Author: Shaunacy Ferro

In many cities, getting caught peeing in public can saddle you with a hefty fine, or even land you in court. But there are simply not enough public restrooms to accommodate the needs of bar hoppers, the homeless, and people with weak bladders. Some cities have attempted to rectify this problem with free-standing bathrooms, while others have installed retractable urinals that rise up from the ground at night. (Amsterdam has a version that’s made for women to use, too.)

Paris is dealing with the perils of stray pee in a more attractive way, as Co.Design reports. Uritrottoir, a public urinal created by the Nantes-based design studio Faltazi, is a flower bed urinal that creates compost out of men’s pee. The city has bought two of the urinals so far, with plans to purchase more if they prove effective.

The flower boxes sit on top of a compost bin filled with hay. The urine is diverted into the straw, adding an extra source of nitrogen to the composting process. It doesn’t directly provide compost to the flowers atop the bed, though; the plants are just for a little extra class. In order to make sure that no individual Urtrottoir overflows, the bins have wireless sensors, so someone can monitor the pee levels remotely and replace the bins, transporting the golden-soaked straw to a facility outside the city. According to The New York Times, it will cost around $865 a month to pay workers to clean the two toilets and haul away the pee-straw mix.

Faltazi previously created a funnel that can be installed in hay bales at music festivals to create outdoor, compost-friendly urinals in any location. Placed on sidewalks and in secluded corners, the flower-box version gives men out and about in the city an opportunity to relieve themselves in a way that doesn’t require a city cleanup crew. The boxes come with a privacy shield much like a regular urinal would have, so passersby don’t get an eyeful. And when no one is actively adding compost materials, they just look like a nice little flower bed.

It’s a stand-up only design, though, so women will have to keep holding it for the foreseeable future.

[h/t Co.Design]

All images courtesy Faltazi.

In Istanbul, the cat is king. The city is famous for its legions of feral felines. Even though no one technically owns them, these hundreds of thousands of street cats are as well cared for as any pet—people feed them, welcome them into their shops and homes, and even bring them to the vet. The kitty culture in Istanbul is notable enough that the Turkish city’s magical relationship with its feline residents is the subject of a new documentary, Kedi. And yes, it puts all other cat videos on Earth to shame.

Kedi follows seven street cats on their daily jaunts through the city, exploring their social lives and encounters with their favorite human friends. The documentary takes a cat’s-eye view of the city: The camera tracks low along the ground, eye-to-eye with the film’s feline stars as they roam the streets, following them into cafes, up onto rooftops, and down to the waterfront. Most have several human allies who care for them and whom they visit every day.

In interviews, these caretakers often meditate on the fiercely independent nature of the cats living around them. One compares being friends with a cat to communicating with aliens. Most of the interviewees call the cats that pop into their lives “friends,” rather than “pets.” The cats come and go as they please, each one with its own agenda and distinct personality. They might stop by for a bite to eat or for a round of petting, then move on to their next destination. Some stalk boldly into cafes, while others wait patiently outside for someone to bring them a snack.

Many cities have stray cats, but the people of Istanbul have an unusually friendly coexistence with their feline residents. Director Ceyda Torun, who was born and grew up in Istanbul before her family relocated to New York, attributes the city’s unique relationship to its feral cat population to its culture. “Without the cat, Istanbul would lose part of its soul,” says one resident in the film’s opening.

Cats have a special place in Islamic folklore as well, Torun tells mental_floss. In one folktale, the prophet Muhammad cuts the sleeve off his robe to avoid disturbing his sleeping cat.

More importantly, cats have been wandering the city for millennia. Founded as Byzantium in 660 BCE, Istanbul has been a major trading port for centuries. And with the ships came the cats. The oldest known remains of a domestic cat were found in nearby Cyprus, where humans have likely had feline pets for some 9500 years, and Torun says there’s evidence of Turkish cat culture dating back more than three millennia. One zoologist she spoke to—who had been collecting animal remains under the Bosporus strait—found the 3500-year-old skeleton of a cat whose broken leg had been mended by human hands.

To get a sense of just how revered Istanbul’s street cats are, consider this: In 2016, the city erected a statue by a local artist honoring a recently departed street cat, Tombili. He was so beloved (locally and on social media) that the petition for a statue of him gathered 17,000 signatures in less than two months. Street cats are welcome at mosques, in cafes, and in people’s apartments.

