Month: November 2016

Which fandom do you prefer to sleep under?

1. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

This appliquéd quilt featuring Zelda and Link was made by sewing each individual piece onto a fabric background. CandySnow sold this quilt through her Etsy shop and then had to suspend sales because the buzz surrounding the Zelda quilt caused her to get behind in orders. You can see more pictures of it in this gallery.

2. GAME OF THRONES

Felice Regina made a Game of Thrones quilt for her husband Seth depicting the animals from the various house sigils on the show. By using a combination of patchwork, appliqué, and embroidery, Regina made each animal visible in negative on the reverse side. Regina posted a tutorial in case you want to recreate the quilt yourself.

3. TRACER FROM OVERWATCH

Erica Price made this huge quilt depicting Tracer from the game Overwatch. It’s 7 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, made of over 3700 individual patchwork pieces. Price is planning to sell it. You can see more pictures in this album.

4. POKEBALL

Some lucky infant will be introduced to the gaming life with an 8-bit style Pokeball baby blanket that measure 32 inches square. You can purchase it or one of several other video game quilts at the KreativeMumma Etsy shop.

5. DARTH VADER

Asmotron received this Darth Vader quilt from his mother. She took the patchwork pattern from a much smaller bead pattern, then thought the “blocky style” might not be right. But she unknowingly made it cooler by giving it an 8-bit pixelated style, which her son loved. The reverse side sports a Vader-printed fabric that glows in the dark. The computerized quilting pattern depicts different Star Wars characters and spaceships. Best mom ever! You can see all the quilt’s features in this imgur gallery.

6. MEGA MAN

Xarddrax was proud and a bit envious that his wife made an 8-bit Mega Man quilt for their 14-year-old son last Christmas. She designed the pixelated images of the game’s various bosses on graph paper and took original pictures to match colors when she bought the fabric. It’s really big, too, at 7 feet, 3 inches square.

7. DOCTOR WHO

Beth and Sara are the Crafty Geeks. They made this quilt featuring minimalist but very recognizable characters and icons from the British TV series Doctor Who. They’ve used the same style for quilts featuring superheroes, Star Trek characters, and various other science fiction and fantasy worlds. Look for them displaying their creations at a fan convention near you, and right now at Instagram.

8. PAC-MAN

This is only the second quilt Shannonagannery ever made, and she didn’t even use a pattern! She estimates that the tied patchwork quilt with Pac-Man and ghost appliqués took 75 hours to complete. “I was very ready to be done by the end and will be taking a sewing hiatus,” she wrote on Reddit. “Baby quilts only from now on!”

9. MINECRAFT TNT

Redditor bottledgoose made this quilt in the shape of the TNT used in Minecraft as a gift for her stepson. All those diamond shapes were sewn together by hand! Yeah, the stepson liked it. You can see a gallery of images from the quilting process here.

10. THE WALKING DEAD

Rick Grimes of The Walking Dead is shown in silhouette in this appliquéd art quilt. Jenna Clements titled her quilt “What Lies Ahead” for quilt shows, but otherwise calls it “The Rick Quilt” because everyone knows what that means. The organizers of the 2016 Exeter Spring Quilt Festival selected it to be shown at their other quilt shows, so Clements let her creation go on tour. But she was glad to have it back at her shop later.

If you’re not intimately familiar with England’s geography, you may not be entirely sure of where your favorite British shows are set—unless they happen to be set in London. But a print from Chicago-based graphic designer Tim Ritz, spotted by CityLab, will show you exactly where shows like Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, and The Office take place.

The poster even zooms in to map London-specific shows on the city level, and tells you not only where shows are set, but where they’re actually shot and which channel they air on. The Great British Bake Off’s latest series was filmed in Welford Park, just west of London. The UK version of The Office is set in the same county, in Slough, about 20 miles from London. The teen drama Skins is set in Bristol, another one of those towns many Americans have heard of but may have no idea how to find on a map. (It’s in South West England.)

