In computer animation circles, the Utah teapot is legend. When I first installed a 3D rendering app in the dark ages of computing, this teapot was one of the models included with the software, and I rendered the heck out of it. But what’s so special about this teapot? And why is it on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California?
The Utah teapot was “digitized” by Martin Newell in 1975, using a piece of graph paper and a series of measurements. Newell was a mathematician working at the University of Utah, and he bought the teapot at a department store in Salt Lake City. By precisely defining the curves of its surface, Newell created a dataset that other 3D computing pioneers could use to render virtual versions of the teapot. It became ubiquitous in 3D computing, at least in part because there simply weren’t very many models like this in the early days—we didn’t have giant libraries of ordinary objects represented in 3D, so this teapot was a convenient starting point.
In the video below, join Tim Scott at the Computer History Museum explaining the history and significance of the teapot, as he stands with Newell’s original 41-year-old teapot.
Though the election has been over for more than a month, yard signs still dot houses around the land. Trump/Pence. Clinton/Kaine. Humphrey/Muskie?
In November, the lawn in front of the Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, looked a bit like it belonged to an extremely overzealous voter. In reality, Lefferts was the latest host of an art installation called “Monument to the Unelected,” a look at conquered candidates dating back to John Adams’s run against Thomas Jefferson in 1796.
Created by artist Nina Katchadourian, the 50-odd political signs have appeared in several locations around the country. Though many of the names are centuries old, the signs are designed to look fairly contemporary—Katchadourian creates them herself out of plastic sheets. That includes the latest addition to the collection, a blue sign emblazoned with “I’m With Hillary 2016.” And while you’d be forgiven for thinking the project is a response to the mania surrounding the 2016 election, Katchadourian created it in 2008 as a commission for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Of course, it’s a project about politics and history, but it doesn’t take a position on who should win any given election,” Katchadourian toldThe New Yorker. The monument, rather, is “a statement of fact—it’s what we have collectively done, up until now.”
In an artist’s statement, she added, “At a time when the country was preoccupied with the ‘fork in the road’ moment of a major national election, the piece presented a view of the country’s collective political road not taken.”
“Monument to the Unelected” left Brooklyn shortly after the election, but will surely appear again in about three years. If you see an “Aaron Burr is my president” yard sign, you’ll know you’re in the right place.
Wine can get weird. When planning your next soiree, skip the conventional vino varieties and opt for a type that’s made from unconventional (or straight-up wacky) ingredients or a unique hue. Sip on some inspiration below.
1. ROSE PETAL WINE
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Located in West Sussex, England, the small, family-run Lurgashall Winery produces wines, spirits, and meads from fruit and natural ingredients like birch sap, brambles, honey, and walnuts. The Royal National Rose Society, a specialist plant society in England that focuses on rose care and cultivation, commissioned Lurgashall to make a rose wine from handpicked flower petals. The pink-hued vintage is reportedly aromatic and medium-dry. No word, however, on whether it tastes as fragrant as its parent plant smells.
2. METEORITE WINE
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In 2012, Ian Hutcheon—who then worked as manager of Tremonte Vineyard in Chile’s Cachapoal Valley—merged his love of wine and astronomy: He released a Cabernet Sauvignon that was fermented in a vat with a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite, believed to have crashed into the Atacama Desert around 6000 years ago. Fittingly, Hutcheon named the vintage “Meteorito.”
Originally, Hutcheon only sold the wine at his observatory, Centro Astronomico Tagua Tagua, which he opened in 2007. “The idea behind creating the wine was to blend astronomy with winemaking, and offer the wine as an entertaining product visitors to our observatory could take home as a souvenir,” Hutcheon told The Drinks Business in 2013. But the space-inspired wine ended up garnering international attention, and wine lovers from other countries—including the U.S.—clamored to try the celestial drink for themselves.
3. BLUE WINE
Gik Live
Wine is typically red, white, pink, or yellow. But thanks to a start-up composed of six young Spanish entrepreneurs, we’ll soon be able to drink a blue variety. The company—and its wine—is called GIK, and its founders (who have no prior wine-making experience) partnered with the University of the Basque Country and the food research department of the Basque Government to make the cerulean beverage.
Gik’s wine is made from a red-and-white grape blend, with a non-calorie sweetener added to the mix. Surprisingly, its vivid hue doesn’t come from dye—it reportedly is the result of a natural pigment found in grape skin, combined with indigo from the Isatis tinctoria plant. You can buy Gik online in Europe, and it’s also available for pre-order in the U.S.
