Scott Tolbert

Graduate of the College of Perpendicular Logic

[Jake @JakeCan72]

At 14, Zack MacLeod Pinsent burned his last pair of jeans after finding a box of his great-grandfather’s suits, and he hasn’t worn modern clothes since.

What could have remained a teenage phase became his trade. He taught himself historical tailoring and built a business in Brighton, drafting patterns by hand and making clothes using techniques from the 1660s through the 1920s.

His clients now range from museums to people who simply want garments cut the old way. Last year he hosted a Regency Ball at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion that sold out in under three minutes, drawing 150 people from seventeen countries to spend a night dressed for the world Zack decided at 14 he’d rather live in.

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

Professional racing driver Ollie Millroy thanks competitor Loek Hartog for saving his life after getting into a fiery crash over the weekend in China.

Millroy says he'd be dead if Hartog hadn't jumped out of his car to pull him out of his burning car.

"I am still alive tonight, entirely thanks to one man. Loek Hartog stopped instantly with no flag marshalls or fire crews in sight, and risked his own life to get me out of the car."

"I don’t remember anything between 30 seconds before the crash and 1 hour after it, but I will remember his incredible act of bravery for the rest of my life..."

"I’m laying here tonight with 5 broken ribs, broken collar bone, broken hand and finger and a bruised lung, but it could have been much worse."

"Thank you Loek. I owe you my life for your selfless act today."

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This vintage German wrench is older than most people reading this… And still works better than modern tools.

[Scott Tolbert @ishoodanode]

@Tomhennessey69 She must have been really hungry and Love’s her some Golden Arches.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On this day in 1776, a lone American soldier sealed himself inside a tiny wooden ball, sank beneath the waters of New York Harbor, and hand-cranked his way under a British warship to try to blow it up. It was the first submarine attack in the history of warfare, and it happened during the American Revolution, decades before anyone thought such a thing was possible.

The inventor was a Yale-educated Connecticut man named David Bushnell, and what he built sounds like something out of a fantasy. He called it the Turtle. It was a one-man submersible shaped like a giant egg or an acorn, made of oak timbers bound with iron and sealed with tar. Inside, a single operator sat in near-total darkness, surrounded by hand cranks and foot pumps and valves. To dive, he let water into the hull. To surface, he frantically pumped it back out by hand. He drove the thing with hand-turned propellers and steered by feel. It carried enough air for perhaps half an hour. And bolted to its back was a powder charge, a primitive torpedo, that the pilot was supposed to screw into the wooden hull of an enemy ship and leave behind with a timer ticking.

Bushnell meant to pilot it himself, but he fell ill, so the mission fell to a volunteer, an army sergeant named Ezra Lee, who had only the briefest training in how to work the impossibly complicated machine. On the night of September 6 into the 7th, Lee climbed into the Turtle and set out into the harbor toward the HMS Eagle, a 64-gun British warship, the flagship of the fleet blockading New York.

Think about the raw nerve of it. Lee cranked that little wooden sphere out across the black water, alone, then flooded the tank and sank beneath the surface into total darkness, navigating half-blind, working the cranks by hand, running out of air, all to sneak up under the belly of an enemy man-of-war. And astonishingly, he made it. He got the Turtle right up against the hull of the Eagle, exactly as planned. No one aboard the great ship had any idea that a submarine, the first attack submarine ever, was pressed against them in the dark.

Then it came down to a screw. Lee tried to bore the attachment for his bomb into the ship's hull, and the drill would not bite. He had likely hit a band of iron sheathing or a heavy fitting, and his hand tools could not get through it. He tried, and tried, running low on air and time, and it would not take. Unable to fix the charge, and with dawn coming and the tide turning against him, Lee had to give up and retreat. As British sailors eventually spotted something strange in the water and gave chase, Lee released his powder charge to lighten the craft and slow them down. It drifted off and exploded harmlessly in the harbor with a great roar, damaging nothing but scaring the daylights out of everyone.

The mission failed. The Eagle sailed on unharmed. But that is not really the point. On that September night, a man went underwater in a machine of his own nation's invention and pressed home an attack on an enemy warship, something no human being had ever done before in the history of war. The Turtle was a technological leap so far ahead of its time that the world would not see submarines used effectively in combat for nearly another century.

Remember David Bushnell and Sergeant Ezra Lee. A scrappy, outgunned young country, unable to match the greatest navy on earth ship for ship, instead tried to reinvent naval warfare from scratch, sending one brave man alone into the dark deep in a hand-cranked wooden ball. They did not sink the Eagle. But they launched the age of submarine warfare, and they did it in 1776.