In addition to series shot in England, the UK map features shows set in Scotland (like Outlander), Northern Ireland (like The Fall), and Wales (there’s one: Doctor Who), as well as Ireland.

Click to enlarge. Image Credit: Tim Ritz

Whether or not you’ve ever wondered exactly where Downton Abbey is located, the map can give TV fans greater context about the shows they watch, especially period pieces like Outlander or Pride and Prejudice, in which characters travel across the UK without the luxury of 21st-century transportation systems.

It’s $34.

[h/t CityLab]

On November 26, 1948, Edwin Land debuted his first “Land Camera,” dubbed the Model 95A. This was the first “Polaroid camera,” as we’d popularly know it—though camera nerds like me still talk about Land Cameras. Anyway, the 95A went on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston for $89.75. (That would be just over $900 in today’s money.)

Land had been inspired to create an instant-results photography system by his daughter, who asked him why she couldn’t see the picture he had just taken of her. In those days, you had to develop the film using many steps (and plenty of chemicals), print it, and then your kid got to see the picture. It took Land and his team years to develop the instant self-developing film and cameras to go with it, but the system became a huge hit.

My favorite video about Polaroid cameras is this 10-minute documentary-slash-ad by Charles and Ray Eames. It focuses on the SX-70 model, introduced in 1972. Enjoy:

For more on the history of Polaroid and Edwin Land, check out this Boston.com slideshow. Polaroid did a lot of cool stuff before making cameras! Also interesting is this timeline (PDF link) of Polaroid inventions.

(Image courtesy of Jarek Tuszyński, used under CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.)

 
Besides writing The Scarlet Letter (1850) and other famous works, Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for studying transcendentalism and hanging out with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and 14th President Franklin Pierce. But his daughter, Rose Hawthorne, had an arguably even more compelling life than her father. Although she belonged to a wealthy Protestant family and had connections to the literary and political elite, she switched careers from writing to nursing at 45 years old. While caring for poor terminal cancer patients in New York City tenements, she became a Catholic nun, founded a religious order, and took a new name. Today, she’s on her way to becoming a saint.

On May 20, 1851, Nathaniel wife’s Sophia gave birth to Rose, the couple’s third child, in Massachusetts. Two years later, the Hawthorne family moved to Britain so Nathaniel could work as the American consul in Liverpool. As a child, Rose lived and traveled throughout England, France, and Italy. Though Protestant, she spent time at the Vatican Museum, listened to the chanting of Italian friars, and even saw Pope Pius IX on his balcony. These early experiences likely contributed to her later conversion to Catholicism.

By 1860, the Hawthorne family was back in Concord, Massachusetts. But Nathaniel died four years later after a mysterious illness, and in 1868, Sophia and her children moved to Dresden, Germany for its lower cost of living. When the Franco-Prussian War hit, they escaped to England in 1870, where Sophia died of typhoid the next year.

Less than a year after her mother’s death, Hawthorne married George Lathrop, an American writer she had met in Dresden. The couple moved to New York and then Cambridge, where Hawthorne wrote short stories and poetry and Lathrop worked as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In 1876, their son Francis was born, but he died of diphtheria in 1881. The couple’s relationship was stormy, and Hawthorne struggled with Lathrop’s alcoholism as well as the death of their son. At the end of the 1880s, they moved to Connecticut and got involved with the Catholic community there, eventually converting to Catholicism together.

In 1895, Hawthorne got permission from the Catholic Church to separate from her alcoholic husband (he died a few years later of cirrhosis). Now single and in her mid-40s, she decided to make a major life change. Inspired partly by hearing a sad story about a seamstress with cancer who died alone in an almshouse, Hawthorne trained to become a nurse and decided to devote the rest of her life to caring for poor, terminally ill patients. “A fire was then lighted in my heart … I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor,” she wrote.

Hawthorne moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, renting rooms in tenements there. She spent her days caring for ill patients, helping sick mothers feed their children, and attending Mass daily. To get donations and support, she also wrote articles and newsletters about her mission. Although most of her contemporaries thought cancer was contagious, Hawthorne didn’t treat her patients as pariahs. Instead, she aimed to fulfill what she thought of as God’s will by alleviating their suffering and giving them dignity before they died.

