Newgrounds Presents: Xiao Xiao

Newgrounds Presents: Xiao Xiao

ARKive saves threatened wildlife

Website stores rare images and film of endangered species.

CHARLOTTE WESTNEY - Nature


ARKive has the only surviving film of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
© ARKive / Zoological Society of London



A huge digital storage project called ARKive is offering safe haven to images and film of the world's most endangered animals and plants.

Photos, footage and soundtracks are often as threatened as the creatures they document. Some, like their subjects, have already been lost forever. ARKive aims to give these valuable records a permanent home and make them publicly accessible through several websites.



Arkive Site

USATODAY.com - Secrets of deep-sea 'Lost City' are surfacing

By Tim Friend, USA TODAY
Scientists report that the Lost City, a bizarre cluster of limestone spires rising from the peak of an ocean-floor mountain, is at least 30,000 years old.

Lost City's hydrothermal vent field is located in the mid-Atlantic about 1500 miles off the U.S. east coast.
The 'city,' on top of a mountain about as high as nearly 3-mile"

More ...

Tacky Living - Gracious with a Difference

An odyssey into 50's pop culture and urban archaeology. (Also has some pictures of topless females!)

Tacky Antenae - Bad Breath - MUCH more!!

NetsurferDigest: Toe Wrestling

Welcome to the extraordinary world of competitive toe wrestling. It's like arm-wrestling, but, well, with toes. It's a sport with a history, albeit a fairly short one, having been invented in an English pub in 1976, and there have even been efforts to elevate it to an Olympic event. We sense that toe wrestlers are more likely to be the kind of people who hang around pubs rather than honing their athletic prowess, and as if to prove this point one of the photographs in the picture gallery shows a contestant dressed in a jacket made of beer mats. There is some disappointing news for netsurfers who fancy a chance at competitive toe wrestling - the tenth Annual World Championships have just been held, so you'll have to wait a year if you want a tilt at champions Alan "Nasty" Nash or Karen "Kamikaze' Davies". More ...

Outhouses

Indoor plumbing may be all most readers know, but it wasn't so long ago that many Americans went out back to do their business. Indeed, a reasonable number of outhouses still exist in the rural US. The Outhouses of America sites honors our past plumbing with every possible detail imaginable, and some unimaginable. Learn how to build a working house. It's not as easy as you might think and the results of getting it wrong are generally extremely unpleasant. The site even has pages devoted to an annual outhouse race. All that seems to be missing is an outhouse with power and an Internet plug so you can set up a desktop in it.

More ...

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently. Ms. Mariann Simms - Wetumpka, AL humormeonline.com More...

Endurance Miles

On Behalf Of Frank -

I like riding my horse.
    I like riding a hundred miles on my horse.
    Riding fifty miles on my horse is okay.
    Riding twenty-five miles on my horse is okay.
But, I REALLY like riding a hundred miles on my horse.
    I have other horses.  One, I don't like to ride at all.  Some, I just
like to groom and feed sweet cookies to and watch them grow.
    I love horses.
    Some people are okay, too, but I LOVE horses.
    ----Frank
 

A. C. Gilbert - The Erector Set (and other wonders)

Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born on February 15, 1884 in Salem, Oregon. As a young boy, Gilbert developed an interest in magic and athletics. In 1892 he moved with his family to an area near Lewiston, Idaho where he soon set about organizing an athletic club for his friends. At one field event he fashioned winners' medals out of the backs of his father's old watches. Later, he ran away and joined a minstrel show until his father retrieved him 20 miles from home.

After his family returned to Salem in 1900, Gilbert attended Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove where he set world records for running long jump and pull-ups. He later attended Pacific University and went on to earn a medical degree from Yale University. Gilbert helped pay tuition by performing magic tricks--often making $100 per night. His athletic training and skill won him a gold medal in the 1908 Olympics in London where he set a world record in the pole vault using a pole he invented. After judges questioned the use of the pole, he repeated the vault with a standard pole and still won.

Despite his athletic successes and his medical degree, Gilbert focused on manufacturing magic sets after he and a partner formed the Mysto-Manufacturing Company based in New Haven, Connecticut in 1909. The inspiration for a new toy, the erector set, came to him after seeing steel girders used in construction. His partner chose not to pursue the opportunity so Gilbert marketed the toy himself in 1913. By 1915 the new A.C. Gilbert Company was producing the girder-based erector sets, which soon became very popular.

The genius of the invention was its versatility. Over the years, the engineering sets used various sizes and combinations of parts that appealed to the imaginations of boys everywhere. Buildings, trains, steam shovels, ferris wheels, and numerous other sets were produced over the decades (see examples). Many included small electric motors. By 1935 over 30 million sets had been sold. Gilbert also developed chemistry sets, microscope sets, and several other educational toys. During his years as a leader in the business, he founded the Toy Manufacturers Association of America and accumulated 150 patents for a wide range of inventions.

After a 50 year career, he retired in the late-1950s and died in 1961. Perhaps his greatest legacy is one of reinforcing the central role of play in the learning process.



A.C. Gilbert Discovery Village