Allison Hoffman crochets amazing, miniature replicas of celebs and common folk alike and writes about them on her blog, CraftyisCool. Her story is one of the classic Never-Could-Happen-Before-The-Internet success stories of our generation. In her own words: “I started CraftyisCool in 2007 when I had trouble finding Yo Gabba Gabba toys for my little boys. I crocheted my first toy and after many requests for the pattern, I started up an online shop and a Ravelry store soon after. I created a Conan O’Brien doll and teamed up with Mike Mitchell from “I’m With Coco” for a giveaway. The doll went viral and was blogged about by everyone from Perez Hilton to Entertainment Weekly. After I sent a big crocheted blimp to Conan O’Brien on a whim, he posted a picture of himself with his gift on his blog, Twitter page, and Facebook showing off my handiwork to the world. Soon after came several tweets from Pee-wee Herman, linking his followers to my Pee-wee, Chairry, and Jambi dolls, as well as several famous faces posing with dolls I created in their likenesses. Jimmy Kimmel was gifted a little Jimmy for his birthday from his sister, who had seen my work online…”
And so it goes. Now she’s a big local celeb in Austin, TX, where she lives and is working on a fun crochet book. Maybe someone needs to crochet a miniature of her now and repeat the, er, pattern.

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For quite some time now, we’ve known that UFOs tend to whisk away people and return them to Earth with amazing stories. But there are plenty of stories of aliens abducting cows. While the thought of alien abduction of humans can be frightening, we seem to have embraced the idea of UFOs carrying off our cows. Maybe it’s a case of reassuring ourselves that there are alternate victims.

Aliens from outer space were blamed for a spate of cow mutilations in the 1970s. Since then, it seems that extraterrestrials are more careful not to leave evidence of cow abductions. Maybe they’ve learned how tasty beef is. But in 2009, rancher Mike Duran in Colorado saw strange lights in the sky before finding one of his cows dead. Duran said it was a repeat of an incident from 1995. Derek Bridges reported seeing a buffalo being beamed up into a spacecraft in 2009 in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. A nearby farm has imported bison, but the farmer said no livestock was missing. However, Bridges recorded video of the incident, in which you can see lights, but not much else. Farmers elsewhere say that cows aren’t the only livestock bothered by aliens. They’ll take sheep if no cows are available. Image by Flickr user Theron LaBounty.

This video has been around for quite some time, but its provenance is shrouded in mystery.

See more videos of cow abductions at YouTube.
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In this RSA Animate presentation, economist Jeremy Rifkin discusses emerging research on empathy. It’s a fast-paced, smart talk — and it deals with the core question what is empathy? More than wondering what it is, Rifkin discusses how we observe it arise in each human (anyone who has been around kids has observed this progression), research on animals that demonstrates the neurological basis of empathy, and the philosophical implications of empathy for our world. Why does empathy matter? Ultimately because we’re all gonna die — and we might as well make the world a nice place to share.

Topics: monkeys in Parma who want nuts, mirror neurons, the first drive: to belong, what empathy is, child development as an existential trip, empathy as the opposite of utopia, how consciousness changes over history, and the Y-Chromosome “Adam.”

For: everyone, especially parents.

Further Reading

Rifkin is pretty controversial, and frankly I haven’t read any of his work. He did write a book on this topic (just one of dozens of books over the past 40-ish years), called The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. There’s a surprisingly extensive Wikipedia entry on the book. Any readers out there have experience with this book?

Transcript

There’s a dotSUB transcript available. The full RSA talk (see below) is also transcribed, in the “speech text” link from the RSA.

Bonus Points

Here’s the entire fifty-minute talk by Rifkin, from which the animation above was taken:

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A world map or globe might help you solve today’s Tuesday Test Time challenge, but it’ll still take some looking around to gather all five answers for today’s mentalfloss.com Brain Game. Good luck!

The short-form English names of
what FIVE nations of the world
end with the letter L?