In 1897, Alice Huber, an artist who read about Hawthorne’s work, joined her as a volunteer, eventually working full-time with her to care for the sick. Two year later, Hawthorne and Huber raised money from New Yorkers to open a house in lower Manhattan, which they called St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer, after Saint Rose of Lima. In 1900, after a Dominican friar vouched for them, the New York Archbishop approved Hawthorne and Huber to take their vows, wear Dominican habits, and become nuns. Hawthorne, who took the name Mother Mary Alphonsa, founded a religious order, The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, later called the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.

 
Mother Alphonsa also started a magazine called Christ’s Poor to publicize and raise money for her charitable work. The project was successful—writer Mark Twain made regular donations. Until her death in 1926, Mother Alphonsa continued her mission to care for impoverished people with terminal cancer.

In 2003, the Archdiocese of New York commissioned a tribunal to study her life and deeds, as well as her writings. A decade later, the Vatican received documents in favor of her canonization. Although it could take years for the Pope to decide if Mother Alphonsa will become a saint—among other hurdles, there must be proof she committed two miracles—her legacy of selflessness, generosity, and courage continues. Today, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate three homes—Rosary Hill, Sacred Heart, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help—in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, respectively. These homes offer free palliative nursing care for patients with incurable cancer, continuing the work that Mother Alphonsa began over a century ago.

Each month, we round up the most interesting comics, graphic novels, webcomics, digital comics and comic-related Kickstarters that we think you should check out.

1. A.D.: AFTER DEATH BOOK ONE

By Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire
Image Comics

Most wouldn’t expect formal comics experimentation to come from the writers of Batman and the X-Men, but, to be fair, Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire are two of the most celebrated creators in comics and both have had a lot of success outside of their work for Marvel and DC. In this three-part prestige format series, they are collaborating to tell a story about a future in which death has been cured. Jonah Cooke, the story’s protagonist, has been alive for centuries and in this first chapter, reflects on his life and his culpability in an event that changed the world.

The format of this book is not entirely a comic; it’s a combination of sequential art, prose, and illustrations. Lemire, who lately has been writing for other artists, provides the art in his discernibly loose, outsider art style while Snyder handles the considerable sections of prose with a novelist’s skill. The result is an ominous and contemplative read about memory and mortality.

2. MUHAMMAD ALI

By Sybille Titeux and Amazing Ameziane
Dark Horse Comics

Some biography subjects were born to be in comics and the brash, super-heroic figure of the boxing world known as Muhammad Ali is one of them. He famously appeared in a comic with Superman back in 1978, but in this 2015 French graphic novel, being released for the first time in English, he gets a 128-page bio-comic all his own. Ali’s life—from his youth as Cassius Clay through his storied boxing career, his conversion to Islam, and his rise as an early hero of the civil rights movement to his final battle with Parkinson’s disease—is all covered here. Titeux gives many of the biographical events some proper historical context by providing some details of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and the conflict in Vietnam. Ameziane’s photo-realistic artwork depicts these events with accuracy and an appropriate sense of drama equal to Ali’s legend.

3. SUPER POWERS #1

By Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani
DC Comics

Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani are responsible for some of the most popular all-ages comics and their work for DC, like Tiny Titans, is just about the best option you can find out there for early reader superhero comics. Their newest series, Super Powers, stars some of the biggest heroes in the DC Universe and begins with a story in which Batman has gone missing, leaving Superman and Wonder Woman to not only find their friend, but to also fill in for him in Gotham City while he’s gone.

