Malady579

Because this is the internet (and the internet died with MySpace), here's the Flying Spaghetti Monster spotted in a pair of tangled earbuds. It's the Pastafarian equivalent of spotting Jesus's face in your burnt toast/Cheeto/microwaveable meatloaf. Although -- if you spot the Flying Spaghetti Monster IN your spaghetti dinner, how are you supposed to know if its just his image or if you're actually about to eat your god, possibly with a piece of garlic bread. Man, I love garlic bread. My girlfriend doesn't though because it makes my breath smell but that's never really an issue because she's make believe anyways so it really only comes up when I'm playing pretend at night due to the crushing loneliness. In my mind she asks me sleep facing away from her which actually works out because it makes it easier to pretend somebody's really there. I could use a hug. Thanks to Dan, who doesn't believe in meatballs.

Near the village of Morro Jable on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura, there stands the Villa Winter, a squat, dilapidated manor, surrounded by empty space all around. The strangely remote villa would be eerie enough on its own, but the rumors of secret Nazi activity during World War II make it all the more spooky. 

Built around 1937, the home was the work of German engineer Gustav Winter. While some websites list him as a top member of the Nazi party, information about his actual relationship with the Reich is scarce, but what seems to be agreed upon is that he built the house in heavily enforced secrecy. He built a road out into the barren expanse near the (at the time) tiny fishing village of Morro Jable, and created the two-story villa with a workforce that was guarded by day and escorted away at night. The bizarrely isolated home was styled like a classical villa complete with columned arches and a small tower.

The actual goings on at the Villa are unknown, but a number of legends have attached themselves to the home. Fueled by reports of thick cables that lead from the home out to sea, and an overly large fuse box in the tower, a popular legend holds that the home was just a cover for a secret underground submarine base. The abundance of natural caves, known existence of German submarines in the area during the war, and general secrecy surrounding the place don't help either. It is also rumored that the remote home was a waypoint where Nazi party members would head to undergo plastic surgery before fleeing to South America.

Whatever the truth is behind the Villa Winter, it still stands in the same isolated spot it always has, reluctant to give up its secrets. Reaching the villa is still difficult, requiring a long trip down an ill-kept dirt road. Today Morro Jable is a bustling resort town, and the villa is still manned by a caretaker who is said to let visitors explore the space for a small fee. Maybe one of them will one day find that hidden submarine port.

russianmonarchist:

The interior of the Russian Embassy in Madrid, Spain. Design by Ilya Glazunov.

Apparently I’ve had crummy doorbells for the past 45 years and didn’t even know it. It took visiting a good friend’s home to find out what I was missing.  When I got there, I was greeted by what looked like a mini-HAL.

The creepy thing was that I didn’t even touch the device before hearing my friend's voice come through it. He was a hundred feet away and knew I was there because of a built in motion detector. When I began walking up his driveway, the RING detected me and pinged Juan on his phone. He then had the option of ignoring me, simply viewing my actions or talking to me.

Though I couldn’t see him, we were having a full conversation as if we were talking on a speakerphone.   But the fact that Juan could have been anywhere in the world and know that I was approaching his home, makes this so much more than a speakerphone or intercom.

When Juan FINALLY opened his front door, he showed me the recorded video of me walking up and talking into the device. I have to say I was amazed by how good I looked.

The RING’s video is HD and is recorded at 720p at 30 FPS. The field of view is 180 degrees and the RING has night-vision! My awesome iPhone 6 doesn’t have night vision!

One of the first things you'll do when you get your Ring device is set the sensitivity of the motion sensor. This is so that if you have kids playing in your yard, the RING doesn’t keep pinging you over and over.

All you need for the simple installation is a Wi-Fi connection and a drill.

There are a few other tools that you’ll need, but they're equipped in the well-designed packaging. 

To power it, you could either tie into your existing doorbell system or you can set it up with the supplied wall mount in any part of your home or office. The battery in the RING device is USB rechargeable and holds its charge for a full year!