Torun and her crew spent three months in Istanbul finding both human and feline subjects before any filming even began. They took a two-pronged approach to their search, both roaming the streets themselves to look for cats and asking locals if there was a special cat in their neighborhood, including cats that hung out in a particularly unusual place, like a mosque or a Turkish bath. Some of the subjects, like the mother cat who stars in the first vignette—cheekily nicknamed “YellowS**t” by one shopkeeper who feeds her—were only discovered after production began.

As you might expect, cats don’t make entirely dependable film subjects. For one thing, they could get a little too excited about the cameras. At times, Torun says, “we had a hard time shooting because we had multiple cats on us rubbing their face on the camera rig.” They ended up with a lot of shots of cats “just rubbing themselves on the camera or rig or spraying things [with urine].” Luckily, once the cats had made a thorough inspection of the cameras, they tended to go back to whatever they were doing before. “We have hours and hours of footage of cats grooming themselves or sleeping. They weren’t going to perform,” Torun says.

And yet, in other ways, the cats were easier to film than you might expect. “They stick to routines,” Torun explains. “They do the same things over and over. They don’t really stray out of their territory.” All the documentary crew had to do was show up in the right places. They would come back every other day or so during the two months of shooting to see what the cats were up to. Some of them even seemed to know they were being filmed.

The cats would perform “as if they were getting instructions from me,” Torun says. The film ends on a rooftop, focused on a cat perched on a ledge as the sun sets over the city in the background. “He almost knew that we were making a movie and that was the best place,” says the director.

Torun ended up with 180 hours of footage of cats lounging around, stealing food, begging for attention, and more. The finished film, debuting in the U.S. on February 10 courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories, clocks in at an hour and 20 minutes. But if Torun decided to release those other 178-plus hours of cat videos, we wouldn’t be opposed.

All images courtesy Kedi.

Hiding in the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. is a compact little piece of Japanese history. In 1976, as a gift from Japan for America’s bicentennial, bonsai master Masaru Yamaki donated a bonsai tree first planted in the 17th century. And it’s still there, housed at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum.

The Japanese white pine, currently 392 years old, is the oldest tree in the collection. It was planted in 1625, and has probably been “in training”—its growth guided by different bonsai masters—since it was around 3 to 5 years old. Bonsai are delicate trees that require a master’s care, but this one has been through a lot, though the National Bonsai Museum didn’t know that when it arrived.

In 2001, Yamaki’s son and grandson visited the museum to see their relative’s tree, and in the process, revealed its unusual history to the bonsai curator there: When the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, it exploded less than two miles away from the Yamaki home, where the bonsai was kept on a garden bench. The family—and the tree—survived. So did the other bonsai trees that were kept in the garden, placed under a tall wall.

The fortunate Yamaki tree, which is a rare specimen from the island of Miyajima, is not the oldest bonsai in the world, though. Tokyo’s Imperial Palace is home to both a 450-year-old tree and a 550-year-old one.

[h/t My Modern Met]

You may not have been thinking about Heat as you watched The Dark Knight in 2008, but Michael Mann’s 1995 heist classic had a major influence on Christopher Nolan’s Batman flick. Glass Distortion, the film analysis series, just took a look at the distinct echoes of Heat and other Mann movies that appear in The Dark Knight, as Gizmodo spotted.

In an interview, Nolan directly cited Mann as an inspiration on the film, telling Variety in 2009 that he screened Heat for his department heads before they started filming.

“I always felt Heat to be a remarkable demonstration of how you can create a vast universe within one city and balance a very large number of characters and their emotional journeys in an effective manner,” Nolan said. See how that inspiration made its way into his blockbuster:

[h/t Gizmodo]

The U.S. military has started playing with paper airplanes. DARPA, the Defense Department’s technology lab, is funding research into inexpensive, biodegradable cardboard drones that can deliver supplies and then disappear, as the MIT Technology Review reports.

Designed by Otherlab, Aerial Platform Supporting Autonomous Resupply Actions (APSARA) gliders are made of heavy-duty cardboard that ships flat, like IKEA furniture. They’re cheap to mass-produce, so it’s not risky to send them into remote areas where the military might otherwise lose another pricey drone. Soldiers can assemble them in the field if necessary.

There’s no engine or battery, just a small set of electronics to allow the glider to navigate to its destination. They can carry 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of blood, medicine, or other humanitarian supplies into areas that don’t have road or plane access, including onto the battlefield.

