation).

However, if you just want to turn in space without moving (thrusters always push you around), you can “push on yourself”.  This is how the Hubble telescope points at stuff.  If it used tiny thrusters it would run out of fuel pretty quick (that thing is always looking at stuff) and it would pollute its tiny corner of space with exhaust.  Instead Hubble uses flywheels, which run on electricity, to turn.

Turn a wheel in space, and turn yourself.  Hubble has small flywheels (right) to turn, and tiny flywheels (left) to zero in on an exact direction.

Scattered throughout Hubble are an arrangement of little motors attached to basically nothing.  Just by turning on those motors, and by spinning them in one direction, the entire craft turns (slowly) in the other direction.

So, if you want to move in space, you’ve got to move something else, and if you want to turn, turn something else.

Flying Robot Quadrotor Uses Claw to Pick Up an Object at High Speed

How to be a Cool Person, A Guide by a Second Grader

“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. 1845.