Since it connects to your phone through the WiFi connection in your home, the RING doesn’t have to even be mounted outside - or at all for that matter.

 

Because this device is so versatile, I’ve been using it for tasks other than what it was designed for.

• My wife was sick in bed last weekend so I unhooked the RING from it’s outside harness and laid it on our nightstand. Whenever Gina needed something, she was able to instantly connect and communicate with me.   Sure she could have used her cell phone but with only one button to push, this made things simpler.
• My cats love to hang out on our kitchen table when my wife and I aren’t around. We have just 1 house rule and they break it whenever we aren't looking!  I was able to set up the Ring device so that it sits on the table and gets a perfect view. Because there’s night vision built into the RING, and I’ve set the sensitivity pretty low, I’m alerted only when they’re on the table.  When I accept the alert, I can see their actions and more importantly I’m able to shoo the cats away.

• My friends and I play a heck of a lot of pool in my converted garage and when we order pizzas I normally have to keep popping my head out the door to make sure we aren’t missing the delivery guy. I become a hungry, paranoid mess!  Now, with the RING, I get the alert as soon as he shows up.

• If someone in your family is suffering from dementia, the RING, could automatically ping you as they leave their home.  This could offer you great peace of mind while you're shopping for groceries or at work.

 

Ok.  Those those are pretty cool uses for the RING, but the designers intended for people to actually mount the device onto their home.  What I've just described are scenarios where I merely place in in different spots.

By using the RING as intended, you can give the appearance of being home even when you aren't.  Being able to converse with someone at your door, when you aren’t there is a great theft deterrent.

Even if you're in a meeting and can’t make it to your phone when alerted, the RING takes a video of who was at your door and timestamps it. You can then check out a back-log of all the videos its ever taken.

There are some pretty great movies that users have uploaded about how the RING saved their day and you can check them out here.

My favorite is #6 where a moving truck driver is busted because he put giant ruts in a client’s lawn. He was caught red-handed and had to pay for damages. Pretty awesome!

The Ring is pretty stylish and there are different colors to match your home.

There’s even a sister product you can pick up called the CHIME which works with the RING.   This device alerts you when the RING is pressed in case your phone battery is drained. Since it just plugs into a wall outlet, you can move it anywhere around your house.

I found that I needed tech support’s help with this part of the installation but that was pretty seamless.

 

I think the RING product is pretty darned fun and if I didn’t get to play with it myself, I wouldn’t have known I needed one.

The RING is $199.00 but for all that it does, I think it’s well worth it.

Our cats may never jump on the kitchen table again.

 

This video appears to be a freighter's anchor being lost as it is dropped. The situation just gets worse and worse as the chain's momentum increases and whatever braking mechanisms exist fail. Soon, metal is on fire, and it seems clear that it is now time to back away from the gigantic runaway anchor chain whose back end components are likely to go places unknown when they emerge from the ship. Yet our intrepid shooter keeps filming!

I see no gloves, goggles, hard hats or fear, and thereby suspect this involves Russians.

HBO confirmed Monday that the sixth season of “Game of Thrones” will premiere in April. For fans of the show, this is presumably fantastic news, but for fans of George R.R. Martin’s long-running book series — the basis for the show — it’s bittersweet, to say the least.

Martin has published five of the seven novels planned in the series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” And while the HBO program is trucking along right on schedule, Martin is not. The sixth season will be based on what would be in the sixth book, “The Winds of Winter,” and that has not yet come out. The showrunners are essentially out of printed source material, but they do know the gist of what happens in the forthcoming novels.²¹ Martin has said he wants the next book out before the next season, but there’s a strong probability that fans will see the ending of the story on television rather than on the page.

