December 29, 2016
Felines, Canines and Tiny Humans
Cats meeting babies for the first time (mostly "WTF?"). Dogs meeting babies for the first time (mostly "WTF!"). (h/t Miss Cellania)
Prince, Carrie Fisher, and Gene Wilder riding on a white horse....
JPL says the comet may be visible as people welcome in 2017 on Saturday. Even if you're not a fan of New Year's Eve fireworks, you'll have another reason to look to the skies.
NASA says as we ring in the new year, a comet will near the moon and be visible to those looking west.
But here's the catch - you'll need a pair of binoculars to see it.
NASA says comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková, named after the astronomers who discovered it in 1948, takes 5.25 years to complete its orbit. [more inside]
"Your itinerary of self-destruction is a stellar one"
What happens when your sabbatical tenant refuses to leave? A professor decided to rent her Berkeley-area home while she took a semester's sabbatical to conduct research in France. When her tenant, another professor, stopped paying rent, and her neighbors reported concerns about how her property was being treated, she tried to evict him. It was a far more difficult process than she imagined. Renowned scholars Judith Butler and Wendy Brown offered their support in the form of scathing emails.
They're all good animals.
Bored Panda is compiling 100s of photos of People Posting Pics Of Their Animals Before And After Being Called A Good Boy. (Click the "show 10 more" link after the last pic.)
"You aren't offering anything back to the public."
How Pittsburgh became Uber's Kitty Hawk: Gov't emails reveal the promise, pitfalls of alliance — PennLive reports on the often chummy, sometimes adversarial relationship between Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Uber senior executives, including co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. [more inside]
"The busy world before you is unfurled": early BBC television
The test transmission from August 1936 is shown in the documentary Television Comes to Bradford, followed by a 1986 interview with the singer, Helen McKay. Regular broadcasts began in November 1936. One of the early programmes was a documentary, Television Comes to London. First part is about the work to convert Alexandra Palace into a broadcasting station. From 12.40 the film shows the first night of broadcasting. [more inside]
The diverse patchwork of Southern food styles is beginning to blur
The Surprisingly Recent Story of How Shrimp and Grits Won Over the South. This isn't a new article, but damn did it make me want some shrimp and grits.
A huge man screamed about Cream for 2.5 Minutes
Hey, people who watch pro wrestling: give me your favorite most ridiculous wrestling thing that I can immediately accuse you of lying about asks Maddi Gonzalez on Twitter.
Hey, Willrow. Where you goin' with that ice cream machine in your hand?
The bewildering array of disk formats clearly confuses consumers in the Star Wars universe. In A New Hope, Luke Skywalker, who is tech-savvy enough to be trusted to help purchase a droid and then clean it up, seems to be stumped by the disk drive on R2-D2. “You’ve got something jammed in here real good,” he says to R2-D2, as though he doesn’t know it’s a disk. If it’s a disk drive, wouldn’t it obviously be a disk, and wouldn’t he know to push a button to eject it?From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck
[⚠️ Contains spoilers for Rogue One ⚠️]
"When your local place closes up, you're pretty much lost."
Rural resident pool cash to save last bars, gathering sites Once-bustling Renwick, Iowa, lost its grocery, hardware store, school and Ford dealership years ago, but when its sole bar closed last June, it seemed to some residents there wasn't much of a town left.
So a group of seven friends and spouses who had met for beers at the bar for decades took matters into their own hands.
The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos
"The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. The selection of examples now appears somewhat dated, as do a few of their pronunciations, indeed a few words may even be unknown to today's readers (how many will know what a "studding-sail" is, or that its nautical pronunciation is "stunsail"?), and not every rhyme will immediately "click" ("grits" for "groats"?); but the overwhelming bulk of the poem represents as valid an indictment of the chaos of English spelling as it ever did." [more inside]
Shut up and calculate...
What does any of this have to do with physics? An excellent long form essay on graduate school in physics.
This platform stuff is getting out of hand
Should life be hard?
MeFi's own Mark Rosenfelder answers a reader question about whether "the idea that life needs to suck" is true. TL;DR, he doesn't think it is, but it's worth reading on for more.
ugly rotten mean punk scum
City Cat (possibly NSFW?) was a Serbian TV adaptation of Bane Kerac's vigilante superhero comic Cat Claw.
What's happening in Chicago
More than 750 people have been murdered in Chicago in 2016. It has become dangerous enough that more than a fifth of Chicago’s 652 public schools have Safe Passage routes to help children travel safely.
A steam train chugs and tootles through the Worcestershire countryside
After previous shows on buses, boats and sleighs, this season's Slow TV offering from the BBC is a one hour train ride on the Flying Scotsman (trailer), plying the Severn Valley Railway from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster. Locomotive 4472, built in 1924, was the first train to exceed 100mph (in 1934) and, post-restoration, hauls carriages around various lines while drawing substantial crowds and train enthusiasts (extremely English scene). More: big steam, with a news helicopter, leaving a station, ascending Shap, and again, and steaming past.
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