Don't Panic! Lighten Up!

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Russian supermarket staff & customers unfazed by armed robber; send him away without a fuss

RT
Sun, 04 Jun 2017 17:08 UTC

Footage of a failed robbery attempt at a Russian supermarket shows a cashier nonchalantly scanning groceries while being held at gunpoint, before the perpetrator leaves the store empty-handed like a guilty schoolboy.In the CCTV video from a grocery store in Moscow Region, the female cashier is seen serving a customer when an unmasked man, wearing a black coat and a hat, enters the shop and heads directly to the cash register. He then produces a gun and points it right at the cashier's head.

However, contrary to all expectations, no drama follows. Demonstrating tranquility worthy of a Buddhist monk, the woman continues to serve her customer, who also appears to be totally unmoved by the armed perpetrator.

The only person who seems concerned is a man who is seen entering the shop and retreating as soon as he notices the gun.

Potty paper...what it reveals about your personality

PSYBLOG
Tue, 30 May 2017 00:16 UTC

Do you hang your toilet roll with the end of the paper hanging 'over' or with the end hanging 'under'? According to a survey by Dr Gilda Carle, 'over' people are more assertive. Assertive people are more likely to be in leadership roles and to have a take-charge attitude, says Dr Carle.

Those hanging the roll 'under' are more likely to be submissive. Submissive people tend to be more agreeable, flexible and empathetic, says Dr Carle.

To create the toilet paper personality test, Dr Carle surveyed around 2,000 people of all ages, asking them whether they rolled the paper over or under. Some people, Dr Carle has found, actually switched the toilet roll in other people's houses (around one in five). Naturally it was those 'over' people imposing their dominant personality on submissive 'unders'.

The rich roll over. Rolling under might also be linked to lower earnings, another survey has found. 73% of those earning under $20,000 rolled under, while 60% of those earning over $50,000 roll over.

(Who knew there were so many surveys on toilet roll alignment?)

Comment: What did the toilet paper say to the 'bum'? "Let's stay in touch." What did the 'bum' say to the toilet paper? "You're on a roll."

BlessU-2! Robot 'priest' offers automated blessings at German church

NDTV
Tue, 30 May 2017 17:42 UTC

A robot priest that beams lights from its hands and grants automated 'blessings' to people is being met with mixed reactions at a church in Germany.

The robot, called BlessU-2, was developed by the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau.

With its metallic body and touch screen, the robot asks a person what blessing they want, after which it raises its arms and appears to smile. Lights then start to flash as the robot says "God bless and protect you" and recites a biblical verse. After the blessing, the user can printout the dictum.

Take a look at how the robot priest operates in this video:

Journalist whisperer: Lavrov gives perfect answer to extremely boring question

Russia Insider
Fri, 19 May 2017 22:14 UTC

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov shows once again why he's an all-star diplomat

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is an experienced journalist whisperer—giving him all the skills he needs to subdue feral members of the press.

Sometimes these wild beasts ask questions so profoundly mindless that you can actually feel your brain-cells being kidnapped by ISIS and lowered into a shark tank.

Union Jack to be replaced with a picture of a mug of tea

Davywavy
News Thump
Wed, 24 May 2017 23:43 UTC

The Union Jack is to be replaced by a flag with a picture of mug of tea on it to better reflect the British spirit.

Plans announced by the government would replace the criss-crosses of red, white and blue with a shot of a lovely cup of hot brown just before it has a Hobnob dunked in it for the first time.

The change will mean all future marches by the EDL and BNP will have to be carried out with members dressed like the Tetley Tea Folk, which will be a great improvement.

The Treasury has approved the proposals, reasoning that anyone owning Union Jack merchandise will have to go out and buy a replacement meaning bumper additional revenues.

"It's what Britain is all about, really," said spokesman Simon Williams.

Meteorite that struck a woman sells for more than its weight in gold

Jason Daley
Smithsonian
Fri, 19 May 2017 13:39 UTC

The recently sold bit of Sylacauga meteor, worth 18 times more than gold (Christie's)

At 2:46 P.M. on November 30, 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was napping on her couch. Suddenly a nine-pound object bashed through the ceiling of her home, smashed into her radio, ricocheted off and hit her in the thigh, reports Kat Eschner at Smithsonian.com. The object was a meteorite and it left a nasty bruise in the only well-documented case of a person being struck by a rock from space. A piece of that meteorite sold last week at auction at Christie's fetching more money per gram than gold.

As Daryl Pitt, a meteorite consultant for the auction house, tells Rae Paoletta at Gizmodo, the 10.3-gram specimen of meteorite sold for $7,500. "By way of example, the price of 24K gold today is $39.05/g," Pitt says, "and so this specimen sold for 18.5 times its weight in gold."

Babushka blues: Video of Belarus granny playing guitar with a light bulb goes viral

RT
Sat, 20 May 2017 20:00 UTC

A video of a Belarusian granny in the street playing blues on the guitar with a light bulb has so far received over six million views.

Most of the people commenting on the viral YouTube video were touched by the performance, and wondered about the woman's fate.

Stanky Bean & Dorkwood: This is what happens when AI invents paint colors

Annalee Newitz
arsTechnica
Fri, 19 May 2017 14:12 UTC

Who came up with these names? Welp, it wasn't an AI.

At some point, we've all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colors. Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I've seen to date.

Writes Shane on her Tumblr, "For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values.) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?"

Shane notes that, at first, the algorithm seemed to be forming words that are a combination of brown, blue, and gray. Shane told Ars that she chose a neural network algorithm called char-rnn, which predicts the next character in a sequence. So basically the algorithm was working on two tasks: coming up with sequences of letters to form color names, and coming up with sequences of numbers that map to an RGB value. As she checked in on the algorithm's progress, she found that it was able to create colors long before it could actually name them reliably.

Dr. Putin's diagnosis: US political establishment has incurable Stage 4 Stupidity

Russia Insider
Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00 UTC

With the United States rapidly descending into a William Hogarth political farce, curious minds want to know: What does Russia's President Vladimir Putin think about this never-ending freak circus?

Putin has generously provided us with some insight into his innermost thoughts on this trending topic. Speaking earlier this week at a news conference alongside Italy's prime minister (the same conference where he "reprimanded" Lavrov for withholding US nuclear codes), Putin casually diagnosed the US political establishment with a fatal case of dangerous stupidity:

It's hard to imagine what these people, who generate such nonsense and rubbish [about Trump's alleged ties to Russia], can dream up next.

What surprises me is that they are shaking up the domestic political situation using anti-Russian slogans. Either they don't understand the damage they're doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt.

The US is cannibalizing itself. Let's just hope that whatever reemerges from the American abyss will have some common sense. Hope dies last, as they say.

Comment: FYI: There doesn't seem to be an antidote.

Lavrov headed to the Gulag

Russia Insider
Thu, 18 May 2017 20:26 UTC

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is a traitor. During his secretive meeting with Donald Trump last week, Lavrov was provided with thousands of terabytes of top secret information. Victory! Except after Lavrov returned to Moscow, he failed to divulge this super secret information to Putin or Russia's secret services. As you can probably imagine, Putin is very upset that Lavrov chose to withhold so many juicy American secrets from him.

And today Putin publicly reprimanded Lavrov for betraying the Motherland:

Shame on Sergey Lavrov!