I’ve crunched the numbers behind the varied ways people have tried to predict when “The Winds of Winter” will be published, and earlier this year, I looked at one of the best analyses of Martin’s writing pace, developed by one of his closest observers. The writer — real name Jeff, well-known in the online “A Song of Ice and Fire” fan community as “BryndenBFish,” particularly for his sophisticated analyses of the book series at his blog — projected that “The Winds of Winter” would come out in late 2016 or early 2017. In other words, definitively after the sixth season.

But now that we know when the sixth season will start, I caught back up with Jeff to talk about whether Martin could possibly finish before the premiere. And Jeff said it’s possible, if unlikely, that fans could still be able to get their hands on a copy in time, mostly because of the wild production schedule for books like Martin’s.

“While the average turnaround time for a book to go from ‘manuscript submission’ to ‘published and on the shelves’ usually ranges from four to six months,” Jeff said, “Random House hustled and published ‘A Dance with Dragons’ seven weeks after they received the final manuscript.” (The accelerated publishing schedule for these huge books is a double-edged sword: It’s great for fans who want the books yesterday, but it raises many questions about how much careful editing Random House really gives one of its star authors.)

One reason it’s so hard to predict the release of “The Winds of Winter,” compared with the previous entry in the series, “A Dance with Dragons”: There’s little information coming from Martin and his editors about how much of the book he’s finished. Based on details disclosed by Martin’s editor Anne Groell and by Martin himself at HBO’s season four premiere, Jeff estimated that Martin has about 200 pages written for “A Dance with Dragons” that were not used in that book and can be rolled over to the new one, and 168 known pages of new manuscript that have been turned in.

Jeff reckons on an April 24 premiere date, based on HBO’s scheduling of a forthcoming show, “Vinyl,” and thus estimates that Martin has to submit a book by Feb. 23 in order to make the finish line — this is the minimum amount of time necessary, assuming an accelerated production schedule last seen with “A Dance with Dragons,” for a book to hit store shelves before the premiere.

The long and short of it?

As Jeff put it: “He’s going to have to submit something in 90 days or it’s likely he won’t publish in time.”

The limestone rock quarry known as Zedekiah’s Cave under the Old City of Jerusalem has been a center of legend and ceremony for thousands of years.

There are several stories about the cave that are matters of faith. Legend says that stones from the quarry were commissioned by King Solomon and used to build the lost First Temple, which is why the site is sometimes referred to as Solomon’s Quarries. Another biblical king, King Zedekiah, is said to have attempted to flee a besieged Jerusalem for Jericho through this cave. When he was captured by henchmen of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, his sons were murdered in front of him before his eyes were put out. He spent the rest of his life blind and imprisoned. The drops of water that trickle through the cavern’s ceiling are today known as “Zedekiah’s tears.” Still another legend marks the quarry as the final resting place of Korah, who led a rebellion against Moses and was swallowed up by the earth in a godly act of retribution.

What can be proven through archeology and historical corroboration, however, is perhaps equally remarkable. The 300-foot-long subterranean chamber is entirely man-made, hollowed out by generations of labor. The total size is estimated at around five acres. Around 50 CE, Herod the Great used this quarry for building projects, including the Second Temple and what is now the Western Wall. Suleiman the Magnificent would have the cave sealed during the 16th century, fearing that invaders would be able to use it to dig tunnels right into the heart of Jerusalem.

The cave remained sealed until 1854, when an American missionary named James Turner Barclay discovered the entrance, after his dog ran into a small opening that had been revealed by heavy rainfall. In the 1880s, a German religious cult moved into the cavern, but was removed by Turkish and German authorities. The Freemasons were also drawn to the cave, as they hold particular kinship to King Solomon, who is believed to have been the first Grand Master. The group held their first ceremony in the cave in 1868 and the Freemasons of Israel continue to hold an annual ceremony in it every year.

The last known use of the cave as a quarry was for the building of the clock tower above the Jaffa Gate in the in early 1900s. However, anyone acquainted with the cavern’s long history knows there’s still time for many more tales to be told.

You’ll have tons of fun playing this well-balanced board game even if you never win - and I should know.