4. WHO KILLED KURT COBAIN?

By Nicolas Otero
IDW Publishing

For Gen Xers, Kurt Cobain’s death by apparent suicide in 1994 was a “where were you when…” moment that is forever burned into their memories. Over 20 years later, the mystique around his death has sparked conspiracy theories and a number of books including the French novel Le Roman de Boddah by Héloïse Guay de Bellissen, which focuses on Cobain’s suicide note and its reference to his imaginary childhood friend “Boddah.” French artist Nicolas Otero has adapted that book into a graphic novel that captures the feeling of the ‘90s—both the grunge aesthetic and even the page layout-driven style of the comics from that decade—while depicting a dramatized version of the real events of Cobain’s life. We see Nirvana’s sudden rises to success, Cobain’s passionate relationship with Courtney Love, his struggle with heroin addiction. and his early death, all told from the point of view of Boddah.

5. ETHER #1

By Matt Kindt and David Rubin
Dark Horse Comics 

Writer Matt Kindt isn’t a fan of the supernatural genre, so the protagonist of his new book is himself a skeptic who prefers science over magic. However, Boone Dias is a scientist-adventurer who is often brought from our world to a magical dimension called the Ether to solve a murder. In a world where seemingly anything can happen, the inhabitants of that world lean on Dias to find explanations for the unexplainable. Kindt is one of the smartest genre writers in comics right now and he’s paired with astounding new talent David Rubin (The Rise of Aurora West), whose richly colored art is like an hallucinatory children’s book that you’ll want to spend some time admiring.

6. BLACK PANTHER: WORLD OF WAKANDA #1

By Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, Afua Richardson, and Alitha Martinez
Marvel Comics

After his cinematic debut in Captain America: Civil War, an upcoming solo film, and a new comic series written by acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther has now become a high-profile character in the Marvel Universe—enough to warrant a spinoff series focusing on his supporting characters. The Dora Milage is the King of Wakanda’s elite all-female guard, made famous during Christopher Priest’s iconic run on the Black Panther series in the 1990s. Two of the members, Ayo and Aneka, have been a major part of Coates’s run and will now be the focus of this book. 

Neither of the big two comics publishers have been a model for hiring diverse creators—especially when it comes to African American women—but this particular book boasts an interesting creative team of women of color, led by professor and op-ed writer Roxanne Gay who readers of Bitch Planet will know from her essays in that comic. She is joined by artist Alitha E. Martinez, while a 10-page backup story co-written by Coates and poet Yona Harvey features art by Afua Richardson, who made a splash this past year drawing the politically charged Image series Genius.

7. MAYDAY #1

By Alex DeCampi, Tony Parker, and Blond
Image Comics

This is the first issue of a proposed trilogy of mini-series that mix Cold War espionage with unexpected elements like ‘70s drug culture, Alice Cooper, and Krautrock. The series will follow a pair of CIA agents through different exploits in the 1970s. The first issue begins with the murder of a Soviet general while he is in the act of defecting to the United States. Rather than a John le Carré-style of complex spy maneuvering, it quickly veers into the unexpectedly violent and weird vibe of a Coen brothers film when the two Russian assassins hook up with a bunch of hippies and fall victim to some LSD-laced vodka.

DeCampi employs a number of neat writing tricks here, including a clever way of showing how someone trying to understand another language may miss every few words as they’re trying to keep up with a conversation. She also manages to integrate a ‘70s era soundtrack into the story, along with a recommended playlist at the end and some notes about the musical choices.

8. SUGAR & SPIKE VOL. 1

By Keith Giffen, Bilquis Evely, and Ivan Plascencia
DC Comics

Sugar Plumm and Spike Wilson are private investigators for superheroes. When someone like Alfred the butler needs someone to track down a stash of embarrassing zebra and rainbow-colored Batsuits that has been stolen or Green Lantern needs to investigate whether an alien flower on display in a museum is the same sentient being he used to wear on his lapel for a time back in the ‘80s, they turn to Sugar and Spike for help. This series, which ran in the recent Legends of Tomorrow anthology and is now collected on its own in a trade paperback edition, is representative of DC Comics’s new, brighter outlook on its properties; one that embraces the silliness of the past and lets their superheroes be superheroes (Sugar and Spike themselves are meant to be grown-up versions of a couple of toddler characters that ran in a strip of the same name back in the 1950s). It’s a clever yet ridiculous concept that is played for laughs and works well, thanks to the physical comedy and character acting by artist Bilquis Evely. Amidst all the broad comedy, there are also subtle hints at a complicated but affectionate relationship between the two protagonists that leaves you wanting to know more.

