Floating Cube Optical Illusion

Remarkable effect for such a simple trick.

Your Word For The Day Is "Aneuploidy"

Aneuploidy is the condition of having an abnormal number of chromosomes. One of the more common types of aneuploidy is Klinefelter's syndrome, in which a person is born with an extra chromosome, resulting in anomalies like an XXY pair in males. This frequently causes the male to have reduced fertility, and sometimes even to result in an intersexed individual.

One such individual is the famous Caroline Cossey, who was born male but got gender reassignment to female after a troubled childhood and the revelation that she had Klinefelter's. She went on to become an actress and model, and even to be one of the female companions to James Bond in the movies.

Here's a photo of Cossey to help you remember "aneuploidy":

Stuffed, Mounted Griffin, Anyone?

Sarina Brewer is a taxidermist who makes fantastic creatures from mythology, and this is her website.

Brewer is a devoted wildlife preservationist and naturist who also volunteers at the Science Museum of Minnesota. She follows a "waste-not, want-not" policy, so that none of the animals she works with were killed for the express purpose of taxidermy. Obviously, when you follow a policy like that, you end up with lots of spare parts, and well, this happens...

77,000 Years Ago, Humanity Was Almost Wiped Out By A Volcano

What you see here is Lake Toba, a donut-shaped lake which now fills the crater left in Sumatra, Indonesia, when a supervolcanic eruption happened about 77,000 years ago. This eruption blasted volcanic ash into the Earth's atmosphere, coating the entirety of South Asia in a 15-centimeter blanket of ash, as well as depositing ash over nearby oceans and seas. This resulted in a volcanic winter over the Earth, which lasted for as long as a decade, and potentially brought about a millennium-long global cooling event as well.

During this time, it appears that most of the human race was wiped out, with the population count getting as low as 1000 breeding pairs of humans.

In 1993, scientist Ann Gibbons first hypothesized that the bottleneck in human population, followed by the Pleistocene population explosion, could have been linked to the Toba event. Geneticist Lynn Jorde, in this BBC interview on supervolcanoes, echoes this idea:

"Our population may have been in such a precarious position that only a few thousand of us may have been alive on the whole face of the Earth at one point in time, that we almost went extinct, that some event was so catastrophic as to nearly cause our species to cease to exist completely."

In a population bottleneck, as the graph on this Wiki shows, a vast majority of a species is killed off, leaving only a few stragglers to either adapt and proser, or perish.

The possibility exists that such a global catastrophe could nudge along natural selection in favor of intelligence. It does stand to reason, after all, that if some disaster wipes out most of humanity, that the smarter folk will have a better chance of survival, by both being better prepared and being better at adapting new survival strategies during the ensuing fallout.

Reality TV Is Edited To Show Anything But Reality

Two YouTube videos which explain the sudden explosion of "reality" TV shows, and why they have nothing to do with reality.

Charlie Brooker, especially, is a hip media commentator. Fascinating and gossipy, you're well-served to check out the Charlie Brooker YouTube channel. Don't watch the "news" without him!

The Eye of Nature

Here's looking at you kid.

The Tiniest Act of Real Estate Defiance

The concept of real estate, approximately 10,000 years old, tends to bring out the pettiest stubbornness in people, almost raised to a heroic degree. In New York City, there is a tiny triangle set into the sidewalk in front of a cigar store at the corner of Seventh Avenue South at Christopher Street, which is dedicated to an old real estate dispute. David Hess owned land there once, with an apartment building which was condemned to be torn down to make room for the subway. Hess hung onto only this 500 square-inch triangle, which was commemorated with the mosaic. The property was sold after his death in 1938, for the sum of $1000.

At the time of Hess's ownership, it was the smallest piece of real estate in New York.

Roadside America has a complete story of this famous standoff.

The legal concept here is "eminent domain", in which a governing entity has the right to simply take over any land within its borders, real estate titles be damned. So for those of you who think you "own" real estate, think again. On the other hand, such policies are necessary to prevent private landowners from seceding from their government to form their own tiny sovereign nation.

Four Rhymes For Supposedly Rhyme-Less Words

Purple - curple : "The hindquarters or the rump of a horse, a strap under the girth of a horse's saddle to stop the saddle from kicking forward."