Know that feeling near the end of the day, when you’re not sure if you need a cup of coffee to perk up or a glass of wine to unwind? Friends Fun Wine certainly does. The Florida-based company sells different types of canned wine, including what they bill as the world’s first coffee wine. Currently, it offers Cabernet Coffee Espresso and Chardonnay Coffee Cappuccino, as well as non-coffee beverages like sangria and moscato.
5. PUMPKIN WINE
Not into pumpkin spice lattes? Give its alcoholic cousin—pumpkin wine—a try. Maple River Winery in Casselton, North Dakota, makes the seasonal drink from local pumpkins. According to staff, the autumnal drink is so popular that it sells out quickly each fall (hence it’s not listed on their website). However, vineyard visitors can still sample other unusual flavors—including apricot, gooseberry, lilac, and strawberry-rhubarb—depending on their seasonality.
Birthday Cake Vineyards’ name gets straight to the point. The New York-based company makes wine that, according to them, tastes like birthday cake. Customers can choose among a variety of white wines that taste like strawberry shortcake, cheesecake, and cake batter, and reds flavored like coffee cake and black forest cake.
7. JALAPENO WINE
Cardinal Winery
Brave enough to eat a jalapeno pepper whole? Try drinking an entire bottle of them. Located 30 minutes north of Philadelphia, Cardinal Hollow Winery in West Point, Pennsylvania makes more than 25 different types of wine—including strawberry, blackberry, and dandelion—but one of their best-selling creations is jalapeno wine. If the idea of sipping alcohol made from fiery chili peppers seems more terrifying than tasty, you can still cook with it. Cardinal Hollow Winery recommends using it to marinate meat, sprinkle on salads, and adding it to other types of wine for an added kick.
8. BEER-WINE HYBRIDS
Dogfish Head
Drinkers typically identify as either “wine” or “beer” people, but a handful of breweries have blurred this line (and confused everyone’s taste buds) by creating a variety of unique beer/wine hybrids. Brewers will add grape juice, whole grapes, and must (a blend of skins, seeds, stems, and other grape products) to their product, or ferment beer using wine yeasts.
One notable example is Dogfish Head Brewery, the craft beer heavyweight in Milton, Delaware. One of their beers, called Noble Rot, contains two white wine grapes: pinot gris and viognier grapes. (The latter are infected with a “benevolent fungus” called botrytis, a.k.a. “noble rot,” to reduce their water content and maximize their sweetness.) Another brew, Sixty-One IPA, is made with Syrah grape must. And Midas Touch is a hybrid wine/beer/mead beverage inspired by ingredients found in 2700-year-old drinking vessels that archaeologists discovered in the legendary King Midas’s tomb.
9. VODKA WINE
Un costume sur mesure pour Absolut Tune, mariage d’un sauvignon blanc néo-zélandais mousseux et de la célèbre vodka Absolut! pic.twitter.com/zuNW5TWA1a
In 2012, Absolut Vodka launched Tune, a sparkling Sauvignon Blanc spiked with vodka. (It reportedly had a 14 percent ABV, which suggests that the drink had relatively little actual hard alcohol in it.) The following year, Tune was recalled in 10 states after it was discovered that the brand didn’t disclose whether the wine contained sulfates. Eventually, Tune was discontinued, but a few online retailers still appear to sell it.
BONUS: WINE MADE FROM GRAPES GROWN IN SPACE (FORTHCOMING)
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In the future, humans may enjoy wine made from grapes grown in a plant growth chamber on the International Space Station. In 2015, officials announced that the commercial spacecraft SpaceX Dragon would deliver wine grape seeds to the habitable satellite on its upcoming commercial resupply mission that April. Turns out, wine grapes are perfect for space travel: they don’t require much water, they produce strong fruit, and they yield little waste.
However you pronounce GIFs, the little moving images have become an integral part of our modern vocabulary. And the futuristic minds at NASA are not about to be left in the past. The space agency has launched its own image collections on Giphy and Pinterest.
Anticipating some confusion on the part of NASA diehards, the agency issued a press statement explaining what Pinterest is.
“Pinboards are often used for creative ideas for home decor and theme-party planning, inspiration for artwork and other far-out endeavors,” they wrote.
Over at Giphy, they continue, “Users can download and share the agency’s creations on their own social media accounts, and can be used to create or share animated GIFs to communicate a reaction, offer a visual explanation, or even create digital works of art.”
The images are NASA at its best: sweeping shots of the cosmos, space walks, exuberance at Mission Control, and the wacky antics of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. So go forth, good nerds, and get your GIFs on.