According to Otherlab’s press release, a military transport plane stocked with hundreds of pre-programmed cardboard gliders could deliver supplies to an area the size of California in one go. However, this design is just a trial run for the concept. According to Air & Space magazine, Otherlab plans to make the final product out of mycelium (living root structures from mushrooms) that could be activated when the glider is released. The spores would digest the frame, and within a few days, the drone would disappear completely.

If you thought the military’s drone programs were secretive now, just wait until they have drones that can eat themselves.

[h/t MIT Technology Review]

In a suburb outside of Stockholm, bus stops are more than just places to pick up and drop off passengers. They’re also chargers. A new pilot program along a bus route in Södertälje is testing electric buses that can charge up at every stop, as recently highlighted by Co.Exist.

The electric hybrid buses charge automatically when they pull up to the bus stop, where a charging station is buried under the asphalt. It takes seven minutes to charge the bus battery enough for the full 6.2-mile route.

Right now, the Södertälje buses charge overnight and then at the final stop on the route. Sensors direct the bus drivers to park over the right section of the road. A charging box is lowered from under the bus to access the wireless charger.

It’s a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, the city of Södertälje, and Sweden’s national power company, Vattenfall, as well as the bus manufacturer Scania. This is partially a test to see how the system fares in northern climates, and Scania is still working out the best way to implement it, including where the charging stations should be placed along the route.

Seven minutes is a long time for a bus to sit at one stop in the middle of the route, and though this bus route is relatively short, another route probably wouldn’t be able to support a bus running on just one charge. For full-city usage, there would have to be more chargers throughout the route, which could lead to bus bunching as drivers wait for their vehicles to charge. Another solution might be to put chargers under the entirety of the road. The UK has already begun testing an under-road charging system it plans to one day install under the nation’s highways.

[h/t Co.Exist]

Clifford the Big Red Dog’s size poses a lot of interesting issues for a pet owner. On the one hand, Emily Elizabeth never has to worry about him getting run over by a car; he’d be the one doing the running-over. On the other hand, how the heck does a regular-sized human deal with Big Red Dog-sized poop?

Neatorama spotted a reddit thread debating this question, and as you might expect, some people have thought long and hard about it. The thread even includes some major calculations about Clifford’s digestive output. The most feasible option, it seems, would be to train Clifford to poop in a dumpster.

Clifford is around 25 feet tall, so based on the average weight and height of a regular lab, redditor gregnuttle estimates he would weigh around 87 tons. If he was to poop in proportion to a human, by weight, that would be around 1320 pounds of dog doo a day. According to these calculations, that would be about 423 cubic feet of poo, fitting nicely into a single dumpster.

Thus, the only real answer here is to train Clifford to poop in a dumpster outside your house, and get yourself a private garbage service to come empty it every day. Your home would smell amazing, surely. Who knows what would happen if Clifford had an accident, though.

The real question is: What patch of grass could handle the volume of Clifford’s pee?

[h/t Neatorama]

Header image by Brad Barket/Getty Images

The American Civil Liberties Union is one of the most famous civil-rights organizations in the U.S., defending First Amendment freedoms for everyone, regardless of their views. Here are nine things you might not know about the almost century-old organization.

1. IT’S ACTUALLY TWO NONPROFITS.

There are two arms of the ACLU. The ACLU itself is a 501(c)(4) corporation, meaning that it is a membership organization that participates in lobbying state and federal government. Because of its lobbying status, you can’t take a tax deduction for your donations to the ACLU. But the ACLU Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization, just like most nonprofits. Those tax-deductible donations go only toward funding litigation and education programs.

2. IT WAS FOUNDED TO SUPPORT CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS.

Created as the Civil Liberties Bureau after World War I broke out in 1917, the ACLU was founded to, in part, oppose the creation of a draft and protect conscientious objectors to World War I, who at the time were subject to routine harassment and restrictions on what they could say for their choice to avoid service. It was initially a committee within the American Union Against Militarism, but split off due to disagreements about the organization’s vocal opposition to the government’s war policies. Then called the National Civil Liberties Bureau, it lobbied for conscientious objectors to be protected in the Selective Service Act and advised men worried about the draft. It was reorganized as the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920.