Orange - sporange : synonym for sporangium, "A case, capsule, or container in which spores are produced by an organism."

Silver - gilver : "In the fashion world, a color that is a mix of metallic gold and silver."

Month - billionth, millionth, zillionth...

The Woman Who Was Arrested Because Of A Teddy Bear's Name

If you're ever in Sudan and you're in a spot where you are forced - through an unfathomable chain of circumstances extending from your current lot in life - to name a teddy bear, name it anything but "Muhammad"!

Gillian Gibbons, a schoolteacher from Liverpool, England, failed to follow this wise advice, and look what happened to her! In 2007, she got arrested for blasphemy against Islam, which could have drawn her six months in jail, a beating of 40 lashes, or a cash fine.

The outcome: She was eventually given a presidential pardon and returned to England. The school in Sudan has since been closed down because of public outcry and controversy over the matter.

One amazingly good juggler

I've never seen somebody do it with glowing props before. That really adds something.

Where the world turns psychedelic...

One might wonder, upon visiting the various locations of Danxia in China, if this is the part where God dropped acid. The various landforms are formations of limestone and sandstone which have been eroded or carved by glaciers. Between the trippy colors and the bizarre shapes, one could have easily gotten away with filming a few episodes of Star Trek here.

Five Weird Methods Of Fortune-Telling

Tyromancy - Divining the future by examining how curds form during the process of curing a cheese.

Stichomancy - Divining the future or a person's destiny from picking random passages out of a book.

Pedomancy - Divining a person's fortune by the soles of their feet, or their footprints. Similar to palm-reading, just using a different appendage!

Omphalomancy - Divination of an infant's future from examining the knots in its umbilical cord.

Cromnyomancy - Divination from observing how onion sprouts grow.

Eight Artifact Designs That No Longer Serve A Purpose

You never notice them until someone points them out. Because they've always been that way. But once you know about them, you can't help but notice them, and appreciate how ridiculous we are in the way we have to keep things familiar.

These are all design elements on various things which used to have a function, but are now done "just for decoration" or because "we've always done it that way".

1. Slot Machine Payout Tray / Hopper

Slot machines originally both accepted and paid out cash. Modern slot machines pay out a printed receipt which you then cash at the cashier's cage. They no longer need the tray where the coins used to land, yet slot machines still have them. Some of them even play a recording of coins hitting the tray when you cash out and the machine prints its receipt!

2. Cigarette Filter Design

Cigarettes used to have filters made from cork. When they switched to synthetic filters (usually made from cellulose), they kept the printed paper on the outside in a cork design.

3. Hood Scoops

Originally, hood scoops were necessary to direct the flow of air onto the engine to help cool it. Modern cars now have air ducts from other, less intrusive parts of the car, but some cars still keep the hood scoop design. If your car has a hood scoop, put your hand in it. It may be completely closed off!

4. Fake Wood Grain Covering

Things like shelf paper, tabletops, and counters may be made of plastic, metal, or even processed particle board, but they'll still have this tacky vinyl covering with fake wood grain on it. Once you're aware of it, you'll get tired of looking at it.

How about those station wagons in the 1970s which had fake wood paneling on the sides? These things persist even when they make no sense. Who would even want to drive a wooden car?

5. Hubcap Spokes

Ever notice how many car hubcaps still have spokes in the design, as if you were still unable to deal with the concept of a tire unless it resembled a Conestoga wagon wheel?

6. Digital Camera Shutter Sound

Like the casino hopper sound, consumer-grade digital cameras still play an audio sound of an old-fashioned camera's shutter sliding and clicking.

7. Your Keyboard Layout

The standard "QWERTY" layout of the keyboard was originally designed partly to keep neighboring typewriter keys from jamming when they hit together. Other keys' placement were originally required by the limitations of manual typewriter design - for instance, the 'CAPS LOCK' key is directly over the left shift key because it used to be a physical lever that held down the shift key itself; it would lock in place until you tapped it again. Modern computers and laptops have no such requirements, of course, but the keyboard stays that way.

A whole new generation of design appendixes evolved from the first generation of computers, too. The 'scroll lock' key, for instance, comes form the days when text-only computers scrolled monochrome text on a black monitor - you'd print something out, and then hit scroll-lock to freeze the screen until you could read that screen-full of text, and then release it to get to the next screen-full...

