by Casey Chan on Sploid, shared by Cheryl Eddy to io9
Here’s a fun art piece made by artist Matthieu Robert-Ortis: in one perspective, it looks like two giraffes standing opposite each other while in another, it looks like a single elephant staring straight at you. The piece plays on your perspective and hides two wire sculptures in one, what you see depends on which angle you’re looking at it.
I want one of those scenes in a dude bro film where “tomboy” chick has to wear a dress to go undercover or whatever, but instead of the guys drooling as she walks down the stairs, they’re like “k. U need to stop. Go put the cargo pants back on. You look super uncomfortable and awkward in that. Brutus, you go be the fake prostitute.”
I’m just imagining this super ripped guy called Brutus being like ‘YESSS!!! I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE FAKE PROSTITUTE!! Now is my time to shine!!’
Madam U’s snakes aren’t individual animals but more like the tentacles of an octopus. When she’s not giving conscious attention to the snakes they do their own thing, exploring and feeding information back to her. But when she wants to she has full control over them.
Public Health officials in Shelby County, Tennessee today confirmed six cases of measles in the county, up from two last Friday. Victims of the measles outbreak are "widely diverse" in terms of age, gender and where they live, authorities said.
Get Link Info protects you from being rickrolled, linked to malware or otherwise misled with a link: punch in a short URL from any of the big URL shortening services, see the real one before you go there. There's a browser plugin for Firefox and IE; for Chrome users, Redditor NickPapa suggests Nope, which doesn't quite do that, but does warn about links that redirect. [via]
Unlike URL shorteners, Shady URL takes any URL you give it and generates a sinister long one instead: "Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening."
For example, boingboing.net becomes http://www.5z8.info/pirate-anything_p5r2pa_getPersonalData-start and twitter.net becomes http://www.5z8.info/inject_worm_d4o6ox_oneweirdoldtiptolosebellyfat
Man, my computer crashed on me when I was almost done with this one and I found I hadn’t saved since like the first 15 minutes of working on it so boo, had to keep this simple to get it out with this ridiculous weekend.
Anyway, yeah, I just like Ganondorf’s “BEHOLD! THE POWER OF A GERUDO WARRIOR” taunt in Hyrule Warriors, because when you think about it, he’s not saying “Behold the power of me, Ganondorf” (he has another taunt like that anyway). It’s some home town pride, he’s basically saying “Hahahaha I fight like a girl and I’m gonna fuck you up!” And that’s delightful.
See, I’d watch a JDrama featuring hordes of nameless cowboy antagonists. Like not even joking, they could have a lieutenant who wears spurs all the time inappropriately and do kickboxing to show he’s more dangerous and better trained than the others.
It could be set in Kobe and the cowboys could be rustlers trying to steal fancy beef cattle for their American megafarm cattle baron employer loosely based on a telephone game version of Cliven Bundy only he’s running Monsanto.
…sweetie, how has no one weaponized you yet?
Well, for one I’m not sure -how- I could be weaponized. Unless someone made a weapon that could convert weird little fiction pieces and quirky story ideas into energy.
You could called it a sort of Narrative Device, if you will.
THANK YOU FOR THE CHALLENGE WHEN THE NICE MEN WITH THE VAN GET THERE DO NOT FIGHT SHHH SHHH IT WILL ALL BE OKAY
by Andrew Liptak on Gizmodo, shared by Andrew Liptak to io9
There’s been dozens of probes that have gone out exploring the solar system since 1959's Luna 2 probe. PopChartLab has gone and noted down each one since in this beautiful poster of the Solar System.
During World War II, as they mulled whether to attempt an invasion of the continent, the Allies needed to estimate the number of tanks Germany was producing. They asked their intelligence services to guess the number by spying on German factories and counting tanks on the battlefield, but these efforts produced contradictory estimates. Finally they resorted to statistical analysis.
They did this by studying the serial numbers on captured and destroyed German tanks. Suppose German tanks are numbered sequentially 1, 2, 3, …, B, where B is the total number of tanks that we seek to know. And suppose that we have five captured tanks whose serial numbers are 21, 35, 42, 60, and 89. It turns out that
where N is the sample size (here, 5) and M is the highest sampled number (here, 89). In this example, the formula tells us that B = 105.8, so we’d estimate that 106 tanks had been produced at that time.
In the event, Allied statisticians reportedly estimated that the Germans had produced 246 tanks per month between June 1940 and September 1942. Intelligence estimates had put the total at about 1,400. When the Allies captured German production records after the war, they found that they had produced 245 tanks per month during those three years, almost precisely what the statisticians had predicted, and less than 20 percent of the intelligence estimate.
