The Science of Happiness - An Experiment in Gratitude

Ninjas slicing onions everywhere...

[Doug Bloodworth] Impressive Realistic Oil Painting

via [Facebook]

Whatsapp's Double Check: The Relationship Breaker

What are those check marks next to my messages?

We are glad you asked. These checkmarks are actually very important since they are indicators that acknowledge the delivery of a message. Here is what they mean:

•  - message successfully delivered to the server.
•  - message successfully delivered to the phone of your chat partner.

Note: this does not indicate that the message was read, just that it was delivered.

Also note that in a group chat you will only see one check mark indicating that the message was successfully delivered to the server.

via [whatsapp]

[Christina Bianco] Diva Impressions in One Song

Christina Bianco does 19 diva impressions on 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' song. She starts with Adele, then goes through a bunch of singer such: Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Lisa Minnelli, Celine Dion and goes on... This woman kicks!

The Simpsons Opening by Guillermo del Toro

Treehouse of Horror XXIV Couch Gag

The Hidden Mothers

This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image. Years later the impression left is that a sinister event was happening.

Better a hidden mother than a explicit bunny:

via [The Hidden Mother flickr group]

The Age of Internet Empires: Most Visited Website per Country

"The situation is more complex in Asia, as local competitors have been able to resist the two large American empires. Baidu is well known as the most used search engine in China, which is currently home to the world’s largest Internet population at over half a billion users. At the same time, we see a puzzling fact that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea (ahead of the popular South Korean search engine, Naver). We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed. However, we may also be seeing the Baidu empire in the process of expanding beyond its traditional home territory.

The remaining territories that have escaped being subsumed into the two big empires include Yahoo! Japan in Japan (in join venture with SoftBank) and Yahoo! in Taiwan (after the acquisition of Wretch). The Al-Watan Voice newspaper is the most visited website in the Palestinian Territories, the e-mail service Mail.ru is the most visited in Kazakhstan, the social network VK the most visited in Belarus, and the search engine Yandex the most visited in Russia."

via [geography.oii]

[#World] Deadly Lake Turns Animals Into Statues

I unexpectedly found the creatures - all manner of birds and bats - washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.
I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.

                                                                                                       -  Nick Brandt

artist: [Nick Brandt]
book: [Across the Ravaged Land]