Don’t You Animal Again!

“Do not touch.”

“Do not smoke.”

“Do not block the driveway.”

“Do not stand here.”

And

“Do not use; Out of order.”

These are just some of the signs that we see everywhere — on fast food restaurants, on gates, buildings, on train stations, and on public bathrooms. But this sign definitely is one-of-a-kind.

Via Engrish.com

By Franzified

Surprising Bits of Wisdom From 7-Year-Olds

Oftentimes what we witness from 7-year-olds are silly, if not stupid, stuff. But sometimes they can spit out little gems of truth which come out from their little mouth, which have been processed in their little brains — bite-sized truths that catch us off-guard.

Bored Panda compiles 30 tweets where parents are surprised about what goes inside the brains of their 7-year-old sons and daughters. See them all over at the site.

(Image Credit: Pezibear/Pixabay)

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

How To Give A Good Speech, According to Aristotle

Have you ever had a good idea, but you don’t know how to express it well? Well, fret not, for a book from the ancient past might be your answer.

Despite being thousands of years old, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which is a book about the art of persuasion, remains relevant up to this day. We might not be aware of it, but we still use the tools that Aristotle has laid down thousands of years ago — tools that could help us present a persuasive argument.


In his definitive work, Rhetoric, Aristotle wrote that a good speaker must have three things under control: the argument (logos), the presentation (ethos), and the audience (pathos). This is just as valid today as in ancient times.

Aristotle and, later, the Romans Cicero and Quintilian, established a complex five-­point plan for writing brilliant speeches, which essentially boils down to this: Good preparation is everything.



Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler gives us some of the tools from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which we can apply in creating our speeches.

Check out the full article over at Medium.com.


By Franzified

(Image Credit: Skitterphoto/ Pixabay)

Hidden Illustrations In Swiss Maps

(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)

In order to identify unauthorized publication, mapmakers include small but intentional flaws in their maps. These flaws could be a fake street or a town that does not really exist, and no one can perceive it except for the creator. This kind of practice has been around for centuries. But sometimes, cartographers just do it for fun.

A recently published story at Eye on Design brings to light an unspoken tradition among Swiss cartographers to hide small doodles inside Switzerland’s official maps. There is a barely perceptible spider here, a fish there, a reclining naked woman disguised as a stream, and a marmot blended with the hills. These illicit drawings are cleverly hidden among the contour lines that depict Switzerland’s remote mountainous regions. Being located far from populated areas, they often escape scrutiny for decades.

Unfortunately, when the doodles are discovered, they are immediately removed when the maps are updated, as, according to the national mapping agency of Switzerland, the Swisstopo, “creativity has no place on these maps.”

Via Amusing Planet

By Franzified

Japan’s Mundane Halloween Contest of 2019: How It Looked Like

"Guy who grabbed a cart but did not buy much"

Five years ago, in 2014, a Japanese subculture, called jimi Halloween (地味ハロウィンor “mundane Halloween”), emerged. The said subculture was started by a group of adults at Daily Portal Z who “kind of wanted to participate in the festivities of Halloween, but were too embarrassed to go all out in witch or zombie costumes.” In order for them to still be able to celebrate Halloween without embarrassing themselves, they decided to dress up in mundane costumes instead of extravagant costumes.

     The type of costumes that you have to explain to people and then they say, ooooh I get it.

Reality, indeed, is much more scarier than anything else.

Check out the other pictures at Spoon&Tamago.

"She forgot to take out the trash"

"It's a pain in the butt to drink a hot beverage, specially if you're wearing glasses."

(Images Credit: Spoon&Tamago)

By Franzified

Myths About Grief That You Might Be Believing

Grief and loss still remain as one of the great taboos of society. Think about it. We are reluctant in talking about death. We avoid the subject entirely. We euphemize words that pertain to death. Instead of saying that a person “died”, we say that that person “passed away.”

No one is to be blamed, however, when a person avoids the topic. After all, it is a difficult, awkward, and painful thing to discuss. There’s a downside to not talking about the topic, however — it allows spaces for myths about grief and loss to spread, which would make it harder for us to grieve.

Thankfully, Psychology Today provides us five of the most common myths about grief, alongside actual facts about it.

Take for example the first myth — that “grief is a feeling.”

     One of the most common misconceptions about grief is that it’s a feeling. Given that grief occurs in some of the most painful situations anyone can imagine, we generally associate it with depression. But grief is actually a process composed of many emotions, including expected ones like sadness, as well as more surprising ones like anger, frustration, guilt, or even shock.

     It’s common during grief to experience positive feelings, as well, such as relief that our loved one is out of pain. At times, people also can feel numb, almost like the death hadn’t happened. What’s important to know is that all of these emotions—at least in measured amounts—are normal.


Know more about these myths over at the site.

(Image Credit: vlanka/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

When Distractions Distort Reality

Your phone vibrates as a new notification pops in. You hear some kids outside playing. You see the advertisement on this article. You hear the sound of a new message coming in. The next thing you know, you got distracted.