This week’s theme covers musical acts that were popular in the 1980s. As usual, each question contains a word or phrase related to the theme (although the question itself will be unrelated). Today’s 5 Questions quiz: The Police

Apple’s Deal With the Devil. A manufacturing turnaround that executives call “breathtaking” strikes many as “barbaric.”
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Probably the Craziest Finger Drumming Video You’ll Watch Today. The machine does amazing things, but it still takes talent to play it like this.
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An admirer gave admitted murderer Joran van der Sloot $75,000 for bail before finding out he cannot get bail. She wants it back, he said something about no, and his lawyer says he already refunded it, sorry.
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How Return of the Jedi Should Have Ended. Pointing out all the plot holes and what the prequels did to the story makes that last scene really awkward.
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Tracy Morgan collapsed after receiving an award at the Sundance Film Festival. They haven’t told us what’s wrong, but he is a diabetic with a transplanted kidney.
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Winter Pick-Up Lines. NSFW text. Funny to read, but hearing these would leave you cold.
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What if one of your battle robots stopped battling and acted like a real person? Archetype is a short film that’s really a teaser for a possible future feature film.
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Whaddaya know …it turns out I don’t need to see How I Met Your Mother because I’ve already seen Friends.
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Gabrielle Giffords’ ‘bittersweet’ resignation video. Recovery must be her priority, but she vows to return to public service someday.
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5 Bodies Nobody Ever Found. But even decades later, people are still actively looking for clues.

The violin is considered by many to be the thinking man’s instrument, famously played by the likes of Albert Einstein and Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional genius Sherlock Holmes. Here are 12 other celebrities who fiddled around in their spare time:

1. Charlie Chaplin played the violin (and the cello) in a unique way: backwards – specially strung to be fretted with the right hand and bowed by the left. As the story goes, renowned violinist Jascha Heifetz once unwittingly picked up Chaplin’s violin to do a little showing off, only to screech out several discordant notes. Chaplin calmly took the violin, and whipped out some Bach. He then explained: “I am…made inside out and upside down. When I turn my back on you in the screen, you are looking at something as expressive as a face. I am back, foremost.” He can be seen but not heard playing the violin in The Vagabond, one of his earliest silent movies, and Limelight, in which he and “pianist” Buster Keaton destroy one another’s instruments before any actual music occurs.

[Viewer beware: some violins may have been injured in the filming of this routine.]

2. Larry Fine (aka Louis Fienberg, aka Larry of the Three Stooges) began playing the violin as a child — therapy for a bad chemical burn on his arm. (more…)

Before people had hundreds of channels, if they wanted to watch surgery or gawk at celebrity babies, they had to actually leave the house. Here are some of the ways people entertained themselves in the pre-TV era.

1. Attending Public Dissections

Thanks to advances in science and the relaxing of church and government laws, the dissection of human corpses came back into vogue in the 1300s. At first these dissections were performed in small rooms or houses for the benefit of a handful for medical students. Then, almost overnight, a bored and apparently pretty morbid public started clamoring to attend them as well.

Specially designed “anatomy theatres” were purpose-built in many of the major European cities; most could seat well over 1,000 people. Tickets were sold to the public and the prices often varied based on how “interesting” that particular corpse was. (more…)

President Obama is slated to let Congress (and the rest of us) know how the country’s doing in his third State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Here are the answers to a few questions that might come up when the address storms every channel of your television.

Why does the President give a State of the Union address to Congress every year?

The address can trace its roots back to the Constitution. Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution says that the President “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

Isn’t that a pretty vague order?

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In Forrest Gump, Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue tells Forrest about a variety of shrimp dishes. Can you name all 21 ways he says this “fruit of the sea” can be prepared? (You can either type the full name of the dish—”Shrimp Gumbo”—or just the Gumbo part. And there’s your free space.)

Take the Quiz: Name Bubba’s Shrimp Dishes