Am I the only person who can’t fully enjoy these without assessing the likelihood that the mark was in the know, i.e., that the surprise reveal was staged?
In this one it’s the camera person that makes me suspicious. The mark never acknowledges that there’s someone standing there a few inches away filming the whole thing. But he must be aware of that. I suppose you could have set up the prank by desensitizing him to that over a period of time. But on balance I think it’s more likely the scene was staged.
It’s almost ALWAYS more likely the scene was staged. It’s a cynical view, I realize. But you have to ask yourself: which would have been easier to achieve? An actual prank with an unaware mark? Or a faux prank in which the mark is pretending?
Frank Hurley Flashlight taken during the Polar Night,
“The Spectre Ship”
c. 1911
c. 1911 only in the sense that the southern winter of 1915, which is when Hurley took this photo of Endurance trapped in the Antarctic ice, is sort of adjacent to the year 1911.
The comments offer an interesting example of how Tumblr posts accumulate folklore.
Yes, it’s Cassini that took the source images, even though Cassini was known mainly for its ultimate destination, Saturn. It did an earlier flyby of Jupiter (and before that, Earth and Venus — twice!) on its way there.
Kevin M. Gill made this video, which is technically more of an animation, since he made it by using a small number of source images and shifting elements to create interpolated frames. You can spot the artifacts if you look closely near the moons, which are Io (the reddish one) and Europa.
Spotted Towhees live in dry habitats. Some scientists have suggested that the bold white spots on Spotted Towhees’ backs help them blend in to the sun-dappled undergrowth. I love the way the orange blends into the yellow on the chest.
Thanks for that fun fact @allaboutbird
This looks like a Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus).
If you go to her Instagram she corrected “Spotted Towhee” to “Black-headed Grosbeak”, but she left the Spotted Towhee fun fact that she copied from AllAboutBirds.org more or less intact, so it now tells you that “some scientists have suggested that the bold white spots on their [Black-headed Grosbeaks’] backs help them blend in to the sun-dappled undergrowth.” Who knew? 😜
This is such a Tumblrism. Look at the notes and count how many times people have taken the time to correct the original misidentification. Fairly sure the OP knew full well it wasn’t a goose, but also knew the post would have way more memetic reach this way.
This is such a Tumblrism. Look at the notes and count how many times people have taken the time to correct the original misidentification. Fairly sure the OP knew full well it wasn’t a goose, but also knew the post would have way more memetic reach this way.
Common Raven (Corvus corax), parent with nestlings – photo by Vadim Ivushkin
Baby crows and ravens hatch naked and helpless, and over the course of a few weeks grow to near their parents’ size as their feathers come in. Any image of a small fluffy black bird labeled as a “baby crow” or “baby raven” is a totally different bird. The most common images mislabeled are actually rail or crake chicks, which are wetlands birds not even remotely related to crows and ravens.
If you zoom in you can see the trail of a bunny and what I think was probably either two coyotes or (my guess) the same coyote twice.
Snow is cool.
Upon further review the decision on the field is overturned; the OP’s tags indicate that this was taken in Poland. The “coyote” was almost certainly a dog (or two dogs). Half the distance to the goal line; still third down.
First time for everything. Today was the first time I’ve ever seen a baby rail in a tumblr post, scrolled down, and did not find it being misidentified as a baby crow.
To make your day complete, have an actual baby crow to go with it:
PokemonGoTech is a parody account. It isn’t affiliated with Niantic/Nintendo. So those aren’t likely to be real numbers.
It’s true the game has been down a fair amount, especially at times of high activity. The last bad meltdown was Saturday morning on the US east coast, when the bulk of the US trainer population, having looked forward all week to getting some quality Go time in on their day off before it got too hot (there’s currently a heat wave over much of the US), tried to play all at once.
For what it’s worth, a highly-respected-by-me sysadmin/devops person (not at Niantic, but people talk) was saying that the scuttlebutt she’s heard is that it’s not really a server-scaling issue, because the server side of PGo is running in the Google Cloud and if it was just a question of spinning up more servers that would be easy. It is, rather, a “code is hard to shard across servers” issue; i.e., a software design limitation. In still other words, the system, while clearly doing some pretty impressive things in terms of handling a mind-boggling amount of activity, wasn’t so well-designed that it could actually scale smoothly all the way up to the current level of demand.
So that’s a software issue, and getting it diagnosed, fixed, tested, and deployed is the kind of thing that’s going to take more time than just turning up a dial.
I suspect that the “bugs” of the Nearby tray in the app becoming random/useless and the capture location maps no longer loading are in fact intentional steps they’ve taken to lessen the demands of the application. That is, they’ve intentionally degraded the game by turning those features off in order to lessen the system’s back end requirements while they scramble to fix the larger problem.
It’s probably going to take at least a while longer before things are running smoothly. I appreciate what they’re doing to keep things afloat as best they can in the meantime. I’ve always liked walking around outside, so if I end up having to put my phone away and enjoy reality unaugmented, that’s okay with me. :-)
Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won the best director Oscar on Sunday for The Revenant, has defended himself in the face of criticism for appearing not to applaud the costume designer Jenny Beavan as she made her way to the stage to pick up her award.
In a widely-circulated clip – the Vine has been viewed over 38 million times – Iñárritu is among a number of attendees who are shown not to be clapping, instead regarding Beavan with what many have interpreted as disdain.
In a statement issued to the Guardian on Thursday, Iñárritu called such speculation ‘mean-spirited and false.’
“I think Jenny Beavan is a masterful costume designer and very deserving of the Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road,” he said. Iñárritu also sent a gif showing that he did clap later, as Beavan made her way up the steps to the stage, where she was presented with the award by Cate Blanchett.
Iñárritu continued: “By editing and omitting the full reality and suggesting I felt anything but admiration is mean-spirited and false. What you don’t see in the 10 second clip being circulated is my applause for Jenny as she ascended the stairs to the stage.”
He director concluded: “I’ve learned a lot this awards season… that I should never cross my arms when I am sitting down.
”
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Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘I did applaud Jenny Beavan at the Oscars.’ [x]
[gif of Jenny Beaven walking up to the stage to receive her Oscar, while audience members clap in the background, including The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Spotlight director Tom McCarthy]
Because she had to make the long walk from the cheap seats where the less-famous people sit there was time for those aisle dudes to have stopped clapping while they waited for her to make it down front. When she appeared they were momentarily surprised, because her look (in that context) was legitimately surprising. And of course a moment later they were applauding along with everyone else, but the famous gif stopped before that point. So you just see them looping forever being apparently awful, and the longer you watch the more awful they seem, because your subconscious human-expression-processing apparatus thinks, “Wow. They’ve been scowling a really long time. They must be signaling intense disapproval.”
Millions of people have looked at that gif. A few thousand will eventually come across this explanation. It’s how modern media works. It’s how 100% fake posts on Tumblr get hundreds of thousands of credulous reblogs, but if you look through the notes you find the same exasperated corrections over and over. It’s how a savvy media manipulator like Donald Trump asserts something outrageously untrue on seen-by-millions television, then retracts it in contexts seen only by a tiny fraction of those who saw the original lie.
Tumblr lies. Mass media lies. Our own brains lie.
You think that’s air you’re breathing? Nope. Lies.
Correction: I have discovered that this photo is NOT of the spanker mast hoops aboard the USS Constitution, nor is it from aboard the Pride of Baltimore II. I have traced this to the original photographer: http://ift.tt/1Pm4SbX who states that she took this photo aboard the Sloop Providence in Portsmouth, NH in July, 2012.