In the 16th century, the wealthy had more than just the average rosary at their disposal during their moments of worship. Coveted boxwood carvings depicting intricate religious scenes in miniature allowed the rich to fit religious art right in their hands. Until early 2017, the Art Gallery of Ontario is hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to these tiny hand-carved works of art, as CNN reports.
“Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures” features more than 60 boxwood miniatures, some of which have never been on display in North America before, like a rosary owned by King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The wooden carvings have been part of a years-long, international study using scientific imaging to better understand how they were produced. The study uncovered some surprises, like a hidden portrait of a king and queen that went undiscovered for 500 years.
The collection includes prayer beads (one in the shape of a skull), a knife inscribed with biblical scenes, medallions, triptychs, rosaries, and even sarcophagi. Some date all the way back to the late 1400s.
The exhibition runs until January 22, but you can also see high-resolution images of the entire collection on the gallery’s website. For more information, watch a video with the curator below.
For every Uber horror story you’ve shared, you can rest assured that drivers have plenty of their own. In an effort to encourage better behavior among passengers, the ride-sharing service recently released a list of actions that could potentially get users banned, VentureBeat reports.
The updated community guidelines don’t contain any major surprises: They’re mostly common sense rules that anyone who’s ever conducted themselves in public will hopefully be familiar with. The list of behaviors to avoid includes shouting, swearing, vomiting, carrying firearms, leaving trash in the car, allowing minors to ride unaccompanied, and flirting with drivers or fellow passengers. Uber makes that last part crystal clear for those who didn’t catch on the first time: “As a reminder, Uber has a no sex rule. That’s no sexual conduct between drivers and riders, no matter what.”
They also remind passengers that local laws still apply once they’ve climbed into the backseat. This covers obvious violations, like verbal and physical harassment, but also less serious misdemeanors like riding without a seatbelt or asking drivers to exceed the speed limit.
If most of these rules sound obvious to you, you might be more concerned with receiving less-than-stellar ratings than losing your riding privileges all together. Uber shared a few tips to help boost your rating as well. A big one is punctuality: Meeting your driver where and when they’re expecting you is ideal, but if you know you’re going to be late it helps to shoot them a call or text updating them with your E.T.A. Above all, Uber asks that you treat the people you share your ride with with respect. They write: “People who use Uber come from all walks of life. Please respect those differences in your conversations and behavior. We want drivers and riders to always feel welcome.”
To find out if your good (or bad) passenger behavior is reflected in your rating, you can follow these steps to see how Uber drivers have scored you.
Paleontologists have discovered a tiny dinosaur’s fluffy tail preserved inside a drop of amber. They described their findings in the journal Current Biology.
The amber market in northern Myanmar where the specimen was found has already proven itself a rich scientific resource. Earlier this year, a team of researchers reported finding a pair of well-preserved bird wings dating back at least 100 million years. The team had bought more than a dozen pieces of amber, including those two. As they turned their attention to the rest of their purchase, one silver dollar–sized chunk stood out.
Lida Xing
Within this drop lay what looked like a tiny, feathery switch not even an inch and a half long. Computed tomography (CT) scans, high-powered microscopy, and chemical analysis confirmed the team’s suspicions: They’d found a dinosaur tail.
More specifically, they’d found part of the tail of a fluffy young theropod, most likely a coelurosaur.
Look at that cutie. Image Credit: Chung-tat Cheung
The articulated tail contained eight vertebrae and delicate, barbed feathers that would have been white or chestnut brown while the little dinosaur was still alive. Unlike the bird wing feathers, these appear to be more ornamental than anything else. The researchers say that if the rest of the coelurosaur’s tail looked like this segment, it was unlikely it would have been flight-worthy at all. Its handsome fluffy feathers would have kept it on the ground.
Co-author Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan museum says these findings reaffirm the importance of amber to the scientific record. “Amber pieces preserve tiny snapshots of ancient ecosystems,” he said in a statement, “but they record microscopic details, three-dimensional arrangements, and labile tissues that are difficult to study in other settings. This is a new source of information that is worth researching with intensity and protecting as a fossil resource.”
It is generally believed that the first Christmas tree was of German origin dating from the time of St. Boniface, English missionary to Germany in the 8th century. He replaced the sacrifices to the Norse god Odin’s sacred oak—some say it was Thor’s Thunder Oak—by a fir tree adorned in tribute to the Christ child. The legend is told that Boniface found a group of “pagans” preparing to sacrifice a boy near an oak tree near Lower Hesse, Germany. He cut down the oak tree with a single stroke of his ax and stopped the sacrifice. A small fir tree sprang up in place of the oak. He told the pagans that this was the “tree of life” and stood for Christ.