9. SUNNY VOL. 6

By Taiyo Matsumoto
Viz Media

The final volume of Taiyo Matsumoto’s award-winning manga series reaches English-speaking audiences this month (it came out in Japan last year). The poignant, slice-of-life series about a group of foster children who only find solace and escape when sitting in an abandoned yellow car they’ve named “Sunny” is considered a masterwork by many. This series has been nominated for numerous awards and won the Shogakukan Manga Award this year, one of Japan’s highest honors for manga.

10. THE PLUNGE

By Emi Gennis
Kilgore Books & Comics

In 1901, Annie Edson Taylor was the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. And she did it at the age of 63. Emi Gennis tells her story in this beautiful new black-and-white comic, released through brand-new publisher Kilgore Books & Comics. Taylor’s life story is both an uplifting example of can-do feminism and an anti-climactic tragedy, as she would eventually die poor and alone, gaining nothing from her death-defying feat. Gennis’s crisply inked cartooning style has an appropriately old-timey feel and her depiction of the horrific ride down the falls is captivating and surreal.

11. LEGEND

By Samuel Sattin and Chris Koehler
Z2 Comics

After humans have been wiped out by a biological terror attack, dogs and cats are left to rebuild the world in their absence. But there is something else out there—a mysterious creature called the Endark—that has killed Ransom, the leader of the dogs, requiring an English Pointer named Legend to step up and take his place. Chris Koehler is an accomplished editorial illustrator who has worked for publications such as The Atlantic and Variety. His style exhibits a high level of photorealism and a designer’s sense of minimal color. He manages to translate that style to his first piece of sequential comics without losing any of his technical polish. This collaboration with novelist Samuel Sattin, also a comics newbie, should please most domestic animal adventure fans of stories like The Incredible Journey or We3.

12. Off Season

By James Sturm
Slate.com

Acclaimed cartoonist and director of the Center for Cartoon Studies James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing) has been creating a webcomic for Slate that began in September and will continue through the end of the year. It is about 2016, with a focus on the election and now on its aftermath. Set in New England, it follows a down-on-his-luck divorced dad who was a Bernie Sanders supporter raising a daughter who is excited about the prospect of electing the first female president. Sturm draws everyone—including real-life players like Donald Trump—as anthropomorphic dogs, trudging through the same reality we’re all currently living in real time.

Unless you’re claustrophobic, stepping into an elevator is no big deal; many of us do it several times a day. But prior to 1854, people weren’t exactly lining up to use them, no matter how convenient they were—cables snapped frequently enough that the public viewed them as death traps.

Then, along came mechanic Elisha Otis and his miracle invention, the safety elevator. Thanks to his clever engineering, the cable could snap and the elevator would still hold. Make: has a great demo of how it worked:

However, elevators carried such a stigma that no one was willing to give Otis’s safety elevator a chance. Sales were practically nonexistent. To show the public that his invention worked, Otis orchestrated a stunt that would change the way we build, work, and live.

In 1854, he constructed a 50-foot elevator at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York, getting P.T. Barnum himself to hype up the crowd. Otis made a show of riding the elevator all the way to the top, then severing the cable that tethered the elevator car to the frame. Shocked onlookers prepared for the inventor to plummet to a particularly ugly death—but when the rope snapped, the elevator dropped only a few inches. “All safe,” he assured the crowd.

Just to get his point across, Otis repeated his demonstration over and over for months, proving to thousands of onlookers that a safe elevator had finally arrived. Today, there are approximately 2.5 million Otis elevators in operation [PDF].

So, the next time you step into an elevator, imagine the cable being cleaved in two—and then breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that if that happened you would be fine.