[Joe Rogan Podcast News @joeroganhq]

Sylvester Stallone makes an excelent point.

[Scott Tolbert @ishoodanode]

@bryan_caplan I found one @IfindRetards

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The reason you never swung over the top bar as a kid comes down to one property of a chain. It can pull you, but it can't push you.

To loop a chain swing you'd need to be moving fast enough at the very top that the arc holds itself together. On a standard 10-foot swing set, that means passing the bottom at roughly 27 mph. No kid pumping their legs gets close. Come up short and the chain goes slack near the top, and gravity handles the rest.

Estonia fixed it.

In 1993 a man named Ado Kosk built a swing with rigid steel arms instead of chains and strapped the rider's feet to the base. Steel can push. So you can creep over the top at almost zero speed, hang upside down for a second, and drop through the other side. That's what's happening in this clip, and it's why the bars stay perfectly straight while he's inverted.

Kosk turned it into a sport called kiiking. You pump by squatting and standing, the arms telescope longer as you get better, and whoever loops the longest arms wins. The world record is a 7.43 meter shaft, set by Sven Saarpere in 2022. At the top of that loop, his feet were 15 meters off the ground, about the height of a three-story building.

Every kid on a playground had the right idea. The chains were the only thing in the way.

[Time Capsule Tales @timecaptales]

William Shatner, best known as Captain Kirk in the 1966 Star Trek television series, was an avid archery enthusiast who helped popularize the compound bow during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Shatner apparently became well known within archery circles and Jennings, a U.S. company that was an early pioneer of the compound bow, used Shatner to promote its new “space-age” compound bows. Before that, he reportedly owned and shot several Shakespeare recurve bows.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Buy a five-dollar plastic umbrella,
and rain sounds like plastic banging on plastic.
It makes a storm feel annoying.

A traditional Japanese umbrella — wagasa —
does the opposite.

It takes a single stalk of bamboo,
splits it into forty or fifty hair-thin ribs,
connects them with thousands of hand-tied stitches,
stretches handmade washi paper across the frame,
and coats it in natural perilla oil.

It takes months to make just one.

When you open it, forty ribs snap outward in perfect unison,
creating a geometric dome of light.

And when the sky opens up?

Water doesn't smack it.
Oiled washi paper absorbs the sharp crack of falling rain
and turns it into a soft, melodic tapping —
like fingertips dancing across a koto harp.

In the West, an umbrella is a shield to defend you from the sky.

In Japan, it is an instrument
that allows you to walk through a storm
and listen to the weather sing.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In the summer of 1965, a telephone call reached a struggling Saab dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts.

The man who answered was 43 years old, nearly broke, raising six children, and writing science-fiction novels that most literary critics dismissed without a second thought.

His name was Kurt Vonnegut.

On the other end of the line was writer Vance Bourjaily, calling on behalf of the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop. A teaching position had unexpectedly opened, and they wanted to know if Vonnegut would be interested.

The salary was $8,500 a year.

Vonnegut didn't hesitate.

He said yes.

That decision would alter the course of his life.

Within two years, he would complete the novel that finally made him a literary star, mentor young writers who would become major voices in American literature, and step across the invisible boundary separating an overlooked novelist from one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

But by then, he had already endured more than enough hardship for one lifetime.

The path to Iowa had been anything but easy.

In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, the 22-year-old Vonnegut was captured by German troops. Months later, while imprisoned in Dresden, Germany, he survived one of the most devastating bombings of World War II.

As Allied planes turned the city into an inferno on February 13–14, 1945, Vonnegut and fellow prisoners survived by sheltering deep underground inside a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse.

When they emerged, Dresden was gone.

For weeks afterward, they were forced to recover bodies from the ruins.

The experience would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The war wasn't the only tragedy waiting for him.

While he was overseas, his mother took her own life the night before he was due home on leave. By the time he returned to America, he was carrying grief that would never fully leave him.

And yet he spent the next twenty years trying to do something that seemed impossible:

Write honestly about Dresden.

Every attempt failed.

The memory was too fractured, too painful, too enormous to fit into a conventional story.

Meanwhile, life kept moving.

He married Jane Cox, his childhood sweetheart, in 1945.

He worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.

He wrote short stories for magazines.

He published novels one after another:

Player Piano in 1952.

The Sirens of Titan in 1959.

Mother Night in 1961.

Cat's Cradle in 1963.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965.

Critics often praised his imagination but rarely treated him as a serious literary figure. Most simply placed him in the science-fiction category and moved on.

Then life dealt another devastating blow.