Getting my wife to play games with me is a bit like pulling teeth. To increase my odds of making it happen, I normally promise to light a fire and make a cozy evening out of it.

Here, you can see the lengths I went through last weekend to get my game on.  On this particular night, we played The Duke!

It’s a 2-player strategy game that takes place on a simple board of 36 squares. The game is a bit like chess – only better. The mechanics are constantly in flux and it forces you to think in a way that’s very different from other games.  

Like chess, players take turns controlling  the movement of troops on the playing field.  The player's movement options are graphically portrayed on the front and back of each troop but only the side that’s facing up is in play. Each time you move a troop, it's flipped and the movement rules change.

Each player begins with 3 "stock" troops a sack of mixed wooden tiles that'll be chosen from later.

 

 

Stock troop #1 - The Duke. He’s like the King in Chess. It’s important to keep him safe at all times because once he’s captured - you lose.  The Duke can move clear across the board like a Rook.  

Stock troops 2 & 3 – The Footmen. These are like pawns in chess. They’re expendable but powerful.  When a Footman moves, it can only be from his current position to positions denoted by the black circles.   The Footman on the right, would be able to move 1 space in any diagonal direction, or 2 spaces forward.  Where the Footman on the left would be able to move either horizontally or vertically one square.

Each player places their troops anywhere on their side of the board as long as the Duke touches the bottom edge and the footmen touch the Duke.

 

There are many different troop types and each has a unique way of getting around the board.

 

 

Some troops can slide clear across the board and attack anything in its line of sight while others have the ability to jump over troops to attack or flee.

When a player takes his turn, he has the choice of either moving one of his troops to a new location or pulling a random troop into play. A player can bring out troops as long as there is an open space on one of the 4 sides of The Duke. These spots are troop spawn points.

If a player's troop lands on an opponent's occupied square, the attacked troop is eliminated from play.

Sometimes it’s tough to decide wheather to attack or fortify your army.

Even through the rules are very, very simple, the combinations of game-play seem endless.

Did I mention that my wife beat me?

Here’s the thing - Gina claims to not care for games of any kind and yet she effortlessly destroyed me at The Duke all night long. There was nothing I could do and though it was a massacre, I still had a great time.

But I just may have a secret weapon for our next battle.

You see, The Duke comes with 2 blank troops for you to customize – and while I may never stoop as low as to create a kraken character who can wipe out an entire army with one wave of his tentacle, it’s nice to know it’s there just in case.

She’d never know what hit her!

 

But if you're looking for well designed augmented rules and expansion packs for The Duke, there are a few to choose from.

With these you can play as the Knights of the Round Table, The Three Musketeers or as Robin Hood and his band of merry men.

 

For now, I leave you with a final photo of my cat Kucha posing with The Duke.

 

Boy is that box ever adorable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Founded by King Ferdinand IV's royal decree, the Real Jardín Botánico is a two-and-a-half centuries-old wonder, occupying 20-acres of lush terrain in the heart of Spain's capital city.

Housed in its current location since 1781 in a building designed by the same architectural team responsible for the Museo del Prado, the botanical garden was initially populated with over 2,000 specimens retrieved from all over the Iberian peninsula by botanist and surgeon José Quer. After implausibly surviving centuries worth of civil and international wars, the collection has expanded to over 90,000 flowers and plants (not counting its herbarium with a literal million specimens on its own) plus an estimated 1,500 trees.

Originally arranged according to the Linneaus method favored during the period, in which the specimens are categorized in terraces of import, today its expansive grounds have been rearranged in a fashion that makes more sense.

Visitors will find the Real Jardín Botanico has been divided into seven outdoor gardens and five indoor greenhouses. Each of these sections are arranged logically by theme, content, and nature of origin. Highlights include the "Terraza de Cuadros" – featuring a Japanese garden and a series of box-edged plots filled with medicinal, aromatic, and orchard-like plants arranged around a fountain – and a romantic, period-accurate garden arranged to echo an English garden bursting with trees and shrubs. 

Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, one of Real Jardín Botánico's greenhouses has the ability to recreate the desert climate, making it one of the very few places where visitors can experience an accurate desert experience without leaving continental Europe.

P0rnhub just released this graph showing that they experienced up to a 10% dip in traffic during the day of Fallout 4's release. It looks like everybody who remained abstinent during the day though made up for it that night. I also assume at least a handful of multi-taskers just masturbated to the game. Thanks to JD, who hasn't been to work since the game came out and may or may not still have a job.

Following up on the bizarre coordinated blocks against reporters by some protesting at the University of Missouri yesterday, a statement from David Kurpius, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism:

(more…)

YouTube Link

In this beautiful footage, two tiny caracal kittens named Nandi and Nisha warily explore their enclosure at the Oregon Zoo wth their mother Peggy. Caracal cats, native to Africa, Central Asia, Southwest Asia and India, are not a common sight in nature, as the species is shy as well as nocturnal. The cat's name comes from the Turkish word "karakulak," meaning "black ear."

Read more about Nandi and Nisha here. 

Via Laughing Squid

In The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World published this week in Current Biology, academic researchers from the US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and China report on a study of about 1,200 children from around the world in which a "robust" correlation between religious upbringing in either Christianity or Islam and a lack of altruism was demonstrated. (more…)

PROTIP: Adjust according based on the number of over-eaters in your family. This is a handy poultry cooking chart created by the folks at Personal Creations detailing how much bird to buy for how many people, and how long to cook it. It's for people who might be new to hosting Thanksgiving. Or for people who are used to hosting Thanksgiving, but suck at getting the right amount of food. It is not for vegetarians. What are your Thanksgiving traditions? My family gets drunk as shit the night before, everyone wakes up hungover, then goes to the one restaurant in town that's open on Thanksgiving. Afterwards we all get drunk again and watch my aunts scream at each other and duke it out on the porch. Thanks to Julissa, who agrees it sucks there's only one day of giving thanks, and 364 days of ingratitude.

In the small Netherlands town of Oudewater there is a historic weigh house not unlike a number similar buildings around the Netherlands, accept this one is known primarily for weighing witches.

A weigh house was a common feature of medieval townships, used as a central site where people could come to weigh their crops and livestock. They were generally publicly run, used to levy tax amounts of good as well. Of course as witch hunts became a popular hysteria, they also made the perfect spots to subject the accused to a witchcraft test. Witches were thought to be able to be light enough to float on water, and a common test of, uh, witchitude, was to put the accused on the weigh house scale and see the results. They were generally rigged and countless innocents burned or drowned thanks to the superstitious test.

The weigh house in Oudewater was a bit different, as it was said to have been approved as a fair weighing site by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Thanks to the this, no one is thought to have gone to the stake from its scales. They were originally built in 1482, and the witch weights didn't begin being tabulated until the 16th century, but even now the scales remain.

Today the weigh house is a museum devoted to the site's history. Known as the Museum de Heksenwaag, visitors can come and weigh themselves, receiving certificates that prove they are not witches. If only so many of history's weigh houses could have had such fun programs. 

mymodernmet:

Dad Builds Amazing Halloween Costumes for Children in Wheelchairs

The objective of the Vizcaya Bridge began simply enough: link inhabited riverbanks without disturbing the shipping traffic navigating its waterways. But when this planning is all transpiring in the late 19th century and involves the royal throne, plans have a way of escalating.

Locals living along the Nervion River in the conjoined summer resorts of Las Arenas and Portugalete have taken to calling the Vizcaya Bridge "Puente Colgante," meaning the hanging or suspension bridge. Lest spectators be fooled from a distance, this is no ordinary suspension bridge even though it may appear so. 

