Take a walk with me down a little garden path in a secluded place; you’ll delight in the discovery of a beautiful mathematical equation. –– Tibeess

Tibees is a blissed out mathematician who likens her style to Bob Ross. And I definitely see it. She's soft spoken, easy to follow, and has described math as beautiful and fun.

When introducing this video, she says we'll be "exploring the square root of i. It's a curious question with a delightful answer."

So get out your "pen, some paper, and a vision in your mind," and let's get started! Read the rest

When a teenage girl in China was traveling over her Lunar New Year break, she shocked her mother. The resourceful student somehow managed to squeeze in a ton of homework, including the grueling work of essays and copying passages from textbooks, all while packing her days with holiday festivities. And the work was amazingly accurate and neat, with perfect handwriting.

Her suspicious mom, Zhang, went through the girl's belongings and found an explanation: a strange device with a "metal frame and pen," that turned out to be a "copying robot," according to South China Morning Post. The teen had bought it online for approximately $120. Furious, the mother destroyed the robot and went straight to social media to complain.

Via Oddity Central:

After her daughter admitted to using the device to complete her holiday homework a lot faster, the woman reportedly broke it and took to social media to complain about the girl’s deceitful tactic. “It can help you with homework, but can it help you on tests?” Zhang was quoted as saying.

Perhaps surprising to her mother, a rush of commenters came to the girl's defense. From South China Morning Post:

Most of the comments on the newspaper report’s social media posts enthused about the robot. Some said they wished they had owned such an item when they were younger, while others compared the girl’s short cut to their own, including tieing three or four pens in a row so they could write multiple words at once.

Some argued that the girl should no longer be made to copy texts at her age, while one called for education reform allowing teachers to set challenging and creative homework rather than boring the pupils and adding to their burdens.

Trump admitted this morning that his "National Emergency" is not actually an emergency – "I didn't need to do this," he said about it. But the National Emergency would allow him to build his wall "faster."

"I want to do it faster," he said. "I can do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this. I would rather do it much faster. I don't have to do it for the election. I have already done a lot of wall for the election 2020."

Via Buzzfeed:

George Conway, a conservative lawyer — and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway — who has been critical of the president, tweeted that Trump's comment "should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon."

Former US attorney Joyce Alene tweeted that Trump's comments were a "gift to all the lawyers preparing to sue him." Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice tweeted that they were "plaintiffs' Exhibit A." Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted, "Some emergency!" Adi Kamdar, a fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, tweeted, "The brief practically writes itself."

This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon. https://t.co/ClHQhpTaEe

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) February 15, 2019

Trump, questioned by @PeterAlexander, concedes there’s no national emergency to justify building his wall. “I didn’t need to do this.” “I just want to do it faster.” A gift to all the lawyers preparing to sue him.

During Trump's address this morning where he declared a National Emergency in order to get funding for the wall that Mexico didn't pay for, he also mentioned how excited he was about the idea of a death penalty for people who traffic drugs.

He talked about a meeting he had with China's President Xi Jinping, in which Xi attributed China's low drug crimes to the punishment of death. "That's frankly one of the things I'm most excited about in our trade deal," Trump said, referring to the death penalty given to drug dealers.

"If we want to get smart...you can end the drug problem, a lot faster than people think." Read the rest

"Fitness influencer" Michelle Lewin was romping around on Pig Beach in the Bahamas when a large wild pig couldn't help itself. It saw her butt cheek and bit it.

Lewin posted the video — which includes a closeup of the bright red bite marks — to her Instagram with a good sense of humor.

View this post on Instagram

🐷🤨🤷🏼‍♀️😂

A post shared by Michelle Lewin (@michelle_lewin) on Feb 11, 2019 at 12:50pm PST

Via geek.com Read the rest

A gentleman robbed a bank and was about to make a clean getaway — until he slipped on ice and spilled his stolen cash right in front of a police officer.

Like a skit from a vaudeville show, the bank robber held up Bangor Savings Bank in Maine on Tuesday and then made a clumsy run for it. Things were going well, until dumb bad luck got in the way.

Via centralmaine.com:

He ran across four lanes of traffic on Main Street and into the Ming Lee restaurant parking lot, slipped on the ice and found himself face-to-face with a special agent for the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Task Force who just happened to be parked in the right place at the right time.

“When he fell, the money and the gun he had stashed in his jacket pocket spilled onto the parking lot, and the money was swept across the parking lot by the wind,” police Chief Joseph Massey said later. “Members of the public tried to scoop it up.”

The robber's gun, thought at first to be a handgun, was actually a BB gun. Already on probation for burglary, he was arrested "on charges of robbery."

