Soccer Balls in the Floor

I'm No Civil Engineer But....I Don't Think They Are Either
byu/ReesesNightmare inWTF

This looks really weird, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Are they putting soccer balls between rebar to save on concrete? Yes, yes they are. This is common in concrete construction and it's called a biaxial voided slab. Notice that the balls are not near the walls or columns, but in the emptier areas. This not only saves on the amount of concrete used, but the ultimate weight of the floor. It also increases the floor's insulating qualities.

However, this particular project is more colorful than others. Builders more commonly use plastic boxes or styrofoam to made concrete voids. These are most likely not regulation soccer balls, but much cheaper plastic orbs. Still gets the job done. (via reddit) 

Halloween Cake

Goats? (via Buzzfeed)

The Most Gruesome Ways Pirates Killed People

In the movies, pirates are charming scalawags who operate outside of the normal limits of civilization. This might give you the wrong idea about the Golden Age of Piracy in the mid-17th century. Sure, some governments turned a blind eye to certain pirates, as long as they carried out capers that benefitted some nations in their competition over other governments. But most pirates were fine with violence, whether in war or in plundering coastal villages or even in competition with each other. They could be pretty brutal overall. Captains reinforced the pecking order and kept their crews in line with the threat of a painful death, and rivals were treated even worse. Short of death, permanent maiming was on the table, too, which explains the hooks and peg legs. Some pirates weren't above a bit of torture, either, to get what they wanted.

Miss Cellania's Links

Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost Board Game Is Finally for Sale. (via Nag on the Lake)

The “friendship divide” explained: How your education affects your ability to connect.

Attack of the Dead Men 1915: The Great War's Supernaturally Horrific Battle and History's First Weapon of Mass Destruction. (via Strange Company)

Santorio Santori And Insensible Perspiration. The scientists went through some crazy stuff to figure out how much water our bodies lose through evaporation and breathing.  

Hemingway, after the hurricane. The 1935 Labor Day hurricane killed 400, many of them veterans who should have been evacuated.  

Gruesome, macabre, and coveted Halloween-style home decor.

The short and horrid life of Russia's Emperor Ivan VI. More here. (via Messy Nessy Chic)

Is It Perimenopause or the Fascist Death Knell of Late-Stage Capitalism? Is my hair thinning, or am I ripping it out because a thirty-four-time convicted, sexually abusive steak salesman with a Hannibal Lecter fetish is five points ahead in Arizona? (via Kottke)

8 Fascinating Facts about Alchemy.

Inspiration

(via Fark)

25 Halloween Life Hacks

Everywhere you look on the ‘net, there are tips for making your Halloween celebrations easier or even more fun. As he does sometimes, John Green takes some of those ideas and tests them to see if they really work the way they are supposed to. He doesn’t take a lot of care, so your results may vary, but you get the idea. My contribution: use a large rubber glove, cut the glove off with scissors, including each finger. But his result is funnier, in the Halloween episode of the mental_floss List Show.

PS: I have never found a better way to carve a pumpkin than by using a hole-boring drill bit and a sawzall. Done in two minutes.

Tweet of the Day

The most Australian video I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/ve6h33hR3O

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 17, 2024

I believe the bird is a tawny frogmouth, not to be confused with the Australian boobook.

I Think So, Too

(via Bad Newspaper)

Albert and Frank

(via Fark)

The Oregon Zoo Rhinos Celebrate Autumn

During harvest season, we often see videos of zoo animals having fun playing with and eating pumpkins. At the Oregon Zoo, they have the annual "Squishing of the Squash" event for the elephants. Now we get to see the rhinos do it in an event that should be called the "Goring of the Gourds." The pumpkins are donated by local farmers with extra pumpkins and hobbyists who grow giant pumpkins for the fun of it.

The black rhinos showed us what those horns are good for -they are tools, used to open up a pumpkin by goring or even slicing it. They are also pretty good for tossing things or even carrying them around. Oh, yeah, the elephants have already had their Squishing of the Squash this year, too. A good time was had by all. (via Laughing Squid)

Scary Area

(Thanks, WTM!)

Fox News Interview with Kamala Harris

The opening skit on Saturday Night Live last night trotted out all the political characters of the season to highlight the absurdities of the presidential campaign. Kamala Harris suffers through a Fox News interview and spits memes while Brett Baier plays unrelated but hilarious clips of what Trump has been doing on the campaign trail.

Practice

(via Fark)

Singing Cat

This video is only three seconds long, so you’ll want to play it again and again. Matt Ambrose is singing “Boom Boom Boom” by the Outhere Brothers. His cat Maximus is, too. (via Viral Viral Videos) 

Tweet of the Day

Romina, who has insomnia, sometimes cannot sleep for days and then falls into a very deep sleep. When Romina falls into a deep sleep, her cats worry about her and come to check her breathing frequently and massage her pic.twitter.com/UhizooN5Ou

— contents that ll heal your depression 🌻 (@Catshealdeprsn) October 11, 2024

(Thanks, WTM!)

Halloween Special

(via Bad Menu)

No Alcohol

(via reddit)

How They Dug the Deepest Hole on Earth

The Soviets were really big on proving they were the best at everything, whether it was science, nuclear weapons, the space race, or Olympic athletes. That probably had something to do with why they decided to dig the deepest manmade hole on earth. Oh, there were plenty of scientific research reasons, but the expense involved leads one to believe it was mainly another superlative they could brag about.  

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is more than seven miles deep, or 12,262 meters, to be exact. The Soviets kept digging for 19 years, from 1970 to 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall suddenly shifted government priorities (like survival). But the project had other problems, too, that had to do with the earth and what's going on seven miles down there. Half as Interesting explains the project in a little over seven minutes; the rest of the video is an ad. (via Digg)

The Taco Bell Chihuahua

Taco Bell has built quite a large business on the premise of combining the same five ingredients into a wide variety of food items in different shapes and sizes, with a wide price range. Staying open until the wee hours helped a lot, too. They've not been as lucky with their advertising campaigns, though. The biggest and most memorable was the Taco Bell chihuahua that was everywhere in the late 1990s. The dog was cute, the scenarios were funny, and you saw those ads every time you turned a TV on. The chihuahua image was made into plush dolls and graced t-shirts. Then suddenly, the ads with the chihuahua were gone, and no one really noticed because, well, it was advertising after all. Weird History Food explains where the chihuahua came from, how he (or actually, she) became a sensation, and why the dog disappeared so quickly. No, it wasn't because the dog died.

Halloween Party

(via Fark)