Designed in 1893 by Basque architect Alberto de Palacio, the same man responsible for the Crystal Palace in Madrid's Parque Retiro, the Vizcaya Bridge's planning was meticulously thought-out. Not only did it ensure that the period's tall ship traffic could pass uninhibited beneath its 200-foot-tall arches, but the 538-foot long bridge itself was designed to transport passengers and cargo in its own right. A gondola system still in use to this day, was devised to ferry humans and vehicles together, suspended above the waterway, across to the other side. 

Since its opening in 1893, each day, every eight minutes, all day and night, a gondola suspended beneath the bridge's upper walkway carries up to six vehicles and dozens of passengers from one bank of the Nervion to the other. With over a century of use under its belt, Vizcaya Bridge only experienced a single lapse into disuse; during the Spanish Civil War, dynamite was detonated on the bridge's upper deck, and it took four years before the damage could be repaired, returning the beloved bridge to serviceable condition. 

In 2006, this truly remarkable piece of engineering was recognized by UNESCO, adding an extra degree of security that this rare, mutant bridge that genuinely has managed to do it all will continue to delight and service its passengers for centuries to come.

Next season of Mythbusters is the last one. The fantastic television series starring our friend Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, and a wonderful cast of makers and explosives, will end after the 14th season, totaling 248 episodes and nearly 3,000 experiments. Congratulations, you guys. It was a fantastic run. You inspired, and will continue to inspire, huge numbers of people of all ages with your curiosity, wonder, and ingenuity.

"I’ve been going through genuine grief,” Adam told Entertainment Weekly. “Even food doesn’t taste as good.”

What will they do next?

Adam: I’m definitely going to do more television, behind and in front of the camera. I love producing this show and figuring out how to structure the episodes. I’m going to jump into the website Tested.com. I’m looking forward to visiting Comic-Con.

Jamie: There’s a scripted show we’re executive producing at CBS that was announced, and that’s exciting. I can’t talk about it yet, but when it comes out it’s going to knock some people’s socks off. As far as me personally, there’s some outside projects I’m starting to ramp up. There’s an Office of Naval Research project. I’m developing some new kinds of robotic firefighting vehicles to help with the massive forest forests we’re dealing with in the West. I’m keeping the M5 [special effects company]. I’m a builder, first and foremost. There are people I have to work with filming [Mythbusters] that are interested in how to build things for the sake of the story rather than what I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t want to sound sour grapes about it, but for a show, you have to tell a story. You present it in a way that’s interesting and easy to follow. But I want to circle back to actually doing build projects where I don’t have a bunch of film people getting in my way and manipulating what’s going on.

Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa are a husband-and-wife team of freelance 3D computer graphics artists from Tokyo. Their latest creation is Saya, and she is going to be the star in the movie they are self-producing. (more…)

"The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien" is a new collection of the drawings, maps, diagrams, and sketches that Tolkien drew to help him navigate Middle-earth, and the entire complex universe he created for his novels. Edited by Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, the hardcover book contains nearly 200 images, the majority of which have never been published before.

"The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien" (Amazon)

(via Wired)

Students at the University of Texas at Austin will protest a new law that will allow more guns on campus.

Instead of signs, the students are protesting by "strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks," which is in violation of the campus' obscenity policy.

Jessica Jin, who set up the Campus (DILDO) Carry event on Facebook, invokes the argument that allowing more guns on campus will make students safe is a fallacy. She's urging students to send campus leaders that message by strapping on the plastic phalluses.

"You're carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I'm carrying a HUGE DILDO," Jin says in the group's description. "Just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play."

“This is what happens when people come back from vacation in China and try to get into Beijing. And you thought your puny traffic jams were crazy.” (more…)

Ever wonder why normal people are intimidated by the thought of learning to code? Or for that matter, intimidated at the very thought of talking to geeks who make a living coding software? This is why. In middle school, my kids already figured it was too late to learn. This is the latest from CommitStrip. The top comment:

Ya, well, let's see how good your code is during the zombie apocalypse

Touche!