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

When Can We Say That A Person Is Actually Dead?

For much of his life, Blair Bigham saw the line between life and death as something irrefutable.

As he worked as a paramedic in the Toronto area for a decade, Bigham saw life as something simple: oxygen flown into the lungs, where it would be absorbed by blood, and then pumped around to cells that it would break it down, along with the glucose taken in from the gut, and finally, down to create microscopic bits of energy needed to power life.

Likewise, Bigham also saw death as something simple: it happens when energy is no longer generated, the batteries are drained, and the lights finally go out.

"I had pronounced dozens of people dead. In particularly horrific cases, when someone had, for example, been the victim of a house fire or blunt-force head trauma, I didn’t even need to check a pulse. The pallid colour of the skin, the emptiness of the eyes, and the body’s acquiescence to gravity said it all."

But his way of thinking was challenged when he started medical school in 2012.

"In the hospital, people seemed to die, well, slower than they did in the field. There were often no car accidents or bullets or torn aortas that I could point to as the cause of their demise. Death was no longer sudden. Instead, I tended to people who were dying—a process that could take days, weeks, months, or even years. The line between life and death started to feel blurry. When I started working in the intensive-care unit (ICU) as a senior medical student, that line became even harder to bring into focus."

On his journey as a medical student, Bigham would come across a case that he would never forget, and he would never see death as something simple again.

Find out more of this story over at The Walrus.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

By Franzified

How Former U-2 Pilot Ross Franquemont Captured a Time Lapse Composite of an Eclipse

Image credit: Ross Franquemont

We seldom get to see a total solar eclipse as it happens and it's even harder to take a photo of one because you would need special equipment and the right timing just to capture that perfect moment when the Sun, Moon, and Earth align. Not to mention, you have to be careful not to expose yourself directly to the sun for too long or risk getting "eclipse blindness" or retinal burns.

But there are ways in which one can get a picture perfect shot of a total solar eclipse. However, you would need to go way up in the sky just to be at the right position. Luckily for Lieutenant Colonel Ross Franquemont, a former U-2 pilot, that chance came during the Great American Eclipse in 2017.

 In 2015, I saw a video of a total solar eclipse taken from an Alaskan Air flight over the Pacific. 

I learned that an astronomer had written to Alaskan Air convincing them to slightly alter the aircraft’s course and departure time so it would fly through the eclipse. 

I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if I could fly through an eclipse? Then I remembered that I do fly airplanes and could probably make that happen.

By Jeremiah

Turning Algae into Biofuel in a Quicker and More Efficient Way

Image credit: lasaa/Pixabay

With increasingly warmer oceans, we should expect to have more algal blooms and see more algae floating on the ocean's surface which would make it somewhat risky to get in the water. However, algae also have benefits to us humans in the form of biofuel.

Despite this though, it takes more time and energy to turn them into fuel so there's no point. Until a group of researchers found a quicker and more efficient way of converting algae into a more eco-friendly source of fuel.

This year, the University of Utah scientists discovered a faster way to turn algae into fuel. Algae is filled with lipids that we can feed our energy-hungry diesel engines. The problem is extracting the lipids, which usually requires more energy to transform than the actual energy we’d get – not achieving what scientists call “energy parity.”

But now, the University of Utah team has discovered a new mix that is more efficient and much faster. We can now extract more power from algae with less waste materials after the fact. 

Paper co-author Dr. Leonard Pease says, “We have removed a significant development barrier to make algal biofuel production more efficient and smarter. Our method puts us much closer to creating biofuels energy parity than we were before.”

By Jeremiah 

The Most Powerful Laptop In The World

Three weeks ago, at the IFA 2019, ASUS unveiled the ProArt Studio Book One, a laptop which boasts a ridiculous 24 GB graphics processing unit, making it the most graphically-powerful laptop ever.

That power come[s] from a mobile version of Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 6000, the desktop versions of which were unveiled at SIGGRAPH last year. Built on the Turing architecture, the main gimmick of this GPU is real-time ray tracing, which is claimed to trace the path of light through virtual scenes and produce realistic reflection, refraction and scattering.  

With 24 GB of this graphical grunt, that makes the ProArt StudioBook One the most powerful laptop around by quite a wide margin. The runner-up title also belongs to Nvidia, with laptops packing the 16 GB Quadro RTX 5000 which came out earlier this year.

A 24 GB GPU might look like overkill even for gamers, but this laptop is not for them — this laptop is for professional animators, engineers, and data scientists as they crunch massive datasets, edit 8k video, and produce detailed 3D animations.

The ProArt Studio Book One does more than boast for its monster of a GPU; it also has other high-end specs worth boasting about. 

It’s powered by an Intel Core i9 2.4 GHz octacore processor and 32 GB of RAM, contains 1 TB of SSD storage, and is topped off with a 15.6-inch 4K screen. 

[...]  

There’s no word on availability or pricing for the ProArt StudioBook One just yet, but considering the Quadro RTX 6000 itself carries a price tag of over US$3,500, it’s a fair bet that it won’t come cheap.

Image Credit: ASUS

By Franzified