Robots have already proved their utility in space, cruising landscapes no human could—or should—explore on foot. But they may come in handy in dangerous locations here on Earth, too. Students and staff at Duke University’s School of Engineering and School of Nursing have collaborated on a two-armed robot they’ve dubbed the Tele-Robotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant (TRINA, for short). The robot was designed to assist nurses in high-risk healthcare situations, according to The Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper.

The robot nursing assistant, which features a tablet that shows the face of its human operator, was created in response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. After some healthcare workers were infected with the virus while trying to treat patients, the National Science Foundation put out a call to engineers and scientists to come up with a solution.

At the moment, TRINA is in the early stages of development and can only perform basic tasks, like picking up a glass of water and moving trays of food from one location to another. A team is now working with TRINA in a simulated hospital at the School of Nursing, exploring its capabilities as well as figuring out what tasks subsequent versions of the bot need to learn, from passing out meds to patients to inserting IVs.

TRINA was not built to replace human nurses, but rather to assist and act as a surrogate body. The robot is remote-operated, requiring a human to drive it and make it work. In the future, Duke scientists and engineers hope to use the “robo-nurse” in contexts outside healthcare services, like the cleanup of toxic spills.

For now, TRINA is getting ready for clinical trials at the Duke Clinical Research Unit. “We need to establish a better interface with the human and the robot to make them work together and be more comfortable,” Duke engineering student Jianqiao Li explained to The News & Observer.

[h/t The Duke Chronicle]

Banner and header image courtesy of iStock

Shopping on Black Friday—or, really, any time during the holiday season—is a good news/bad news kind of endeavor. The good news? The deals are killer! The bad news? So are the lines. If you find yourself standing behind 200 other people who braved the crowds and sacrificed sleep in order to hit the stores early today, here’s one way to pass the time: check out these fascinating facts about shopping through the ages.

1. The oldest customer service complaint was written on a clay cuneiform tablet in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago. (In it, a customer named Nanni complains that he was sold inferior copper ingots.)

2. Before battles, some Roman gladiators read product endorsements. The makers of the film Gladiator planned to show this, but they nixed the idea out of fear that audiences wouldn’t believe it.

3. Like casinos, shopping malls are intentionally designed to make people lose track of time, removing clocks and windows to prevent views of the outside world. This kind of “scripted disorientation” has a name: It’s called the Gruen Transfer.

4. According to a study in Social Influence, people who shopped at or stood near luxury stores were less likely to help people in need.

5. A shopper who first purchases something on his or her shopping list is more likely to buy unrelated items later as a kind of reward.

6. On the Pacific island of Vanuatu, some villages still use pigs and seashells as currency. In fact, the indigenous bank there uses a unit of currency called the Livatu. Its value is equivalent to a boar’s tusk. 

7. Sears used to sell build-your-own homes in its mail order catalogs.

8. The first shopping catalog appeared way back in the 1400s, when an Italian publisher named Aldus Manutius compiled a handprinted catalog of the books that he produced for sale and passed it out at town fairs.

9. The first product ever sold by mail order? Welsh flannel.

10. The first shopping cart was a folding chair with a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs.

11. In the late 1800s in Corinne, Utah, you could buy legal divorce papers from a vending machine for $2.50.

12. Some of the oldest known writing in the world includes a 5000-year-old receipt inscribed on a clay tablet. (It was for clothing that was sent by boat from Ancient Mesopotamia to Dilmun, or current day Bahrain.)

13. Beginning in 112 CE, Emperor Trajan began construction on the largest of Rome’s imperial forums, which housed a variety of shops and services and two libraries. Today, Trajan’s Market is regarded as the oldest shopping mall in the world.

14. The Chinese invented paper money. For a time, there was a warning written right on the currency that all counterfeiters would be decapitated.

15. Halle Berry was named after Cleveland, Ohio’s Halle Building, which was home to the Halle Brothers department store.

16. At Boston University, students can sign up for a class on the history of shopping. (Technically, it’s called “The Modern American Consumer: the Commodification of Boys and Girls.”)