3. MANY OF ITS LAWYERS ARE VOLUNTEERS

While the ACLU does have a full-time legal staff, it relies heavily on the work of volunteer attorneys. These “cooperating attorneys” analyze proposed legislation for civil liberties issues and write commentary and complaints to government administrations and officials. As former ACLU legal director Burt Neuborne points out in a 2006 article, “one of the unparalleled strengths of the organization is the ability to mobilize literally thousands of volunteer lawyers in defense of the Bill of Rights” [PDF].

4. THE NEW YORK TIMES WAS NOT INITIALLY A FAN …

On July 4, 1917, the paper ran an editorial called “Jails Are Waiting for Them” arguing that “sensible people of good will do not make the mistake of believing that speech can be literally and completely free in any civilized country.” The author argued that “inevitably there must be restrictions on speech,” and accused the “little group of malcontents” of “antagonizing the settled policies of our Government, of resisting the execution of its deliberately formed plans, and of gaining for themselves immunity from the application of laws to which good citizens willingly submit as essential to the national existence and welfare.”

5. … NOR WAS PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON.

Woodrow Wilson was adamant that free speech didn’t always apply during a war. Arguing for a censorship provision in the Espionage Act of 1917, Wilson wrote to a member of Congress that censorship is “absolutely necessary to the public safety.” The provision didn’t make it into the law (although in 1918 the Sedition Act was added to the same effect), but that didn’t stop the federal government from suppressing some of the activities of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Though relations between the group and Wilson’s administration were initially friendly, in July 1917, the U.S. Postal Service banned 12 of the NCLB’s pamphlets promoting civil liberties from being sent in the mail. In 1918, the Wilson administration found the bureau’s work in violation of the Espionage Act because it encouraged men to refuse to participate in the draft, and its office was later raided by the Justice Department.

6. ONE OF ITS EARLIEST CASES IS ALSO ONE OF ITS MOST LEGENDARY.

The ACLU was the main driver behind the Scopes Monkey Trial, the landmark case that debated whether a teacher could defy state legislation banning the theory of evolution from public school curriculums. The case was actually a bit of a publicity stunt for the town of Dayton, Tennessee. The ACLU had placed an advertisement in the Chattanooga Daily Times offering to finance a case to challenge the law, which had been passed in 1925. Hoping to bring some fame and fortune to their town, Dayton’s leaders immediately gathered to find a suitable teacher for the role. They ended up choosing the 24-year-old John Scopes, who hadn’t actually taught biology (he was new to teaching, and taught math, physics, and chemistry his first year). He didn’t recall teaching evolution at all, in fact, but he agreed to participate anyway, and he was arrested a few days later, with ACLU member Clarence Darrow serving as his lawyer. The trial lasted just eight days, and the jury deliberated for less than nine minutes; Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.

The ACLU planned to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the verdict was later reversed due to a technicality. According to the ACLU, “the ultimate result of the trial was pronounced and far-reaching: the Butler Act was never again enforced and over the next two years, laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution were defeated in 22 states.”

7. IT’S A REGULAR FIXTURE AT THE SUPREME COURT.

The ACLU participates in more Supreme Court cases than any other private organization. ACLU lawyers represented the petitioner in the 1944 case on Japanese internment camps, Korematsu v. United States, and Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple at the heart of Loving v. Virginia. The organization also regularly files amicus briefs, which are written arguments submitted to the court by someone who has an interest in the case and wants to influence the ruling but isn’t directly involved. The ACLU has filed amicus briefs in landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona.

8. ITS CLIENTS AREN’T ALWAYS LIKEABLE.

The ACLU’s crusade for freedom of speech extends to the full political spectrum—even causes that might be morally abhorrent to some of the organization’s liberal supporters. In 1978, it famously represented a Nazi group that wanted to hold a march in the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, which included a large population of Holocaust survivors. Some ACLU members resigned over that choice, but the organization as a whole held that the principle at stake was still free speech. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

It has since also defended Confederate flags on license plates, online writing by NAMBLA members, the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to picket military funerals, and the Ku Klux Klan’s right to adopt a highway.

“Historically, the people whose opinions are the most controversial or extreme are the people whose rights are most often threatened,” the organization explains on its website. “Once the government has the power to violate one person’s rights, it can use that power against everyone. We work to stop the erosion of civil liberties before it’s too late.”