In September 1958, Vonnegut's sister Alice died from cancer just two days after her husband was killed in a tragic commuter-train accident.

Their children suddenly had no parents.

Without hesitation, Kurt and Jane took in three of Alice's four sons.

Their family expanded overnight from three children to six.

The responsibility was enormous.

By 1965, Vonnegut was struggling to support everyone. Book royalties weren't enough. The Saab dealership wasn't succeeding. Money was tight, and the future was uncertain.

Then came the call from Iowa.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop was already one of the most respected creative writing programs in America.

For Vonnegut, it offered something priceless:

Stability.

For the first time in years, he could breathe.

He arrived in Iowa City carrying manuscripts, unfinished ideas, and the emotional weight of a war he still hadn't managed to put on paper.

What followed were two of the most important years of his life.

He taught fiction from 1965 to 1967.

Among his students was a young writer named John Irving, who would later become one of America's most celebrated novelists.

Irving never forgot him.

He once described Vonnegut as a man who was harsh toward institutions but deeply compassionate toward individual people.

Others remembered him the same way.

His classes weren't casual obligations.

He cared.

Students remembered his comments decades later. They remembered his humor, his honesty, and his insistence on clarity.

While helping young writers find their voices, Vonnegut finally found the form his own long-delayed book required.

For twenty years he had tried to write about Dresden as a straightforward war story.

It never worked.

Then he realized the memory itself wasn't straightforward.

Trauma doesn't unfold in neat chronological order.

It jumps.

It circles back.

It revisits moments without warning.

That insight changed everything.

He created Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time," drifting across different moments of his life.

Through Billy, Vonnegut finally discovered how to tell the story he had been carrying since 1945.

In Iowa City, he finished Slaughterhouse-Five.

At the same time, attitudes toward his work began to shift.

A major review in Harper's treated him as a serious literary writer for perhaps the first time.

His Iowa salary increased from $8,500 to $11,000.

Publishers and critics suddenly seemed more interested.

People who once ignored him began paying attention.

He left Iowa in 1967.

Two years later, Slaughterhouse-Five was published.

Vonnegut was 46 years old.

The timing was remarkable.

America was deeply divided by the Vietnam War, and readers were already questioning the purpose, cost, and consequences of conflict.

Vonnegut's novel arrived at exactly the right moment.

The response was explosive.

Almost overnight, he became one of the most widely read writers in the country.

The book has remained a classic ever since and is regularly included among the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century.

The man who had spent decades struggling for recognition had finally broken through.

He went on to write many more books.

He became one of the most recognizable literary voices in America.

Yet throughout his life, he kept returning to a simple belief that mattered more to him than literary fame:

"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

It was advice he repeated often because he believed it.

After everything he had seen—war, death, loss, disappointment—kindness remained the lesson he valued most.

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, at age 84 after suffering injuries from a fall near his Manhattan home.

In the years that followed, former students, friends, and fellow writers reflected on the impact he had made.

John Irving remembered him.

Suzanne McConnell remembered him.

Countless others did too.

And many of them traced a crucial turning point back to one unlikely decision:

Accepting an $8,500-a-year teaching job in Iowa because he needed a way to support six children.

What looked like a temporary lifeline became the bridge to everything that followed.

A struggling writer.

A family in need.

A two-year teaching appointment.

And one book he'd been trying to write since he was twenty-two years old.

Sometimes history changes not with a grand moment, but with a phone call answered at exactly the right time.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

They changed the doors and gave dementia patients a piece of home back.

In the Netherlands certain nursing homes discovered a straightforward yet meaningful solution to help residents with dementia feel safer and more at ease. Staff place life size stickers depicting each person’s original front door on the entrance to their current room.

Instead of facing hallways of nearly identical doors residents now recognize something deeply familiar. The specific color the shape and the unique details of the home they once lived in stand out clearly.

These custom decals known as True Doors reduce disorientation make individual rooms simpler to identify and help preserve important personal memories.

The approach restores dignity for family members. It encourages greater independence for residents according to caregivers. Most importantly it transforms a standard room into a warmer more comforting space that genuinely feels like home.

Compassion does not always demand elaborate measures. In many cases it can begin with something as simple as a familiar door.

Image created using artificial intelligence for illustration purposes only.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Japan, every first-grader gets the same backpack.
A randoseru.

It costs between $400 and $800.
Parents and grandparents buy it together.

Foreigners look at the price and gasp.
Until they realize what it actually is.

It takes over 300 separate steps to make by hand.
Craftsmen in Tokyo stitch the leather with reinforced threads.

