If we could free up the land - for example, with more efficient forms of agriculture - that actually wouldn’t be a terrible idea. Reintroduction of megafauna can have very positive ecological impact.
Forget murder hornets, I want to see what happens when we bring back terror birds.
Forget terror birds, I’m rooting for the return of the Azhdarchids.
Who volunteers to tell it it’s not a dinosaur?
I hope this turns out to be true.
Baseball player Old Hoss Radburn was the first person photographed giving the middle finger. 1886.
He looks exactly like the one you would expect.
His name also figures.
I dunno, there could be lawsuits. As S.M. Stirling’s The Sky People set on a pterosaur-inhabited Venus put it, “you don’t let kids go out without an armed escort!”
A likely story. We all know you’re quite familiar with oliphants.
Why would you say that? The oliphaunts were at the Battle of Minas Tirith; the ring bearer was traversing Mordor at the time, many miles and mountains away. He may have heard of the existence of oliphaunts,but it is not at all evident that he had ever seen or had experience with them.
Frodo and Sam saw oliphaunts when they witnessed the battle between Faramir’s men and the Southrons in Ithilien. That’s when Sam recited the Oliphaunt poem. I think the only use of the word “oliphaunt” in the book is by Sam at that point. The ones at the siege of Minas Tirith were called Mumakil.
I thought that he saw one when Faramir’s Rangers ambushed a convoy of Haradrim in Ithilien.
Ninja’ed. Or perhaps-Ranger’ed!
I was going to say this 
If you flew on KLM between 2013 and 2017, your first officer may have been the King of the Netherlands.
Willem-Alexander is an avid pilot and has said that if he had not been a royal, he would have liked to be an airline pilot so he could fly internationally on large-sized aircraft such as the Boeing 747.[21] During the reign of his mother, he regularly flew the Dutch royal aircraft on trips.[22] However, in May 2017, Willem-Alexander revealed that he had served as a first officer on KLM flights for 21 years, flying KLM Cityhopper’s Fokker 70s twice a month, even after his accession to the throne. Following KLM’s phased retirement of the Fokker 70, he began training to fly Boeing 737s. Willem-Alexander was rarely recognized while in the KLM uniform and wearing the KLM cap, though a few passengers recognized his voice, even though he never gave his name and only welcomed passengers on behalf of the captain and crew.[21][23]
While reading that article, I also discovered that John William Friso, who became the Prince of Orange in 1702, is a common ancestor to all current European monarchs:
- Philippe of Belgium
- Frederik X of Denmark
- Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein
- Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg
- Albert II, Prince of Monaco
- Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands
- Harald V of Norway
- Felipe VI of Spain
- Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden
- Charles III of the United Kingdom
I keep running into interesting random facts, I guess. Here’s one I’ve been wondering about for years.
You know how in early auto racing photos, the wheels on speeding cars look like tilted ovals, and the entire car seems to be “skewed” forward at the top, like this?
I always thought this was due to some purely optical effect, but it turns out to have been caused by a purely mechanical characteristic of the early press cameras like the Speed Graphic that were used to take photos like the above. This camera had a focal plane shutter that opened top to bottom, i.e. bottom to top with respect to the image which was inverted. So the bottom of the car got recorded on the film slightly before the top, by which point the car had moved forward a few inches.
There is a huge genealogical tapestry displayed in Castle Vianden (in the northeast of Luxembourg) showing the twists and weaves of royal lineage going back hundreds of years. Fascinating stuff, seeing the grand sweep of European history subtly mirrored in the connections between various families. (Also the castle is really cool, and worth visiting if you’re ever in this neck of the woods.)
You still get this effect on digital cameras and camera phones because the sensor scans down from top to bottom. It’s called the rolling shutter effect. It’s particularly notable when capturing very fast moving things like an aircraft’s propellors. Try taking a photo of them with your camera phone horizontally and then vertically and compare.
CCD sensors have pixels that are exposed simultaneously so do not display this effect.
Follow-up — it’s been a few years since my last visit to the castle, so I decided I didn’t trust my memory and should double-check. And it turns out, the genealogy display is not a tapestry, but more like a wall-mounted installation. You can see a decent picture of it about two-thirds of the way down this page.
(I stand by the part about the castle being a cool place to visit and tour.)
This affected animation styles. Cartoon cars that are being depicted as hustling down the road are often drawn leaning forward, similar to the one in your photo.
modern CMOS sensors used in consumer-grade cameras (e.g. the ones in cell phones) employ a similar “rolling shutter” behavior, and produce similar photographic distortions of moving objects - except that the top-to-bottom scan happens directly on the sensor, so moving objects appear to be leaning backward instead of forward. When recording photographs or videos of really fast-moving objects like propellers, or oscillating objects (or with the camera itself shaking), the distortions can become surreal:
Truck Nuts – those dangling plastic scrota you can attach to your truck or SUV (or golf cart, or bicycle, even) have been with us for decades now. But there’s a – pardon the expression – new wrinkle.
In honor of Electric Vehicles, someone came up with Wire Nuts. Anyone who’s done any home wiring is familiar with the plastic caps that you can screw onto heavy-gauge twisted wire to protect and insulate connections. ell, this is a pair of oversized wire nuts, attached to oversize red and black wires (no green wires for a Ground connection, because that would be Weird). They hang down from the back of the truck,just like the more traditional truck nuts:
I haven’t seen these In The Wild yet. It’s moderately clever, but I’m sure I’d get tired of it fast.
I heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say this one on his podcast this week, regarding the strength of the electromagnetic force.
If you remove the electrons from one cubic centimeter of the nose of the main tank on the space shuttle and put them at the base of the launch pad, the shuttle would not be able to launch. It’s because the net positive charge at the top and the electrons at the bottom would be attracting each other so strongly.