An Indian man has been awarded damages in a legal case against the country’s biggest movie theater chain after he complained that it showed too many commercials before a movie.
Abhishek M R, a 31-year-old lawyer from the southern city of Bangalore, decided to take action against the PVR INOX chain after he was forced to cancel work calls because the movie overran the scheduled finish time.
In a case brought before Bangalore’s District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, he claimed that his time was wasted and that he suffered “mental agony” as a result of the 25 minutes of commercials that preceded a 2023 screening of the film “Sam Bahadur.”
Watching any advertising generally causes me mental agony so I see where this guy’s coming from
A beloved Australian bird best known for its stunning tail and powers of mimicry may have a cunning hidden talent.
New research has revealed the superb lyrebird to be a resourceful farmer, creating micro-habitats to host and fatten its prey before returning later to feast.
Scientists from La Trobe University observed the ground-dwelling birds working to create habitats suitable for their diet of worms, centipedes and spiders.
Here’s a vid of Tommy Emmanuel performing the song “Luttrell,” off his 2002 DVD release Tommy Emmanuel - Live at Sheldon Concert Hall. I’m posting this 100% solely because of the part at 1:35 where he makes a random vocalization and then immediately makes a face like “why the fuck did I just do that.”
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s had a cascading effect that benefited the entire ecosystem, a new study finds.
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The new study, published Jan. 14 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, used 20 years’ worth of data, collected from 2001 to 2020, regarding willow shrubs (Salix) along streams in Yellowstone. The researchers looked at willow crown volume — the total space occupied by a shrubs’ branches, stems and leaves. Measuring crown volume enabled the researchers to calculate the shrubs’ overall biomass: the amount of organic material available at the plant level of the food web, and the energy that will be passed on through the food web when animals eat these plants.
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The analysis found a 1,500% increase in willow crown volume along streams over the study period, demonstrating a major recovery of these shrubs. The study links this significant willow shrub recovery to a reduction in elk browsing, probably influenced by the return of predators to the region, which enabled willows to grow back in some areas.
Now, I’m not saying a wolf commissioned this study, but I am saying this is exactly what you’d expect the conclusion to be if a wolf commissioned this study
Once upon a time, in the dark days of the early 2000s, we were beset on all sides by horny profiles. This was a replicable genre, wherein a writer—usually, but not always a man, met a subject—usually, but not always, a woman, often a model or an actress—and spent the entire time with his tongue unrolling like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, and his lust so unrestrained that he began to compulsively mix his metaphors, purple his prose and expand his word count beyond all bounds of taste or readability. These profiles were badly written, they needed a cold shower, and there were so many of them.
The horny profile is now, mercifully, a mostly-dead genre, something that withered along with the popularity and influence of men’s magazines. But to re-read the horniest of them is to consider what function they once served, and to guard ourselves, as if against an infectious disease—an STI, if you really want to belabor the point—against their recurrence.
Some of the example quotes are spit-takingly insane
Reuters summary of a Financial Times report I can’t read because I sure as hell don’t have a subscription:
Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a “near miss” that shows up the bank’s operational issues it has sought to fix, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day, FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with the event.
A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, FT said.
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There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last year, down from 13 the year before, according to an internal report seen by the FT. Citi declined to comment to FT on this report.
Let him who has never mistyped 280 as 81,000,000,000,000 cast the first stone, as the saying goes
The owners of an island volcano in New Zealand where 22 tourists and local guides died in an eruption had their criminal conviction for failing to keep visitors safe thrown out by a judge on Friday.
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The case hinged on whether the company — which granted access to the volcano to tourism operators and scientific groups, for a fee — should have been in charge of safety practices on the island under New Zealand’s workplace health and safety laws. Anyone in charge of a workplace must ensure management of hazards and the safety of all there, including at entry and exit points.
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In Friday’s written ruling, Justice Simon Moore ruled the company did not have a duty under the relevant law to ensure that the walking tour workplace was without risks to health and safety. He agreed with the company’s lawyers that the firm only granted access to the bare land through permits — and should not have been legally considered an entity that managed or controlled the workplace.
As part Hawaiʻian, there’s a truly deep part of me that bristles mightily at the idea of owning a volcano
The world’s oldest dated rune stone, a landmark discovery revealed in 2023, is just one piece of a larger, nearly 2,000-year-old slab, new research has found. Now, scientists in Norway are working to reassemble the ancient puzzle, a process that’s starting to shed light on who carved the mysterious runic writing and what the words mean.
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Archaeologists who originally unearthed the oldest known rune stone in 2021 while investigating an ancient grave site in eastern Norway found the large piece covered with traces of runes. But as the fieldwork continued, the researchers uncovered additional sandstone fragments, some bearing similar runic inscriptions, in other nearby graves.
The broken pieces appeared to fit together, with some of the runic script from one stone continuing onto another, and the scientists realized the fragments were all once part of a single stone. The research team published the new findings in the February 3 issue of the journal Antiquity.
Excited to find out that someone broke the tablet because some kid just wrote something vulgar on it
A team of environmental scientists at Duke University, working with colleagues from the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the University of California, has found that green staghorn coral around Heron Island (part of the Great Barrier Reef) are more likely to survive warming water temperatures if hoof-clawed crabs live in the near vicinity.
It’s time for another thrilling episode of “I don’t have a real song I feel like posting this week so here’s a vaguely music-related video instead.” Today, we have some guy named Roomie who set up six microphones in a row which are all set up to autotune to a specific note, so he can run back and forth between them and sing a melody with them like it’s a giant harmonica, provided that melody uses exactly those six notes and no others. It’s very goofy.