Image: torbakhopper/Flickr Read the rest

Six police officers in Vallejo, CA shot and killed 20-year-old rapper Willie Bo while he was sleeping in his car at a Taco Bell.

Police came to investigate Bo after an employee at Taco Bell called to report that a man was "slumped over" in his car, according to The Guardian. The car was running with the doors locked.

When police arrived, Bo was "unresponsive" and "had a gun on his lap." The cops called for backup.

When Bo surprised them by actually moving, the officers freaked out.

Via The Guardian:

Six Vallejo officers fired “multiple rounds” at the man, identified by family as Willie McCoy, police said. McCoy had a handgun on him when the officers fired out of “fear for their own safety” on Saturday night, according to the department. The family of McCoy, whose rapper name was Willie Bo, said Tuesday that police had racially profiled the young black man and that there was no justification for using deadly force against someone who was sleeping and not a threat...

Police further alleged that officers told him to “keep his hands visible” but that he “quickly moved his hands downward for the firearm”. Police said six officers all fired shots within roughly four seconds, but they did not disclose the number of bullets that struck McCoy. The officers continued shouting commands before removing him from the vehicle and “rendering medical assistance”. He died on the scene. Police have not yet confirmed his identity and said an autopsy was pending.

A teen's Reddit post went viral when he asked the public how he could get vaccinated. "My parents are kind of stupid and don't believe in vaccines. Now that I'm 18, where do I go to get vaccinated? Can I get vaccinated at my age?"

The Ohio high school student, Ethan Lindenberger, says he had just gotten his driver's license and a car, and had some money, and was ready to defy his parents. "It's stupid and I've had countless arguments over the topic. But, because of their beliefs I've never been vaccinated for anything, god knows how I'm still alive."

A month after his post, he started getting shots, including "hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and HPV," according to The Huffington Post. His mother reacted by telling undark.org that his actions were like a "slap in the face...It was like him spitting on me.”

Lindenberger has six siblings, and only his oldest sister and brother were vaccinated. After that, his parents thought that "vaccines are some kind of government scheme," according to Ethan, who spoke out on Good Morning America today.

"I've never been vaccinated for anything, God knows how I'm still alive." An Ohio 18-year-old went against his anti-vaxx mother's beliefs and fought to get vaccinated when he turned 18. @LinseyDavis reports. https://t.co/7uPNW231Zv pic.twitter.com/P8IFBev1rv

— Good Morning America (@GMA) February 12, 2019

Seven states now allow minors to petition so that they can make their own decision when it comes to vaccinations. But in the states where kids don't have a choice, some teens are coming to Ethan for advice. Read the rest

When booking a flight, it's often cheaper to buy tickets for a connecting flight — one in which your destination is the first leg of the flight. You then get off the plane and ignore the second leg. This is a trick that some passengers do to save money, and apparently Lufthansa isn't pleased.

The airline is suing a man who booked a flight from Seattle to Oslo with a stopover in Frankfurt, but got off the plane in Frankfurt and scrapped the last leg of his flight.

According to CNN:

Lufthansa saw this as a violation of their terms and conditions and is seeking €2,112 (around $2,385) in compensation.

A Berlin district court dismissed the lawsuit in December, but Lufthansa's spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the company has "already filed the appeal against the decision."

It's not clear how Lufthansa thinks they can win a case like this. If we buy a gallon of milk because it's cheaper by the ounce than buying a quart, must we drink the entire carton?

Image: By Lasse Fuss - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

Baby Abram and Haru, his Shiba Inu sidekick, both want a piece of cheese. But in order to get it, they must first ring the bell. Can they learn this trick? The answer isn't too surprising, but what does surprise me is how polite the dog is to the baby, and how helpful the baby tries to be to the dog. Read the rest

Police at Towson University in Maryland are warning students to be on the lookout: a helicopter mom is on the loose. Several students have already been harassed by said mom, in her 50s, with dark hair and a cellphone in her hand.

The mom is harassing students on campus in hopes of finding a Valentine date for her son. She corners students and shows them photos of her boy, hoping to make a match. Instead, the students have complained to the police.

According to The Baltimore Sun:

It caused enough of a disturbance that police alerted students via an “incident advisory” that included a link to surveillance footage of the woman. They asked anyone with information about the woman or the incidents to contact university police at 410-704-4444.

“This incident advisory is being provided in order to make the TU Community aware of an incident on campus that may cause concern,” Charles Herring, chief of the university police department, wrote in an e-mail to the campus community. “This advisory is intended to heighten awareness and inform the community of incidents that may impact their safety and security.”