MIDDLE AGES
A legend began to circulate in the early Middle Ages that when Jesus was born in the dead of winter, all the trees throughout the world shook off their ice and snow to produced new shoots of green. The medieval Church would decorate outdoor fir trees—known as “paradise trees”—with apples on Christmas Eve, which they called “Adam and Eve Day” and celebrated with a play.
RENAISSANCE
During Renaissance times there are records that trees were being used as symbols for Christians first in the Latvian capital of Riga in 1510. The story goes that it was attended by men wearing black hats in front of the House of Blackheads in the Town Hall Square, who following a ceremony burnt the tree. But whether it was for Christmas or Ash Wednesday is still debated. I’ve stood in that very square myself in the Winter, surrounded by snow.
Accounts persist that Martin Luther introduced the tree lighted with candles in the mid-16th century in Wittenberg, Germany. He wrote often of Advent and Christmas. One of his students wrote of Luther saying:
For this is indeed the greatest gift, which far
exceeds all else that God has created. Yet we believe so sluggishly,
even though the angels proclaim and preach and sing, and their lovely
song sums up the whole Christian faith, for “Glory to God in the
highest” is the very heart of worship.
Returning to his home after a walk one winter night, the story goes, Luther tried unsuccessfully to describe to his family the beauty of the starry night glittering through the trees. Instead, he went out and cut down a small fir tree and put lighted candles upon it.
In a manuscript dated 1605, a merchant in Strasbourg, Germany wrote that at Christmas they set up fir trees in the parlors and “hang thereon roses cut out of paper of many colors, apples, wafers, spangle-gold and sugar …” Though the selling of Christmas trees is mentioned back to the mid-1500s in Strasbourg, the custom of decorating the trees may have developed from the medieval Paradise Play. This play was a favorite during the Advent season because it ended with the promise of a Savior. The action in the play centered around a fir tree hung with apples.
ENGLAND
The earliest date in England for a Christmas Tree was at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor by Queen Charlotte, the German born wife of George III, for a party she held on Christmas Day, 1800, for the children of the leading families in Windsor. Her biographer Dr John Watkins describes
the scene:
In the middle of the room stood an immense tub with a
yew tree placed in it, from the branches of which hung bunches of
sweetmeats, almonds, and raisins in papers, fruits and toys, most
tastefully arranged, and the whole illuminated by small wax candles.
After the company had walked around and admired the tree, each child
obtained a portion of the sweets which it bore together with a toy and
then all returned home, quite delighted.
GERMANY
The Christmas Tree was most popularized in England, however, by the German Prince Albert soon after his marriage to Queen Victoria. In 1841, he began the custom of decorating a large tree in Windsor Castle. In 1848, a print showing the Royal couple with their children was published in the “Illustrated London News.” Albert gave trees to Army barracks and imitation followed. From this time onwards, the popularity of decorated fir trees spread beyond Royal circles and throughout society. Even Charles Dickens referred to the Christmas tree as that “new German toy.” German immigrants brought the custom to the United States and tree decorating is recorded back to 1747 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
AMERICA
Many individuals and communities vie for the honor of having decorated the first Christmas tree in America. One interesting story tells of Hessian soldiers who fought for George III in the Revolutionary War. As they were keeping Christmas in Trenton, New Jersey around a decorated tree, they left their posts unguarded. George Washington and his troops were hungry and freezing at Valley Forge, but they planned their attack with the knowledge that the Hessians would be celebrating and thus would not be as able to defend themselves.
Christmas trees really became quite popular in the United States following the invention of the electric light. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland decorated the tree at the White House with electric Lights. This idea caught on and spread across the country.
Rolf’s German Restaurant in New York City’s Gramercy Park neighborhood has one of the city’s most over-the-top holiday decoration displays—but visitors have to step inside to see it. As Business Insider reports, the restaurant spends between $60,000 and $65,000 each year to festoon the tiny eatery’s interior with twinkling lights, baubles, and garlands.
Approximately 15,000 ornaments, 100,000 lights, and 800 figurines hang from the ceiling, walls, and bar, Rolf’s manager, Suhal Uddin, tells Business Insider. The restaurant begins its extravagant decoration process in late September, and after several weeks of sleepless nights, workers typically finish the festive project by November 1.
The restaurant is inundated with reservation requests during the holiday season. Rest assured: This year, Rolf’s decorations will stay up until the end of May, giving you plenty of time to wait for the crowds to die down and check them out in person.
Check out pictures of Rolf’s over-the-top Christmas display below.