9. IT WASN’T IMMUNE TO THE RED SCARE

While defending Communists was a major part of the ACLU’s work in the early 20th century—it was accused of being a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee—it was not entirely immune to the Red Scare’s influence. It banned Communists from serving on its board of directors in 1940, along with any other member of a “political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country.”

With that decree, it booted one of its founders, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was publicly a member of the Communist Party, from the organization. It repealed her expulsion 36 years later, a dozen years after her death.

“Much of the internal rhetoric that surrounded the ACLU’s deeply principled, but controversial, decision to defend the Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie, Illinois was driven by a fear of repeating the 1940 betrayal of principle,” Burt Neuborne wrote in his history of Flynn’s ouster [PDF].

Now’s your chance to get into the globe-making game. Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, a London-based globe fabrication studio, is looking for a new apprentice, according to Atlas Obscura.

The job isn’t cartography-related; it’s about the making of the globe itself, so they’re looking for someone with product design, engineering, or sculpting skills. Essentially, if you’re good at making things with your hands, they want you. Ideally, you also have some digital design skills and photo editing experience, too.

You can expect to be in training for a while. According to the job listing, it takes six months to a year to learn to make even the smallest globes by hand, and several years to make bigger ones. You’ll have to have quick fingers and a whole lot of patience. Still, your globes could end up on a Hollywood set or in a BBC production, so the years of training are worth it.

Take a look at the application here.

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

Improv shouldn’t be limited to comedy clubs. According to The Engaging Educator, it’s great prep for the rest of your life. The New York-based education organization teaches improv not as a stepping stone to a career on SNL, but as a way to improve your communication skills in the real world.

We stopped by one of their “Improv for Professionals” classes to see how the skills you need to be a great improvisational comedian can translate to the office. Here are five reasons why saying “yes, and” can help your professional life:

1. IT KEEPS YOU LISTENING

When you’re always thinking about what you’re going to say next, you tune out everyone else. And when you are so eager to make your own voice heard that you stop listening prematurely, you can miss out on vital information. Improv requires intense listening skills so that actors can stay in sync with each other and move the scene forward together, even when things are happening quickly. If your improv partner says “Welcome to Disneyland!” and you space out thinking about how you will respond, you’ll miss when she says “The park is closed today because it’s raining frogs.”

In the office, you and your coworkers are all working together to move towards common goals. It’s a lot easier to keep everyone on the same page when you fully pay attention to each other.

2. IT PRIORITIZES COOPERATION

Not even the most brilliant employee can carry the whole company forward alone. Good teamwork is essential, just as it is with improv. On the stage, players need to work together to create a story, and this means accepting the ideas of others and jumping in to take the lead when another player’s mind blanks. The idea is that you should not only be contributing to the scene with whatever choices you make, but you should also set up your partner for success. The same goes for working on a big client project. When one person is successful, it makes everyone else look good, too.

3. YOU MUST BUILD ON THE IDEAS OF OTHERS

The common adage in improv is that you must always say “yes, and.” In other words, you never shoot down someone else’s idea. Instead, you run with it and build on it. When someone says, “I like your house plant!” You don’t say, “No, actually, that’s a priceless statue.” You say, “Thanks! It’s super poisonous, so I wish you hadn’t touched it. I should probably call the paramedics.”

Even if an idea that gets thrown out in an improv scene wouldn’t be your first choice, you have to work with what you’re given and respect the ideas of others. That’s not so different from what needs to happen in a strategy meeting or brainstorming session.

4. YOU HAVE TO OFFER CONCRETE IDEAS

In improv, questions can kill a scene, while concrete statements move it forward. “Where are you going?” puts the onus on the other player to figure out a way to continue the story. Whereas, “I see you’re on your way to the lion exhibit. Me too!” provides a lot more for everyone to go on. In the office, questions are necessary, but sometimes, they can stall the action. Instead of taking a risk or trying something new, you end up spending all day questioning the pros and cons. You can still ask questions, but you also have to bring something constructive to the table.

5. YOU’RE GUARANTEED TO FAIL

No one is brilliant 100 percent of the time, in improv or anywhere else. Everyone has the occasional slip-up or bad idea. Perhaps you got distracted and missed what your partner said, or asked a question that brought the scene to a halt. It sucks in the moment, but if you become accustomed to metaphorically face-planting, it gets easier to handle—making it less scary to take a risk that might end with you looking silly. If you never risk failure, you might never get that big laugh—or big promotion.