17. Barbra Streisand had a mini-mall installed in her basement. “Instead of just storing my things in the basement, I can make a street of shops and display them,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. (There are photos of it here.)

18. Shopping online is not necessarily greener. A recent study at the University of Delaware showed that “home shopping has a greater impact on the transportation sector than the public might suspect.”

19. Don’t want to waste too much money shopping? Go to the mall in high heels. A 2013 Brigham Young University study discovered that shoppers in high heels made more balanced buying decisions while balancing in pumps.

20. Cyber Monday is not the biggest day for online shopping. The title belongs to November 11, or Singles Day, a holiday in China that encourages singles to send themselves gifts. According to CNN, this year’s event broke all previous records with $17.8 billion in sales.

A heaping handful of these facts came from John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, and James Harkin’s delightful book, 1,234 Quite Interesting Facts to Leave You Speechless.

 
Anywhere from 60 to 100 tons of material falls to Earth every day. Most of it is in the form of dust and grain-sized particles and is harmless, but it’s a reminder that a lot of stuff is out there. The weathering on the International Space Station provides startling evidence of that.

So what do we do if a not-so-harmless object is hurtling towards us?

Although a doomsday asteroid is a frightening prospect, don’t worry—NASA has a plan. The agency actively monitors space for dangerous objects and has conducted research into the best way to repel or destroy a space invader. Today, it is actively developing missions to do just that, and even has a department to deal with the problem: the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. But just how fast could the agency deal with an actual catastrophe? Here’s an inside look into NASA’s emergency planning system.

FIRST WE FIND IT.

NASA has several ongoing projects to survey the solar system for new celestial objects. In 2009, the agency launched an infrared telescope called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Its mission, run by NASA’s astrophysics division, was to create an infrared map of the entire sky. After the completion of its primary mission, NASA’s planetary science directorate asked to extend the life of the spacecraft, re-purposing it as an asteroid hunter in 2013. NEOWISE was born. Over the course of its life, what the spacecraft has found is terrifying―hundreds of new near-Earth objects, and scores of potentially hazardous ones. In other words, the solar system is a lot scarier than we thought. Here on Earth, there are several observatories that work together with a goal of discovering, tracking, and characterizing this population of renegade asteroids and comets.

A small body called TB145―the “Great Pumpkin asteroid“―exemplifies how the discovery of a potentially hazardous object works in practice. On October 10, 2015, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PAN-STARRS) in Hawaii spotted an object approximately 600 meters across that was speeding perilously toward Earth. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia imaged it, and the Goldstone Deep Space Network telescope also took radar images. The Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii provided spectrometry. In a very short amount of time, scientists knew a lot about this scary new cosmic neighbor. The object was soon identified as the dead nucleus of a comet, its volatiles having been burned away. Moreover, scientists identified boulders several meters in size sitting on the object’s surface. Those boulders matter because they can help steer the object away from Earth. We weren’t in danger from it; its trajectory was well understood, and even at its closest pass, it was 300,000 miles away from the Earth.

THEN WE TRY TO MOVE IT.

 
Two of the rapidly maturing projects of the still very nascent asteroid deflection program are the Asteroid Impact Deflection Assessment and the Asteroid Redirect Mission. These programs use two different techniques to attempt to change the orbit of space objects, kinetic deflection, and enhanced gravity tractoring.

The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. It recently completed its concept study phase and has moved into design. The goal is to build a rendezvous spacecraft called the Asteroid Impact Monitor (AIM) that would fly to an asteroid called Didymos, which is easily reached from Earth but does not cross our orbital path. (In other words, if something goes terribly wrong with this experiment, we don’t risk creating the potentially hazardous object we want to deflect.) Didymos is about a half-mile in diameter, and even has its own small moon, informally called Didymoon. Then NASA will launch a spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART is a “kinetic impactor”: It will plow into Didymoon and demonstrate how much energy can be imparted, and how much it changes the moon’s orbital period. The hope is to test the effectiveness of a technique called “kinetic deflection,” which would enable scientists to redirect an asteroid were it on an impact trajectory with Earth (provided they discovered the asteroid quickly enough).

