Some more otters to start your week off right.
A soda fountain arms race? Sounds crazy, but we suppose the Victorians had to keep themselves occupied without the internet somehow. Look how small the people are by comparison!
Have you ever heard of tetrachromacy? It's the ability to see an unusually greater color depth due to the presence of a fourth cone ocular cell, and it's likely only found in women. Colorblindness, on the other hand, is caused by only having two cone ocular cells and is primarily found in men. This woman, for instance, a doctor in Northern England known as "subject cDa29," can see 99 million more colors than the rest of us! We can't even imagine, but it must be soooo beautiful!It's a cat-knapper, literally! This cat, our personal hero, has either decided to protest the notion of private property (thanks, comrade!) or has set up a pretty sweet Bling-Ring style kitty-criminal syndicate. We're perfectly pleased with either scenario. Meet Dusty:[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5dsqCDtX0o[/embed]So, it turns out that Dan Brown had it right about DaVinci's TheLast Supper..sort of! It doesn't appear to have any references to the Illuminati or Mary Magdalene, but it does shed some light on the radical nature of our man Leonardo. Apparently, DaVinci's message lies in what's missing from his painting: the halos found in basically every other version of the famous biblical scene! This suggests that DaVinci didn't consider these men divine, but rather just average dudes like the rest of us, except with a lot more social and political sway. Take a look! DaVinci's version is on the left and Pedro Berruguete's version is on the right.
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In 1997, a group of people decided to build a castle in France using only medieval technology. It's still not complete! In fact, while it is still a tourist attraction during construction, they don't predict it will be complete until the early 2020s! Take a gander at this video for some more info about this awesome project.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CboJzrDhoSk[/embed]Have you ever wondered about what led up to the creation of the internet? Well, it turns out that, in some ways, the Internet was born out of a sort of Cold War era arms-race with the USA playing the role of the socialists and the USSR playing a kind of imperialistic capitalists. In the USA, the ARPANET came into being on Oct. 29, 1969 when the first host-to-host connection was made from UCLA to Stanford. In the USSR, on the other hand, there was Cybertonia: a fantastical virtual country that functioned as a sort of work club among leading Soviet scientists in the 1960s. In a way, the dream of Cybertonia was a precursor to Second Life: it had its "own constitution, its own currency, its own passports...as well as newsletters and academic publications, all in a fantastical and kind of Merry Prankster-ish way of imagining their own political space or their own country outside the Soviet Union."Speaking of retrofuturism, take a look at this awesome futuristic Mars colony being 3d-printed in the Mojave Desert. Mars City Design, a think tank (of sorts) that is aimed at developing blueprints for the first self-sustaining city on Mars, has spearheaded this project with their team of "Marschitects." After these Earth-based prototypes, they hope to start on Mars with a base of four people and then ultimately grow it to a city of 1,000. Imagine!Meet Clara Luzian, a new media artists who makes haunting, eerily beautiful GIFS that explore themes of human isolation, alienation, artistic expression, non-verbal communication, and the collective unconscious—made all the more visible with the Internet. Aren't they splendid?
Bummed out about climate change and the Anthropocene? Well, at least the silver-lining of the whole "impending-extinction" thing is that it has happened before and life survived beyond it! New fossil evidence suggests that the first mass extinction on Earth was, in fact, caused by early “ecosystem engineers” – newly evolved animals that changed the environment so radically that they drove older species to extinction. It'll be okay! *Breathes deeply*