We are bombarded with distractions everyday — distractions that, more often than not, keeps us away from achieving our goals. But more than that, distractions can also be dangerous, as it alters the way we perceive reality.

     A new study suggests that distractions… might change our perception of what’s real, making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw.

     Even more troubling, the study suggests people might not realize their perception has changed – to the contrary, they might feel great confidence in what they think they saw.

     “We wanted to find out what happens if you’re trying to pay attention to one thing and something else interferes,” said Julie Golomb, senior author and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “Our visual environment contains way too many things for us to process in a given moment, so how do we reconcile those pressures?”

     The results, published online recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, indicate that, sometimes, we don’t.

What happened on the research, and what do the results imply? Find out the answers over at Ohio State News.


(Image Credit: Melmak/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

Can Math Help You Find Love?

Bobby Seagull is a mathematician who became famous as he became a finalist on the University Challenge in 2017. Clearly, it can be said that he is an intelligent man, at least when it comes to math and science. Still, life can be tough sometimes, and we can’t have everything in his life. In the case of Bobby, he is unlucky when he comes to love.

A few years ago, he sat down to try to work out why he had been so unlucky in life. “I was 32 or 33, I was single, I loved maths and science – I thought: ‘Can I use maths and science to help me?’ It was a genuine, earnest attempt.” 

Inspired by Peter Backus – a Manchester University economics lecturer who in 2010 wrote a paper titled Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend – Seagull used the Drake equation, developed to estimate how many intelligent alien civilisations there might be in the galaxy, to determine his number of potential partners. “You start by assuming there’s infinitely many, then you keep on making the pool smaller and smaller.”

Find out what happened next in his aim to find love over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

The Origin of Siri’s Name

Have you ever wondered where the iconic virtual assistant of iPhone, Siri, got its name? Somebody asked the same question on Quora, and of all people, Adam Cheyer himself, the former engineering director at Apple, answered.

As a startup, when coming up with Siri's name, we wanted something that was easy to remember, short to type, comfortable to pronounce, and a not-too-common human name. And we wanted to be able to get the domain name for not too much money.

The name Siri have different meanings as well on various languages.

Head over to Quora to see Cheyer’s full answer.

Via Mental Floss


(Image Credit: JESHOOTS-com/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

The Universe of Words by Emmanuelle Moureaux

We use words in many different ways. We use them to express what we feel, to describe the world around us, and to communicate with other people. Words make our lives and our world colorful.

This masterpiece, made from approximately 140,000 hiragana characters, is titled “Universe of Words”, made by Emmanuelle Moureaux.

To celebrate 100 years of the japanese soft drink calpis, emmanuelle moureaux presents [this] new installation… Forming part of the ‘Calpis 100th year anniversary, let’s meet at Tanabata’ exhibition, the work immerses visitors in colored pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling. As the latest in moureaux’s ‘100 colors’ series, the work uses the full spectrum to compose intimate and thoughtful spaces.

The installation was unveiled in July 4, 2019, coinciding with the Japanese star festival, Tanabata.

Tanabata Day marks a tradition when people write their hopes and dreams on colored pieces of paper and hang them from a bamboo branch in the hope that their wishes will come true. moureaux‘s installation reinterprets this event by floating words throughout the gallery space, in an effort to evoke visitors’ curiosity and emotion.

More photos over at DesignBoom.


(Image Credit: DesignBoom)

By Franzified

Identical But Different: The Surprising Individuality of Bacterial Clones

A crowd of runners, all of which looked identical, gathered near the starting line. But this wasn’t your usual 5k. The facilitators of the contest would test both speed and navigational ability as the runners find their way through a maze, as they choose the right direction at every intersection.

At the end of the course, the postdocs Mehdi Salek and Francesco Carrara would be waiting to identify each of the finishers.

The winners, however, won’t receive any medals or trophies. After all, they’re not human: they’re Escherichia coli bacteria.

In recent years, the notion that there could be individual winners in the race have shaken the foundations of microbiology. To test this notion, a team of microbiologists and engineers created a unique endurance event for these bacteria.

The cells at the starting line of Stocker’s microbial marathon were genetically identical, which implied, according to decades of biological dogma, that their resulting physiology and behavior should also be more or less the same, as long as all the cells experienced identical environmental conditions. At the DNA level, every E. coli cell had a roughly equal encoded ability to swim and steer through the course. A pack of cells that started the race at the same time would in theory all finish around the same time. 

But that’s not what Salek and Carrara found. Instead, some bacteria raced through the maze substantially more quickly than others, largely because of varying aptitude for moving toward higher concentrations of food, a process called chemotaxis. What appeared to Salek and Carrara as a mass of indistinguishable cells at the beginning was actually a conglomerate of unique individuals.

Find out more about this study over at Quanta Magazine.

Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay

By Franzified