8. Computer And Phone Icons

Computer and phone icons are a virtual forest of visual metaphors for outdated technology. Look at that hourglass! How many of you have seen one in real life? Yet we use it to symbolize time, clocks, waiting, etc. And then there's those quill pens used for writing apps, envelopes used for email apps, cartoon speech bubbles used for texting apps... How about that floppy disk icon to represent the concept of saving a document? Floppy disks have been out of common use for at least a decade now.

A Turing Machine Made From Model Trains

From Turing Train Terminal. In the schematics section, they detail how the system can perform up to six binary calculations. I couldn't find a YouTube video of the beast in action, so here's a Lego Turing machine instead, set to the theme to the '80s TV series A Team by somebody with nauseating taste:

In 1966, the world's richest private citizen was Jean Paul Getty, at a mere $1.2 billion

Proof of the declining value of currency, more prosperous times for all, or of more uneven income distribution? In 1966, the Guinness World Record for richest human alive was J. Paul Getty, at a mere $1.2 billion, and his worth by the time of death only equaled $2 billion. Not only that, but the oil tycoon was the only billionaire in the US.

Even adjusting for inflation, Getty's bank account would have only been worth about $10 billion today. That's chump change compared to our list of billionaires in modern times:

• Bill Gates $101 billion (peak worth reached in 1999)
• Carlos Slim Helu $74 billion (peak worth reached in 2011)
• Lakshmi Mittal $69 billion (peak worth reached in 2008)
• Warren Buffett $66 billion (peak worth reached in 2007)
• Mukesh Ambani $63 billion (peak worth reached in 2007)

The Forbes' list strives to include everyone with a net worth of a billion dollars or more. But even it tells a story about uneven distribution among the wealthy. The double-digits billionaires run out at #88; the total number of people on the list is 1,153.

It says odd things about our global economy that in the space of five decades, what would once be considered a fortune is barely enough to scrape by now.

The day break-dancers performed for the Pope

In 2004, Pope John Paul II was entertained by a very modern and urban performance: break-dancers in the Vatican! He seemed to enjoy it. Here's the video:

Simpsons Fans, Your Day Has Arrived

Somebody else thought of a live-action Simpsons show first, so that I would not have to. Thank you!

The fascinating story of "Parked Domain Girl"

You've seen her a dozen times, often enough that her face jars your memory and yet you're never able to quite place the reference. She's a white blond young adult, wearing a backpack while she clutches the straps securely and grins tightly with her tilted face at the camera. Here she is, in all her famous glory:

She's "parked domain girl", and her use as the standard default photo for a parked web domain, starting in 2005, has spurred a little online fandom.

URLesque gets to the bottom of the story: The photographer is Dunstin Steller, and he snapped this photo of his little sister, Hannah, and tossed it onto his iStockPhoto portfolio. For a few cents, Demand Media scooped up the photo and was then licensed to use it throughout their web properties. Thus, every time a website goes dark, Demand Media scoops up the domain registration and parks it, with ads and links around this photo.

The file is usually saved with the name "0012_female_student.jpg". Here's another photo of her in the same setting:

And here is the same building where the photo was taken, at Unity Village, Missouri.

Steller works as a stock photographer and his sister Hannah is presumably still in the modeling business. Time may yet come when she wants to capitalize on her Internet fame; there certainly is fan art and meme images of her all over the web!

Fingernail Clippings Turned Into Patriotic Art

This guy is selling his fingernail clippings on an attractive American flag design for $1776. You have to like an artist who puts so much of himself into his work.

We once trusted our kids with radioactive kits - for science!

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory was a toy kit sold for one brief year in 1950, by Alfred Carlton Gilbert, who also invented the Erector Set. It consisted of a Geiger-Muller counter, a cloud chamber, electroscope, spinthariscope, and actual uranium ore, along with a book about how to prospect for uranium.

According to an interview with Gilbert, the set was not only the real thing, but perfectly safe. It was discontinued, not because of safety concerns nor because of parental outcry, but because the unit was very expensive ($50 in 1950 dollars) and even at that they lost money on every unit sold. It was also just a little more advanced than the average science-fair project set.

The A.C. Gilbert company also sold other radioactive-themed toys, including this stand-alone impressive Geiger counter:

View other discontinued toys at the Banned Toys Museum.