It is engineered to survive six brutal years
of six-year-olds kicking it, dropping it in puddles,
shoving rocks in it, and using it as a sled in winter.

And it does not break. Ever.

If a child trips backward, the stiff frame acts as a helmet,
protecting the back of the skull from hitting the concrete.
If a child falls into a river, the air pockets keep it floating like a life raft.

Then, six years later, elementary school ends.
The bag is scuffed, weathered, but fully intact.

Many families send it back to the workshop,
where artisans carefully cut the worn leather
and transform it into a miniature palm-sized replica —
a gift from the child back to their parents:

"Thank you for carrying me through these six years."

It isn't a school bag.
It's six years of childhood, stitched so tough
that even time couldn't rip it apart.

[Matthew Thomason @Matthew56193629]

In roughly 156 AD, at the age of 86, Polycarp was arrested by Roman authorities. He refused to flee, offered food to his captors, and calmly went to the local stadium. When the Roman governor pressured him to curse Christ to save his life, he uttered his most famous words:

"Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He hath done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?"

He was burned at the stake and stabbed with a dagger.

The written report of his death, titled the Martyrdom of Polycarp, became the first recorded, eyewitness account of a Christian martyrdom outside of the Bible. It was read aloud in churches across the ancient world, inspiring generations of early Christians to remain steadfast in their faith.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Every nail in your house is slowly backing itself out, and the reason is that wood and steel disagree about what season it is.

Wood swells and shrinks around 8% across the grain and about 0.1% along it. Steel does neither. So the framing expands around the shank in humid months, pulls away from it in dry ones, and the hole ends up slightly bigger than the nail that made it. Carpenters call the result backout. Those small round bumps in your ceiling drywall are nails walking out of the studs, one humidity cycle at a time.

Wooden joinery deletes the argument.

This splice is a kanawa tsugi, used to join two beams end to end, and the little block getting tapped into the face is a shachi-sen. A tapered key. Both halves are the same species at the same moisture content, so they swell together and dry together and the fit never changes.

The key does all the clamping, and the physics is just a wedge. Taper it 1 in 8 and it multiplies whatever you hit it with roughly eightfold, so a few sideways taps generate hundreds of pounds pulling the two hooked faces into each other along the beam. Friction eats a chunk of that force. Sounds like a defect until you notice friction is also why the key never vibrates loose.

Pull on the finished splice and it gets tighter. The hooked faces bear down harder on the key the harder you pull, where a nailed joint loosens a little with every load cycle.

The strange part is what this buys you 300 years later. Japanese carpenters have a practice called ne-tsugi, splicing the roots. Rot always starts at the base of a column where it meets stone. So they jack the surrounding structure, saw the rotted foot off a 400-year-old temple post, cut this exact joint into fresh timber, slide it in, drive the key. The building stays standing through the whole operation.

Japan has taken 46 magnitude 7 or greater earthquakes since Horyu-ji went up in the 600s. There's no record of one of its five-story pagodas coming down in the shaking. Wooden joints slip and grind and dump the energy out as friction. Rigid metal connections have nowhere to put it, so they hand it back to the timber as shear.

The oldest wooden building on Earth is held together by wood pressed against wood, and 1,300 years in, the tolerances still hold.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The guy who paid attention in physics class

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

I can’t skip videos like this.

No man can skip it. I think it’s just hard wired into us.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a protein in your body taking actual steps right now. Two feet, one in front of the other, about 100 steps per second, hauling cargo many times its own size. And the math on its commute is one of the most absurd things in biology.

The stick-figure walk is real. Kinesin has two heads that work like feet. The back foot lets go, swings 16 nanometers past the front one, and plants. One molecule of ATP burned per step. Scientists confirmed the hand-over-hand gait in 2004 by tagging a single foot and watching it leapfrog the other.

Each step lands exactly 8 nanometers apart, matching the spacing of binding sites on the microtubule underneath. So it's walking a ladder, and it never misses a rung.

Now the commute. The nerve running from your spine to your big toe is one cell, about a meter long. Everything the far end needs, mitochondria, neurotransmitters, repair parts, gets walked there. A meter at 8 nanometers a step is 125 million steps. Convert that to a human stride and you get roughly 90,000 km.

Two laps around the Earth to deliver one package.

Trillions of these are walking inside you as you read this. And when the walkers start failing, the longest routes fail first, which is part of why some nerve diseases show up in the feet and hands before anywhere else.

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

A video of James Brown teaching you how to dance. What more could you want?

[Scott Tolbert @ishoodanode]

@otis_racing @ChefGruel I remember those plates!