Another such project in development is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, run by NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations directorate. That mission is an element of NASA’s “journey to Mars,” and will further the development of solar electric propulsion, a technology designed to push large masses around the inner solar system—things like Mars habitat modules and cargo and, as a bonus, asteroids.

 
In fact, the near-Earth object observation program of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office helped identify places to test out the Asteroid Redirect Mission’s capabilities. When it launches, a robotic spacecraft will fly to asteroid 2008 EV5, a potentially hazardous object close to Earth that has been tentatively selected as the mission’s target. The spacecraft will approach the asteroid’s surface and survey it for boulders. Once scientists identify a suitable boulder, the robot will touch down on the surface using long landing legs, and then deploy grappling arms to grab hold of the boulder. With the boulder firmly in hand, the spacecraft will lift off from the asteroid surface.

Before flying back to Earth’s orbit with the asteroid (for astronauts to study safely once it’s in a new, safe, lunar orbit), the spacecraft will first perform an “enhanced gravity tractor” maneuver—another kind of asteroid redirection. By flying near one side of the asteroid, the mass of the spacecraft and the tens-of-tons boulder will use gravity to gently and gradually alter the trajectory of the asteroid.

AND IF THAT DOESN’T WORK, WE BLOW IT UP.

In a pinch, there’s the nuclear option [PDF]. If scientists discover an asteroid on an impact course with Earth and find that there’s no time to build a spacecraft, study the object, and adjust its course with “slow push deflection/migration” techniques such as the gravity tractor, they can crack their knuckles and resort to “impulsive migration” techniques. The beauty of using a nuclear device on an asteroid is that you don’t need to know much about the asteroid in advance. In a time-sensitive situation, this is your go-to option, and there are four ways of deploying it.

A standoff nuclear detonation involves a flyby of a hazardous object and using a proximity sensor to detonate a nuclear device. The explosion would push the asteroid off course. This technique is orders of magnitude less effective than plowing the nuke into the asteroid and pressing the red button, but it has the advantage of not fragmenting the asteroid. Fragments are bad. Remember the meteorite explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia?
 

 
That rock was a dinky 20 meters in diameter. If we created a sustained bombardment of such asteroid fragments, we would be in for a pretty bad time.

The standoff technique also allows for a progressive adjustment of an asteroid’s course. We wouldn’t be limited to launching a single nuke; we would launch several. (It’s not like we’re running low on nuclear weapons.) Rather than correct the asteroid’s course in a single dramatic blast, we could more precisely adjust its course with a series of detonations.

Other nuclear use tactics are surface, subsurface, and delayed. A nuclear surface is like dropping a nuke on the asteroid. When it touches the asteroid’s surface, it detonates. Subsurface is like the DART half of the Asteroid Impact Deflection Assessment mission―the impactor drives a nuclear explosive deep into the asteroid, and it detonates. A delayed nuclear technique is just that: The nuke is landed on the asteroid and waits for scientists to detonate it when the time is right.

All of this can be done with conventional explosives as well, though it’s unlikely that conventional explosives would pack enough punch to make much of a difference.

Countries are not products, so it’s weird to think of having to “sell” them, but that’s exactly what tourist bureaus exist to do. In order to entice potential travelers, many countries have taken a cue from the corporate world and adopted their very own slogans.

FamilyBreakFinder decided to compile a list of all the known tourist slogans and throw them onto one big map. Each of the grey countries shown have an official slogan, while the purple countries do not. Some are vague (like the United States’s “All within your reach”), some are enthusiastic (like Brazil’s “Brasil—sensational!”), and some are confident (like Uganda’s “You’re welcome”).

If you know of a slogan that’s not on the map, let us know in the comments. 

[h/t Digg]

The Afternoon Map is a semi-regular feature in which we post maps and infographics. In the afternoon. Semi-regularly.