Police don't plan on arresting the mom – they just want her to stop. I think it's safe to say her son would agree.

Image: Mohamed Hassan/Pxhere – CC0 Public Domain Read the rest

Scientists wanted to know how maggots devour food so quickly, so they conducted an experiment. They fed 10,000 maggots a cheese pizza, which disappeared in 2 hours (but only about 30 seconds in this sped-up video) and noticed an interesting "fountain" pattern of movement amongst the fly larvae that allows them to burn through food at a fast clip. According to ScienceMag.org:

The team searched for patterns in the squirming mass by tracking the flow of individual maggots with software used to model the movement of fluids. Despite the appearance of chaos, the larvae moved like water being pumped through a fountain, the researchers report today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Hungry maggots pushed toward the food from the bottom, and satiated larvae were pumped up and over the top of the pile to the back of the line.

This fountain of larvae allows hungry grubs to replace the ones surrounding the food that have stopped feeding, which keeps the eating machine humming. The researchers say better understanding the process could help grub farming companies scale up and turn even more food waste back into food.

A college student in North Carolina heard rattling in her closet that sounded like a raccoon, but she thought it was a ghost. She'd had other strange things happen in her apartment, like finding strange handprints in her bathroom, and having some of her clothes disappear. She worked up the courage to ask through the closet door, "Who's there?"

And someone answered back, "Oh, my name is Drew."

Turns out a 30-year-old gentleman was hiding in her closet, wearing her clothes.

According to Vice:

As horrifying as the whole thing might be, Maddie—who has declined to reveal her last name—apparently didn't think [Andrew] Swofford posed any sort of immediate threat. She reportedly kept up a conversation with him and let him roam around her home while she called for help.

“He tries on my hat," she said. "He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like, ‘You’re really pretty, can I give you a hug?’" According to Maddie, he never actually tried to touch her.

When Maddie's boyfriend arrived, Swofford took off, but was arrested at a gas station shortly after.

Strangely enough, this wasn't the first time she's had an intruder in her place. In December she found two men in her living room. This might explain the mysterious handprints and missing items. And in both cases there were no signs of entry. I'd say it's moving time.

This is Andrew Swofford. A UNCG junior got home on Saturday, to find him in her closet, wearing her clothes.

Remember that school-room lesson on invisible forces where the teacher sprinkles iron filings over a sheet of paper that is placed over a magnet? Here's a complete upgrade. Watch these magnetic field patterns in 3D, created when magnetite sand is thrown on magnets – some of them bouncing on a small trampoline – and shot in slow motion. Beautifully captivating.

Via Gizmodo Read the rest

A sly gentleman working as an independent contractor thought he'd pull a fast one by faking an accident to earn some big insurance bucks. 57-year-old Alexander Goldinsky from New Jersey was at a job when he threw some ice cubes on the kitchen floor and then lay down on top of them, pretending he had slipped. What he didn't think about were the surveillance cameras watching his every stupid move.

According to CNN, Goldinsky "filed a false insurance claim for the ambulance service and treatment he received at a local hospital for his injuries...He was arrested in January over this incident, which occurred between September 1 and November 1 last year." Read the rest

An obnoxious gentleman at a Miami Heat game Wednesday who was shouting at people around him didn't take kindly to a couple of police officers coming around to see what the commotion was about.

According to NBC, they tried to talk to the 23-year-old man, who was "behaving in an aggressive manner," and noticed "a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage in his breath." They then pulled the man up to escort him away from the crowd when things got a bit physical. Jump to 1:48 to see how the man and the cops suddenly get tangled up with each other and tumble down many rows of seats. Read the rest

A drug trafficker was able to hide from authorities for 15 years by, incredibly, replacing the skin on his fingertips with micro-implants. The procedure took several years to complete, according to The Guardian.

The man, whose name hasn't been released, was from Spain but was posing as both a Peruvian and sometimes Croatian citizen using fake ID.

Via The Guardian:

“The suspect had modified and changed his fingerprints to such an extent that they were no longer recognisable,” said the statement.

“As well as cutting and burning, he had used micro-implants of skin. He had also had a hair transplant to avoid being recognised.”

A police spokeswoman told the Guardian: “He’d used very sophisticated methods to alter the fingerprints of both hands so that he couldn’t be identified. He used skin implants to change the shape of his prints so that the scars beneath couldn’t be detected. It was a very sophisticated, specialist process that took place over a number of years.”

He was arrested on Tuesday while carrying two encrypted phones.

Image: By Frettie - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link Read the rest